Somebody picked me up then. I thought it was my daddy, he’d come to find me after all, but it wasn’t, it was just a man. A big fat white man with a beard. He snatched me up by the waist and ran to the other side of the bridge, where there was a kind of pathway down through some weeds. We were at the top of a wall above the tracks and the man held me by the hands and lowered me down and I thought, he’s going to drop me and I’m going to die like Vincent Gum did. I was looking right at that man and I’ll never forget his eyes. They were the eyes of a person who knew he was good as dead. When you have that look, you’re not young or old, or black or white, or even a man or a woman. You’re gone from all those things. He was yelling, somebody take her, somebody take this girl here. And then somebody grabbed my legs from below and lifted me down and the next thing I knew I was on the train and it was moving. And somewhere in there I came to think I’d never be seeing any of them again, not my mama or daddy or anybody I had known in my life to that day.

What I remember after that is more like a feeling than any actual thing. I remember children crying, and being hungry, and the dark and heat and smell of bodies all crammed in. We could hear gunfire outside and feel the heat from the fires passing through the walls of the train like the whole world was aflame. They got to be so hot you couldn’t even touch them without burning the skin of your hand. Some of the children weren’t no more than four years old, practically babies. We had two Watchers in the car with us, a man and a woman. Folks think the Watchers were Army but they weren’t, they were from the FEMA. I remember that because it was written in big yellow letters on the backs of their jackets. My daddy had people down in New Orleans, he’d grown up there before the service, and he always said that FEMA stood for “Fix Everything My Ass.” I don’t remember what became of the woman but that man was First Family, a Chou. He married another Watcher, and after she died, he had two other wives. One of those wives was Mazie Chou, Old Chou’s grandmother.