But then came the raids. For so many months, we’d see them, late at night, squads of people coming into our buildings. One night I looked out the window and saw a van full of men who had just returned home from work, their pants stiff with paint, hoodies drawn up over their necks; delivery men, fluorescent vests and pants glowing in the dark. Their wrists were pinned behind their backs. We didn’t dare go down. “Good hunting?” I heard one of the ICE guys ask with a laugh. “Yeah, a good haul,” answered another.

We knew they were coming. These men and women, their vests say POLICE, but they are not police. They keep coming, like black locusts, swarming up our stairwells, through the cracks and seams of our doors, driving us out.

Chapter Four

It’s so green once Lidia and I leave the city, the road like a hungry tongue, lapping up trees. Bushes foam at the sides. All this air and glaring light rushing through the windshield. How can there be so much beauty when my mother is locked up in some detention center? I hate all of it—the green fields, the wide highway, the occasional flag stabbing the big sky. That’s what had us fooled about this country. We sang it at school for assembly: This land is your land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island…I believed it, as did Ammi.

I remember once we were driving to Bear Mountain and she said, “How beautiful! This place is settler country.”

“Ammi!” I cried. “You’re identifying with genocidal colonizers?”

She gave me a sharp look. “All I’m saying is this is a big country. Vast. Not a place of corruption and bribes. They’ll find room for us.”

“ ‘We’re pointed toward the American continent,’ ” I quoted.

“What was that?”

“Just a book.” Ammi never liked the Beats—she said they were seedy spoiled brats.

“You know I once did a paper on Walt Whitman. So generous, his vision of America.” She quoted: “ ‘Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore—’ ”

“I’ve heard that,” I groaned, slumping against the door. Could I once quote something and not have to hear about her stale old stories? When Ammi saw that I’d put ‘English major’ for my college applications, she went to the library and dumped a bunch of her favorites on my desk: Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës.