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knew he was talking about himself. I told him: Listen: don’t worry about age. It don’t mean nothing. You need a woman that understands your work and loves you. Some can and some can’t and don’t matter how old they are. He said he wanted some children. I said Go ahead and have children. Then he said he was worried because she was going to go to col lege. I said She’s not worried about you not having an education, so don’t worry about her hav ing one.”
    We sleep in Pennsylvania with the shade up so we can watch the darkness and street lights and silhouettes of trees. I wake at five-thirty in sunlight and the flat green country east of Fort Wayne: farms, the neighborhoods of white houses looking less desperate, more sturdy that those east of us, crouching at the sides of cities, like sleeping rabbits in the shadow of the hawk. I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air. From the tracks, Fort Wayne is attractive. Under a light blue sky streaked with cirrus clouds, the city’s few tall buildings are pale beige. The streets are wide and quiet, probably looking wide because they are quiet. The houses near the tracks are old; many of them are two-storied, and in their lawns are old trees. Leaving these, as I order poached eggs on corned beef hash, we move through wooded country, then farms again and country neighborhoods, the houses spaced among low hills and clustered trees.
    At Chicago the train passes homes where blacks live: at first they are decently spaced, single-story, with yards and trees, much like the white suburbs outside other cities, but juxtaposed with vacant weed-grown lots and junkyards; farther on, the houses become four- or five-storied tenements with less and less space between them until, in the final area before the train yard, there is none. It is strange to come into a city after the expanse of country, and I feel I am looking at pictures of my country’s history: a city built because of a lake, and on the city’s outskirts the blacks, descended from slaves, cheap labor pushed northward, holding their piece of the land — the few rooms, the screened windows — under the concrete-pierced sky.
    We are in Chicago at nine-thirty and spend the day in the city with a friend, showers and a change of clothes, margaritas and Mexican food at la Margarita ; we walk to book-stores on Michigan Avenue and buy Simenon, Zola, James Webb, and Sara Vogan. We leave at six-fifty that evening on the San Francisco Zephyr, with a family room for the three of us: the couch becomes a double bed and there is a fold-down bunk above it and another at its foot; a few paces away, down the hall, are six good bathrooms. We are on the first floor. Before dinner we go to the second floor club car, with wide windows and overhead windows, swivel chairs and couches, and we go through green farm country under the enormous circus tent of the midwestern sky, the sun descending, an orange ball over trees and rooftops, a long grey-blue cirrus cloud at the horizon, almost the color of a distant ship; then, the sun gone, a strip of gold cloud and trees silhouetted against the rose and golden sky, their crowns burnished, and we go with that sunset for miles, then into the night.
    On Friday we wake in Nebraska, and I think about the blacks: the porters and stewards, bartenders and waiters, each of them with a certain duende , so that, like the porter leaving New York (“You’re in the wrong room”), they are friendly in a way that lets you know they are not paid attendants, servile to the whim of anyone owning a ticket, but your proud and sometimes avuncular hosts. Perhaps this comes from knowing the train so well, from the camaraderie of work, from the skillful legs and hands that don’t stumble or spill, from feeling finally that it’s their train; and it occurs to me that this is good work for the dispossessed of the land: seeing the