“For me, Miguel, you were always a part of the‘we’that I think of when I think of home.”

THIS IS THE LAND that brought us together.

I have been driving for seven hours. I am tired. I stop my car in the shoulder on the Highway 82 Mississippi River Bridge to watch the sun set in the west. Alone, I lean and look at what Jack Kerouac called “the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls.” I am remembering the etymology of the name of the river above which I am suspended, Mississippi: an Indigenous word meaning father of waters. I am driving from a research residency in Texas to where I live in Georgia, by way of Mississippi, returning from two months in College Station, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Galveston, all of the towns where I met men and women who came from Mexico and Central America seeking a better life. Sometimes they would tell me their stories. And sometimes they reminded me of you, Miguel, my friend.