She had worked in one of Hattie Fontenot's cribs on Railroad Avenue in the 1940s; then she'd spent a year in the women's penitentiary for stabbing a white man through the shoulder after he beat her up. Later she worked in a laundry and did housework for twenty dollars a week, which was the standard full-time salary for any Negro in South Louisiana, wherever he or she worked, well into the 1960s. Tante Lemon's daughter gave birth prematurely to a baby that was so small it fitted into the shoes box she hid it in before she put it in the bottom of a trash barrel. Tante Lemon heard the child's cries when she went out to use the privy the next morning. She raised Tee Beau as her own, fed him cush-cush with a spoon to make him strong, and tied a dime around his neck with a string to keep illness from traveling down his throat. They lived in an unpainted shack whose gallery had totally collapsed, so that the steps looked as if they led into a gaping, broken mouth, in an area people called nigger town. Each spring my father, who was a commercial trapper and fisherman, hired her to shell crawfish for him, though he could scarcely afford her meager salary. Whenever he caught mullet or gar in his nets, he dressed it and dropped it by her house.

"I ain't eating that, me," he would say to me, as though he owed an explanation for being charitable.

I could hear the elevator coming down. A uniformed jailer at a small desk was finishing the paperwork on the transfer of the prisoners from the parish jail to Angola.

"Mr. Dave," Tante Lemon said.