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talked and talked, but I cannot remember what they talked about. You see, Al, I have this idea for a novel; it is about a 110-year-old woman who is born into slavery. I want the people to talk about her and in their rambling to reveal her story as well as their own. The story will happen between 1852 and 1962—from slavery to the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. What do you think they would have talked about?”
    Where to start? With slavery, what the old people could have heard from their parents and great-grandparents about slavery. Next we discussed Reconstruction, the hard times. We discussed the Freedmen’s Bureau. We discussed Lincoln, and Douglass, and Booker T. Washington because I could remember as a child a photo collage of the three hanging over the mantel in my aunt’s room, just as I would see photo collages of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King hanging on the walls of other African Americans in the 1970s. We talked about national heroes such as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson, about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about the First and Second World Wars. After the national events we discussed state events—the great floods of 1912 and 1927, the cholera epidemic in New Orleans, the voodoo queen Marie Levaux, Huey P. Long and his men, the insane asylum in Jackson, the state penitentiary at Angola.
    So we covered the nation and the state; next we came to the parish. We talked about the towns, the sheriff, the river, the people who lived along the river; we talked about the black professor who had been killed in 1903 for trying to teach young African Americans to read and write and to look after their health. His grave is on the bank of False River, about five miles from where I was born. My wife, Dianne, and I go by there all the time to stand in silence a moment.
    After we discussed the parish we discussed the plantation and the quarter. We discussed the crops and the seasons and the work. We talked about the big house where my own grandmother worked for so many years; we talked about the store where the people bought their food and clothes. We talked about long days, dark nights, little pay, and mean overseers. We talked about hunting and fishing and gathering fruit that grew wild along the ditches and bayous. We talked about the church, about baptisms, about the cemetery, about unmarked graves. We talked about one-room schoolhouses and the teacher who came to the plantation to teach us children six months out of the year. We talked about a distant sound, the marching of the men and women for civil rights and their spokesman, a young Baptist minister from Georgia.
    Al and I must have talked eight or nine hours that day and on into the night. After dinner when I got ready to leave, Al said to me, “Now this is what they could have talked about; now you have to convince the readers that this is what they did talk about.” I remembered that the old people spoke of seasons and not the name of the month. They spoke of cold, cold winters and hot, hot summers when it rained or did not rain, when the pecan and cane crops were plentiful and when they were not. When I asked them for the year, they would tell me, “Well, I ain’t for sure.” As a child I remember hearing them talk about the great flood and the boll weevils that came after the flood, but they could not remember the year. Yes, they knew the horror of the flood: they knew how swift the water moved one day, how slow the next. They could tell you the color of the water, they could describe the trash and the dead animals that the water brought, but they could not tell you what year except that it happened around the time that Huey Long was just beginning.
    But I needed more; I needed dates, months, years. I needed to know whether it happened during the week or the weekend, whether it was spring, summer, fall, or winter. I had visited LSU in Baton Rouge several times to talk to professors in the English department and to