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talk to the old smokes, you know? Real interesting. Buy me some money-drawing incense, or boss-fixing powder, or gris-gris balls of salt and saffron and feathers and dog dung. Hell of a thing for the son of a man of science, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Flagg?”
    “Well, sir, you never know.”
    “I figure the exact same way.”
    Willis and Violet could not help but like Hippo. Everybody did, white and black. Everybody said Hippo was a good and friendly talker. So good it hardly mattered if he was truthing or lying, it was just such a pleasure to listen to him. Everybody said that made him a natural-born Louisiana politician. That and the fact he somehow managed to find a college willing to grant him a law diploma.
    Hippo was there with the Flaggs that Saturday morning of 1948 with some important papers for signing, papers that would bring paving to the little dirt lane off Tchoupitoulas Street. Cement curbsides and street lamps and a sewer hookup, too.
    Willis and Violet did not understand all that the sweaty young white man was saying, nor could they completely follow the tiny print on his papers. But since he had been respectful and amusing, they felt they should trust him. And so the Flaggs proudly signed as property owners, on the dotted line where it said “Freeholder.”
    Then about a year later, when Willis and Violet had fallen impossibly far behind on the special surcharges levied against them for the modern conveniences— all in accordance with Hippo’s important papers—the Flaggs’ home was seized by the Orleans Parish sheriff and put up for sale in tax-forfeiture court.
    At the auction, there was but one bidder—the Most Reverend Zebediah Tilton. At last, he owned every cottage in the lane.
    Minister Tilton wasted no time. After putting down cash money to retire the delinquent surcharges, the good minister drove straightaway from the courthouse to call on the Flaggs.
    He arrived in his big maroon Packard motorcar, one of the first postwar models off the Detroit assembly lines. When the neighbors saw the Packard roll in from Tchoupitoulas Street they ran to their homes and shut the doors and windows until Tilton drove out again. All the neighbors, that is, save Hassie Pinkney. Hassie sat on the front steps of her cottage, straining to hear the sorry conversation going on next door.
    In the parlor of the newly dispossessed Flaggs, Zebediah Tilton was polite and sympathetic. After all, he had no reason to be rude when he bought someone’s home out from under them. The law made everything so easy and polite.
    “Now, I know you can understand that our church has many missions,” he said in his creamy preacher’s voice.
    “What in hell church is that?” Violet asked.
    “The Land of Dreams Tabernacle, Mrs. Flagg. Although we are temporarily conducting services in Bynum’s pharmacy over on Dauphine Street, we do have our Deacons Building Committee searching for a permanent location.” Zeb Tilton’s beefy brown lips widened into a smile, and Violet could see clear back to his gold teeth. “Among our churchly missions is providing what we can in the way of housing for our poor, unfortunate brothers and sisters.”
    Willis sat in a cane back chair in a sort of shock, still as a stone as Minister Tilton talked. Willis seemed as if he heard nothing. For days before the court sale, he had spent almost no time at home, instead sitting up at Shug’s with his cares, hiding from Violet so she would not see him crying in his beer. But he could no longer conceal his sorrow. Willis’s eyes looked as if they might rust away from grief. Violet sat next to him, holding his big calloused hands.
    “Now, I surely don’t want to see good people like you having no place to live,” Tilton went on, soothingly. “But you see, the problem here is that we must serve our members first. So, I’ve been giving this predicament of yours a lot of my thought and my very most powerful prayer. And I do believe I have come upon a