The second summer on the mound at Panacea, a Santa-Rosa-Swift Creek burial mound, I had a run-in with the principal investigator's major-domo, and Brenda and I were defrocked, our membership in the Order of the Blue Trowel revoked.

Sometimes Hick called what he wrote PI novels, from post-inaccrochable. What you wrote when you couldn't sell what you wrote.

But also because they were always about what a prick the principal investigator (PI) was, and how you had to kiss his major-domo's ass to stay on the dig.

Joey Pants says his mother would say to him, "What's it to you--are you writing a book?"

When he said yes, she'd say, "Well kiss my ass, and make it a love story."

Chief, the head of the department, took us under his wing. He made it possible for us to spend the Fall semester in Tallulah, Louisiana, digging a Coles Creek temple mound, he took us on a dig with him, in the summer, when we dug a Weeden Island burial mound Clarence B. Moore had dug, and he helped get us into Tulane, me with a three-year NDEA fellowship and a tuition waiver and Brenda with a tuition waiver and the chance of an assistantship later on.

Tulane had a PhD program and FSU didn't.

In fact, Tulane had an accelerated PhD program, where we could get our PhDs in three years, if all went well.

We enjoyed being newlyweds.

Potter gave Brenda a Gibson guitar with a low action, and she played guitar, and sang. We also bought bluegrass records, now, when we bought new records.

I remember our year in graduate school at FSU fondly, because we'd already been accepted at Tulane, our future looked assured, we were going to be able to realize our idealistic dream and live lives of research, teaching, advancement of the discipline, and service to the community, putting more back in than we took out.

Minor chord.

You can't have guns and butter.

The Great Society and the Vietnam War.

The crew lived in a beach cottage out on Alligator Point that summer.

Jack Neff came to see us there.

We passed him, walking, going home from work, in the truck.

"That looked like Jack Neff," I said. He had on a straw hat and smoked a corncob pipe. He carried a wicker suitcase.

He looked like van Gogh, going out into the fields to paint.

I stopped and backed up.

It was Jack Neff.

"Howdy," he said. "I owed you a visit."

Jack was studying pottery at Alford University, in upstate New York. Karol had gotten her degree in English, and was working as a social worker, in Alford.

"What's it all about, Alfie?"

Jack nominated that to be school song, at Alford.

After Jack left the League, to work for ConEd, he left again, to work for the post office.

I asked him how he liked that and he said his black co-workers were prejudiced, against whites, and he got the shitty routes, and the overtime he didn't want.

That was my experience at the post office, later, in Panama City, although I only worked there as a Christmas casual.

He said being a power company lineman was worse.

Black people would set fires and then shoot at the firemen when they came to put the fires out. In Harlem.

They also shot at linemen when they came to restore the power.

Jack didn't like black people.

I don't think he'd known any black people, one-on-one. He'd only known them us-and-them. Or us-and-you.

Jack didn't like black people in the Army, either. They were clannish and superior. They played the race card on you at every opportunity. If they got the upper hand in your outfit you were fucked.

I told him the story about Jacob Lawrence in the Coast Guard. He was a messman. His CO got him a public relations billet so he could paint, and wouldn't have to work as a messman.

Jack Neff said if his CO had found out he painted, he'd have made him a messman, rather than a radio repairman, to teach him a lesson. Or put him on permanent KP, working for a black mess sergeant. To teach him a lesson.

I said that was my experience in the service, too. You didn't want to reveal your sensitive side or your life would be made a living hell by your buddies of either race. By the NCO cadre of either race. By the officers.

Jack Neff said when we went to Slug's he didn't see the jazz musicians as artists, he saw them as blacks. Hostile, aggressive, malevolent. Racist.

Like postal workers. A hair-trigger away from mayhem.

Lee Morgan was shot to death in Slug's, by his common-law wife, in a dispute over drugs, infidelity, or a small amount of money.

Not while we were there, of course.

If the black people looked at us like they thought we felt that way, well, they were right. Jack Neff did. And I was with Jack Neff.