I was a crew chief at Shadows-on-the-Teche, in New Iberia, excavating the slave quarters at an antebellum plantation where the slaves made the bricks, on the premises.

I got to hear a lot of cajun music, on the radio. Also zydigo, which is not the same thing.

One weekend Brenda came over and stayed with me in the trailer out at Spanish Lake, and we went to a nightclub, the Blue Moon Café, to hear a Cajun band. The crew went to New Orleans and we had the trailer to ourselves.

It was like going on a cruise.

We drove up to Breaux Bridge on top of the levee beside the Atchafalaya Swamp and ate Cajun food at a restaurant on the water there.

If you saw the movie Southern Comfort, or Hard Times, you got the idea. Both of them had Cajun music.

I was also the cook on that dig. We used to go to the dock at Delcambre and buy a deck bucket of unsorted shrimp.

I put a line from a song in a book, "and the deckhands were singing `Adios, Jolie Blon.'"

I was singing "Opelousas Austin," which was a hit, then.

Blackie Forestier, where are you now that we need you?

Adios, the shrimpers were probably from Texas, like the shrimp boat captain in Caldo Largo.

I thought Caldo Largo was a better book than To Have and Have Not.

But then, I thought Jack Rudloe's Pot Luck was a better book than To Have and Have Not.

Toni Morrison didn't like the way Hemingway wrote about "the nigger," in To Have and Have Not, but that's the way I would have thought of him.

In Screed I wrote, "I did my head at the nigger and he waved."

Two black men worked at The Shadows. They'd been there when Weeks Hall still owned the place, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation kept them on.

Raymond worked outside, in the gardens, doing yard work, and Clemmie worked inside, doing janitor work, and light maintenance.

There were two kinds of slaves: house Negroes and field Negroes.

Clemmie liked to tell stories. The National Trust wasn't interested in oral history. As an anthropologist, I was. I was like Zora Neale Hurston going into the turpentine camps and collecting jokes, toasts, and mother-son incest-insults.

Clemmie knew where Bunk Johnson's unmarked grave was.

Bunk Johnson used to sit on the banks of Bayou Teche in front of The Shadows fishing for sac-au-lait and watching the stopper bob. As happy as a dead pig in the sunshine.