I parked around back, where you used be able to go in, but the gate was locked.

There was a new Visitor's Center, across the street from The Shadows. It said to buy tickets and sign up for a tour of the house, there, so that's what we did.

At the Visitor's Center, they showed a film, and then a tour walked across the street to the house.

We had time to browse in the gift shop before the film started.

I bought a copy of Marcelle Bienvenu's cookbook.

Actually, a sequel, with anecdotes, family snapshots, and recipes.

I bought The Weeks Hall Tapes, by Morris Raphael, transcriptions of tapes Hall made for a cookbook, which he never wrote, with a tribute to Bunk Johnson, as an afterword.

Clemmie, Clement Knatt, who worked for Hall, and was at The Shadows, when I was there, knew where Bunk Johnson's unmarked grave was. Also the graves of Spot, Hall's English Setter dog, and Mollie, a cottontail rabbit. "Mr. Hall, he liked that brown mollie."

Théophile would get Mr. Hall a black woman, when he needed a woman.

In the house, in the room preserved as Week Hall's studio, there's a portrait of Théophile, with his bad eye.

Aside from the raising of your own domestic animals and the cultivation of your own vegetable garden, food in this milder climate was to be had merely for the going out and getting it. The cost of it all was negligible (Tapes, p.8).

Good reason for living where I live.

I had not taken a tour of the house when I worked there. That was for tourists.

Now, as I took the tour, I didn't pay much attention, because the guide was a young woman who seemed not to know a great deal about the world, the history of anything but the subject before her, or life in general. She was of the refined sugar and television generation, where schools teach the tests, and your job in school is to make good grades and get into the next school, the next school, the job, the next job.

The marriage, the next marriage.

My mind wandered.

I thought about digging there, talking to Clemmie, listening to his stories, I sort of did an oral history on Clemmie, the National Trust had no interest whatsoever in what Clemmie could tell them, they had no interest in Weeks Hall.

Clemmie would tell about Bunk Johnson fishing on the banks of Bayou Teche, behind The Shadows, for sac-au-lait, with a cane pole, watching the stopper bob, or Théophile coming back from the bootlegger in a pirogue, towing a jeroboam of moonshine behind the boat, riding low in the water, it's eyes just peeping out, like the crocodile who bit Captain Hook's hand off, in Peter Pan.

I remembered a hardware store downtown with a wringer washer in the display window, the washer in avocado.

Everything's up to date in Kansas City.

I remembered writing in the attic, or garret, upstairs, the steamer trunks full of art books from Paris and Berlin and Rome and Madrid.

The tour guide didn't know anything about that.

Clemmie didn't remember Henry Miller, although he knew who he was.

Miller had autographed the door, had promised to return, to write a book, the book that became The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a book of "camellias and hallucinations."

When we came out I took a picture of a statue in the garden, among the aspidistra bushes. It was turning cold. It had started to rain.

Miller signed the door, "Keep the aspidistra flying."

The book I wrote after the one I wrote about digging at The Shadows was called THE SHADE OF THE ASPIDISTRA, and used a quote from Orwell as an epigraph, "And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra."

THE SHADE OF THE ASPIDISTRA. Move to the mountains of North Carolina to live poor and write. The allusion is to Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Weeks Hall's English setter, Spot, is buried under an aspidistra bush. Mr. Hall, he loved that brown molly. Southern code for miscegenation. Work as potter's helper, laborer in a feldspar mine. Brenda pregnant with Owen.