My mother was a child in Lockport, Louisiana, where there were six "good" houses distinguishable from the small row houses, each with a two-seated outhouse in the back yard, in which the unskilled workers, most of whom were Cajún, lived. To the east of the mill were houses for the sawyer and two mill officials; to the west, houses for the mill's bookkeeper, the commissary manager, and the filer, her father. Papa, she called him.

A wide veranda extended across the front of the house. Here my mother spent long hours in the lazy bench swing, saved from the fierce afternoon sun by a Confederate jessamine vine starred with small white fragrant flowers that relentlessly seduced big hairy black-and-yellow bumblebees and long-billed hummingbirds whose rapidly vibrating wings seemed an excessive labor on such days. Beneath the house, which was set high on pillars, was a cool, dark place hidden from view behind a skirt of green lattices, where her papa built shelves to store her mother's Mason jars of mayhaw jelly and mustard pickle and brown paper bags of sugar beets.

Inside the house, in the living room, were the phonograph and the piano, the Morris chair that was "Papa's chair," and several tall glass-enclosed bookcases containing, my mother remembered, illustrated editions of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, A Child's Garden of Verse, the family Bible, Evangeline, Girl of the Limberlost, complete sets of Scott, Hugo, and Dickens, and The Princess and Curdie, on the front of which was a picture of the princess in a gown of pale green silk that seemed to glow when she looked at it, like a will-o'-the-wisp.