I couldn't wait to go to college. My grandfather walked in the dining room where I sat at the table reading catalogues. I wanted to go to Newcomb but knew nothing about it other than that it was in New Orleans. For years late at night, I'd listened to a black-cajun radio station that somehow made it across the air waves all the way to south Georgia. The music! I was pulled toward that raucous sound. The disc jockey advertised White Rose Petroleum jelly night after night. I knew about ruined plantation houses with oak allées and I kept a record album propped on my bedside table so I could see the cover photo of the golden crescent of the Mississippi at sunset.

I was a little interested in Vanderbilt because I heard that's where poets went. I ordered catalogues from Pembroke and Wellesley. Reading them, I had visions of myself in full wool skirt and starched white blouse editing the school news, a practical and serious person. The catalogue from Randolph-Macon came, too, sent by a very nice friend of my mother's who went there in the Dark Ages and told my mother it was the finest school for girls in the U.S.

Daddy Jack, who paid the bills at our house, thumbed through one and tossed it back on the table. I knew what he was going to say. "I went to the school of hard knocks myself," he rewarded me, "I didn't have any of this fancy education, and I've done pretty well if I do say so." And you do say so, I thought. "We'll, you've got your head in the clouds, but I tell you one thing, sister, you can go anywhere you want as long as it's not north of Washington D.C. I'm not paying a dime for you to go off and marry some Yankee two by