bald man with a bad eye and I told him that I was going to Louisiana. On business. He told me to have a nice time and to stop in again when I got back. I said that I would, and I told him to have a nice night. He gave me a little wave. You take your friendship where you find it.
At 1:40 the next afternoon I was descending into the Baton Rouge metropolitan area over land that was green and flat and cut by chocolate waterways. The pilot turned over the muddy wide ribbon of the Mississippi River, and, as we flew over it, the bridges and the towboats and the barges and the levee were alive with commerce and industry. I had visited Baton Rouge many years before, and I remembered clear skies and the scent of magnolias and a feeling of admiration for the river, and for its endurance through history. Now, a haze hung low over the city, not unlike Los Angeles. I guess commerce and industry have their drawbacks.
We landed and taxied in, and when they opened the airplane the heat and humidity rolled across me like warm honey. It was a feeling not unlike what I had felt when I stepped out of the troop transport at Bien Hoa Air Base in 1971 in the Republic of South Vietnam, as if the air was some sort of extension of the warm soupy water in the paddies and the swamps, as if the air wasn't really air, but was more like thin water. You didn't walk through the air down here, you waded. Welcome to Atlantis.
I sloshed down to the baggage claim, collected my bag, then presented myself to a smiling young woman at the Hertz desk. I said, "Pretty hot today, huh?"
She said, "Oh, this isn't hot."
I guess it was my imagination.
I gave her my credit card and driver's license, asked directions to the downtown area, and pretty soon I was driving past petrochemical tank farms and flat green fields and white cement block structures with signs that said things like FREE DIRT and TORO LAWNMOWERS. The undeveloped land gave way to working-class neighborhoods and grocery markets and, in the distance, the spidery structures and exhaust towers of the refineries and chemical plants that lined the river. The chemical plants reminded me of steel towns in the Northeast where everything was built low to the ground and men and women worked hard for a living and the air smelled strange and sulfurous. Most of the men in these neighborhoods would work at the refineries, and they would work in shifts around the clock. The traffic in the surrounding areas would ebb and flow with great whistles announcing the shift changes three times a day, at seven and three and eleven, sounding like a great sluggish pulse, with each beat pumping a tired shift of workers out and sucking a fresh shift of workers in, never stopping and never changing, in its own way like the river, giving life to the community.
The working-class neighborhoods and the refineries gave way to the state's capitol building, and then I was in the heart of downtown Baton Rouge. The downtown area was a mix of new buildings and old, built on a little knoll overlooking the river and the Huey Long Bridge. The river ran below the town, as much as within it, walled off from the city by a great earth levee that probably looks today much as it did over a hundred years ago when Yankee gunboats came down from the north. Even with the commerce and the industry and a quarter million people, there was a small-town southern feel to the place. Monstrous oak trees laden with Spanish moss grew on wide green lawns, standing sentry before a governor's mansion sporting Greek Revival pillars. It made me think of Gone With the Wind, even though that was Georgia and this wasn't, and I sort of expected to see stately gendemen in coarse gray uniforms and women in hoop gowns hoisting the Stars 'n Bars. I wish I was in the Land of cotton…
At six minutes before three, I walked into an older building in the heart of the riverfront area and rode a mahogany-paneled elevator to the third floor and the offices of Sonnier, Melancon amp; Burke, Attorneys at Law. An African-American woman with gray hair watched me approach and said, "May I help you?"
"Elvis Cole for Lucille Chenier. I have a three o'clock