When the fifteen minutes were up and we all loaded back on the bus and headed west, the little old lady took out a big plastic bag and began unpacking a feast—slices of hummingbird cake, slabs of banana bread, cookies dredged in powdered sugar, sliced ham wrapped up in tinfoil, and a cardboard box of fried chicken.

“Y’all come on up and help yourselves,” she said. “You know I can’t walk on this moving bus.” To me she whispered, “It’s left over from the funeral of my brother-in-law’s wife, but we won’t tell them that.” And to them she said, “What you can’t eat, take home. It’s all good food, there’s not a thing in the world wrong with it.”

The Man of Music sat on the edge of the seat by the old man and fed him little crumbles of pound cake, poking it into his smacking mouth with the tips of his fingers. The old man gummed each bit, dribbling crumbs down his chest, swallowed, and opened his mouth for more.

The lady made up about a dozen sandwiches out of biscuits and ham for the little boy. “You need to eat,” she told him. “You don’t know if your grandma will have supper for you in Pensacola.”

“Lucky Strike,” said the Man of Music. “I’m making up a song, y’all. I can feel it coming on; I believe it’s gon’ be about true love.”

“By then Governor Wallace was getting used to me,” the bus driver said. “And one day he said, ‘You like me, boy, don’t you?’ ‘Yessir, I do,’” I said. “‘Well, I like you, too, boy, and when you grow up, I’m gon’ send you to law school.’”

The little lady carefully spread a napkin out over her lap. “Mayhaws, plums, scuppernongs, she’d make jelly out of anything in season,” she said. “Way more than anybody could eat. There was no reasoning with her when it came to jams and jellies.”

“I wanted to go to law school,” said the bus driver. “I was ambitious; I wanted to grow up to be president of the United States. But I did one thing wrong. I fell in love.”

“Uh-uh, honey, don’t,” sang the Man of Music.

“My granny says there’s a word for what my mama is, but she won’t say that word,” said the little boy.

“In fact you could say it was jams and jellies that killed her,” said the little lady, nibbling delicately on a chicken wing, holding it wrapped up in a napkin to spare her short white gloves.

“Governor Wallace was a smart man,” said the bus driver. “He said to me, ‘Boy, this is puppy love. You gon’ get married, tie yourself down with a passel of young-uns, and you can kiss law school good-bye.’ He was right, too, I never made it to law school.”