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 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 appointment."

She smiled nicely. "Oh, yes, Mr. Cole. I'm Darlene. Ms. Chenier's expecting you."

Darlene led me back along a corridor that was solid and enduring, with heavily lacquered pecan walls and art deco sconces and framed prints of plantations and cotton fields and portly gentlemen of an age such that they might have shared cigars with old Jeff Davis. . . Old times there are not forgotten. . . The whole effect was unapologetically Old South, and I wondered what Darlene felt when she walked past the slave scenes. Maybe she hated it, but then again, maybe in a way I might never understand, she was proud the way any person might be proud of obstacles overcome and disadvantages defeated, and of the ties with a land and a people that adversity builds in you. On the other hand, maybe not. Like friendship, you take your paycheck where you find it.

She said, "Here we are," and then she showed me into Lucille Chenier's office.

Lucille Chenier smiled as we entered, and said, "Hello, Mr. Cole. I'm Lucy Chenier."