Thrown-away Child

Violet motioned for him to take the best chair in the parlor, the one with the padded seat and back fitted with slipcovers she had embroidered herself while riding the bus back and forth to house-cleaning jobs.
    Exactly two other white people had been inside the Flaggs’ immaculate cottage. First was a crewcut salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. Second was a bald bill collector who came around to talk about Violet’s sister, Rose Duclat, and how she had run away up north leaving a stack of unpaid markers. Both these white men had pulled out handkerchiefs and wiped off the good chair before perching on it. But Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux gave no such offense. He plopped down his milky big behind in the chair, as if he was home in his own parlor.
    “Oh my, Missus Flagg, but you keep a mighty pretty house,” he said.
    “Thank you, sir,” Violet said. She looked at Willis, who seemed as confused as she was.
    “And this lemonade!” Giradoux lapped noisily. “Divine... divine!”
    “Thank you again, sir.”
    “Might’s well call me Hippo like they all do down to the courthouse and city hall.” Giradoux spoke to Violet and Willis both. He patted a belly that overlapped his belt. Violet imagined his naked belly looking like a batch of yeasty dough. “My daddy, he’s Doc Giradoux, you know.”
    “Is that so?” Violet asked.
    “Oh yes. He wanted so very bad for me to follow in his footsteps. That’s how come he named me after Hippocrates, the great Greek physician. You ever heard of Hippocrates?”
    “I believe I have, sir,” said Willis.
    “My daddy’s a good man—good to colored and white alike, you kn ow—and I feel bad about wasting his money on every medical school between here and Shreveport. Well, but then Daddy finally give up on me and let me go free.” Giraudoux patted his doughy belly again. “Daddy’d say to his friends, ‘My young Hippo, he took a different path—straight to the ice box!’ ”
    Hippo and the Flaggs laughed together.
    “No, I ain’t like Daddy or that old Greek,” Hippo said. “I become a lawyer eventually, not much of a trick. As a doctor’s boy, I am a strong disappointment. Why—don’t you know I sometime shop down to Cracker Jack’s drugstore on South Rampart?”
    “You talking about that root shop, sir?” Willis looked over at Violet, raising his eyebrows. A white man in a root shop? Violet shrugged.
    “The very one.” Hippo finished off his lemonade. “I drop around every so often and talk to the old smokes, you know? Real interesting. Buy me some money-drawing incense, or boss-fixing powder, or gris-gris balls of salt and saffron and feathers and dog dung. Hell of a thing for the son of a man of science, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Flagg?”
    “Well, sir, you never know.”
    “I figure the exact same way.”
    Willis and Violet could not help but like Hippo. Everybody did, white and black. Everybody said Hippo was a good and friendly talker. So good it hardly mattered if he was truthing or lying, it was just such a pleasure to listen to him. Everybody said that made him a natural-born Louisiana politician. That and the fact he somehow managed to find a college willing to grant him a law diploma.
    Hippo was there with the Flaggs that Saturday morning of 1948 with some important papers for signing, papers that would bring paving to the little dirt lane off Tchoupitoulas Street. Cement curbsides and street lamps and a sewer hookup, too.
    Willis and Violet did not understand all that the sweaty young white man was saying, nor could they completely follow the tiny print on his papers. But since he had been respectful and amusing, they felt they should trust him. And so the Flaggs proudly signed as property owners, on the dotted line where it said “Freeholder.”
    Then about a year later, when Willis and Violet had fallen impossibly far behind on the special surcharges levied against them for the modern conveniences— all in accordance with Hippo’s important papers—the Flaggs’ home was seized by the Orleans Parish sheriff and put up for sale in tax-forfeiture court.
    At the auction, there was but one bidder—the Most Reverend Zebediah Tilton. At last, he owned every cottage in the lane.
    Minister Tilton wasted no time. After putting down cash money to retire the delinquent surcharges, the good minister drove straightaway from the courthouse to call on the Flaggs.
    He arrived in his big maroon Packard motorcar, one of the first postwar