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enter. No wonder Mama had quickly learned to take care of herself—she kept a knife in one boot and a pistol in the other, and she could grab one or both faster than any blue nose on the police force anyway.
    It was this scrappiness she’d wanted to impart to Mary, and she would tell her little girl tales of life with the Swamp folk the way other children were told Mother Goose. She barely spared any details, knowing full well her daughter, with no father present, had little chance for a life much different.
    But, oh, did Mary love to hear Mama’s stories! Stories of how the ladies would jig the night away to Fiddlin’ Henry and Banjo Jim, and how they’d dive stark naked into the Mississippi under a full moon, and bet on cock fights, and suck on berled crawfish heads. The people Mama spoke of were larger than life, and Mary wanted to be just like them.
    She’d curl up on Mama’s lap in a rocker on the porch of the brothel, back when whores could live a dozen to a house without fear of being cleared out by the police. “Did I tell you about America Williams, the World’s Strongest Whore?” Mama would ask. She certainly had, but Mary wanted to hear it again and again.
    “Men would pay a whole dollar just to try and beat her at arm wrestlin’,” Mama began. “And you should see how red those men’s faces got when they’d come to find America Williams’s arm bent over their own! Those men, they’d be so affronted that they’d pay up even more for a trick with America, wanting to see for themselves if she might be a fraudulent woman. Hard to say, though, what a man preferred to find when America pulled up her dress. A man’s pride is a strong and strange thing, Mary.”
    Then there was Red-Light Liz, the one-eyed harlot. As Mama told it, “If Liz took kindly to a john, she would let him peek under her eye patch. Those johns were sworn never to tell what they saw, but it was known that a glimpse of whatever was hiding there would bring all sorts of good luck.” Little Mary imagined a sunbeam of light shining from behind Liz’s eye patch.
    “And then there was the dimmest whore in the entire Swamp,” Mama would continue. “We called her Molly Ding-Ding. She once blinded a john when he stiffed her ten cents. But she hadn’t counted the coins right—the poor john had actually tipped her an extra nickel.”
    Only when Mary grew older did she come to realize that according to most people’s standards these women were nothing more than lowly whores. Still, they would never be that to her. These were women who had made their way in the world, all on their own, and Mary had decided long ago that was the kind of woman she wanted to be.
    Mama was able to get out of the Swamp when a great thing happened: the banks of the Mississippi became filled with sailors. At last, a swell of business on dry land! Mama and her friends packed up their few mud-caked possessions and overtook an abandoned building on Gallatin Street. They nailed a sign out front: HOUSE OF REST FOR WEARY BOATMEN. Truth was, the place was hardly habitable enough to be called a house, and the last thing going on there was rest. But Mama and the others were the best welcome a homesick sailor could hope for, and that stretch of the river soon became known as the Port of Missing Men. Mama regaled how, as a ship would dock, she’d lean out the window, flaunting her cleavage. “Hey, sailor!” she’d call. “A picayune will get ya a bed for the night, a drink o’ whiskey . . . and some company!”

    Mary rolled the picayune over in her palm, Mama’s voice echoing in her head. She caught her reflection in a little cracked mirror she’d hung with twine, the only decoration on the crumbling walls of the crib. Her own eyes stared back at her. Mama and MawMaw before her had these slate gray eyes too, a trait passed down through the generations. But only the women. Gray eyes that didn’t often cry, but also didn’t sparkle. Rarely would they give