This job he kept until he died.

With this work came a traveling territory—seven southern states—plus a company car. A plain Ford tu-dor. He would “cover” Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and a small part of Tennessee, a slice of Florida, a corner of Texas, all of Mississippi. He was to call on the wholesale grocer companies that provisioned small stores across the rural south. He arrived at each and wrote down orders for starch. There was only the one product. His customers occupied murky, back-street warehouses with wooden loading docks and tiny stifling offices that smelled of feed by the bushel. Piggly Wiggly and Sunflower and Schwegmann’s were the big accounts. He liked his small customers best, liked arriving to their offices with something he could make happen. A sale. Many—ones in Louisiana, across the Atchafalaya—spoke French, which made it more difficult but not impossible. No one hit him in the head.

HE WAS NOW ON THE ROAD ALL THE TIME, and my mother simply went with him. Little Rock would be home—a small two-room apartment on Center Street. But they lived on the road. In hotels. In Memphis at the Chief Chisca and the King Cotton. In Pensacola, at the San Carlos. In Birmingham, at the Tutwiler. In Mobile, the Battle House. And in New Orleans at the Monteleone—a new city to them, very different from what they’d known in Arkansas. They loved the French Quarter—the laughing and dancing and drinking. They met some people who lived in Gentilly. Barney Rozier, who worked on oil derricks, and his wife, Marie.

Part of the traveling job was to attend “cooking schools” in the small towns. Young girls came out of the backwoods to learn to be wives—to cook and clean and iron, to keep a house. Guard armories, high school gymnasiums, church basements, Elks Clubs were where these took place. He and my mother worked as a team, demonstrating for the girls the proper way to make starch and use it. It wasn’t hard. The Faultless emblem was a bright red star on a small white cardboard box. “You don’t have to cook it” was the company motto. There was a song with that phrase in it.