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So it was appropriate that he should tell me the first episode of the many I was to hear of the myth that was “Huey.” The roads, he said, was shore better now. A man could git to market, he said. A man could jist git up and git, if’n a notion come on him. Did’n have to pay no toll at no bridge, neither. For Huey was a free-bridge man. So he went on to tell me how, standing on the river bank, by a toll bridge (what river and what bridge never clear), Huey had made the president of the company that owned the bridge a good, fair cash offer, and the man laughed at him. But, the old hitchhiker said, Huey did’n do nothing but leaning over and pick up a chunk of rock and throwed it off a-way, and asked did that president feller see whar the rock hit. The feller said yeah, he did. Wal, Huey said, next thing you see is gonna be a big new free bridge right whar that rock hit, and you, you son-of-a-bitch, are goen bankrupt a-ready and doan even know it.

There were a thousand tales, over the years, and some of them were, no doubt, literally true. But they were all true in the world of “Huey” – that world of myth, folklore, poetry, deprivation, rancor, and dimly envisaged hopes. That world had a strange, shifting, often ironical and sometimes irrelevant relation to the factual world of Senator Huey P. Long and his cold scrutiny of the calculus of power. The two worlds, we may hazard, merged only at the moment in September 1935, in the corridor of the capitol, when the little .32 slug bit meanly into the senatorial vitals.

There was another world, a factual world, made possible by the factual Long, though not inhabitated by him. It was a world that I, as an assistant professor, was to catch fleeting glimpses of, and ponder. It was the world of the parasites of power, a world of sick yearning for elegance and the sight of one’s name on the society page of a New Orleans newspaper; it was the world of the electric moon devised, it was alleged, to cast a romantic glow over the garden when the President of the University and his wife entertained their politicos and pseudo-socialities; it was a world of pretentiousness, of blood curdling struggles for preferment, of drool-jawed grab and arrogant criminality. It was a world all too suggestive, in its small-bore, provincial way, of the airs and aspirations that the newspapers attributed to the ex-champagne salesman Von Ribbentrop and to the inner circle of Edda Ciano’s friends.

As for Long, he was concerned with nothing but power, and though he surrounded himself with a motley crew on whose cupidity, vanity and yearnings he could play, he could once give a cynical warning too to a group of such hangers-on: if he died, he said, they would all go to the penitentiary. He was a prophet, and once the weight of his contempt, political savvy and discipline had been removed by the young Brutus in the capitol, the feverish little world of Governor’s Mansion, capitol, and even campus was to go on a spree of high-geared and low-geared looting and larceny, and plunge idiotically rampant toward the day when headlines would advertise the suicides, and the population of prisons, Federal and state, would receive some distinguished additions.

But this is getting ahead of the story. Meanwhile, there was, beside the lurid world, the world of ordinary to look at. There were the people who ran stores or sold insurance, or had a farm and tried to survive and pay their debts. There were – visible even from the new concrete speedway that Huey had slashed through the cypress swamps toward New Orleans – the palmetto-leaf and sheet-iron shacks of the moss-pickers, rising like some fungoid growth from a hummock under the great cypress knees, surrounded by scum-green water that never felt sunlight, back in that Freudianly contorted cypress gloom of cottonmouth moccasins big as the biceps of a prize-fighter, and owl calls, and the murderous metallic grind of insect life, and the smudge-fire at the hovel door, that door being nothing