Should the Levee Ever Break, Act 1, Scene 1, Part 2

Allow me the opportunity to acquaint you with a few particulars regarding the background to our story and place the principals securely in the context of the setting in which we take our sojourn with them. Our story begins once upon a Mardi Gras, in a mythical city where time and space maintain a tenuous truce, and logic figures into no part of the alliance. In that city, there lived a happy family that answered to the name of Babineaux. The Babineaux family lived in a tidy little flat on the corner of Iberville and Dauphine, just a few blocks from Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. It is a historic neighborhood. Algebra Babineaux, the mother, had been a schoolteacher on a Choctaw reservation in Oklahoma before she married Papa, whom she met while visiting relatives in Quebec. They moved to New Orleans after inheriting a small shop in the French Quarter from a benevolent relative. Algebra Babineaux is reverent. She sings grace every morning at breakfast while the family holds hands around the kitchen table, "The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord for giving me the things I need, the sun, the rain and the apple seed. The Lord is good to me." Algebra Babineaux also possesses a firm belief in the sanctity of justice. Her motto is, 'keep the faith.' She’s a country girl who likes her grits thick. Her belief in the rule of law is so strong, she makes it a point to always butter everyone’s breakfast toast on both sides so that if a slice might accidentally drop to the floor, there’d be no possible chance of violating the Tumbling Toast Corollary to Murphy’s Law.