Then Robert joins in. “I had taken my bath in the tin tub,” he begins. “I was clean.” “Was that the Saturday-night bath?” Beckwith’s wife, Isabel, asks. Everyone laughs in recognition. Like most black people in the South, none of them had had indoor plumbing back then, and Saturday was the one night in the week when they could manage the time-consuming ritual of boiling water from the well and filling a tin tub so everyone in a given family could take a bath.
