65

The Moses Grill is a down-home neighborhood café a few streets from Beauregard Square in the Tremé district. A middle-aged man with thin gray hair labors at a griddle and fryer while a young woman, possibly his daughter, delivers steaming plates of hearty fare to the diners at their little square tables, which are each fussily covered with an immaculate white cloth.

As you enter, nobody pays you any mind. A few diners raise their hands in greeting at Cleo as she leads you across the room to a table by a window. Clearly she's a regular.

The food is great—much of it fried, most of it unhealthy, all of it delicious. But the company is even better. You find Cleo remarkably easy to talk to, and she seems to be enjoying her time with you too.

Cleo flirts back. It's all very lighthearted, and you can't really tell if she is showing genuine interest in you or if she is just flirting for the pleasure of flirting. Either way, it adds spice to your conversation.

Eventually, the talk turns to Cleo's own work out in Congo. "You know, I've been thinking," she says after telling you a little about her future hopes for the dig. "Why not come in on it with us? I always thought it was crazy that this city should have two good archaeology departments and we never work together.

"Now, for the Congo dig, we got the expertise, but we don't have Tulane's resources. With Tulane cash behind us, we could really step up the excavation, turn it into a major project. And in return, you'd get half credit for anything we find, and your students could come out in the digging season and help us out, get their hands dirty, learn some real archaeology."