When the doctors couldn’t completely remove the large and painful cyst on her son Kent’s lower back, Chung Kim Do, who insists that we call her Miss Kim, took matters into her own hands.

Miss Kim, 58, is a single immigrant mother from Vietnam who raised six children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is skeptical of Western medicine and, despite all the love that she has for her new homeland, Miss Kim refuses to administer Tylenol when she can call upon the healing properties of ginger and other herbs.

Every night, for five nights, Miss Kim snuck into her son Kent’s room, rolled him over and lifted up his shirt. She spat on the cyst and gently rubbed her saliva into the lesion as her son slept. A business week later, the cyst was gone.

Kent looks a little embarrassed when his mother tells us the tale. Her hair is neatly pressed up in a mini-bouffant and her girlish bangs are swept to one side. Dressed in a pinstriped business suit and adorned with jeweled earrings, Miss Kim clearly took the lessons she learned at beauty school to heart. Her laugh is an inaudible, joyous eruption and her kind eyes moisten with sadness or pride, depending on the story she’s telling.

A particularly wet-eyed story was the one about how she got here.

“I don’t understand,” Miss Kim said, looking upward. “God blessed me.”

She was born in 1953 in a small hamlet called Pleiku, where my mother was also raised. I visited Pleiku once. As I sputtered along on a motorcycle with my father, I remember seeing a severed dog head for sale in the market. When we drove back through the main drag, the dog head was gone.

My mother has fonder memories of the place.

She was Miss Kim’s best friend in grade school. My mother remembers walking home from school with Chung every day. The road was lined with shady trees and vendors selling frozen yogurt. Miss Kim’s family was poor and only got poorer with the end of Vietnam War because of their affiliation with the losing South Vietnamese government. In their schoolgirl days, my mother recalls buying afterschool treats for the two of them. Crispy pâté chaud, sweet mung bean soup, pouches of sour frozen yogurt.

Miss Kim still remembers my mother’s kindness. Separated by more than 1,300 miles, they often talk on the phone.

Though my mother finished high school, Miss Kim dropped out after the ninth grade to help sell trinkets and candy at her family’s store. She eventually married a Chinese man, something she was reluctant to do but agreed upon for the sake of financial stability. Together, they had six children.

It was after her husband died in a motorcycle accident that Miss Kim wanted to leave Vietnam. “Bring me anywhere but here,” she said. “I wanted my children to have a good future. I had dreams. I dreamed my children would have a good education.”

Someone from a Catholic ministry saw Miss Kim, a single mother raising six children, and agreed to help her get to the United States via the Philippines. In 1994, she arrived in Baton Rouge, unable to speak English.

She immediately started working in a factory where she skinned raw fish and shelled crabs. After five months laboring in the factory, Miss Kim knew she had no future there. She decided to go to beauty school. With her newly minted license, she opened her own business, a nail salon, which has been in operation ever since.

“The customers so love me,” Miss Kim tells us with a laugh.

In 2003, with the help of her son Ben who had just graduated from pharmacy school, Miss Kim purchased the house they currently live in, an immaculate and spacious home to all her children and in-laws.

Next year, Miss Kim plans on converting her nail salon into a beauty school, so she can teach others the trade.

“If I was still in Vietnam, I’d be poor,” Miss Kim said. “I appreciate America very, very, very much.”

Burl Cain, 69, warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary for about 17 years, arranges for us to view the 18,000-acre prison, the largest maximum security penitentiary in America, from its Mississippi River edge.

That’s the way Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) saw the same land—once a slave-breeding plantation (named Angola, after the African nation thought to have larger and stronger men, Cain says), then a cotton and indigo plantation and finally, a prison after the Civil War.

The slightly inclined beach, unlike the tall bluffs elsewhere on the Mississippi, allowed steamboat roustabouts during Twain’s time to harvest wood that would serve as riverboat fuel. But we motor up and down the Mississippi aboard a gas-fueled, 28-ft. prison pontoon boat while its captain, Randy Robinson, 45, explains why few inmates choose to try escaping on the 14-mile-long river sides of the penitentiary grounds.

Robinson describes a water temperature as low as 40 degrees, the river’s treacherous turbulence and, in places, a rapid current that is “spooky, spooky.” During heavy storms, the river also represents a flood threat; twice in recent years the penitentiary temporarily has had to evacuate 2,000 inmates to others prisons.

Later, we drive by a line of 150 inmates marching into a prison field to harvest vegetables as a rifle-toting guard on horseback watches. Nicknamed “The Farm,” the 5,300-inmate penitentiary produces enough vegetables to feed over 11,000 inmates housed in five state prisons year-round; each inmate is fed three meals daily for a cost of only $1.50, says Gary Young, the prison official who accompanies us.

After beginning a series of six inmate interviews, we break for a five-course, prisoner-produced lunch at a dining center for penitentiary guests called The Ranch. We are gorging on tasty, tiny chocolate chip cookies and lemon meringue pie when we are summoned to the office of Warden Cain, a short, affable, Santa-Claus-shaped true believer in religion’s ability to achieve inmates’ moral rehabilitation.

During our meeting Cain displays his several sides—flatterer, nontraditional penologist, propagandist and teacher on parenting. Cain claims he has been a Twainiac since childhood. He says his mother, a fourth-grade teacher, encouraged him to read Twain’s writings. Cain played fish with a deck of cards that featured Louisa May Alcott, Twain and other American authors. Cain says, “I always wanted to get Mark Twain.”

Interspersing his talk with “that’s just cool” and “it’s pretty cool,” Cain outlines his philosophy for a good prison: “good food, good medicine, good play and good praying….We do all those four components and we just rock and roll.” In a prison world of few Muslims and Buddhists and a lot of what Cain calls “Bapticostals,” Cain promotes praying, avoiding profanity and studying the Bible.

The prison helps trains inmates to become preachers to spread the gospel at other Louisiana prisons, as well as Angola. The penitentiary’s 83 death row inmates and 4,000 lifers are encouraged “to find meaning to their existence in prison even in the direst circumstances,” writes Dennis Shere, in Cain’s authorized biography. “For the warden, that existence is found in believing in Jesus Christ as Savior.” Cain’s biography makes clear that it was produced by a publisher of books “written from a biblical perspective.”

At least one former prisoner views Cain’s systems of rewards and privileges for moral rehabilitation with skepticism. Wilbert Rideau, the prize-winning former editor of the prison’s newsmagazine and probably the penitentiary’s most famous ex-con, calls Cain a bully. Rideau writes in his memoir, In the Place of Justice, that Cain “enjoyed being a dictator, and regarded himself as a benevolent one.”

Months before our scheduled visit to the penitentiary I had written to Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of public relations, to arrange for interviews with what the prison has taken to calling “offenders” (a label disliked, a prison official acknowledged, by inmates). Fontenot had refused to confirm my prison-visit date and had denied my request to interview a death-row prisoner.

Since previously I had interviewed several death-row inmates at the penitentiary, I contacted the Louisiana office of the American Civil Liberties Union for its help. The ACLU, in turn, talked with Warden Cain, who called me. “I’m probably the only warden in the country,” he said, “who gets along with the ACLU.”

Cain explained the difficulty of arranging an interview with death-row inmates. Families of victims did not want the inmates to receive publicity. The inmates’ lawyers worried about media attention damaging their clients’ appeal for release or a reduced sentence. But Cain said he would try to arrange a death-row interview.

In our presence that afternoon, he drafts a letter that he says he hopes will persuade Manuel Ortiz to allow us to video interview him on death row, despite his lawyers’ concerns. “This story will be good for Angola and should not cause you any grief,” Cain writes. “If you don’t feel comfortable with the questions they ask, then don’t answer, just move on to the next one.” Cain’s letter does not work. We say hello to Ortiz during our visit to death row but do not video interview him.

But we do video interview Cain. Earlier both prisoners and ex-staff had groused to us about being required to classify themselves as black or white on penitentiary forms, even though they identified as Asian American, Native American or something else. So I ask Can about the prison’s classification system.

Cain says that, in melting-pot America, the prison really does not care about race or ethnicity: “We just all Americans….We Americans, and we don’t refer to anyone as African Americans or English Americans or Vietnamese. You can tell he is Vietnamese, you know, because of the way he looks. We really don’t get into all that. We just don’t care. We just Americans.”

Cain ends the interview with his approach to raising children, captured on Dan Tham’s video.

Loren Ghiglione