Born into slavery around 1853 in rural Alabama, Bill Traylor worked as a sharecropper for nearly five decades after the Civil War and Emancipation. But in his 80s, without work and homeless in Montgomery, he took a new path, as an artist. Painting on scraps of paper or cardboard, Traylor’s folk art told the story of African Americans in the Jim Crow era. Chip Reid reports on “Between Worlds,” an exhibition of Traylor’s work, and life, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.