All the Right Stuff

  There was nothing much to cutting up vegetables or cleaning the kitchen or the dining room. I had never actually met anyone like Elijah before. He was smart, but not like old people are wise smart. A little bookish. He was funny, too, and that made him easy to work with. We would work in the mornings making soup, and then, between twelve and two, we would serve bowls of soup and rolls and butter to old people from the neighborhood.

  Another thing that Elijah knew was history. Sometimes he would go off on a lecture about how they ran the civil service system in ancient China or how India and Pakistan used to be one country. It was not stuff I needed to know about, but it was interesting. I got the feeling he liked me, even when he was kidding me about not knowing about some vegetable.

  “Did you know that garlic and onions are all varieties of lilies?” he asked me.

  “No, I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “And you still haven’t figured out what the social contract is?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I haven’t.”

  When I got home, I asked my mom what she knew about some social contract.

  “I know what a contract is, and I know what being social is,” she said. “But I’ve never heard of being sociable by no contract unless you’re a hooker or something.”

  She went on asking me what I had done that day and I told her about getting the stuff ready for the next day’s soup and she said that was good. “A man who can cook can find a wife easier than a man who can’t,” she said.

  I didn’t want a wife who wanted me for my cooking, but I didn’t say that to Mom.

  2

  When I arrived in the morning, Elijah was already up and being busy around the huge black stove.

  “So I guess you got the social contract all figured out,” he said to me. “Why don’t you explain it to me while you wash your hands? Wash them all the way up to the elbows, too, like you’re getting ready for surgery. We don’t serve any dirt around here.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said. “It seems to me that if anything really big was going on, I would have heard about it.”

  “You’ve heard about it,” Elijah said. “You just didn’t know how to call it by its right name.”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  I watched Elijah take a bag from the refrigerator, open it, and carefully lay out a pile of bones. He held them up and inspected them, nodded to himself, and then brought out a roasting pan. He put the bones in the pan, poured two cups of water over them, and put them into the oven. He turned the oven on and then turned back to me.

  “The first thing you have to know about the social contract is what I call the wake-up-in-the-morning laws,” he said. “When you wake up in the morning, you begin thinking about what you can do with yourself during the day. What’s the first thing you think about doing, Mr. DuPree?”

  “Depends on how I feel that morning,” I said.

  “There you go,” Elijah said. “I was telling people that you were a smart young man. Humans can do anything they want. If you feel like eating a ham sandwich, then you go on and eat a ham sandwich. If you don’t have a ham sandwich and you see I got one, then you come over to where I am, hit me on the head, and take my sandwich. That’s because as a human being you can do what?”

  “Anything I want,” I said.

  “Now, isn’t that good?”

  “Yeah, but… I don’t go around hitting people on the head,” I said. “The way you put it—you know, people doing anything they want—there would be a lot of fighting going on.”

  “But the possibility of doing anything you want is the key to the social contract,” Elijah said. “You don’t have to do geometry or algebra to figure that out. You just sit down and use your reason, and bam! you got it. But, like you said, there’s going to be a whole lot of fighting going on. So how would Mr. DuPree handle that?”

  “You keep your hands off my ham sandwich, and I’ll keep my hands off your ham sandwich,” I said.

  “So what you’re saying is that you have the right to do anything you want, but you’ll give up some of your rights if I give up some of mine?” Elijah asked.

  “Okay, I’ll go for that,” I said.

  “Are we just talking about ham sandwiches here, boy?” Elijah asked me.

  I looked at Elijah to see if he was making fun of me, but he looked serious. “I don’t know exactly what we are talking about,” I said. “You were the one who brought up the ham sandwich.”

  “What we’re talking about is the right of a person to do anything they want to do, and comparing it with the decision to give up some of those rights so everybody can get along without a lot of fighting,” Elijah said. “I’m willing to give up my right to knock you in your head and take your ham sandwich if you’re willing to give up your right to hit me and take mine. That sound good to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So my giving up some of my natural rights in exchange for you doing likewise is an agreement we’re making,” Elijah said. “You still with me, or you getting a headache?”

  “I got you covered,” I said.

  “Well, Mr. Paul DuPree, that agreement is at the heart of the social contract we’ve been talking about. You are giving up your natural liberty and taking on a different kind of liberty. What you’re gaining is what the first writers of the social contract called a civil liberty, the liberty to do anything you and all the other people who are part of your social contract have decided as a group to allow. People have been making agreements about what rights they are going to give up so they can live together, be safe, and chase after whatever little dreams they have going for themselves. That’s been going on since they lived in caves umpteen thousand years ago.”

  “I never heard of no cavemen drawing up contracts,” I said. “You ever see those drawings they find in caves? They have pictures of animals or hunting scenes, but I’ve never heard of any contracts.”

  “Okay, Mr. DuPree, if the cavemen didn’t have written-out contracts, they still had rules that you had to live by if you were going to stay in the tribe,” he said. “And if you didn’t live by those rules, they wouldn’t have any trouble kicking you out, and everybody would understand why. Those rules came by agreement, and they were part of the first social contracts.”

  “No offense, sir, but are you saying I’m supposed to care about what some cavemen were doing?” I asked. “Because I don’t.”

  “Don’t care a bit!” Elijah said, shaking his head.

  “Yo, I see how you care and everything, and I respect that,” I said. “You know, different strokes for different folks. I just mean that it really doesn’t get to a point where I can feel it.”

  “I care about it, Mr. DuPree, because I believe that the tribes with the best rules were the ones that survived!” Elijah said. “And that seems important to me. If you play one of those video games in which there are warriors running around trying to kill each other, you understand that survival is important.”

  “You play video games?” I asked.

  “I’ve played a few,” Elijah answered. “And the few I’ve played had rules to help you survive. And if you’re going to play those games, you have to agree to live by the rules. Or do you have a different kind of game, Mr. DuPree?”

  “Okay, I see where you’re coming from but—I mean this truly—we don’t need agreements and contracts and whatnot today because we have laws,” I said.

  “You really think that’s true?” Elijah asked. “Look me right in the face and say it again, real slow.”

  “I said, we don’t need those rules because we have laws,” I said. “Laws replace rules.”

  “Sit down right there and start slicing up some of those onions while I talk to you, son,” Elijah said. “And please don’t cut your fingers up into the onions, because blood makes the soup salty.”

  I sat down and started cutting the onions as he watched me. He let me cut two onions before he started talking again.

  “We don’t have a law that
says a man needs to get out and find himself a job, do we?” Elijah asked.

  He held his hand up before I could speak.

  “And if he does have a job and wants to spend his money on beer and lottery tickets on the way home from work and not feed his family, that’s not illegal, is it?”

  The hand went up again, and I kept quiet.

  “There’s a law that says you have to go to school, but there’s no law that says you have to learn anything. If you get on the crosstown bus and you want to stick your tongue out at everybody on the bus, you can do it and you’re as legal as the day is long, am I right?”

  “Can I answer?”

  “You got a mouth, use it,” Elijah said.

  “It’s legal, but I don’t want to stick my tongue out at everybody on the bus,” I said.

  “Okay, but how many people you see won’t shake a stick at a piece of work?” Elijah asked. “And how many you see down at the bar or wherever they go spending their money instead of taking care of their families? You see any of that around where you live?”

  “Plenty,” I said.

  “And how many young people—and old people, too—do you hear cursing on that bus we’re talking about?”

  “I guess a few,” I said.

  “And how many young people you see walking out that little delicatessen on the corner—”

  “The one next to the barber shop?” I asked.

  “That’s the one,” Elijah said. “They come out eating their fruity pops or their poppy fruits or whatever young people cram into their mouths today, and throw the wrappers on the ground. Can I get an amen on that?”

  “Amen.”

  “But what you want to tell me is that those things aren’t that important, right?” Elijah had folded his arms across his chest. “A candy wrapper don’t mean anything even if it is lying on the sidewalk, and if a man wants to spend his money down at the bar instead of bringing it on home to his family … well, that’s his right. Isn’t that what you want to tell Elijah?”

  “It’s important to you,” I said. “I can see that.”

  “Would we be living better or worse if that man we talking about had a job and if the young person throwing their fruity pops wrapper on the ground put it in the trash can?”

  “I wouldn’t be living any different,” I said. “If the guy didn’t feed his family, that’s his business.”

  “And that’s his right under that first wake-up-in-the-morning law,” Elijah said. “But if you have to pay taxes to feed his family, then what’s going on?”

  “I didn’t think about that,” I said.

  “And if you have to pay taxes to get somebody to go around picking up fruity pops wrappers, then that’s all right with you, too?”

  “I didn’t say that it was all right,” I said.

  “And suppose I told you that there are unwritten contracts in our society that say that if you don’t follow them, you’re going to suffer all your life?” he went on. “Take that little business about going to school. You sitting up in school daydreaming about your career in the National Basketball League—”

  “National Basketball Association!” I said.

  “I knew you would catch me on that one,” Elijah said. “But dreaming about the National Basketball Association is your business, too, isn’t it?”

  “I know where this is going, Elijah,” I said.

  “But our society says that most of the good jobs and nearly all of the best jobs require a college education,” Elijah said. “They got it set up so that you can get ahead in certain ways. The tribe did the same thing back in the day. That tribe said that anybody who didn’t work didn’t eat. Then they said that whoever was the best hunter got his pick of the meat. If you couldn’t hunt good, you had to eat the leftovers. That made sense to those cavemen. Make sense to you?”

  “You’re sounding like a preacher now,” I said.

  “And if you’re strong and you can defend the tribe, then you get to eat with the good hunters,” he went on. “That make sense, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But today our tribe says that if you’re the best hunter, it doesn’t mean anything,” Elijah said, “because we don’t need hunters. And if you’re the strongest man on the block, it doesn’t mean much, either. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said.

  Elijah had put on a frying pan, put some olive oil in it, and was cooking the cumin seeds. Then he added some garlic, and in a minute the place was smelling good.

  “So what we’re talking about is society making rules for what it wants done and how it wants to live,” Elijah went on. “Some of the things it wants from us are written down like you said, in laws. Laws are the will of the people. But some of the things that aren’t written down are also going to dictate how well you do in life.”

  “Why don’t they just write everything down and then everybody would know it and we wouldn’t have a problem,” I said.

  “Because the rules change, sometimes from generation to generation,” Elijah said. He was putting the sautéed seeds in a large pot. “Sometimes they change from person to person or from situation to situation. But if you can learn how to tell the differences between onions and maybe make a little soup, you can probably learn a little something about the social contract. What you think?”

  “I guess I can,” I said.

  “The first thing you got to know is that frying up these cumin seeds with a little garlic releases their flavor and adds some depth to our black bean soup we’re having this afternoon. Now that’s a good thing to know. Did you know that a good black bean soup has more character than some people?”

  “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Elijah,” I said, “but I don’t think I need to know all of this stuff. And what I’m going to say might sound foul, but I don’t mean it to be. Most people don’t go around worrying about ham sandwiches and contracts they don’t know about, and they get along just fine.”

  “Do they, Mr. DuPree?” Elijah asked. “Do they really?”

  3

  I was supposed to be mentoring some kid on Friday mornings, and I looked forward to it. I figured it would be a boy, maybe a middle school kid having trouble reading. I hoped it wasn’t one of those kids who mixed up letters because I didn’t think I knew how to deal with that. I arrived at the school at nine thirty and told the guard what I was there for.

  “You got ID?” he asked, looking over his glasses at me.

  I showed him my ID and he told me to go to the second floor, room 203.

  I found the room and there were five kids my age already there and some smaller kids, all boys.

  “Mr. DuPree?” A young, thin woman with dark eyes looked up from her clipboard.

  “Yes.”

  “You have to report here every Friday and then go right to the fourth-floor gym,” she said. “Keisha’s waiting for you there now. You know you’re mentoring her in basketball, right?”

  “Basketball?”

  “She’ll explain it,” she said. “Have fun.”

  Basketball? She’ll explain it? I imagined a nine-year-old on crutches trying to get her confidence up. Okay, I could handle it.

  I got to the fourth floor, went to the end of the hall, and saw the school’s logo over the entrance to the gym. I walked in and looked around and didn’t see any kids. Then I noticed somebody at the water cooler. She was wearing sweats and had a ball under her arm. She saw me and came right over.

  “Hey! I’m Keisha. How you doing?”

  “I’m doing okay,” I said. She looked vaguely familiar, and I knew I had seen her before.

  “You know how you got me?” she asked.

  “How?” Lame answer, but it was all I could think of.

  “I picked you because I saw you play a few times and heard that you were available,” she said. “They told you my name? Keisha Marant?”

  “Yeah, I mean, no.” I was close to stammering. “They said something about basketball.”

  ??
?Okay, here’s the deal,” Keisha said. “You want to sit down or something?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Now I was remembering who she was. Keisha Marant played ball for George Washington and was All World until she just dropped out of school. Now here she was, all six feet of her, striding over to the benches at the side of the court.

  “Here’s the deal. They’re having a tournament in August down at the Cage on West Fourth Street. I got some girls together who can hoop, and we’re going to enter it. I got to show strong and I need some help, so I applied to get myself mentoring when I saw you were in the community program. You don’t have that much game, but you can shoot from the outside and that’s what I need to work on. You reading me?”

  “I thought that mentoring was about reading and math, not basketball,” I said.

  “So you can’t handle it?” Keisha rolled her eyes toward me.

  “Yeah, I guess I can handle it,” I said. “But I thought your game was already pretty tight?”

  “I can play inside, but the college coaches are telling me that they need somebody with an all-around game,” Keisha said. “What I’m thinking is that they know I got a baby—”

  “You got a baby?”

  “They know I got a baby and my grades aren’t too tough and I dropped out for a minute, so they think they’re taking a chance on recruiting me,” she said.

  “But if your game is complete, then they’ll take that chance,” I said, finishing Keisha’s thought.

  “Then I saw you play and you kept pulling up and popping from the outside,” Keisha went on. “I liked the way you looked.”

  “Okay, let’s see how you shoot,” I said.

  Keisha hunched her shoulders, then dribbled up to the three-point line and let the ball go. The way she shot, I could tell she didn’t have any confidence in it going in, and it didn’t.

  We watched as the ball bounced off the rim, and I retrieved it. I bounced it back to her and nodded toward the basket. She shot again, a two-handed set shot from one side that missed the rim entirely.