“Yeah.”
“You remind me of Socrates,” Sly said. “He lived in Greece way back when they were trying to figure out if calendars had to have numbers on them. He was teaching some half-ass radical stuff—like thinking for yourself—which their heavy hitters didn’t like. They told him he had to stop teaching, and when he didn’t, they told him he had to go. All his friends told him to split the city, but he said that wasn’t right—he owed the government his loyalty, so he killed himself.”
“Get out of here!”
“Yeah, he was an old fool,” Sly said. “Fools commit suicide and think they’re doing themselves a favor. That’s why the old man is trying to brainwash you into his dog and pony show. Obedience first, then smile, then shuffle. Crime ain’t about no damned ham sandwich. You ever hear of anybody going to jail over a ham sandwich?”
“Not really.”
“You know what crime is?” We were making a left turn onto the West Side Highway. “Crime is a form of protest against the system. Sometimes it’s the only path a poor man has. When the power structure and their flunkies—like Elijah—see that one of the lower classes is sneaking out, taking a different path than the one they laid out for him, they get upset and call that path a crime.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“It’s kind of hard to believe,” I said.
“I didn’t think you would,” Sly said. “Sounds too simple, but you keep looking around you. Keep thinking about how the brothers are getting locked up and then ask yourself, What are they getting locked up for? Ask yourself if they were taking somebody’s ham sandwich or just trying to get paid on a rainy day.”
“There’s a whole lot of ways of looking at things,” I said.
“And it’s human nature to find just as many ways of not looking at things,” Sly said. “When most people run into a problem, the first thing they do is stuff cotton in their ears and close their eyes. Most of your life, that’s what you’re going to want to do, and most of the time, it’s going to be what you do.”
“You think that Elijah has his eyes closed?”
“He means well,” Sly said, “but he’s tap-dancing across a rainbow and telling the world that it’s a bridge to the good life. It all sounds good, but it doesn’t work for us. And when a young man like you comes along, somebody with something on the cap, we need to make sure that you’re going to be useful to the tribe. We got enough nonthinking people running the streets, and enough of them behind bars or hooked up in the medicine business.”
“Medicine?”
“I’m talking about all these guys standing on the corners feeling sick because they can’t get around your professor’s rules and start building something that looks like the American dream,” Sly said. “When they get sick enough, they start self-medicating—smoking dip and snorting girl—to make themselves feel better or at least helping them get through the day. That’s folk medicine. The man calls it addiction. What you call it?”
“I never thought about it as self … what did you say?”
“Self-medicating. People trying to ease the pain the system thinks they should bear.”
I thought about the girl in Anthony’s film and wondered what pain she had been bearing. I wanted to think that my father had been in pain, too, and that he had been self-medicating, as Sly said.
We pulled up on a crowded part of Thirty-second Street, in front of a Korean restaurant, and Sly got out.
“Keep an eye on our passenger,” he said through the window to D-Boy. “If he tries to steal anything, shoot him.”
D-Boy had his eyes right on me in the rearview mirror. From the corner of my eye, I could see Sly going into the restaurant. Sly had a sense of humor, and he was smart, but he also acted like he wouldn’t mind shooting you if he thought you needed it. A lot of brothers in the hood acted tough. It was a way that kept you out of trouble at times. If you acted soft, there was always somebody around ready to test you. But the stories about Sly made me think there was more to him than acting.
“You know I’m not going to steal anything,” I said, throwing out my best smile to D-Boy.
D-Boy didn’t say anything, but he kept his eyes on me. It wasn’t a good feeling.
Sly was in the restaurant for five minutes or so. When he got back into the car, he said that everything was cool, and D-Boy pulled off. I tried to think of something funny to say, but nothing came to mind.
On the way back uptown, Sly was quiet. I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but I didn’t want to jump in with anything stupid. I found myself breathing shallow so I wouldn’t make much noise.
It didn’t feel like we were going very fast, but we were passing cars on the highway. I noticed that D-Boy never said anything, but every once in a while he would kind of hunch his shoulders up and down. I wondered if he was carrying a gun.
When we got off the highway at 145th Street, D-Boy turned on the radio, and Sly immediately turned it off.
“I’m starting a new business on 145th Street,” Sly said. “I’m importing goods from Korea and China and selling it wholesale from a store I’m opening. Anybody from the neighborhood who can prove where they live can get credit. I’m going to call the place The Woods. How you like that name?”
“I guess … it’s okay.”
“I’m calling it The Woods because back in slavery days, that’s where we had to go to talk over our business and strategies. You like that?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re running scared, man,” Sly said. “But you’re smart. I’m going to need some smart people down the road to help me run the business. You think you might be interested?”
“You mean after college?”
“Whenever,” Sly said. “People who can think don’t come along every day. In the meanwhile, just stay strong.”
“I’m doing it,” I said.
I was halfway upstairs before I started breathing normally again.
11
“The best soup in the world is oyster gumbo,” Paris B said. He was a big man who had worked in a hospital and was now retired. “You get you one of them big cans of oysters like the restaurants have and put them in some white wine over a little heat. Don’t let it get too hot, because that’ll toughen the oysters. Just warm them in that white wine for ten to fifteen minutes, so the oysters start to feeling good about theyselves. Then cut the heat and go back to cutting up your chicken parts, flour them down, and add some salt and pepper. Then dice some ham—make sure it’s good ham—and fry that with the chicken until it’s all nice and brown and your mouth starts feeling like it wants to smile but your lips is holding back.”
“Go on.” Elijah was sitting at the end of the table, and I was sitting across from Paris B.
“Then you put in your water with some onions and a little cayenne pepper and salt if your pressure can take it,” Paris B continued. “Let that cook for half the morning and then you add your oysters. Give it five minutes, then mix in your filé powder real smooth. Give it five minutes of some high heat and get your mouth ready for some goodness! What you think, Elijah? What you think?”
“I’m going to get Mr. DuPree here to start in on it tomorrow,” Elijah said. “It’s about time he had his own special soup. Every human being should have one somebody they can really love, and one soup they can make.”
I liked soup, but I knew it wasn’t going to make much of a difference in my life. On the other hand, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, which was sounding lamer and lamer to me. What I was seeing was that some people had clear choices about who they were, like Anthony and his mother. Other people didn’t have clear choices and had to figure out what to do from day to day, like John Sunday, and maybe Lavinia, the girl in Anthony’s film.
Sly was talking about a conspiracy, and I couldn’t go for that too tough, but he was heavy into it and could make it sound like the word. But I scoped that there were some thoughts waiting to be lined up and maybe
I needed to get them together in a hurry.
When Paris B left, I swept up the dining room after I washed and racked the dishes. For some reason, Elijah put all the dishes in the closet every night. The next day I had to take them out of the closet and put them back on the table. One time I told him we could save time by leaving them in the rack. He thanked me and then put the dishes in the closet.
I was ready to go home when Elijah motioned for me to sit down. He asked me how my day off had gone, and I told him what Sly had said about how they make everything poor people do into a crime.
“Sometimes it seems that way,” he said. “But you and me, we have to think harder than Mr. Sly is thinking, because he’s looking out for himself and we want to think about the whole world. Thomas Hobbes came up with a system that he thought would benefit the whole world. You can look him up on the internet or, better still, you can get one of his books. John Locke was thinking about the world and various forms of government, too. So was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a book called The Social Contract. We’ve talked enough about the social contract for you to follow most of what he’s saying. You have to remember that all of these authors published their books before the American Revolution, so Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams were probably familiar with their work as they hammered out our Constitution. If you read the Federalist Papers, and imagine the arguments that went on behind closed doors to inspire them, you can sense the same discussions about government, individual rights, and social relationships that the social contract theorists wrestled with.”
“You read all of this stuff?”
“Yes, I have,” Elijah said.
“Boring, right?”
“Do you think it was boring stuff to people who were going to become slaves or indentured servants, or have their land taken away from them?” Elijah asked. “And should it be boring to people who can’t figure out a way of getting off the bottom of the social ladder? People like John Sunday?”
“No, it shouldn’t.”
“It’s hard reading, but hard isn’t bad if it’s going to make a difference in your life,” Elijah said. “Thinking isn’t bad, either. I think you know that by now.”
“I got that covered,” I said, feeling kind of confident.
“Okay, so we’ve covered two aspects of the social contract, natural liberty and civil liberty,” Elijah said. “Now we’re going to talk about a third aspect of the social contract—the fact that we are all living under some kind of contract—and then we’re going to mix it up like a good soup with a strong stock of ‘just the way we do things.’”
“Is this going to be confusing?”
“David Hume was an interesting thinker,” Elijah went on. “What he thought was that there couldn’t be a true social contract because a true consent of the people would involve everyone agreeing, and that never happens.”
“Which is what Sly says,” I pointed out.
“And there’s enough truth in what all of these thinkers are saying for us to be paying close attention,” Elijah said.
“And there’s enough hurting to go around to everybody if you don’t get it right,” I said.
“Say that again?”
“You want to give me five reasons why I’m wrong, right?” I said.
“No, repeat what you said about the hurting, Mr. DuPree.”
“I think there’s enough hurting to go around if you don’t get this whole thing down right,” I said. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be like a sharp pain or anything like that, but it could be just being miserable all the time.”
“You couldn’t have said it better, sir,” Elijah said. “If you take it from Sly’s point of view, they’re hurting because there’s a conspiracy.”
“And if you take it from your point of view, they’re hurting because they don’t know about the social contract,” I said.
“And if you take it from a conservative point of view, they’re hurting because they won’t follow the social contract,” Elijah said. “But everyone is offering up some form of a social contract.”
“So now you’re saying I have to deal with it?”
“You can deal with it or ignore it,” Elijah said. “That’s up to you, but it’s going to be there, and somehow the social contract is going to make your life better or worse. You think we can talk about it tomorrow?”
“Suppose I rupture my brain trying to get all this stuff in?” I asked.
“Then we’ll replace your brain with the largest vidalia onion we can find and see if that makes a difference,” Elijah said.
“Yo, Elijah, that’s cold.”
Mom and I watched the Yankees get wasted by the Red Sox. I thought of telling her what Sly had said about guys using drugs, that they were medicating themselves. It had made me feel a little better about my father, thinking he was trying to stop the hurt rather than just wanting to get high, but I thought I’d think on it some more before I ran it down to Mom.
12
“How’s CeCe?” I asked. It was Friday morning, and Keisha was wearing cutoffs, a tank top, and sneakers.
“She’s good. How you doing?”
“I’m okay,” I said. “You been practicing your shot?”
“I took a hundred shots yesterday,” she said. “Out of a hundred, I hit forty-nine.”
“Yo, that’s good!”
“How’s that good when nobody’s guarding me?” Keisha said. “You shooting from the three-point line and you get maybe two shots a game where someone isn’t waving a hand in your face or going for the ball. I need to hit forty percent when I’m being guarded.”
“So you can do it with time,” I said. “We can set up the volleyball net and you can shoot over that. See how many shots you can make in three minutes.”
“Let’s do it.”
We set up the volleyball net by putting one pole at the top of the key and slanting it so that it ran more or less parallel to the three-point line. I got three basketballs and passed the first one to Keisha.
Swish.
She had got the ball and went up instantly, shooting over the net. I passed the second ball, and she went up and nailed that one, too.
I threw her the third ball on a bounce while I scooped up the first two. That one banged off the rim, and I had to chase it.
The fourth ball fell through, and I knew the girl was getting her shot together.
The next ball rimmed the basket and came out.
Then I realized I had forgotten to check the time.
“Okay, let’s start again,” I said. “I forgot to time it.”
“Those shots I made count!” Keisha said.
“Yeah, okay.”
We practiced with the net for ten minutes, took a two-minute break, and went after it for another ten. Then we sat down, and I saw she wasn’t even breathing hard.
“You’re in good shape,” I said.
“You mean after having a baby and everything?” Keisha asked.
“Just generally,” I answered.
“Did you know that Wilma Rudolph won gold medals after she had her kids?” Keisha was wiping the sweat from her legs.
“You have nice legs,” I said, instantly thinking I shouldn’t have said it.
“Is that what you’re thinking about me?” she asked. “Because if you’re thinking you’re going to get with me, you’re wrong.”
“Did I say anything like that?”
“So what are you thinking about me?”
“You’re okay,” I said. “I’m surprised you had a baby, but you’re okay. At least you’re trying to move on with your life and everything.”
“And you think I shouldn’t be trying to get on with my life?”
“Hey, I didn’t say that!” I said. “I’ve just been thinking about how people move their lives along. You know what I mean? This guy I work for thinks we’re all working under some kind of contract—the social contract—and I’m trying to figure out if that’s right.”
“A what contract?”
?
??An unwritten contract,” I said. “It’s like a set of rules everybody has to live by.”
“And me having a baby broke the rules?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You insinuated it, though.”
“Yo, why you coming off so belligerent?” I asked. “You throwing everything I say back at me like you throwing rocks or something!”
“So me having a baby broke the rules?”
“Let’s forget it, okay?”
“Why do I have to forget it?” Keisha asked. “Because you said so?”
“Okay, so you had a baby, that’s your business,” I said. “But in a way, that was breaking the rules, right?”
“Wrong, Mr. Mentor,” Keisha said. “Because the rules don’t work for everybody, and so they don’t go for everybody.”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, if they work for everybody,” I said.
“I just told you they don’t work for everybody.” Keisha was getting a little loud. “They didn’t work for me. I started off like a good little kid trying to study hard and get good grades and sit up straight in school. And when I got home every day after school and heard all the fighting and cussing going on in my house, I couldn’t remember a thing I learned in school. I couldn’t do my homework because I didn’t have a room of my own to do it in.
“So all that ‘study hard and be good’ didn’t work for me. Maybe it works for you, but it didn’t work for me. Then I started playing ball, and I put everything I had into ball because if I worked at it hard enough and played the game strong enough, I could shut out the other crap going on in my life. I was playing Little League baseball, then I played basketball, volleyball, and would have played football if they had let me. And I’m good at it, too.”
“You are,” I said.
“But then I got to be fourteen, and people started telling me that the rules changed and I had to start looking good and flirting with guys and going to parties and dances. That was the next set of rules. I met a guy who was like ten years older than me and he started calling me his wife and then I was pregnant and I guess I became his ex-wife at fifteen. That man didn’t have no rules about who he was going to be with or when he was going to grab his hat and tip. So the study rules weren’t for me because too much shit was going on in my head, and then the girly rules weren’t for me because I was just fifteen minutes of good times for some man who didn’t need anything else. And guess what?”