All the Right Stuff (4 page)

“I'm strong enough!” she said.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? I'm stronger than your little punky butt!” Keisha said. “You want to go one-on-one?”

No, I didn't, but I said yes.

We played to fifteen and she beat me fifteen to seven. Then she said she had to go.

“I thought we were supposed to be dealing for three hours,” I said.

“CeCe is with my grandmother, and I have to take care of her,” she said.

We started walking toward the door, and I asked her was she coming next week. She said yes, and if things worked out she would stay the whole three hours.

“You know, you can still go to college even if you don't play ball,” I said. “I don't think college is that hard.”

“It might not be for you, but it will be for me,” Keisha said. “I don't have a whole lot of discipline and patience and stuff like that. I'm just me doing my thing, and I need some competition or something to keep me going. If I can't play ball, I probably won't be anything any damn way. I know that and you know it, too.”

“What do I know about you?” I asked. “I don't know anything about you except you can't shoot from the outside.”

“I'm a black seventeen-year-old girl with a baby,” Keisha said. “What else do you
need
to know?”

Keisha had an attitude, and she was making sure that I knew it. I didn't know if she could learn to shoot from the outside, but I thought I'd give it my best shot to try to teach her.

I called my friend Terrell and told him what had happened.

“You going to try to get with her?” he asked.

“No, I don't think so,” I said.

“Yo, my man is scared!” Terrell's voice went up. “You're scared to try to get with her, man.”

“What else do you
need
to know?”

It was my second week
in Elijah's Soup Emporium, and I was getting used to the routine. Come in at ten, check out what soup Elijah was cooking, start getting ready for the next day's soup. When the seniors came in at noon, me and Elijah would serve them, then take their plates when they had finished. Elijah would work on the next day's soup in the afternoon while I did the washing. I was liking Elijah, too. He was always kidding me, but I felt that he had accepted me right away. I realized he was trying to teach me things—no, more than that. He was trying to pass on things he knew.

“That's sixteen regulars and four new people,” Elijah said when the last of the seniors had left for the day. “Not bad for summer. When the weather gets cold, we're going to have close to forty or fifty people coming in for a bowl of soup.”

“It was good soup, too,” I said.

“I know it was,” Elijah answered. “If there's anything in this world that I do know, it's the difference between good soup and dishwater.”

“What kind of soup we making this afternoon?” I asked.

“I don't make too many different kinds of soup here,” Elijah said, cutting up some more onions, which, I think, was his favorite thing to do. “We serve five days a week, and so we have five basic soups and three once-in-a-while soups. Tomorrow the soup is collard greens and ham in beef stock. In the winter, we serve the same soup with a few white beans added for weight.”

“Collard greens
soup
?” I asked. “I never heard of it.”

“Hasn't it come to you yet, Mr. DuPree, that there are more than one or two things you haven't heard of in this life?” Elijah asked me.

I was trying to think of something good to say when the doorbell rang. Miss Watkins was a regular at the soup kitchen. She always brought her own cloth napkin, which she would spread on her lap before being served. She looked me up and down and then waved a thin dark hand for me to move aside. I stepped back, and she came in and spoke to Elijah.

“I'm going down to the fish market on 125th Street,” she said. “You needing anything?”

“See if they got some fresh mullet,” Elijah said. “I can use a few pounds. What are you doing out here in all this heat, Miss Watkins?”

“Walking off the rust spots,” Miss Watkins said. “Can't let myself get too stiff to be about my business.”

Elijah gave Miss Watkins five dollars for the mullets and asked if she needed anything.

“Just need enough to do to keep the grave from tempting me,” Miss Watkins said.

She took one of Elijah's cloth shopping bags with her, to carry the fish in, and left.

“That woman has seen more in her lifetime than anybody needs to be seeing,” Elijah said. “Good-hearted woman, too. She lost her husband in the war, and a daughter two years later in a house fire. You don't see many people who have been through as much as she's experienced who haven't grown hardhearted.”

“You think she knows about your social contract?” I asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Elijah said. “She might not have the vocabulary in place, but she's living out her relationship with the world just as nice as you please.”

“Okay, so you're the man as far as soup goes,” I said. “But I was thinking about those cavemen you were talking about the other day. If that contract thing you talking about was so tough, then how come the cavemen aren't around anymore?”

“What makes you think the cavemen aren't around anymore?” Elijah asked. “Just because they dress different than what you see in the movies?”

“You mean they dress different but they're still around with the same contract?” I asked.

“No, they turned in that old contract for a new one,” Elijah said. “Now put these greens in the sink and wash them good.”

“They look clean to me,” I said. “I think they wash them in the vegetable market.”

“Mr. DuPree, please do an old man a favor,” Elijah said, speaking slowly. “I know you're sitting on that stool to keep it from floating away, but get up and go wash the greens as I asked you.”

Washing collard greens isn't too bad because the leaves are broad and you just have to run water over them to wash away any grit that might be left on them. I started doing that while Elijah cut up the ham shoulder.

“Did you invent collard greens soup?” I asked.

“No, but I was raised on it,” Elijah said. “Way back in slavery days, the only things that people had to eat was what they could raise themselves and what the master gave them. Collard greens were a good, healthy crop. If they could get a piece of smoked pork to season it, then they were doing all right. The right stuff for eating didn't have to be expensive.”

“The right stuff?”

“That's what we're doing, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “We're taking all the right stuff, putting it together, and making something wonderful.”

“You mean the soups?” I asked. “Or you mean bringing people together?”

“Boy, did you just grow a few inches right in front of my eyes?”

“What you mean?”

“What I mean is that you're a pretty sharp young man,” Elijah said. “I'm going to have to get a little deeper with my social contract theories with you.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “But check this out. I had American history in the seventh and ninth grades. We didn't have anything about social contracts. And we didn't have anything about cavemen in America, either.”

“All right, I'll take back what I said about you growing,” Elijah said. “But some men in England way back in the thirteenth century started talking about a social contract—”

“No, I said America,” I said. “You know, the United States.”

“Kings and queens and lords and ladies and barons and whatnot,” Elijah said, ignoring me. “And these men looked around and noticed that the king had all the rights and the barons wanted some for themselves. If the king said jump, you said, ‘How high?' If the king said, ‘Lay down and die,' you laid down and at least closed your eyes. So some fellows got together and talked about getting a set of rules to give all free men an even break. What they dreamed of was a contract that restricted some of the powers of the king.”

“And the king was all right with that?”

“Well, he was all right with it when he saw that the people were thinking about cutting his head off if he wasn't all right with it,” Elijah said, grinning.

“That was over in England someplace?”

“Yes, it was. But after that, the English started thinking that they could influence the way government worked and began trying to make laws based on what they thought was fair for everybody,” Elijah said.

“That was good,” I said.

“To a point,” Elijah said. “It was good in some ways and bad in other ways.”

“How come nothing I say is completely right?” I asked Elijah.

He turned slowly and looked at me. “I was wondering about that myself,” he said.

Just then a knock came on the door, and a shiny-faced brother asked if Tony was in.

“Tony lives on the next floor,” Elijah said. “You can go up there and play as many numbers as you want and leave as much money with Tony as you need to.”

The shiny-faced brother looked at me, then looked at Elijah, touched the front of his cap, and walked away.

“Tony's the local numbers man,” Elijah said. “Part of the shady side of Harlem. Meanwhile, are you giving them greens a bubble bath or are you just washing them?”

I took the greens out of the water and took the knife that Elijah handed me and started chopping them. He took the knife from me and chopped some to show me how he wanted it done and then handed it back to me again. I started chopping, and he grunted, which I figured meant I was doing it right.

“Things were better over in England after they restricted the king's powers. Laws were made to enforce the social contract, but there were still some people down at the bottom of the ladder, struggling in the mud, trying to get out of the mess they were in. Some other people just didn't like how the country was being run, and so they decided to leave and come over to where a new land had been discovered. That land they were calling America.”

“The Pilgrims,” I said.

“Some of them were Pilgrims,” Elijah said. “Some were just people looking to start their lives over again. Some were convicts sent over here in place of being sent to jail or hanged. They started landing over here around 1600. Soon as they got over here, they started making their own social contract. They figured what was going to be the best thing for their society, and they created rules and laws that had to be followed.”

“Which was the right thing to do,” I said.

“In a way it was, and in a way it wasn't,” Elijah said.

“That's because you can't let me get one point in that's right,” I said.

“No, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “Because life is never that simple. You see, when all those folks arrived here from England, there were already some people living here. You might have heard of them. The Erie, the Seminole, the Mohawk, and out west, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Comanche, and so forth.”

“The Indians?”

“The so-called Indians,” Elijah said. “Now the people living here had their own social contracts that suited them just fine. But the people coming from England decided that their social contract was the best one and the people already living here had to move aside. The people from England had the most guns, and their social contracts started to win out.”

“Whoa, wait a minute.” I stopped chopping greens. “When you were running down the social contract the other day—that was the ham sandwich business—you were talking about people agreeing to stuff. Now you're talking about this king over in England, and he was being forced to deal with the contract. Then you get over to America, and you're talking about who's got the most guns. That's not a contract, brother, that's intimidation.”

“That's true, Mr. DuPree, that's definitely true.”

“Yo, Elijah, you leading me through a whole lot of mess that you're saying is about the social contract, but I'm thinking it's about people doing what they want to do.”

“But is it history?” Elijah asked. “Did it really happen?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it's worth looking at, isn't it?”

“You know, I don't know if I should feel glad that you're running this down to me,” I said, “or mad because of the way it went down!”

“That's why we need people with intelligence and a good sense of justice to pay close attention to the social contract and the theories behind it,” Elijah said. “An Englishman named John Locke said that property was not just land but the labor used to develop that land as well. So if the Indians weren't cultivating that land, it was all right for the Europeans on the scene to take it.”

“Get out of here!”

“You think I'm not telling you the truth?”