All the Right Stuff (12 page)

“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?”

“What?”

“I'm not going to have a good life,” Keisha said. “I'm dreaming about playing basketball, but I don't think it's going to happen. Not really. So all your little rules don't mean diddly-squat to me.”

“Then why are you here practicing your shot?”

“For the same reason I buy a lottery ticket every month,” Keisha said. “Maybe a miracle will happen.”

We didn't say anything else. When I looked at Keisha, she had a hard face on, but she was tearing up. I put my arm around her, and she leaned against me.

We sat for a while longer; then she got up and went over to where the basketballs were.

“You going to feed me?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I got up and tossed her a ball. She shot it, a high arcing shot that fell cleanly through the net.

“When I was a boy, we used to use lard,”
Elijah said. I had picked up the ingredients he had listed, and he was watching me make soup. “Now we use butter or oil.”

I was browning the chicken with the ham, garlic, and butter, and it was smelling good. When Elijah told me I was going to do the cooking, I was surprised, but I thought I was ready. I kept the pieces turning like he told me, but I was having trouble talking about the differences between soup and stew and pushing the pieces of chicken around in the pot at the same time.

“Don't let it burn,” he said. “Burned meat never tastes good.”

I finished browning the chicken and ham, added the chopped parsley, salt, West Indian pepper, and thyme, and stirred it around the pot until Elijah signaled me to stop. The smells from the garlic and pepper and meat cooking filled the room.

“Now you have to add the stock and water,” he said.

“How much stock and water should I add?”

“When does it stop being soup and start being stew?” Elijah asked.

I looked at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn't. I didn't know what to say, so I just shrugged.

“In my way of thinking, you need to have two and a half cups of liquid for each serving when you begin your soup,” Elijah said. “If that cooks down to two cups per serving, you're just about right. Your friend Mr. Sly might think that less stock and more ingredients is better, and I don't dispute that for what he might be making. But Elijah is serving soup. Soup doesn't fit everybody's needs. Stew goes a lot further. I know that and you know that. But if I were making stew, I might run into a problem. Maybe I couldn't afford it five days a week. And if I did make stew, somebody out there would want dessert. Maybe they would want some rice to go with the stew. Maybe, even, they might want some soup to go with it.”

“So what are you saying? Stew doesn't cut it?”

“No, what I'm saying is that people who come here benefit from my serving them soup. They get companionship, they get some good soup, they get some nourishment for their bodies, and they get something to do in the middle of the day. In other words, there is a benefit to a great number of people within my little social contract.

“Now, I only allow senior citizens to come here for soup. Some folks don't like that. They think I'm discriminating, and in a way, I am. In my soup emporium, I am the ruler. What I say goes. People who come here and enjoy the soup let me make the rules. I've been told that I should have the soup at a different time. I've been told I should have different soups.”

“So you're saying you can't please everybody?”

“Some days I can't please anybody,” Elijah said. “But they've given me the right to choose and they've given up their right to choose in my little kingdom here.”

“I got you,” I said. “They've made a contract with you to get the soup. Did you have a meeting or something?”

“What they probably did is the same thing the cavemen did,” Elijah said. “They looked around, saw something was working, and bought into it.”

Elijah got up and turned down the heat under the large frying pan so that you could just see the flame.

“How come Sly doesn't buy into it?”

“Because man is a wonderful creature,” Elijah said. “He's vain, he's cocky, he has a belief in himself so strong that he creates his God in his own image. Sly can see what I do, and he can see what benefit it brings. What he can't see is why he needs to limit himself to what an old man does in a small way. The best part of Sly is his wanting to be more than everybody else.”

“The best part?”

“When ambition goes right, it's the soul of progress, Mr. DuPree. When it goes wrong, it can create all kinds of misery,” Elijah said. “People like Sly start seeing their ambition as the purpose of life.”

“You just think about that or you had it all figured out before?” I asked.

“I've been thinking for a few years, son,” Elijah said. “A few years.”

Some of the stock I was going to add was in the refrigerator and some, with the oysters, was on the stove. I put the chicken and ham and spices from the frying pan into one of Elijah's two big soup pots. Then I listened to him complaining that I should have put some of the stock in the frying pan and gotten all the bits from the meat cooking.

I cooked the chicken on high and had to add some water as it cooked down. Two hours later, I turned the heat down, took out the chicken parts, and forked the chicken off the bone.

“There's not much fat to skim on your broth, so your chickens must have been old,” Elijah said.

“Yo, Elijah, we actually going to serve this today?”

“Either we do that or you stand up and tell everybody to go home,” Elijah answered.

It was hard to fork the meat off the chicken bones because the chicken was really hot. But I got it off and into the main stockpot, and it was smelling even better. I was getting excited. It was like having a big basketball game for the championship, but nobody knew how I was getting ready for it.

Forty-five minutes before we opened the doors, Elijah had me add the oysters to the soup.

“You have to be gentle with them,” he said.

I took some of the broth from the soup and put it in a bowl to add the last of the spices. The filé powder had to be stirred as it mixed, and Elijah wanted it so there weren't any lumps.

“I can't see if there are lumps or not,” I said.

“If you care enough, there won't be any lumps,” Elijah said. “It'll be smooth.”

I stirred steady until it seemed ready to me, then poured it into the soup pot. Taking the wooden spoon from Elijah, I stirred some more.

“Taste it,” Elijah said.

To me, it was good. Maybe even great. I could hardly wait until the seniors arrived.

“I remember back in Wilmington, North Carolina, when shrimp gumbo saved a man's life,” Sister Effie said.

“Ain't no gumbo saved no man's life!” Cranky old Mr. Peters turned his head and humphed. “That's just one of them stories that—”

“Do not tell me what I have seen with my own eyes, Mr. Robert Peters!”

“I know ain't no gumbo has saved a man's life!” Mr. Peters said.

“It was just past the Fourth of July, and this young black man got into an argument with an old white man right there on Jackson Avenue,” Sister Effie said, her soup spoon about six inches over her bowl of my soup. “The white man was a sheriff or something like that and was so mean he could look a hound dog in the eye and stop its heart. Anyway, Markie, that was the black boy's name, knocked him down and all the white people around that end of Wilmington was mad and they decided to hang that poor boy.

“His mama was real upset, and she didn't know what to do. She was praying and pleading and going on, but that didn't move the hearts of them white folks none. Then his aunt Carrie brought two bowls of gumbo to the jail, and she asked them to let him eat that bowl of gumbo before he passed on, and she put the other bowl down in front of the sheriff. The sheriff sat him down and watched as Markie started eating his gumbo. Well, when Markie had finished that bowl, it gave him so much life, he stood up and said, ‘Come on and hang me!'

“That old sheriff came over and said he should have shot Markie and saved the rope from stretching. But Markie looked him right in the eye—you hear me? He looked him right in the eye and said he didn't give a damn, and that sheriff said he didn't give a damn either and he wouldn't even bother hanging him. And that's how that gumbo saved that boy's life.”

“That gumbo didn't save that boy's life,” Mr. Peters said. “They were always talking about lynching somebody down there, but once they got cooled off, they didn't bother none with it most of the time. That's what happened. Gumbo didn't save nothing!”

Everybody was enjoying themselves. I looked over at Elijah, and I could tell he was pleased with himself. His little piece of the social contract was working just fine. But what I liked mostly was that they were eating my soup the same as they ate the soup made by Elijah.

I didn't look into Elijah's face because I knew I would seem stupid grinning.

When everybody left, I asked Elijah if I could tell him about a girl I knew, and he said yes.

“On Fridays, I'm mentoring a girl,” I said. “She's seventeen and she's had kind of a rough life. When she was young and going to school, her home life was so messed up she couldn't study. She got bad grades, and after that she got a baby, and I think—I know—she's pretty defensive. I'm mentoring her in basketball. She's a good ballplayer, but they're telling her she needs a three-point shot.”