All the Right Stuff (6 page)

“That's okay,” I said.

“No, it's not okay,” Sly said. He put the money into my shirt pocket. “When a young man is afraid to deal with his fellow man, it means the system has you so brainwashed that you're afraid to follow your mind. You put your mind in your pocket and follow the system. The same system that your friend Elijah is calling the social contract.

“You think you know something when you're talking about philosophy, but that brother you gave the soda to knows a lot more than you.”

Sly stepped off the stoop and got into a car I hadn't seen pull up. He rolled the window down and beckoned for me to come over to the car.

“So you know all about the social contract, Rousseau, Hobbes, and all those old dudes?” he asked.

“I know some about it,” I said. “I don't know those guys you're talking about. But I think I would like to know more.”

“That's good,” Sly said. “Only fools don't want to learn more about everything.”

He rolled up the window. And he was gone.

I really had to pee bad.

I wondered what Sly thought about my father. He thought the dude who told me to go to hell knew something. Maybe he would have thought my father knew something, too.

I knew that Elijah was laying traps for me.
Old people like to do that to young people. They set you up to say something and then jump all over it. I thought what Elijah said was interesting, and the way he said it, talking about ham sandwiches and stuff, was funny. But thinking about it when he wasn't around was still confusing. When I got to the emporium in the morning, I had a bunch of questions ready for Elijah.

“The way I figure it,” I said after I walked through the door, “is that either everybody follows the social contract bit or nobody follows it. I'm not going to play by some rules if there are people going around doing what they want to do.”

“Good morning, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “I see that young mind of yours has been working overtime. It's got you so riled up, you can skip right past ‘good morning.'”

“Good morning, sir,” I said. “But I mean what I said. About the ham sandwich. I think if somebody takes my sandwich, I should feel free to take theirs.”

“The soup of the day is oxtail,” Elijah said. “It's been on since five this morning and it's smelling pretty good. Did you know there was a time you could buy oxtails for twenty cents a pound? They were the same as bones or spare ribs. Now they cost you as much as prime beef.”

“Well, I guess maybe there's a shortage of oxen,” I said. “The less there is of something, the more it costs.”

“Oxtails don't have anything to do with oxen,” Elijah said. “They have to do with cows and bulls. It just doesn't sound so good saying ‘bull tail,' now does it?”

“No, sir, it doesn't.”

“Now getting back to what you were saying about the social contract.” Elijah slowly stirred the soup and waved his hand over the large pot to get some of the smell. He looked at me and smiled, and I knew he thought he had made some good soup. “I agree with you one hundred percent. If anybody walks away from the social contract, then we should all walk away. I think that Thursdays and Fridays are the best days. What do you think?”

“The best days for what?”

“For robbing and killing people and taking their ham sandwiches or their money or their televisions,” Elijah said. “Because that's what we're talking about, aren't we? Killing people and taking their stuff?”

“I didn't say that, Elijah, and you know it,” I said. “What I mean is that if somebody is going to think it's okay to take my stuff, then, you know…”

“What do I know?” Elijah asked. “I know a lot of people believe they should be able to follow wherever the wind pushes them. Look at all the fellows and gals in prisons and jails today. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them are stone guilty, and they know it. They have wiped their feet on the social contract. You look at them close, and all their lips are greasy from somebody else's ham sandwich. And now you're telling me that because they're doing it, then you got to do it, too.”

“You hear me say that?” I asked. “Because I didn't hear me say that. What I said was if you're going to take my stuff, then I think that I have the right to take yours.”

“I'm agreeing with you. I'm on your side. Now let's me and you look around and see who is not doing their part on the social contract we're talking about,” Elijah said. “We got all these people running around stealing and shooting people. How about them?”

“They're not following the social contract,” I said.

“How about the people doing the kidnapping and the hijacking?” Elijah asked. “What we going to do about them?”

“They're not following the contract,” I said.

“How about the woman who fakes a fall in the department store so she can sue and get some money?” Elijah asked.

“What you mean, how about her?” I asked.

“Well, she's stealing from the insurance company, which is going to raise your rates, so that's a good thing or a bad thing?” Elijah asked.

“That's a bad thing,” I said.

“That enough for you to throw away your copy of the contract?”

“Not by itself, but if everybody is doing it … that's different,” I said. “The Bible says, ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.'”

“I'm glad you're reading the Good Book, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “But that doesn't stop me from not knowing whether you're going to follow the social contract or not. Because it seems to me like you're looking around to see what everybody else is doing first, and then making up your mind as things go along.”

“You have to do that,” I said. “Don't you have a right to protect yourself?”

“A fundamental, inalienable right, sir,” Elijah said. “You certainly have a right to protect yourself and what belongs to you. But what you're telling me is that if everybody in the tribe doesn't follow the contract, then there can't be a contract, and that bothers me. It bothers me because there's always somebody who wants to walk their own way, or who looks at the contract and says, ‘Hey, I can get an advantage out of this situation.'”

“Okay, so I know this guy who was telling me that all the social contract does is to make little people like me scared to step out of line so the people in charge can do whatever they want to do,” I said. “And he studied the social contract in college.”

“So he should know something about it,” Elijah said.

“He does know something about it,” I said. “I was thinking about what he said and what you said and it's almost the same thing, but he looks at it differently than you do. You said we were giving up our right to do anything we wanted, and Sly said the same thing, except he was saying that the people on top never have to give up their rights, just the people on the bottom.”

“Hobbes,” Elijah said. “A lot of people study Hobbes, but they don't really understand him.”

“I'm talking about Sly,” I said. “He's a big dude, wears those little glasses.”

“I'm talking about Thomas Hobbes,” Elijah said. “He was one of the first men to talk about the social contract. You can look him up on the internet.”

“You use the internet?”

“Mr. DuPree, I am a black man with gray hair, a touch of arthritis, and a thirst for knowledge. I am not a dinosaur!”

“Yes, sir.”

“And this fellow you're talking about is right. Hobbes was trying to make sense of how people can live together successfully, but he thought that most people couldn't make their own decisions. In his version of the social contract, the people on top of the heap had to decide the best way for society to live. If you let people make their own decisions, life would end up being poor, nasty, and short.”

“That's what Sly said!”

“When you say Sly, are you referring to Mr. Edward Norton? Young man who drives around in a fancy car and has a bodyguard?” Elijah asked.

“He said he used to talk to you,” I answered. “You know him?”

“I know his family and yes, I used to talk to him at times,” Elijah said. “His father was a preacher, and so was his grandfather. Edward, or Sly, as he likes to be called, was always a bright young man. But one morning he got up and looked in the mirror and saw himself in a new light. He saw the same thing that a lot of other people, including Hobbes, saw—that maybe the social contract was good for most people, but the people on top didn't really have to worry about the people on the bottom.”

“And Sly sees himself as one of the people on the top?”

“That he does, Mr. DuPree. That he does. But Edward is a young man who thinks, and that's good.”

“So does this all end up with somebody being right and somebody being wrong?” I asked.

“It ends up with people looking at the same picture and seeing different things,” Elijah said. “A man named John Rawls said that the only way that the social contract could work perfectly was if everybody goes into it blind. And our friend Edward—or Sly, as you call him—is not going to close his eyes for a minute.”

“I like my problems easier,” I said. “I don't mind thinking about things, but I want to come up with an answer.”

“Let's have a fancy tablecloth today,” Elijah said. “You go upstairs and go into the room on the right-hand side of the hallway. Inside you'll find a breakfront, glass doors on top and drawers on the bottom. Look in the top drawer, and you'll see two real nice light-blue tablecloths. Bring them down and we'll set the tables.

“And take your time going up and down the stairs,” Elijah went on. “Because I need you to figure out for me if right needs to be right for everybody and for all time, and if wrong for you is always wrong for me.”

“Yo, Elijah, no offense, sir, but I'm not going there,” I said. “My head is already spinning around this social contract stuff. If I try to get any deeper in this mess, I'm liable to rupture my brain or something.”

After I got the tablecloths, I washed and dried the tables. Then me and Elijah laid out the cloths and smoothed them over. Elijah's got a lot of different sets of plates, and this time he used the ones with the blue border and gold trim. When the people started coming in, they all noticed how nice the tables looked, and Mr. Perkins said it reminded him of his aunt Mae's table down in Camden, New Jersey.

“Elijah, you put wine in this soup?” Sister Effie was about nine hundred years old. “Because I don't drink wine and I don't want no wine in my soup!”

“No wine, Effie,” Elijah said. “Just oxtails, carrots, and good stock.”

Everybody left happy. Miss Lou Fennell, who was kind of sick and who couldn't speak, came over and patted Elijah's hand and then patted mine.

I washed the dishes, put the tablecloths in the washing machine, and cleaned the kitchen as Elijah looked over the vegetables he was going to use in tomorrow's soup.

Before I left, I got the spelling of Hobbes from Elijah. At home, I looked him up and got a zillion hits! I looked at a few of them and saw that people were not only writing about Thomas Hobbes but discussing the social contract all over the internet. What came to me was that if that many people were all over the social contract, how come almost nobody who I knew was down with it?

“There's a girl on the phone,” Mom said. “She sounds young.”

It was Keisha. She asked what I was doing.

“Nothing much,” I said.

“I got to take CeCe to the hospital,” she said. “You know how long they take in the emergency room. Why don't you come over and sit with me?”

“What hospital?”

“Harlem, on 135th Street.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she said, and then hung up before I had a chance to answer.

“Who was it?” Mom asked.

“Remember that girl I told you I was mentoring on Fridays?”

“That's not
mentoring
!” Mom said. “Basketball isn't mentoring.”

“She thinks it'll get her into college,” I said, putting on my jacket.

“Where you going?”

“To the hospital,” I said. “Her baby is sick and she wants me to sit with her in the waiting room.”

“Her
baby
?” Mom's eyebrows arched. “She goes to high school and she's got a baby. You're teaching her basketball and now you're helping her take care of the baby. How well do you know her, Paul?”

“Hey, it's no big thing,” I said. “A lot of girls have babies before they finish high school.”

“It should be a big thing,” Mom said. “You watch yourself.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

When I got over to Harlem Hospital, I saw Keisha waiting in the lobby. She had her little girl on her hip.