“I’ll finish up here later tonight,” Elijah said. “Get your coat. I’ve got someone I need you to meet.”
“So who is this guy again?” We had locked up the Soup Emporium and were going to see one of Elijah’s friends at the fish market.
“I’ve known John Sunday a long, long time,” Elijah said as we walked down Malcolm X Boulevard. “We met way back in 1981, when I was working at Macy’s in the evenings. The night crew would order lunch around midnight, and John would deliver sandwiches and sodas. I lost touch with him for a while, but then I saw him selling fish in the market here about ten years ago. Interesting man, and an interesting part of the social contract.”
I pictured a guy who looked like Elijah, but maybe a little bit older. He would be sitting between the stalls in the market talking to a group of students or reading from some old book that was written back before time began.
It was hot, and 125th Street was jumping. People had set up tables along the sidewalks and were selling books, DVDs, candles, and incense. Every other storefront had a different kind of music blasting out from loudspeakers, and some girls in tight dresses were dancing and showing off their stuff in front of the Apollo. For a moment I thought I saw my father looking at some shoes in a window. It wasn’t him, of course, just some guy with the same build doing what he had liked to do, window-shop on 125th Street. The noise and the excitement of Harlem had always made him happy, even when he didn’t have any money.
John Sunday was sitting on a folding chair in one of the rooms at La Marqueta. There were fresh fish in every booth, along with baskets of crabs, shrimp piled on ice, and lobsters on the long counter next to him. John himself was a big white man who looked like he had shrunk inside his clothes. They were just hanging loose on him. The stubble on his face made him seem almost gray, but his eyes, kind of pale blue, lit up when he saw Elijah. He smiled and pointed a bony finger at me.
“This your grandboy?” he asked Elijah. “He’s tall enough to play basketball. You play any basketball?”
“I play some,” I said.
“You got to watch old Elijah,” John Sunday said. “He’ll steal you blind. He just come around here to see me because he wants to steal one of my recipes. Ain’t nobody can make mullet stew like John Sunday. Ain’t that right, Elijah?”
“Sure is,” Elijah said. “How you doing, John?”
“Doing good. Doing good. Sit yourself down,” John said. He reached behind the counter and pulled out another folding chair and a milk crate. “Maybe I’ll tell you some of my secrets.”
We sat down, Elijah on the chair and me on the crate. It felt a little sticky, and I tried not to think about it.
“John Sunday, this is Mr. Paul DuPree, who is helping me over the summer,” Elijah said.
I shook hands with John Sunday, and he had a good, firm grip.
“John came up from Shreveport, Louisiana,” Elijah said. “Shreveport isn’t a bad little town, but it isn’t any paradise.”
“You can say that again,” John said, shaking his head. “My daddy worked in an icehouse in Shreveport, and so did my brother Billy. Billy was named after a famous preacher used to come around once in a while. We could hear him on the radio Sunday nights, too. When my daddy died right after the war, I went to work in the icehouse. I didn’t go on the trucks, though. I’d stay inside all day, chopping ice into blocks for people to buy. Then, when it was time to go home, I’d go out and the hot air hit me and it was all about whew! And then some more whew!”
“It gets hot all over Louisiana,” Elijah threw in.
“It ain’t a bad heat because you don’t have as many big buildings like they do in New York, so it cools off at night,” John Sunday said. “But when you come out of that icehouse into that heat, it was like being hit in the face. More than one man caught pneumonia from doing that. You know a man’s lungs can only take so much switching between hot and cold. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said. He was looking at me with his head turned to one side.
“Well, that’s the truth,” John Sunday said. “I worked for that icehouse from the time I was eleven until I was seventeen years of age. Worked like a dog, too. Work scares some people, but it don’t scare me. I love to work, I truly do.”
“Why did you leave?” Elijah asked.
“Get on, Elijah!” John Sunday pulled his head back, away from Elijah. “I told you I got that cooking job up in Baton Rouge. What’s your name again, boy?”
“Paul DuPree,” I said.
“Okay, I’m going to call you Paul,” John Sunday said. “Well, Paul, a man come through Shreveport saying how he was going to go up to Baton Rouge and open him up a restaurant. He was looking for a cook and a waitress.
“Shoot, I didn’t know nothing about no cooking, but I thought it was time for me and my girlfriend, Aimee, to get together proper and everything, and so when he asked me if I could cook, I said yes.”
“And you couldn’t cook?” I asked.
“I could cook some because I seen Miss Arlene, our colored gal, cooking, and sometimes she let me snap beans or do a few little things. Me and Aimee went up to Baton Rouge. I liked that town. Yeah, it was all right,” John Sunday said. “And since that little restaurant was in the back of a general store over on the east side where they were doing a lot of building, we did some business. That’s where I learned to make mullet stew.
“Look at Elijah looking over at me, hoping I drop the secrets of my stew,” John Sunday said. “Man, if I give up these secrets to Elijah, he’s liable to take them down on the Oprah show and make a million dollars!”
“And you would get half!” Elijah said.
“I’m waiting for Oprah to come on through here, and I’ll get the million and then you get half, Elijah,” John Sunday said.
“How long you stay in Baton Rouge?” Elijah asked.
“’Bout two or three years,” John Sunday said. “Me and Aimee got together and had us two kids and then she got tired of everything and went back to Shreveport to live with her mama and made it clear that she didn’t want no part of me. Said that as long as she was with me, she wasn’t going to get nowhere in life. I guess she had read enough of them fancy magazines to want a big house and a shiny car or maybe a shiny house and a big car, I don’t know. But the truth is that her name was Aimee Sunday and our two little children was John, Jr., and Palmer, and once a week she had to think about me whether she wanted to or not, cause I gave her my name, which was Sunday. Ain’t that something?”
“Yeah, it is,” Elijah said.
I could see that Elijah wanted me to hear John Sunday’s story, but I didn’t know why. It didn’t sound like much to me.
“Then you were in the civil rights movement, weren’t you?” Elijah went on.
“That wasn’t no big deal. Some people say I was in it, but I don’t say no such a thing. I did what I thought was decent and that’s about it,” John Sunday said. “’Lijah, you buying some fish?”
“Thinking about it,” Elijah said. “How they look?”
“They looking good. Fresh as they want to be.” John stopped and looked at his watch. “You fixing this for tomorrow?”
“You got it,” Elijah said.
“Found a piece of job up in Montgomery changing tires,” John Sunday said as he started picking out the red fish for Elijah. “It wasn’t much, but it was honest. Then along came that bus boycott, and it was the stupidest thing you ever wanted to see. Lot of people was talking about how the black people wanted to sit up front and put the white people in the back. It wasn’t about that. The black people said they would sit in the back, but when the bus filled up, they didn’t want to have to get up and let a white person sit down. That was the unequal part of it.
“All the white people was getting mad. The bus didn’t matter none, but everybody was talking about what was going to happen next. They was saying if you sat next to a black man today, the next day he would be doing something nasty to your daught
er. Black people, they were walking into town to their jobs or getting rides the best they could. Some lost their jobs, too,” John Sunday said. “You know, if you got a man by the throat, he can fight you for his life. You catch him by the job, ain’t nothing much he can do about it.
“Anyway, some of the quality white folks would go out and pick up the black people who worked for them. Some of the quality white ladies who had maids would go pick them up, too. Me, I was living just off downtown toward where the highway cut in, and I drove in to my job. Couple of boys lived near me and I seen them walking and told them to jump on in. I carried them in all through that strike. Lord, I got called all out my name behind that action right there.
“I was called a traitor to my race. I was called everything but a son of God. Didn’t bother me none. People who want to hate you can find something in you they don’t like. They have a talent for doing that. Well, maybe I’m lying a little bit. It did bother me some. What bothered me was that some of the people making the most noise had been raised up by black people.
“When the boycott was over and black people were sitting where they wanted on the buses, the whole thing looked a little foolish. Black people still couldn’t ride the buses late at night in case some hooligans had more beer in their guts than they had sense in their heads and would mess with them, but more or less, things stayed calm until the March on Washington. Then it got real ugly.
“When I left Montgomery, I missed that tire-changing job because it paid good and you got good tips, but that town had enough ugly tucked up under its belly so that I didn’t mind leaving at all. That whole thing in Montgomery made you start thinking and maybe listening to what the politicians were saying. I’m not a voting man, but if I was, I would have voted for Kennedy in 1964. Of course he was killed before he had a chance to run, but he was all right, even if he was a Catholic.”
“You come to New York because you heard I was here,” Elijah said.
“Come to New York because I heard you could find a job here in a heartbeat,” John Sunday said. “I walked up to a man on Eighth Avenue and asked him where I could find a job. He looked at me like I was crazy, but another man, I think he was a Puerto Rican or something like that, told me to go over to Fifty-fourth Street and they had plenty of jobs over there. I went and found me a job as a deliveryman. That’s when I met Elijah and taught him how to play checkers.”
“You—you taught me how to play what?” Elijah was grinning.
“Elijah, you know you can’t beat me in no checkers,” John Sunday said. “On the best day of your life, you could not beat me if I could get one eye open and move one finger to push the pieces around the board, and you know it!”
“If I had the time, I’d beat you two or three games today,” Elijah said.
“If you had the time, I’d whip out my checkerboard and whip you like a baby boy,” John Sunday said. He had wrapped the fish in newspaper and was putting them in a cloth bag.
“I worked that delivery job at night, and then I got a little part-time messenger job in the daytime,” John Sunday said. “I’ve always been lucky at finding things. I found that job in Montgomery when there wasn’t a whole lot of jobs around, I found that delivery job and that messenger job, and then I found Jesus. All the time, He was sitting in my heart, waiting for me to recognize Him. When I did that, everything in life just seemed to be right. You know—what’s your name again, boy?”
“Paul DuPree.”
“I’m going to call you Paul,” John Sunday said. “Paul, you know some people feel uncomfortable when I talk about Jesus? They don’t feel uncomfortable when I talk about Obama or George Washington, but they get real edgy if I talk about Jesus. Ain’t that something?”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“What I come to know was that my whole life was about Jesus,” John Sunday said. “And when I got the feeling in my heart that He was there, it just made everything all right. Let me tell you—it made everything all right!”
“You made your peace with that landlord of yours?” Elijah asked. He was taking the money from his wallet to pay for the fish.
“Yeah, once I got the Section Eight papers filled out like you told me,” John Sunday said. “You don’t want no oysters?”
“Got some,” Elijah said.
“Got them shucked and in a tub?” John Sunday said.
“Can’t spend all day shucking oysters, John,” Elijah answered.
“Can’t play no checkers, can’t cook, just what are you good for, anyway?”
“I’m good for a lot of things,” Elijah said. “And you know I’m experimenting with your mullet stew. I’m going to get it, and when I do, I’m going to invite you up to dinner. I’m not going to say a thing, either. I’m just going to sit back and watch you eat it. Then I’m going to whip out my ruler and measure the smile spreading across your face.”
“Oysters in a tub?” John Sunday said. “I don’t think so, ’Lijah.”
“You don’t have your scrapbook with you, do you?” Elijah said. “Mr. DuPree here hasn’t seen anything like your scrapbook.”
The shelf behind John Sunday was filled with sauces in bottles, containers of fish batter, and jars of seasoned salts. Under some bottles of tartar sauce was a big notebook. He pulled it out and handed it to me.
I thought it was going to be something on religion, but it wasn’t. He had bought a regular composition book and filled it with page after page of magazine and newspaper articles about Paris Hilton. I looked through the scrapbook. There were pictures of Paris Hilton when she was a little girl, pictures of her with her family, and some pictures of her just about naked.
“I guess you like Paris Hilton,” I said.
“I don’t hate her, but I’m studying on her,” John Sunday said. “I figure if I can find out what makes that little girl so famous, I will be the smartest man in the world. Just like some people study on butterflies or different types of roses, I study up on Paris Hilton. She gets on television and don’t do much of nothing and everybody is falling all over her. But between me and Elijah, we will figure it out. Won’t we, ’Lijah?”
“That we will, John Sunday,” Elijah said. “That we will.”
Elijah stood up and shook John Sunday’s hand, and then the two men put their arms around each other for a few seconds before they said good-bye.
8
Me and Elijah started walking back uptown. All the way, he was showing me places he had lived or worked or where famous people had lived.
“Bumpy Johnson used to live over on this side of the street,” he said, standing in front of a stand selling caps and cell phone chargers, “and Dutch Schultz used to have his office over on that side. You know who they were?”
“Guys dealing with the social contract?”
“Nope, hoodlums,” Elijah said. “Bumpy was black and Dutch was white and they were both tough guys. That’s when everybody was fighting over who was going to control the illegal gambling in Harlem.”
“Who won?”
“The State of New York. They kicked out the hoodlums and took over the betting themselves,” Elijah said. “Only now they call it the lottery.”
“Things are changing now,” I said. “They’re building up this neighborhood really fast.”
“Harlem is changing,” he said. “But Harlem has always been about change. We don’t stand still up here. Only the image that people carry around with them stays in the same place.”
Elijah is a slow talker but a pretty fast walker, and it took us twenty minutes to reach the Soup Emporium. When we got there, Elijah laid out the fish on the table and looked them over.
“Can John Sunday really cook?” I asked him.
“Yes, he can cook,” Elijah said. “There’s not much to cooking, Mr. DuPree. Just buy the best food you can afford and don’t mess it up too much. People mess up their food by trying to do too much with it.
“He can play some checkers, too,” Elijah went on. “He told you about his little
jobs, but he didn’t tell you nothing about how he used to hustle checkers over in Mount Morris Park—that’s the one they renamed Marcus Garvey Park when they didn’t have nothing better to do. Sometimes he used to go down to Greenwich Village and hustle checkers, but they got wise to him quick down there. He still beats them, but he loves to play the dumb old white boy who beats the city slicker.”
“I got to go now,” I said. “We have a game set up against some preppy dudes from Long Island who think they can play ball. I have to go down to Fourth Street and tear them up so bad, their arms will hurt when they even think of playing ball. That’ll give you another day to give me an answer to my next question.”
“What question will that be?” Elijah asked. He had already put water in one of the big pots to start cooking the fish.
“The question is, Why can’t I live the way I’ve been living—not stealing anybody’s ham sandwiches or anything like that—and not worry about your social contract?” I said. “You know some people who have heard of it, but I know a lot more who haven’t, and they seem to be doing all right.”
“My social contract?” Elijah shook his head. “Mr. DuPree, I have changed the soup I planned to have tomorrow so I could spend the afternoon answering your question. And now I have to spend the rest of my evening getting a new soup ready when I could be watching television with my feet up, and you tell me you didn’t get the answer.”
“What answer?” I asked. “You didn’t mention the social contract all afternoon.”
“I took you down to see John Sunday, didn’t I? And what you saw in Johnny was a bright man with a good heart who lives like he wants to live.”
“And?”
“I’m sure that John Sunday never heard of the social contract, and I’d be surprised if he’s read an entire book in his life. Any book. But if you got about ten minutes to look at his life, you won’t say anything more about not needing to know the social contract. You got ten minutes?”
“I got ten minutes,” I said.
“Besides just getting along in the world with your fellow human beings, the social contract says how you can succeed in this society and how you can’t. It says that our society won’t let you succeed by robbing people. You got that?”
All the Right Stuff Page 6
