“Yes, they are,” Elijah said. “They aren’t using it, but they’re still part of it.”
“And I would like to ask this question of our guest here,” Miss Watkins said. “Does your mama call you Sly?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I didn’t think so.”
As Elijah and I cleaned up, he was talking faster than he usually did. He was happy with the way the meeting had gone and was talking about how Sly was confusing government with the social contract.
“We hire or select our government to enforce the social contract,” he was saying as he carefully folded the tablecloth. “It’s the nature of all governments to try to take power from the people and keep it for themselves, but that’s why we vote to change the government.”
That sounded right, but like with most of what Elijah was saying, I would have to sit down with it and do some thinking. But what got to me most was Miss Watkins’s question. What if everybody didn’t want to go to heaven? She had put it in a negative way, that they were going around messing up their lives by doing bad things, but suppose they were more like John Sunday, doing what they thought were good things but just not understanding that it wasn’t going to work for them in our society? Even if the social contract was made up by blind people who couldn’t see where they were, so they made it up to be really fair, it wouldn’t make any difference to some people. And if they truly didn’t want to go to heaven, were they still accountable for their lives?
“Elijah?”
“Mr. DuPree?”
“I’m seeing some things that I didn’t see before,” I said.
“Like what?” he asked.
“When Miss Watkins was saying that everybody didn’t want to go to heaven, I started dividing the seniors up in my mind. Some of the people, like Miss Fennell, just wanted everybody to act decently. I knew Sly wouldn’t be happy with that, but I think John Sunday would have been.”
“And what did you conclude from that?” Elijah asked.
“I don’t have it all worked out yet,” I said. “But I’m seeing how the contract is different if you’re working it, or if you just let it work you. I still got a few problems with the details, but I think I’m on to something. Can you give me some time to think it through?”
“Mr. DuPree, I will give you as much time to think as God gives me breath to wait,” Elijah said.
15
Sly’s place, The Woods, had been a ninety-nine-cent store before he took it over. The walls were lined with shelves that had all kinds of goods on them. There were bins of clothes, all neatly wrapped in plastic bags, bins of books, iPods, and portable DVD players, and just about anything else you saw people selling on the street.
“The model is Indian,” Sly said. “In India, they set up a series of microbusinesses supported by small loans. What I’m doing here is combining the two ideas. A brother or a sister can come in, establish their identity, and then we loan them the goods they need to set up a street business. We get paid back in cash after the sales are complete. So a man can start with zero capital, walk in at ten o’clock in the morning, and walk out in thirty minutes as a full-fledged businessman.”
“Who’s it for again?” Elijah asked.
“Anybody who walks in the door,” Sly said. “They provide their ID, and we can deal.”
I figured that was what Sly was doing downtown with the Koreans. They were importing the goods, and he was buying the stuff from them and using it in The Woods. The place was going to open up for business at three in the afternoon. Sly didn’t mention anything about the medicines that people around the block were talking about.
D-Boy was sitting at a desk in one corner of the room, reading the Amsterdam News.
Sly put Elijah on one end of the table, and he sat on the other end. The same people who were at Elijah’s for the first meeting were there: Paris B, Sister Effie, John Sunday, Miss Fennell, and Miss Watkins, and four people who Sly had invited.
The table was set up with fancy dishes with bluebirds on them, pitchers of water with lemon slices floating in them, and little bowls of sauces. There were salt and pepper shakers at either end of the table, and they matched the plates. I opened my napkin and saw that there was a red-and-gold border around the edges. The whole thing was really fancy. Some of the food was African, and Sly introduced the cook, a guy from Brooklyn.
“This is Brother Abou,” he said. “I think you’ll enjoy his food.”
Brother Abou was heavy and dark skinned, and spoke with an accent. I thought he was either African or Haitian.
The menu was pan-seared chicken with peri-peri sauce, salmon and spinach with hollandaise sauce, and steaks with pepper and sautéed onions. I noticed that there wasn’t any soup.
“You know, this food looks good, but it won’t influence me one bit,” Sister Effie said.
“It might get to me.” Paris B was grinning all over himself.
I could tell that the seniors were feeling important that somebody was listening to their opinions. I liked it, too.
“I want you to meet some people from the neighborhood who you might not have met before,” Sly said, holding his hand out to the people who were there when we arrived. “Why don’t you introduce yourselves?”
“My name is George, George Pogue. I’m from around the way, 139th Street. I lived there most of my life.” The guy was small and thin, and didn’t have many teeth. “Sly asked us to tell our stories, so I’ll begin with mine.
“I went to Lane in Brooklyn and I did okay, but then I ran into the drug scene. I got busted when I was eighteen for dealing and did sixty-four months on an eight-year bid, and then when I got out, I ran into an aggravated assault charge and I got twelve years on that, plus four for illegal possession of the gun. So, all in all, I did eighteen years in the slam, which is just a little more than half my age.”
“So half your life you’ve been in prison?” Sly asked.
“Yeah. I’m trying to stay straight now, but there’s no jobs out here and I don’t know how people expect me to live,” George said.
“Go on, Nestor.” Sly nodded toward the guy who looked Spanish.
“Same old, same old,” Nestor said. “I left school early, got into this little street hustle and that little street hustle until I got caught up in drugs. Armed robbery, possession with intent to distribute, aggravated this and aggravated that, it all amounted to seventeen years. I didn’t actually hurt nobody except myself.”
“You didn’t think taking drugs was wrong?” Miss Watkins asked.
“I knew it was against the law,” Nestor said. “I’m not going to lie about that. And even if it wasn’t against the law, I knew it was foul. But when I was dibbing and dabbing and got caught up, I couldn’t get no help. They would run—what were they doing then? Methadone. But that just cuts down what you need to get you through the day. It don’t take the weight off your life. You know what I mean?”
“And you never heard anything about drugs until you—what did you say?—started dibbing and whatnot?” Miss Watkins had her head turned so her chin pointed at Nestor.
“Yeah, I heard”—Nestor glanced toward Sly—“but a lot of people make mistakes. I guess I’m not perfect.”
“Johnnie?” Sly nodded toward the woman. She was cute, with short, neat hair and small gold earrings. I wondered if she was Sly’s girlfriend.
“My name is Johnnie Mae Stokes. I’ve never been in jail and I’m afraid of drugs,” Johnnie said. “My story is nothing special. I was with a man and we had two children together. Then he got locked up for breaking and entering. We weren’t married. Then I had two more children before I had my tubes tied. Right now I’m on welfare, as Sly knows. Sometimes I get some work cleaning houses, but most of the time, I don’t have anything to do. I’m not good with numbers or anything like that, and I can’t type, so there’s really nothing out there for me. My two youngest children are four and six. They can’t take care of themselves, and if I get a babysitter, it’ll cost me more than I’m
making. I think I made mistakes, but, you know, I’m human.”
As Abou took our lunch orders, it came to me that all the people on Sly’s side of the table were going in the same direction: that there was nothing they could do to change their lives.
I ordered the chicken and an iced tea. I wished I had a notebook so I could take down some of the things that Sly’s people were saying. I tried to imagine them, sitting around with their ham sandwiches tucked under one arm. That was funny at first, but it didn’t seem funny when I realized that they had been sitting outside the social contract when they made their “mistakes,” and they were still looking at themselves the same way.
“Okay, this is my man Binky,” Sly said, putting down his menu. “Binky, I want you to tell them how your arrest went down. The whole story.”
“I was going to George Washington High and I was doing good… I mean well,” Binky said. He looked to be a few years older than me. “I wanted to be either an engineer, because I’ve got an uncle who’s an engineer, or a time-study guy, because my cousin does that and it sounded good. My father works in the post office, which isn’t bad, but I didn’t go for that too tough.
“Anyway, everybody in my family thought I was going to be something special, and that made me feel good because I believed it, too. I had a hobby, which was martial arts. I took judo and karate at the Y on 135th Street. Some of the other things we learned was how to use swords and stuff. It really wasn’t swords, it was bamboo sticks. And all of us practiced with chukka sticks—that’s two sticks with a chain or a rope connecting them.
“You can hurt people with those things,” Paris B said.
“With two sticks and a chain?” John Sunday asked. “How you going to hurt somebody with two sticks and a chain?”
“You can mess somebody up pretty bad if you know how to use them,” Binky said. “Anyway, one day I was coming home from school, and around 137th Street, a fight broke out between some brothers and some white kids who went to City College. Me and my boy, a guy named Frankie, crossed the street because we didn’t want to get mixed up in it. It wasn’t like a war or nothing, just some fists, from what we could see.
“So we watched from across the street for a minute and then started on home. We were three blocks away and our minds were on something else when all of a sudden this car pulls up alongside us and these two white guys hop out. They’re cops, and they ask us if we were involved in the fight. I said no and Frankie said no and then they looked into our backpacks and found my chukka sticks. I didn’t know they were illegal, and when the dude down at the station started talking about a fourth-degree felony, I thought he was kidding.
“Some college guy had gotten his nose broken and two teeth knocked out in the fight, and they were looking to see who had done it. I heard that somebody had a bat or something like that, but when they found the chukka sticks, they said I might have done it. They couldn’t prove it, but they still had me for possession and I got eighteen months in juvenile.”
“Okay, Elijah, what I’m going to ask you to do,” Sly said, “is weigh in with your theory about the social contract and put it up against these brothers and this sister who have to face life without benefit of your protective theory.”
“I can see where the men using drugs would have a hard time,” Paris B said. “But I know what chukka sticks are, and I didn’t know they were illegal. I sure didn’t know you could get jail time for that. That don’t seem right to me.”
Mr. Abou brought out salads for everybody. The salad looked good, but I was more interested in sneaking a glance over at Elijah, to see what he was going to say.
Elijah’s face was working, like he was thinking real hard but hadn’t got to the point where the words were actually coming out yet.
“If you knew that drugs were illegal, why did you choose to use them?” Miss Fennell asked.
“I knew I was wrong,” George said. “But I didn’t think I was half my damn life wrong. People out here killing people or robbing millions of dollars don’t spend half their lives in no jail. I’m not saying I was correct, but what I’m asking is, just how wrong was I?”
“And I don’t think I was wrong to have sex four times,” Johnnie Mae said. “Most people have sex at least four times in their lives. And if my man had been together, I could be home watching Oprah in the daytime and buying stuff on the Home Shopping Network. Now my job—and it’s a j-o-b, honey—is trying to survive and raise my children on welfare.”
“So, Elijah.” Sly folded his hands in front of himself as if he was going to pray or something. “Here we have a small gathering of people who have had a range of experiences. Some of them have spent years in either jail or the prison of poverty. Johnnie Mae is living in a society that offers her little hope of getting ahead and little hope of finding her way into that door that is marked AMERICAN DREAM. And it seems to me that your social contract theory works against them. Not for them. And the greater good that you spoke about the other day scoots past these brothers and this sister and leaves them permanently in a kind of limbo. So what good is the social contract?”
“Sly, you want a simple answer, and the truth is that there isn’t one,” Elijah said. “But let me break it down as much as I can to a few points.”
“Go on, Elijah,” Sister Effie said. She was leaning forward in her chair.
“The social contract protects these people as much as it does me, or anyone here,” he said. “It guarantees their fundamental rights—”
“The right to be poor and suffering in the richest country on earth?” Sly asked.
“The right to be poor and suffering in the richest country on earth, but free and with the hope of doing better,” Elijah said.
“So if there aren’t any jobs out here—and there aren’t,” Sly said, “then they are reduced to being semislaves. We don’t have to worry about the horrors of slavery because they aren’t official slaves, just sort of semislaves. And if the government, in its quest for the greater good, decided not to give Johnnie Mae food stamps, she might have to sell her body to whoever bid for it on the street to feed her children. But she would have hope while she did it, wouldn’t she?”
“Individual stories don’t change the whole,” Elijah said. “And it’s the whole that holds the promise for these young people. They see this is a rich society, the same as you do. And they want to be part of it. But they’ve gone off course—”
“That’s the truth,” Sister Effie said.
“So Binky went off course when he was trying to keep his nose clean and do the right thing, and now he’s got a record,” Sly said. “Plus he had the humiliating experience that one out of every four young black men has, of being locked up like an animal and treated like an animal, in your social contract system. That could affect his whole life, and you say it’s all right because of some vague sense of a whole system.”
“I didn’t say it was all right,” Elijah said. “I said a system exists, and it’s not perfect. It can’t be perfect because it’s put in place by human beings.”
“I don’t see you suffering too much, Mr. Sly,” Sister Effie said.
“That’s because I’ve turned my back on the social contract, sister,” Sly said. “Because I recognize it as what it is for a poor man—volunteer slavery.”
Sly could run his mouth. He had his arguments down, and they were good. And the people Sly had brought along sounded convincing. They didn’t look like bad people. They were as ordinary looking as anybody you saw on the street.
The conversation kind of died down for a while, and then Paris B started talking about the food and everybody said how good it was. Sly said he was thinking of opening up a restaurant in Harlem.
Even though we had stopped discussing the social contract, it was on everybody’s mind. I watched Binky and Johnnie Mae talking. They seemed to be having a good time. George was checking his watch, and I wondered if he was thinking about selling drugs or something.
“Honey, can I ask you a question?�
�� Miss Watkins again. She had reached over and put her hand on George’s arm. “When you were out there using them drugs, did you know they were messing your life up?”
“I did to an extent, but I didn’t see no doomsday on the horizon. You know what I mean?” George said. “I could handle my weight, but what the justice system threw down on me snatched away my whole life.”
“According to Mr. Sly over here, drug people don’t have to be thinking about going to jail or anything like that,” Sister Effie said. “Isn’t that what you’re saying, Mr. Sly?”
“He shouldn’t have to, and he wouldn’t have to if the social contract was fair,” Sly said. “But I don’t see any fairness in condemning a young man for life because he’s made a mistake that didn’t hurt anybody but himself. And I don’t see slamming Johnnie’s children because of the ups and downs of her life.”
“Yo, Sly, I’m seeing something different here,” I said.
“Run it, youngblood!”
“Okay, so what I’m seeing is that the social contract is out there, and you either deal with it or you don’t,” I said. “If you don’t, then whatever happens, happens! It’s as if you become a universal victim. Anything that comes your way can mess with you. It’s almost as if you’re in the middle of the street and there’s a gang war going on. Bullets flying everywhere, and you’re just standing in the middle of the street hoping nothing hits your butt.
“My man over there said he knew drugs were illegal, but he jumped into that scene and took his chances and lost,” I said. “Nestor hooked up into the same scene and yes, you can criticize it, throw rocks at it if you want, but he knew the program, so him saying that he’s been kicked around is right, but did he really expect everyone to stand up and give him a hand for breaking the law?”
“You’re strong, but you’re wrong, my brother,” Sly said. “For Nestor to follow the social contract that Elijah is running, he has to have the same incentives, and the same opportunities as that dude down on Wall Street making millions of dollars a year and looking down his nose at people in this neighborhood. Or are you saying that people who live in Harlem are supposed to be getting their butts kicked?”
All the Right Stuff Page 11
