All the Right Stuff

by Walter Dean Myers

  “You have to give him credit for being a man,” I said. “And along with that credit comes the duty to step up and get in the game. He may not have the best first step in the world, but he’s still got to deal.”

  “I’m dealing, my brother!” Nestor raised his voice.

  “Oh, what you doing, baby?” Miss Watkins asked.

  “And wasn’t the social contract there for all of these young people?” Elijah asked. “Could they have used it to their advantage?”

  “What contract he talking about, Sly?” Nestor asked. He had a piece of chicken in his hand and pointed toward Elijah with it.

  “He’s talking about a theoretical contract between the people and the government that is supposed to be for everybody’s benefit,” Sly said. “Me and the brother at the other end of the table are disagreeing about whether the contract is really benefiting poor people or just keeping them poor.”

  Sister Effie said we should have a vote, and I knew she was ready to vote for Elijah again. The thing that came to my mind right away was that if you thought you didn’t have to deal with the social contract, whether it was good or bad, you were going to have a problem. In fact, you were going to be a victim of whatever came your way.

  We were getting ready to vote again, but it never happened.

  Paris B was explaining to Sly’s friends how we had voted at the Soup Emporium and how Elijah had won, and I was mentally counting how many votes Sly and Elijah would get this time around, when the door crashed open.

  BLAM!

  Everybody jumped. We turned and looked toward the door and saw two big dudes come busting into the room.

  “Where’s Sly?” The guy was wearing dreads, a painted denim jacket, and black pants.

  “We’re not open until later this afternoon,” Sly said, standing. “Now if you’ll just be so kind as to take your ass on out of here—”

  “I ain’t going nowhere, punk!” Dreads opened his jacket, and I could see he was cut. “I came here yesterday to get some goods, and your flunkies talking about all I can get is what I can carry in a damned garbage bag.”

  “Yo, man, I asked you politely to catch the other side of the door!” Sly was pissed.

  “I told you I ain’t going nowhere until I get what I need,” Dreads said, coming toward where the table was set up. “I think you’re just fronting for the white man, anyway. You trying to keep the people down and yourself on top!”

  “Lord, don’t shoot nobody!” Sister Effie called out.

  I turned and saw D-Boy coming across the room with an Uzi in his hand, shoulder high, pointed right at Dreads. Dreads turned and saw the gun and threw both hands up.

  What happened next was scary. I watched as Sly tried to hold down his temper. He was light enough so we could see him turn red and then go pale. Sister Effie was shaking her head and John Sunday was halfway crouched over, as if he was ready to dive under the table.

  Dreads and his buddy left in a hurry. D-Boy put down the Uzi, grabbed his jacket, and left. I didn’t know what he was going to do outside, but I was glad it wasn’t aimed at me, whatever it was.

  16

  I felt excited on my way to the Soup Emporium. I wanted to tell Elijah what I had figured out about the social contract, about how it was different for people who were active and those who weren’t. He might have wanted to talk about Sly and D-Boy and the Uzi, and I promised myself I would hold off until he finished what he had to say about that scene.

  On the block, there was an argument between some guys on a street-cleaning truck and a brother who didn’t want them throwing dirt on his machine.

  “You don’t clean worth a damn, anyway,” the brother was saying. “All you doing is spreading the dirt around and kicking up germs in the air!”

  “We’ll give you a ticket for interfering with our job,” the street cleaner said.

  Too much. I ducked into Elijah’s, hung up my jacket, and started washing up.

  “How you doing?” I asked.

  “Still here,” Elijah said. “What kind of soup you thinking about making today?”

  “You want to go with the collard greens and ham?”

  “You buy collard greens?”

  “No.”

  “So what kind of soup you thinking about making today?”

  I looked in the vegetable bin and saw we had potatoes, celery, carrots, and green peppers. In the refrigerator, we had frozen smoked neck bones, ham hocks, and chicken breasts, plus a bag of bones for stock.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked. Just then the doorbell rang. “I could go buy some collard greens if you wanted me to,” I said as I started toward the door.

  It was a little after eight, and sometimes the guy who reads the meter came that early, and I was going over in my head what we needed for collard greens and ham soup. It wasn’t the meter reader. It was Keisha.

  “I called your mother and she gave me the address,” she said. She was holding CeCe on her hip.

  “What’s up?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I answered.

  Keisha walked inside and started looking around the Soup Emporium. I motioned for her to go into the kitchen. Elijah looked up.

  “Elijah, this is Keisha Marant,” I said. “She’s the one I’m mentoring in basketball on Fridays.”

  “How do you do?” Elijah stood up and nodded his head toward Keisha.

  “Keisha, this is Elijah Jones, and he runs this soup emporium,” I went on. “We serve soup—real good soup to senior citizens, five days a week.”

  “That’s sweet,” Keisha said. “I like soup.”

  “Mr. DuPree is just trying to decide what soup we’re going to have today,” Elijah said.

  “I can’t stay,” Keisha said. “I just wanted to come by and tell you face-to-face that I won’t be coming on Fridays anymore.”

  “Why are you quitting now?” I asked. “I thought you needed to work on your shot.”

  “It doesn’t make that much difference,” Keisha said. CeCe was trying to put her fingers in Keisha’s hair, and she put her daughter on the floor.

  “Either they take me with the game I got or they won’t take me. I can only be who I am.”

  “What’s the problem with your game?” Elijah asked.

  “Keisha is quick and aggressive,” I said. “Which is good, but one coach said that if she had a better outside shot, she would be more effective.”

  “Give the opposing player something else to think about,” Elijah said.

  “You know basketball?” Keisha asked.

  “Not really,” Elijah said. “But it does make sense, doesn’t it?”

  “A lot of things make sense,” Keisha said. “But I’m not going to do them all.”

  “Besides making soup, we also spend a lot of time discussing the social contract,” Elijah said. “Have you ever spoken to Paul about that?”

  “He tried to run it past me,” Keisha said. “I don’t think he knows too much about it.”

  “Yo, Keisha! Lighten up! I know more about it than you do!” I said.

  “Who cares?” Keisha said. CeCe had put her arms around her mother’s legs, and Keisha was rubbing the little girl’s back. “Look, I’ve got to split. I think I can cop a job for the rest of the summer, and I can definitely use the money.”

  “You should care, if you have a little girl,” I said.

  “So run it, fool,” Keisha said.

  “The social contract is an agreement between people and between the people and their government for everybody’s mutual benefit,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean a thing to me,” Keisha said. “And I can lay that on CeCe all day and it won’t mean a thing to her, either.”

  “Okay, I got another way of looking at it,” I said. “Say there’s a track that runs from here to the Harlem Children’s Zone on 125th Street, okay?”

  “I know where it is,” Keisha said.

  “And somebody told you that if you went along t
hat track, you’d get a free dinner for the rest of the week for you and your daughter, okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “And as you walked along the track, you saw some people running by you, and some roller skating by you, and some just playing cards along the way,” I said.

  “Which is what you see if you walked down there from here,” Keisha said.

  “But then, when you got to 125th Street, they handed you seven peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and said, ‘That’s your free dinners,’” I said. “How would you feel?”

  “I’d feel mad,” Keisha said.

  “Especially when you saw that the people who got there first were getting coupons to have dinner at a fancy restaurant. And when you asked the people why you were only getting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they told you that you lost the race and that’s all the losers get.”

  “They should have said it was a race in the first place,” Keisha said.

  “That’s what the social contract is about, letting everybody know what’s going down,” I said. “Now, if they told you that if you came to Elijah’s Soup Emporium, you were going to get some money, you would be thinking you needed to know if it was a race or not, right?”

  “Go on.” Keisha sat down and pulled CeCe up on her lap.

  “But you see that everybody else knows it’s a race, too,” I said. “But the ones who got there first also got bicycles to come back uptown.”

  “Okay, so I ran into a foul situation,” Keisha said. “I would just leave it alone and go about my business.”

  “What I’m saying about the social contract is that you’re in it now,” I said. “And you can’t walk away from it. You’re in a race that has rules and has rewards for people who know those rules and know how to deal with them well. The people who started out knowing it was a race have a big head start on you, and they’re going to get theirs no matter what you do.”

  “You buying this?” Keisha turned to Elijah.

  “I’m buying it because I believe that what Mr. DuPree is saying is true,” Elijah said. “There are agreements, written and unwritten, that determine how we live, to a large extent.”

  “Okay, so from the get-go … you think if I go down to 125th Street and after I get down there they tell me I was in a race—after I get down there they tell me—that I was being treated fair?” Keisha asked.

  “Yo, mama, I didn’t say it was fair—” I started.

  “I’m not your mama,” Keisha interrupted. “And just run it down—is that fair or not?”

  “It’s not fair, but it’s real,” I said.

  “Go on....” Keisha was looking at me sideways.

  “So what I’m saying is that if you want to hook CeCe up, you got to school her on what’s going on. She has to know she’s in a race, she has to know what the rules are, and she has to learn to deal.”

  “And who is making these rules and setting up this race?” Keisha asked.

  “People who make the laws,” I said. “The government, sometimes. Special interest groups. People on the top.”

  “I never heard of this crap before I met you, Paul.”

  “And when you were coming downtown the first time and saw people sitting on the side of the road playing cards and not even in the race, you know they haven’t heard of it, either.”

  Keisha turned to Elijah. “Don’t we have a Constitution that says everything is supposed to be fair?”

  “Mr. DuPree?”

  “It’s fair under some conditions,” I said. “If you know what’s going down, and have the wheels to deal, then it’s just about fair. If you don’t know what’s going down, or if you think you can skate by, or if you mess up and break one of the big rules, then you have a problem.”

  “Like having a baby?” Keisha asked, pulling CeCe closer to her.

  “Like not realizing what you need to do for your baby,” I said. “If you got it going on, then CeCe should have it even better than you.”

  “And is that what you guys sit up here and talk about every day?” Keisha asked.

  “Quite a lot of the time,” Elijah said.

  “So how is CeCe going to get all of this when I don’t even know it?” Keisha asked. “There’s stuff out there that—ways of getting over—that I can’t get next to, and you’re saying I have to know it to pass it on to my daughter?”

  “You kind of know it now,” I said. “You see things going on. You see people who aren’t doing anything with their lives—”

  “Watching the world go by.”

  “Watching the world go by and becoming victims of anything that comes their way. You see it, and that’s why you’re out there practicing that outside shot. You’re aiming yourself for college because you know that’s a better way.”

  “I don’t even care about myself,” Keisha said. “I just want CeCe to have all the right stuff so she can do well.”

  “How old is your daughter?” Elijah asked. “She’s really lovely.”

  “Going on two.” Keisha’s face softened. “If Michelle Obama doesn’t run, CeCe’ll be the first black woman president.”

  CeCe made a sound that could have been “president” and stuck her chin up in the air. She was as pretty as Elijah said she was, and even prettier when responding to Keisha.

  “I got to be going,” Keisha announced. “I guess I’ll see you Friday, Paul. And you’d better be thinking about my three-point shot between now and then.”

  “I’ll have it locked up,” I said.

  Keisha picked CeCe up with one hand and put her back on her hip.

  “Good-bye.” Elijah waved at the baby as he walked her and Keisha to the door.

  “What else are you going to tell her about the social contract?” he asked when he came back to the kitchen. “I think you’ve convinced her that it exists. And I like the way you compared it to a race course. That was clever.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell her something about being active,” I said. “That you have to be active with the social contract or you can’t use it, like John Sunday, and some of Sly’s friends. They reached a point where they stopped being active and let themselves be used by the system.”

  “If she’s got that child’s welfare at heart—and I think she does—then she’ll be active,” Elijah said. “She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who is going to sit at the table and wait for the pot to boil.”

  “But the hardest thing she’s going to have to deal with?” I asked.

  “That people are going to be working against her,” Elijah said.

  “Who?”

  “People who think they can take advantage of her,” Elijah said. “People who want to use her talents, or her body, for their own purposes. Some people who just might not want her to get ahead in the world. You know, there are people like that.”

  “I think that’s more or less where I was going,” I said. “The social contract is not big on being fair. I think that every time you see that something is unfair, you feel bad and you want to give up.”

  “That’s the time—cut up a couple of those vidalias from under the sink—that the theory of the social contract comes in handy,” Elijah said. “You know the theory, how the system is supposed to work, and you don’t close your eyes or your mind and walk away.”

  I took the vidalias from the closet under the sink, peeled them, and started to cut them up. Elijah was right about Keisha. She was an active person, and having CeCe in her life just gave her more motivation. Still, even she got discouraged once in a while.

  “You want to add a side dish of cornbread to today’s soup?” Elijah asked.

  “Why?”

  “Just to keep our interest going while you run down to me when we should start teaching children about the social contract,” Elijah said. “Or do you think we shouldn’t bother with it at all?”

  “Can I go out and buy the cornbread and save my answer for tomorrow?” I asked.

  “We’re making the cornbread,” Elijah said. “And yes, we can save your
answer for tomorrow.”

  17

  “So why are you all up into Keisha and her baby?” Mom asked. Her face was tight and she was looking around the room, at the walls, at the clock, at anywhere except toward me.

  “Mom, I’m not all up into Keisha!” I said. “Why are you saying that?”

  “You came in here jumping up and down about how you had convinced her to come to the gym and work on her three-point whatever and how she was going to use the social contract to help her baby,” Mom went on. “What do you have to do with her baby, anyway? Why isn’t the father looking out for her?”

  “Why are you mad because you thought I helped somebody?” I asked. “You’re making it seem like—”

  “Paul, you spent all summer working and talking about this social contract and who was doing what, and the best thing you can come up with is how good Keisha is and how bad everyone else is and I don’t get how you can judge one person over the next!” The kitchen light was off, and the sun coming through the curtains only illuminated half of Mom’s face clearly.

  “Mom, who am I judging?” I asked. “Who?”

  “You were talking about those friends of Sty—or Sly—or whoever, over at his place,” Mom said. “They didn’t do this and they didn’t do that or they should have known better. Maybe those people just made a few mistakes. They’re not the only ones who have made mistakes, you know.”

  I finally got it.

  “Mom, you’re talking about my father, right?”

  “I’m not talking about anybody,” Mom said. “I’m just saying that you shouldn’t be judging people so fast.”

  “Okay, so you want to know what I think about him?”

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Do you mind me telling you?”

  “I’m not interested,” she said.

  “I think the way our society is set up, the social contract works easily for some people,” I said. “And for others, it’s a lot harder. Look at Anthony. He’s got it made with his going to film school. His dad’s a doctor and his mom is bending over backward to ease his way. All that’s cool, and it’s making his life easier. With George and Sly’s other friends, it was harder. And that thing with Binky and the chukka sticks shows you that it’s not always fair. And I see that.”