All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers Page A

Sly said. “But you’re smart. I’m going to need some smart people down the road to help me run the business. You think you might be interested?”
    â€œYou mean after college?”
    â€œWhenever,” Sly said. “People who can think don’t come along every day. In the meanwhile, just stay strong.”
    â€œI’m doing it,” I said.
    I was halfway upstairs before I started breathing normally again.

11
    â€œThe best soup in the world is oyster gumbo,” Paris B said. He was a big man who had worked in a hospital and was now retired. “You get you one of them big cans of oysters like the restaurants have and put them in some white wine over a little heat. Don’t let it get too hot, because that’ll toughen the oysters. Just warm them in that white wine for ten to fifteen minutes, so the oysters start to feeling good about theyselves. Then cut the heat and go back to cutting up your chicken parts, flour them down, and add some salt and pepper. Then dice some ham—make sure it’s good ham—and fry that with the chicken until it’s all nice and brown and your mouth starts feeling like it wants to smile but your lips is holding back.”
    â€œGo on.” Elijah was sitting at the end of the table, and I was sitting across from Paris B.
    â€œThen you put in your water with some onions and a little cayenne pepper and salt if your pressure can take it,” Paris B continued. “Let that cook for half the morning and then you add your oysters. Give it five minutes, then mix in your filé powder real smooth. Give it five minutes of some high heat and get your mouth ready for some goodness! What you think, Elijah? What you think?”
    â€œI’m going to get Mr. DuPree here to start in on it tomorrow,” Elijah said. “It’s about time he had his own special soup. Every human being should have one somebody they can really love, and one soup they can make.”
    I liked soup, but I knew it wasn’t going to make much of a difference in my life. On the other hand, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, which was sounding lamer and lamer to me. What I was seeing was that some people had clear choices about who they were, like Anthony and his mother. Other people didn’t have clear choices and had to figure out what to do from day to day, like John Sunday, and maybe Lavinia, the girl in Anthony’s film.
    Sly was talking about a conspiracy, and I couldn’t go for that too tough, but he was heavy into it and could make it sound like the word. But I scoped that there were some thoughts waiting to be lined up and maybe I needed to get them together in a hurry.
    When Paris B left, I swept up the dining room after I washed and racked the dishes. For some reason, Elijah put all the dishes in the closet every night. The next day I had to take them out of the closet and put them back on the table. One time I told him we could save time by leaving them in the rack. He thanked me and then put the dishes in the closet.
    I was ready to go home when Elijah motioned for me to sit down. He asked me how my day off had gone, and I told him what Sly had said about how they make everything poor people do into a crime.
    â€œSometimes it seems that way,” he said. “But you and me, we have to think harder than Mr. Sly is thinking, because he’s looking out for himself and we want to think about the whole world. Thomas Hobbes came up with a system that he thought would benefit the whole world. You can look him up on the internet or, better still, you can get one of his books. John Locke was thinking about the world and various forms of government, too. So was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote a book called The Social Contract . We’ve talked enough about the social contract for you to follow most of what he’s saying. You have to remember that all of these authors published their books before the American