Read Online All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers - Free Book Online

you’re saying is that when everybody is rich and safe and has as much as they need, they don’t think much about the social contract,” Elijah said. He was preparing carrots and lentils for his harira soup. “Most Americans don’t think about the social contract, but we’re all still dealing with it. We have a police force that’s going to protect everybody, and an army, and rules and regulations. So even if they’re not signing a formal agreement called the social contract, it’s still there for them.”
    â€œHow did you get all up into thinking like this?” I asked.
    â€œMy grandfather lived in Littig, a small colored town in Texas. When he was growing up there, just about everybody in the town was black, and some of the older folks had been slaves. He said they had a few white people in town, and the whites and the coloreds got along just fine. In Littig, they had three kinds of food. They had pinch food, which you ate just to keep your stomach from pinching. That was mostly potatoes or rice, pan bread, greens, and whatever you could hunt up. He said you would go to somebody’s house and find a mess of squirrel stew on the stove, or coon, or wild birds. If you could hunt, you could eat.
    â€œThen there was step-up food. You were happy with your step-up food because you knew you were eating good. Beef was plentiful, but he didn’t get much in the way of steaks and what have you. Mostly he had oxtails, shanks, and a little stew once in a while.”
    â€œHamburgers,” I said. “They’re made of beef.”
    â€œThat’s true,” Elijah said. “But you know I never had a hamburger until I came up north? Didn’t know what the things were, and I know my grandfather didn’t.”
    â€œWhat was the other kind of food?” I asked.
    â€œHigh life,” Elijah said, smiling. “That meant you were eating parts of animals that weren’t that close to the ground. Instead of trotters, which is the pig’s feet, you were eating pork shoulder and chops. Instead of eating chicken-feet soup—”
    â€œChicken-feet soup?”
    â€œBoy, I’ve eaten more chicken feet in my life than I’ve eaten anything else,” Elijah said. “Boil ’em up for a few hours with some dumplings, cut up a potato or two in the pot, add a couple of tablespoons of flour and some salt and pepper, and you got the makings for a cold winter night.”
    â€œI’m going to pass on the chicken feet,” I said.
    â€œWell, I’m sure the chickens will appreciate that, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “But as I moved on through life, I began to notice that some folks stayed on the chicken-feet level all their lives. Some moved up to chopsville, and some just seemed to do well all the time. They ate first-rate food, lived well, and didn’t seem to have the troubles the chicken-feet people had. And I began wondering if there was a cause to that.”
    â€œThat’s what Sly was saying,” I said. “Why are some people always on the bottom?”
    â€œI wondered, same as he did, if there was something going on that I didn’t know about. And what I figured out, sir, was that people find themselves part of a social order and don’t understand what that order is or what they need to do to make it work for them,” Elijah said. “There are rules—sometimes they are laws and sometimes they are just the way things are done—that affect how we all live.”
    â€œSly was right on that,” I said.
    â€œNo, he thinks there’s a plot out there to keep certain people down,” Elijah said. “What I’m saying is that there’s a plot to help everybody in a certain way. And if you’re not smart enough to figure out that way, then you are no better off than the crabs I told you about. I did tell you about the crabs, didn’t I?”
    â€œNo, but I’m sure you