Read Online The Busting Out of an Ordinary Man by Odie Hawkins - Free Book Online Page B

regardless of race.
    â€œThat would settle a bunch of problems, if we could solve the white racial problem. I know we can’t solve it by killin’ all the white folks.”
    Lubertha stopped, her heart pumping faster. “Kwendi says that we ought to put groups of the best so-called minority group minds in Think-Do-Tanks for a month, dealin’ with each one of the problems we have here.”
    â€œMinority group minds?” Father Franklin asked, slightly worn down.
    â€œUh huh, his thing is that the so-called majority group mind, the white mind, has so completely messed itself around that it will never be straightened out enough to deal with the problems they’ve created. If they’d been able to, once again, things wouldn’t be in the state they’re in today.”
    â€œSo, you sayin’, you ’n Kwendi ’n him, that Negroes gon’ solve the country’s problems, huh?”
    â€œRight on! Chicanos, Indians, Asians, Blacks, us!” Lubertha’s intensity took her voice almost to the Club meeting level. Her father stared at her as though he were seeing his daughter for the first time.
    Mrs. Franklin shuffled into the kitchen, yawning, wandered past them sitting at the table like a sleepwalker and poured herself a glass of water from the cold water jug in the refrigerator. “You two gon’ sit up here boozin’ ’n flappin’ your jaws all night?” she asked, almost as an afterthought, as she shuffled back to bed.
    Father and daughter burst into broad grins as they watched her shambling departure.
    â€œMomma’s got a point, we both gotta get up tomorrow.”
    â€œYeahhh,” Ed Franklin agreed sourly, crushing his beer can in his paw. “But we ain’t got to the end o’ this,” he reminded his daughter.
    â€œBy no means!” she agreed, as she clicked off the kitchen light, the last one out, and headed wearily for her bedroom.

Chapter 3
    Ways of Making Bread
    Arnold C., for Charles Mack, but better known as “Chili” to the dudes he had played high school basketball with, sprawled out in his king-sized bed, scratching his crotch with his left hand and reaching for the half smoked joint in the swan-shaped ashtray bedside, a token of last night’s doin’s, with the other hand.
    He lit the roach and took a deep hit. Wednesday, 12:15, what tune was she supposed to show up? 1:00 yawwwnnn, guess I better get up and freshen my ass up a lil’ taste.
    He slowly, reluctantly lowered his feet onto the pile carpet, sat on the side of the bed finishing off the dope and looked around his bedroom. Nice, nice, he thought, checking out the plushness of the deep red, charcoal black and velvet green of the interior.
    Yeahhhh, really nice a helluva long way from 42nd and Bowen Avenue, that’s for damned sho’!
    He burned his right thumb and forefinger slightly on the roach, dropped it in the ashtray and stood up to stretch his lean, even planed six-foot frame, loaded again.
    Shit, shower ’n shave. He strolled out of the bedroom heading for his modern gadgeted kitchen, pausing in the living room to open the drapes, to check out what the day was like. Brisk, wind sweeping in from the lake right around the corner, the Northside, only ten niggers in the whole block and three of them hooked up with white broads.
    Chili stood straddle-legged, both hands on his slender hips, looking down at the dull, blue-gray streets uhhh huhhh … he looked up from under his lids slyly, pinning the two women’s faces leering at him from the apartment across the street. Uhhh huhhh, that’s right, he nodded to them, what you see is what you get.
    They stared boldly at each other for a minute and then pretended that each one’s attention was drawn to something else.
    Chili slid away from the slit in the drapes, tired of the game, remembering that he wanted a snack.
    Bitches! Jive bitches! he muttered, jerking the