All the Right Stuff (2 page)

Elijah told me he was eighty-four, but he didn't look like what I thought a man that old would. He was dark, maybe five six or seven, and thin but not really skinny. He stood straight as an arrow and moved around his kitchen almost as if he was dancing.

“So you're saving the world with your soup?” I asked.

“I hear the smile in your voice, Mr. DuPree,” Elijah said. “And I'll let you know I'm not about saving all of it, just my little corner here in Harlem. The way my mind works is that if we could get everybody to save their own little piece of this planet, then eventually we'd get the whole thing in pretty good shape.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If I'm part of this summer grant program next year, I'm going to ask them to send me a young man who at least knows something about onions,” Elijah said.

“Yes, sir.”

I watched Elijah make the soup of the day and get some vegetables ready for the next day's soup. At twelve o'clock, the first people started drifting in, and he had me serve them.

The thing was that all the people knew Elijah, and they were enjoying themselves, eating the soup and talking to each other. It seemed that they weren't all that hungry so much as they were just people who liked to be together. Elijah didn't say a lot to me. Once in a while he would point to something, like a spot on a tablecloth, and I had to figure out that he meant for me to clean it up. I got the feeling that he was looking me over and seeing what I was going to bring. The day went fast in the morning, and slower in the afternoon.

For most of the afternoon, I cleaned anything that could be cleaned. Some of the things didn't even look dirty to me. This included the stove and the table and the floors. When everything was cleaned up, Elijah sat down at his cutting board, which was his favorite spot, and rolled an onion—okay, it was a vidalia—over to me.

“It's about time for you to be going now, but I want you to stop past the butcher's shop on your way here tomorrow—talk to Vinnie over there—and pick me up ten pounds of veal bones. You think you can remember that?”

“Ten pounds of veal bones,” I repeated. “You going to make bone soup?”

“The best soups start with a good liquid base,” Elijah said. “The bones are to give some body to that base. People like soup made from a good stock.”

“People like any soup that's free,” I said. “You're making soup and giving it away for nothing. Naturally they like it.”

“I'm not just making soup,” Elijah said. “I'm making good soup for the senior citizens on this block. They can come here in the afternoon if they have a mind to, sit down, and have a nice bowl of soup. It's the little pleasures in life that make it all worthwhile.”

“If your soup is so good, you should charge for it,” I said. “You go downtown and they have places you can buy cups of soup and they charge four or five dollars for them.”

“Number one, I am not downtown,” Elijah said, taking out the little purse he kept his money in. “I am Elijah I. Jones, and I am here in Harlem. If I were looking to make money, I would be charging for my soup. What I am looking to do is to bring something to the people. I have added that to my contract.”

“What contract?” I asked. “You getting money from the city?”

“The social contract,” Elijah said. “I know that you understand what I'm talking about so you can see how the soup fits in.”

“This is supposed to be a social club?” I asked.

“Don't pay more than five dollars for those bones,” Elijah said. “And don't forget them because I'm running out of stock. And remember, the first thing I need you to do when you get here tomorrow is to stir the beans in the pot. I'm making black bean soup. Those vidalias are going into that soup.”

“So what's this contract?” I said. “Who you working for?”

“The social contract?” Elijah pushed his head forward and squinted at me. “You don't know what the social contract is all about? I guess if you can't tell the difference between a vidalia onion and a regular onion, you just don't know much, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said, trying not to smile.

“Just about everybody in the world is involved in some kind of social contract,” Elijah said. “And that's true whether they know it or not. People think you know it, the government thinks you know it, and everybody is ready to punish you if you don't know it. Now how about that?”

“If you say so.”

“If
I
say so?” Elijah put down the jar of cumin seeds he was holding and looked over at me. “Suppose I told you that if you walked down a certain street in New York, you would find hundred-dollar bills just lying on the sidewalk, ready for you to pick up. Would that interest you?”

“Sure it would.”

“And suppose I told you there was another street, in the same neighborhood, where if you put one foot on the street, you would be shot on sight,” Elijah said. “Now, would that interest your sixteen-year-old butt?”

“Yeah, that would interest me, too,” I said. “But I never heard of either of those streets, and I know they don't exist because if they did, everybody would be talking about them.”

“I can't fool you, can I?”

“Not hardly,” I said.

“Mr. DuPree, the social contract is like those two streets,” Elijah said. “There are rules in the contract that say you're supposed to act in a certain way and receive a certain benefit. And if you don't act the way you're supposed to, you're going to be left out of those benefits. Now, if you've already been on this planet some sixteen years and you don't know about these rules, or if you're not clear about them, you have a problem.”

“I guess I have a problem,” I said.

“But you don't really believe that you have a problem because you haven't heard of the social contract and I'm just an old man making soup for other old people, right?”

“I didn't say that,” I answered.

“Well, Mr. DuPree, you think about it tonight and let me know what you got figured out when you get here in the morning,” Elijah said.

“And take that onion with you so you two can get acquainted.”

The job seemed really easy. Elijah's Soup Emporium, as he liked to call it, was just the bottom floor of a brownstone that Elijah had made into a private dining hall. There wasn't a huge sign on the place, and if you didn't see some of the seniors coming in around noon, you wouldn't know it even existed. Just inside the door, there was a coat rack, and then there was a dining room with long tables with chairs that people ate at. The kitchen was off to one side. The stove was big and modern looking with six burners. There was a large refrigerator, a freezer, a microwave, and more pots and pans than I could imagine anybody ever needing.

There was nothing much to cutting up vegetables or cleaning the kitchen or the dining room. I had never actually met anyone like Elijah before. He was smart, but not like old people are wise smart. A little bookish. He was funny, too, and that made him easy to work with. We would work in the mornings making soup, and then, between twelve and two, we would serve bowls of soup and rolls and butter to old people from the neighborhood.

Another thing that Elijah knew was history. Sometimes he would go off on a lecture about how they ran the civil service system in ancient China or how India and Pakistan used to be one country. It was not stuff I needed to know about, but it was interesting. I got the feeling he liked me, even when he was kidding me about not knowing about some vegetable.

“Did you know that garlic and onions are all varieties of lilies?” he asked me.

“No, I didn't know that,” I said.

“And you still haven't figured out what the social contract is?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I haven't.”

When I got home, I asked my mom what she knew about some social contract.

“I know what a contract is, and I know what being social is,” she said. “But I've never heard of being sociable by no contract unless you're a hooker or something.”

She went on asking me what I had done that day and I told her about getting the stuff ready for the next day's soup and she said that was good. “A man who can cook can find a wife easier than a man who can't,” she said.

I didn't want a wife who wanted me for my cooking, but I didn't say that to Mom.

When I arrived in the morning,
Elijah was already up and being busy around the huge black stove.

“So I guess you got the social contract all figured out,” he said to me. “Why don't you explain it to me while you wash your hands? Wash them all the way up to the elbows, too, like you're getting ready for surgery. We don't serve any dirt around here.”

“I still don't get it,” I said. “It seems to me that if anything really big was going on, I would have heard about it.”

“You've heard about it,” Elijah said. “You just didn't know how to call it by its right name.”

“If you say so,” I said.

I watched Elijah take a bag from the refrigerator, open it, and carefully lay out a pile of bones. He held them up and inspected them, nodded to himself, and then brought out a roasting pan. He put the bones in the pan, poured two cups of water over them, and put them into the oven. He turned the oven on and then turned back to me.

“The first thing you have to know about the social contract is what I call the wake-up-in-the-morning laws,” he said. “When you wake up in the morning, you begin thinking about what you can do with yourself during the day. What's the first thing you think about doing, Mr. DuPree?”

“Depends on how I feel that morning,” I said.

“There you go,” Elijah said. “I was telling people that you were a smart young man. Humans can do anything they want. If you feel like eating a ham sandwich, then you go on and eat a ham sandwich. If you don't have a ham sandwich and you see I got one, then you come over to where I am, hit me on the head, and take my sandwich. That's because as a human being you can do
what
?”

“Anything I want,” I said.

“Now, isn't that good?”

“Yeah, but… I don't go around hitting people on the head,” I said. “The way you put it—you know, people doing anything they want—there would be a lot of fighting going on.”

“But the possibility of doing anything you want is the key to the social contract,” Elijah said. “You don't have to do geometry or algebra to figure that out. You just sit down and use your reason, and
bam!
you got it. But, like you said, there's going to be a whole lot of fighting going on. So how would Mr. DuPree handle that?”

“You keep your hands off my ham sandwich, and I'll keep my hands off your ham sandwich,” I said.

“So what you're saying is that you have the right to do anything you want, but you'll give up some of your rights if I give up some of mine?” Elijah asked.

“Okay, I'll go for that,” I said.

“Are we just talking about ham sandwiches here, boy?” Elijah asked me.

I looked at Elijah to see if he was making fun of me, but he looked serious. “I don't know exactly what we are talking about,” I said. “You were the one who brought up the ham sandwich.”

“What we're talking about is the right of a person to do anything they want to do, and comparing it with the decision to give up some of those rights so everybody can get along without a lot of fighting,” Elijah said. “I'm willing to give up my right to knock you in your head and take your ham sandwich if you're willing to give up your right to hit me and take mine. That sound good to you?”

“Yeah.”

“So my giving up some of my natural rights in exchange for you doing likewise is an agreement we're making,” Elijah said. “You still with me, or you getting a headache?”

“I got you covered,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Paul DuPree, that agreement is at the heart of the social contract we've been talking about. You are giving up your natural liberty and taking on a different kind of liberty. What you're gaining is what the first writers of the social contract called a civil liberty, the liberty to do anything you and all the other people who are part of your social contract have decided as a group to allow. People have been making agreements about what rights they are going to give up so they can live together, be safe, and chase after whatever little dreams they have going for themselves. That's been going on since they lived in caves umpteen thousand years ago.”

“I never heard of no cavemen drawing up contracts,” I said. “You ever see those drawings they find in caves? They have pictures of animals or hunting scenes, but I've never heard of any contracts.”

“Okay, Mr. DuPree, if the cavemen didn't have written-out contracts, they still had rules that you had to live by if you were going to stay in the tribe,” he said. “And if you didn't live by those rules, they wouldn't have any trouble kicking you out, and everybody would understand why. Those rules came by agreement, and they were part of the first social contracts.”