Free Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

skin, the oily phyllo still flaked properly against their teeth, and that provided just enough comfort. They felt they had made the right choice.
    Despite the loss and shame of leaving Grambling, Darlene felt she had won whenever she glanced at Nat. He’d agreed to go with her when he could have stayed and forsaken her along with the rest. He’d settled for a less impressive basketball scholarship. Words can’t prove true love, she would think, only the list of sacrifices you make to keep it alive. Nat had demonstrated his love through his honor.
    Nat didn’t know much about his real parents, only his mother’s first name. The agency might have known more, but they refused to release any information to him. His foster parents had adopted him at thirteen, after the system had pinballed him through unstable East Texas homes where supposed brothers stole his baseball cards, mothers beat his shins with pool cues, and sisters tied him to chairs as a playtime activity. Only his growth spurt put an end to the abuse. Out of the six homes he passed through, he’d wanted to stay in only two of them, the first belonging to an affectionate divorcée with apple-shaped hips, the second to the family who ultimately adopted him, the Hardisons: his foster mother LaVerne, a tubby young woman with freckles and keloids scattered on her skin; his adoptive father, Patrick, nicknamed Puma, a sturdy throne of a man the color and complexion of a walnut, a tense and authoritarian ex-Marine whose tough love contained very little of the latter ingredient. From Puma, Nat absorbed a fervent admiration for the military and respect for authority, as well as the desire to emulate the straight-backed heroes of Iwo Jima and Korea.
    Their few new friends at Centenary did not know that Nat and Darlene’s intense and somewhat paranoid bond had arisen from their persecution at Grambling. On a double date, a couple they knew from the Black Students’ Union stared when they shared from one plate and when Nat rose to let Darlene out of the booth to go to the bathroom and then followed her to the door. They joked uncomfortably when the two returned, but Nat couldn’t see what they found so unusual. Darlene mentioned shyly that they had registered for most classes together too.
    We’re both majoring in econ, she said, and we help each other through all the madness. I make flash cards for us. It’s fun. We’re practically the same person now.
    Their supper companions smiled and changed the subject, and they often had standing plans when Darlene contacted them in the future.
    Almost concurrently with their banishment from Grambling, a deputy in Pensacola had shot a black man dead at point-blank range with a .357 Magnum. A little later, someone strangled a material witness who’d said that she had a relationship with the deputy and had seen the murder. By the end of January, the grand jury had acquitted the deputy. Hundreds of people took to the streets in Pensacola, but seventy policemen beat them with clubs. Nat followed all of this and became outraged; he showed as much anger over these events as he had about what had happened to Darlene, and she wondered if he was letting Pensacola stand in for the earlier, more personal injustice. Now he insisted that they had to work for equality, even on a small scale. Then Darlene realized that she was pregnant, the child probably conceived a week or so after they’d decided to transfer from Grambling.
    Now Nat felt inspired to move to a smaller town, like the one near Lafayette where Darlene had grown up. The pregnancy seemed to make his wishes inevitable, even necessary. Somewhat randomly, Nat chose Ovis, Louisiana, a village on the shores of the Mississippi, half submerged under the poverty line, in part for its odd name. The name sounded humble to him, like the sort of place where he could organize and mobilize small-town black folks. He’d also gotten inspired by Tom Bradley’s and Maynard Jackson’s political