Free Delicious Foods by James Hannaham Page B

And you know animals is some beautiful creatures of God. What they think so bad ’bout being a ape?
    And yet the residents of Ovis appeared to have accepted the injustices they’d suffered as inescapable. Nat felt he could’ve knelt down in front of their strained smiles and gathered their impacted anger in his hands as he went door to door and filled baskets with the harvest, but his attempts to plant it or grow it into any kind of action often proved futile.
    Well, he’d ask Sparkplug, why don’t you register to vote, my man?
    Sparkplug, the most frankly angry man for miles, often in the process of arranging his poker hand, didn’t usually look up. The one time he did reply, he said, Vote for who? The son of the cracker sumbitch killed my uncle?
    The men passed laughter between them like beer, mollifying a shared disappointment, frustration, and rage intense enough to turn murderous if you provoked it, though the opportunity to vent wouldn’t ever arrive. Even if they got a chance, the talons of injustice would swoop down soon enough, dismember these men, and be gone, and everybody would forget that any of it had happened, leaving no trace aside from a lingering miasma that might rise into the Spanish moss.
    Gradually, though, some of the men and women came to Nat privately, and he began to convince these few to see past their hopelessness and wrath into an easier future, if only a slightly easier one. A few signed up. They joked about a time when their despair would lift, when someone would cut them a break, and with a proud smirk, Nat saw that they’d taken the first step toward shedding their perpetual despair. But all his activity, despite the optimism at the heart of its politics, quickly attracted negative attention in the form of threatening phone calls, unpleasant words on the street, and bad service in local businesses. They’d been through this sort of thing before, from their own people, Nat reminded Darlene, so they should know not to pay it any mind. Still, Nat tended to measure these minor wrongs against far larger ones, like the atrocities committed against Henry Marrow, Medgar Evers, and Emmett Till, so he failed to see them for what they were: the opening moves of a chess game he could never win, considering how many moves ahead his opponents were already thinking.

We Named the Goat
    T his chick standing by that navy blue minibus parked at the side of the road seem okay to Darlene—better than okay. Firstly the woman had on a
clean
blouse, in a multicolored African triangle pattern, almost like a stained-glass window. Only a couple holes in that shirt—same with them acid-wash jeans and them skippies on her feet. The minibus seem sorta new, mostly. Wasn’t no scratches or dents you could see under the white light in front the Party Fool, the next lot over from the one where Darlene just lost three teeth. The minibus tires was all waxy shiny, the hubcaps too. The sliding door slid open smooth, and you could smell the plasticky new-car odor inside even from a couple feet away. Them windows be shining, them seats look like they could actually bounce, and when Darlene leant sideways round the woman and peeked inside, she could tell the brothers in the back was comfortable.
    The lady—said her name Jackie—done started in like some direct-marketing TV huckster, talking fast ’bout this place and this job that sounded real good, and that Darlene and I should go with her. A wet Jheri curl went sproing on her head, then it gone partway down the back of her neck, with the hairpins pushing the sides above her ears for that business-casual look. Darlene ain’t concentrated on nothing Jackie said, though, ’cause she said more than need be, the way people do when they already decided that you gonna turn down they pitch.
    While we listening, Darlene had to plant her feet to keep from shouting with joy, even with all that dried blood caked up in her nose and gums and them scratched-up knees. Sound like