Free The New Black by Richard Thomas Page B

the Danny we would get would eventually wear out, but would not age the way the ones they could make now could. We’d get him six years old, and six years old he would stay.
    They made me meet with a kid in a suit and tie, and all he said was the same thing I had heard from the smartpad. He was looking at me funny, and I said, “All I want to get is the service I paid for eleven years ago, near to the day,” and he lowered his head for just a moment, like he was ashamed, and then he said, “You’re entitled to it, and we’ll give it to you if you want, but what you need to know is sometimes what you want isn’t the same as the thing we can give you.”
    Even though he was a kid, what he was saying was true, and I knew it then, and it made me want to pound the sense out of him, and even so I wanted what I wanted.
    I walked out of that Stonewall storefront that afternoon holding the warm flesh hand of a thing that moved and talked and looked for the life of me just like Danny did at six years old, and it was nearly unbearable, at first, to touch him or hear him say, “Now we’re going for ice cream, Daddy?” and to remember the bargain we had made with Danny the day we took him to get him scanned. You be good through this, we’d told him, we’ll take you to get whatever kind of ice cream you want.
    So I said, “Sure, buddy bear,” and I took him to up the road to the Baskin Robbins, and he ordered what Danny always ordered, which was Rocky Road with green and only green M&Ms sprinkled over top, and we got a high table for two, and I sat and watched him chew exactly the way he used to chew, and lick the spoon exactly the way he used to lick the spoon. He said, “Can we split a Coke, Dad?” and I said sure, and went up to the counter and ordered a large Coke, and when I forgot to get an extra straw, I regretted it the way I used to regret it, because he chewed the straw down to where you could hardly get any Coke out of it.
    After that he wanted to go walk the old stone wall like we always did when we came to Lexington, so I took him down there and parked the car and got him out and hoisted him up on the wall, and held his hand to steady him as he walked on top of it, and he said, “Tell me about the slaves, Daddy,” so I did what I used to do and told him about how all the black people in Kentucky used to belong to the white people, and how this very wall he was walking on had been made by their hands, one stone at a time, and the mortar mixed with probably some of their sweat and maybe some of their blood, too, still in it, and how even with all that Kentucky fought for the Union and could well have been the difference in that war. While I was saying it, I was remembering how I used to believe things like that, and the feelings that used to rise up in my chest when I said them, feelings of pride and certainty, and warm feelings toward my people I had come from. These were stories my own dad and granddad used to tell me and which I was now passing along to my own son, and this little Danny, walking along that wall, holding my hand, said the same thing the other little Danny had said in a moment a whole lot like this one but which couldn’t have been, if you think about it, any more different if it was happening on the other side of the world. He said, “It wasn’t right, was it, for people to keep other people to do their work for them? How did anybody ever think it was right?”
    And I said the same thing I said then, which was, “People don’t always do what’s right, son, but you and me get the privilege of making our own choices, and we have to make good choices. That’s what makes a person good, is the choices you make.”
    Right then is when we went off the script. Could be that something was wrong with his making, or could be that I wasn’t leading him right, but right at that moment, he took a wrong step and