Free All the Right Stuff by Walter Dean Myers

DuPree,” I said.
    â€œOkay, I’m going to call you Paul,” John Sunday said. “Well, Paul, a man come through Shreveport saying how he was going to go up to Baton Rouge and open him up a restaurant. He was looking for a cook and a waitress.
    â€œShoot, I didn’t know nothing about no cooking, but I thought it was time for me and my girlfriend, Aimee, to get together proper and everything, and so when he asked me if I could cook, I said yes.”
    â€œAnd you couldn’t cook?” I asked.
    â€œI could cook some because I seen Miss Arlene, our colored gal, cooking, and sometimes she let me snap beans or do a few little things. Me and Aimee went up to Baton Rouge. I liked that town. Yeah, it was all right,” John Sunday said. “And since that little restaurant was in the back of a general store over on the east side where they were doing a lot of building, we did some business. That’s where I learned to make mullet stew.
    â€œLook at Elijah looking over at me, hoping I drop the secrets of my stew,” John Sunday said. “Man, if I give up these secrets to Elijah, he’s liable to take them down on the Oprah show and make a million dollars!”
    â€œAnd you would get half!” Elijah said.
    â€œI’m waiting for Oprah to come on through here, and I’ll get the million and then you get half, Elijah,” John Sunday said.
    â€œHow long you stay in Baton Rouge?” Elijah asked.
    â€œâ€™Bout two or three years,” John Sunday said. “Me and Aimee got together and had us two kids and then she got tired of everything and went back to Shreveport to live with her mama and made it clear that she didn’t want no part of me. Said that as long as she was with me, she wasn’t going to get nowhere in life. I guess she had read enough of them fancy magazines to want a big house and a shiny car or maybe a shiny house and a big car, I don’t know. But the truth is that her name was Aimee Sunday and our two little children was John, Jr., and Palmer, and once a week she had to think about me whether she wanted to or not, cause I gave her my name, which was Sunday. Ain’t that something?”
    â€œYeah, it is,” Elijah said.
    I could see that Elijah wanted me to hear John Sunday’s story, but I didn’t know why. It didn’t sound like much to me.
    â€œThen you were in the civil rights movement, weren’t you?” Elijah went on.
    â€œThat wasn’t no big deal. Some people say I was in it, but I don’t say no such a thing. I did what I thought was decent and that’s about it,” John Sunday said. “’Lijah, you buying some fish?”
    â€œThinking about it,” Elijah said. “How they look?”
    â€œThey looking good. Fresh as they want to be.” John stopped and looked at his watch. “You fixing this for tomorrow?”
    â€œYou got it,” Elijah said.
    â€œFound a piece of job up in Montgomery changing tires,” John Sunday said as he started picking out the red fish for Elijah. “It wasn’t much, but it was honest. Then along came that bus boycott, and it was the stupidest thing you ever wanted to see. Lot of people was talking about how the black people wanted to sit up front and put the white people in the back. It wasn’t about that. The black people said they would sit in the back, but when the bus filled up, they didn’t want to have to get up and let a white person sit down. That was the unequal part of it.
    â€œAll the white people was getting mad. The bus didn’t matter none, but everybody was talking about what was going to happen next. They was saying if you sat next to a black man today, the next day he would be doing something nasty to your daughter. Black people, they were walking into town to their jobs or getting rides the best they could. Some lost their jobs, too,” John Sunday said. “You know, if you got a man by