Midnight Read Free

eating all the grease he eats. I’ve seen the fool smear lard on white bread.”
    â€œChester, what’s this big thing you got with food, man? A hamburger is a fuckin’ hamburger!”
    â€œThat’s what you think, young blood. Pull some of that ghetto snot out of your ears ’n listen up. I got a little-brother-place in my heart for you ’cause I don’t really think you’re dumb as the rest of these funky chumps.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean?”
    â€œIt means that I don’t think you want to spend most of your life in jail.”
    â€œLike you?”
    â€œYeahhh, be cruel, if you want to, yeahhh, like me.”
    â€œSorry, man, I didn’t mean.…”
    â€œAint no thang.”
    Daily, with practically nothing to do but talk and pump a little iron, Chester rapped and Bop began to listen.
    â€œMost of the brothers and the Mexicans in here is half crazy from the shit they’ve been loading their systems up with for years. I don’t feel qualified to talk too much about our Latino friends, but I know what we been eatin’ since 1619 is fucked up.”
    Chester L. Simmons, ex-con man, ex-pimp, ex-ex-ex, managed to convince Clyde Johnson, aka “Bop Daddy,” that there was a racist plot behind the pushing of sugar, grease, drugs, and assorted chemicals into the African-American communities across the United States.
    â€œWhat’s this shit with ‘fast foods’ in our communities?! It’s like we don’t have time to sit down ’n eat. Most of us ain’t got nothin’ but time; we ain’t got no jobs to rush to.
    â€œIsn’t that interesting? The white boy is dead on the go, phone in the car, ready to go, but you don’t see him grabbing those killer burgers and loading up on junk food. We spend the same money he spends, buying synthetic shit that don’t do nothing but make you have a cravin’.
    â€œCheck it out, youngblood. Put enough sugar in your tank and it won’t run. You’ll think it’s runnin’ but it’s just an illusion. Everything they push in our communities is sweet, I think it’s a clever way to get us to swallow some bitter shit. I had a couple junkie chumps give me some sweet gin one time. You believe that?”
    Bop tried to argue the point a few times but gave up; Chester’s logic was tight.
    â€œI ain’t got nothing against eating meat; it’s what you’re eating in the meat that fucks me up. It’s got to be some powerful chemicals they’re using to blow a damn cow up to adult size in four months. Or is it three?
    â€œAnd I’m not one of these funky chumps who believes that vegetables don’t scream ’n cry when we cut and kill them too. It’s just a matter of biology; I’d rather kill a tomato, which doesn’t have a heart like mine or a liver, or a dick, than kill a cow.”
    Chester ate seafood when it was available (either legally or illegally) and vegetables (undercooked by demand) and only smoked marijuana for his holidays.
    â€œThat firewater ain’t nothing but some chemicals them bastards done stirred up in a vat. Herb is from Mother Earth.”
    Chester L. Simmons was the man who made him understand that white bread wasn’t really wonderful and that he ought to pay the Motherland a visit.
    Bop sprawled in front of the television, finishing off the last Beck’s and smoking a joint, marijuana sheen in his eyes, fascinated by the Watts Riot of ’92. Uncle David and Aunt Lu had watched an hour of it after dinner and decided to watch the TV in their bedroom.
    â€œAin’t no doubt in my mind how this shit is gon’ come out. Niggers gon’ lose again.”
    Bop opened the sliding glass door and stepped out into the yard. He felt the veins in his forehead throbbing. The brothers were firing it up. He could hear distant sirens and imagined that he could smell smoke.
    That’s