She Gave Him Some of the Cookies to Take Home

I believe the Parks family was the only bunch around worse off than us. There must have been at least 8 kids. The dad was a no account and the mom was sick with a liver disease that turned her skin a weird awful color. She’d stand on the porch . . . a baby-shit yellow stick figure with dark raccoon eyes. She’d stand there and watch us . . . just lost in her big flowered house dresses. She couldn’t even care for her children at that point.

I remember one time we were all out playin’ across town in some rich neighborhood and a Parks boy went right up and knocked on the back door of a big fine house. He asked somebody’s mom for somethin’ to eat. He just said, “I’m hungry . . . I’ll eat anything . . . even if it’s rotten.” The lady just sort of stood there and looked at him. She patted him on the head and then brought out some cookies. It was a miracle. She carried a silver tray down the steps. We crowded around. They were so good . . . home made . . . somethin’ we never got.

Later I thought about that boy beggin’ for food . . . or garbage. We had us some lean times in our family too but we refused to eat anything spoiled. Somehow though we didn’t ever really feel that we were that much better off than those Parks kids and we didn’t feel that sorry for em. Maybe we should have but we just figured that as far as we were concerned, drawin’ the line at rotten food when you’re hungry isn’t really that much better than goin’ ahead and eatin’ it.