Soul Food

Russell 23 Tom Russell Soul Food She is on her feet downtown feeding the noon rush, a hundred mild gray predators, on twenty pounds of lean chuck on wholewheat. In any underworld like this the talk is phatic, a plea becomes a deal, a moment of earthly fiction when the hammered plot tiresomely advances the day. Lawyers are only creatures with a system of referral. She floats the heavy blue plates of rings and melts on the green curve of counter. I think of us lined up at the river. On the other side, smoke venting to heaven, the grilled patties are flaming up ten across, three down, wholesale judgement. One of them is mine. I asked for everything. The legend of her feet: they walked out of that pit of Mississipi in a dry year. Walked past a sister's grave who bore her name and died the day she was born. That sister was an angel, would never have lain with a jobless serpent under a sycamore and carried his seed north to the projects. You can step off the chain of being, catch the cleaning-lady bus on a Memphis corner, open an eatery in the courthouse square, serve gentry clerks from Alabama, and never hear a single voice from home. I came in the day she missed her purse. Those clients of hers she saw each day across the counter joked about her useless son: he finds loose change in the ears of sows. Mama, one said, cancel those rings and hold that cheese. Her heels were to the counter. She pitched raw flesh with both hands. ...