What Difference Do It Make? Read Online Free Page B

bare hand. That was long before the days of aluminum, when Alcoa steel cans ruled.
    Once when John was in the seventh grade, the junior high was having a donkey basketball game. In case you never saw one, the fathers rode donkeys and played against the sons. John was tall and had made the basketball team.
    Somehow, he convinced our dad that all fathers were required to ride. Dad got home early that day, and with the help of a pint of his buddy Jim Beam, he mustered up the courage to crawl up on a donkey.
    Things went pretty well the first few times the donkeys ran back and forth down the court in a smooth gait like a Tennessee walking horse. Dad made a pass or two and attempted to block John’s shot. Then something went terribly wrong. Dad’s donkey got a burr under its saddle and launched him like an astronaut. After a back flip with a double twist, he landed on his elbow, crushing it like an empty Pearl can. I’m sure it was painful because I think Dad was crying, but John and I laughed our butts off. That was the most fun we ever had with him.
    I can’t remember whether he came to any of my high school or college graduations . . . but probably not. By then, I was glad he didn’t show up because he was a stranger whose only purpose, as far as I was concerned, was to embarrass me.
    But other folks didn’t feel that way about Earl at all. He was well liked by his employer and associates, who appreciated his wit and his don’t-give-a-crap attitude. His buddies said he was as funny as Jackie Gleason and laughed from the gut every time he started spinning a tall tale. They guffawed especially loud went Earl went on a tear about the Republicans.
    â€œThem damn Republicans are responsible for everything bad in the whole world,” Daddy’d holler like he was speaking through a bullhorn from the back of a rail car on a whistle-stop campaigntour. He blamed the GOP for everything from communism to arthritis. And if he temporarily ran out of things to blame them for, he might throw in acne and ingrown toenails.
    The whole time Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House, Daddy thought Texas senator Lyndon B. Johnson was a sterling hero who could save America and ought to kick Ike out on his can. When John F. Kennedy ran in 1960, Daddy didn’t much like him. But Earl was a yellow-dog Democrat who would vote for a four-legged canine of any color before he would vote for a Republican. So when November came, he held his nose and voted for JFK, even if the man was a Catholic and a Yankee.

4
    Denver
    Ever Sunday, a field hand drivin a mule wagon wound down the dirt plantation road gatherin up colored folks to haul em off to praise the Lord . . . The preacher, Brother Eustis Brown, was just another field hand. But he was the onlyest man I knowed besides [my] Uncle James that could read the Bible . . .
    â€œBrother Brown, we done heard that message about a hun’erd times,” one of the older women would say, somebody with gumption like my auntie, Big Mama’s sister. “When you gon’ change the sermon?”
    Brother Brown would just gaze up at the [church’s] holey roof and shake his head, kinda sad. “I work out there in the cotton with y’all, and ever week, the Lord shows me what’s goin on in the congregation so I’ll know what to preach on Sunday. When I start seein some changes out there,” he’d say, pointing toward the plantation, “I’ll be changin what I preach in here.”
    That’s how I learned the Bible without know in how to read.
    A unt Etha and Uncle James didn’t have a single book in their shotgun shack ’cept the Bible. I didn’t know how to read it, though, ’cause at that time colored children couldn’t go to school. I had heard of some colored children gettin some schoolin in some other places, but on my plantation in Red River Parish, we stayed home and worked the fields. There was one time when all