The Future Has a Past by J. California Cooper Page B

who could read, her whole soul fairly fluttered to each word pushed through his lips by his determination.
    As poor as they were, the mother gave him any change she could filch from the meager money for little things they just had to buy. He would, now and then, steal a penny, nickel (never a dime), when possible, slyly whispering to his mother it was one of his brothers who had stolen it (if it was missed) and that one would get a whipping. Needless to say, his brothers and sisters grew to hate him. Already having hard times and somebody gonna lie on you, too?!
    Cecil Ray loved to go to town with his mother and once he stole a cheap magazine. He would have paid for it, but he just didn’t have the money. The magazine was full of pictures of what looked like rich white life and movie stars. He loved the clothes on the men and the painted, fast beauty of the women wrapped in furs. It set a love of clothes on him for all his life. For pretty women too, though the ones he knew were not pretty in the same way the white ones in the magazine were. He did not know the white ones in the magazine were not pretty in that way either. He thought their beauty was natural.
    He didn’t know much about make-up beside lipstick. He stole a tube of lipstick for his mother and because she loved her son, the helper, she put it on for him when his father was not home because she did not want her husband to worry about the money.
    She believed her son had stolen the lipstick. She was a Christian woman and did not want her son to be a thief. But Satan is a wily ole devil and he knows the human heart pretty well. The mother had never, never, ever had a tube of red lipstick or any other type of thing to make a woman pretty . . . so she kept it and pretended, as he said, he had found it. But, now, when her son stared off into space, she raised her eyes over her chores, watching him, and wondered and worried about his future, his life. She prayed for all her children, but especially Cecil Ray.
    Even in the country, people find some way to have a little relaxation, so there is usually a place called a juke joint where you can get a little drink and socialize. There are people who look for places like this to gamble. They take away from the poorest of people what little has been left to them after their toil for the first somebody, their bosses, who kept all they could get away with from the poor laborers. Passing the juke joint on his way to and from errands run for his mother sometimes, Cecil Ray met other young men who did not like to work. Suitcase Brown, Cadillac Jim (though he didn’t have a Cadillac, he had seen a rich white man in one when he was riding the rails into some town), Big Red, Little Black, Broad-way were names of some of the passing gamblers. These men and others gambled for a living. They even took money from women and you must know how little the women made in such company.
    Only a poor Fool would be caught between a rock gambler and a hard place woman, but the Fools came back every week for more of the same cheatin and lyin. Fool’s gold glitters too!
    Some of the gamblers had women they carried around with them, to keep the one or two dollars coming in to gamble with. Occasionally these men had cars, some old and gasping, but still running. A few of the men had a fine, sleek, new model automobile, but they usually didn’t stay more than one night in a small town like the one Cecil Ray lived in.
    These men became Cecil Ray’s heroes. Not his father, who worked hard, wearing washed-out, faded overalls every day, sometimes unwashed for a week or two, and didn’t have but one old threadbare suit he wore to church every Sunday. Had no automobile. Had a mule and a cow. And worked for the white man, who cheated him. Regular. He was what Cecil Ray called a fool. But the father lived and had nine children and a woman he loved.
    Cecil Ray didn’t hear, but seldom, about the gamblers shot, stabbed, starved and dead after they passed