Daddy Peaceful
“Never was a slave treated
the way a child is treated.”
MARIA MONTESSORI
(1920)
6
four o’clock Tuesday 11 April MM
Daddy Gibson T. Peaceful, a retired
steak house waiter who still did private
parties, sat awaiting the return from
school of his three grandchildren,
watching Alphrah Wingate on the
tv. Alphrah had a show on about
child slavery and exploitation all over
the world. Little kids making shoes
for pennies a week, sewing thousand
dollar shirts for ten dollars a month.
Little fingers putting tiny stitches into
immense elaborate rugs. Boys and girls
sold into prostitution by neighbors
for a cup of corn. Children with the
serious faces of forty year olds smiling
fearful smiles. Even in Europe up
in the Reupeon Mountains six and
seven year olds growing a rare kind of
cigaret tobacco and handrolling it into
packages of twenty. Fifty dollars a pack
sold all over the world. Blessed by the
hands of children, they advertise, only
slaves bought and sold.
BRN-FALL-2012.indb 6
An Excerpt from an
unpublished novel.
“Children’s children are
the crown of old men.”
PROVERBS
17/6
Daddy Peaceful liked Alphrah because
she reminded him of his mother.
Every big Africamerican family had an
Alphrah, almost pretty but attractive,
smarter than everybody, pushy but
good-hearted. Give everybody a gift
at Christmas. Send out a hundred
cards. He relit his spliff, inhaled, held
his breath, realizing that he had seen
glimpses of his mother in his three
grandchildren, Cherie, Bloombloom
and Samson.
Cherie had received whatever beauty
his mother possessed. Actually Cherie
had received all the beauty from all
the beautiful ancestors going back in
the Peaceful and Willows families (not
to mention the Latours) for many
generations. She started out a pretty
baby. Folks would stop Tulip in the
street and ask to look in the stroller.
What a pretty baby! Once downtown
taking the kids to Schwarz not
Schwartz and that white advertising
man gave Tulip his card and asked her
to bring Cherie to some audition. Now
at thirteen she turned boys’ heads.
By
WILLIAM MELVIN
KELLEY
Walking behind her willowy walk that
time and the boys rapping, trying to
get her to stop or smile. S’up, shorty!
Can I aks you a question? Thirteen too
young to get that kind of attention but
beautiful movie star beautiful with a
perfect oval face and large brown eyes
and lips like a Benin statue and dark
brown skin without blemish. Beautiful
like Creator blessed her with it.
Tulip’s second child, Bloombloom, had
gotten all of his mother’s intelligence,
and the way she knit her eyebrows
when she got to thinking about
something. Though a much lighter
shade of brown and with waist length
black hair, Bloombloom looked as
beautiful as Cherie, at least to Daddy
Peaceful, but her mind not her looks
astounded people about Bloombloom.
At seven she went around spelling
words. Or asking how to spell words.
Forget about trying to have a grown up
conversation around her and thinking
to cloud the subject by spelling key
words. Bloombloom would spell out
the secret words and stay right in the
conversation. She could count to one
thousand and had begun to multiply.
She drew whole worlds on paper.
She read books.
9/7/12 11:26 PM