Mr. Jim was a humble man. He was a quiet and soft-spoken man. At sixty-five, he was still trim and fit. He had a full head of woolly-white hair and sported a ragamuffin white goatee. Most often he was smiling and happy and nothing that happened in the kitchen ever perturbed him. He had been married all his adult life. He and his wife had four children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren so far. On many levels he was the American success story and he’d lived the American dream.
He’d begun working at the steakhouse almost from its opening because he was a friend of Robert’s. Robert had been a friend of Mr. Bowman’s long before Mr. Bowman owned the steakhouse, and when Mr. Bowman told Robert he was thinking of buying it, Robert told him he could certainly help staff the kitchen. Together with Mr. Jim, Robert had put the whole kitchen staff together. It was a good staff, a loyal one, one that was loyal to Robert, to Mr. Jim, to Mr. Bowman and to the restaurant. Only two cooks had left voluntarily. That was because they had not come in from the beginning and did not share the family values that Robert and Mr. Jim had instilled. Those cooks, when they left, were no great loss.
Then came the second restaurant. Mr. Jim and Robert staffed that one too. Along came Yulie.
Mary had loved Yulie. But Yulie was a drug addict and drugs killed him. Robert knew Yulie and his family from church. Yulie was never married. He had two sisters who went to the church, as did his mother and his nieces. Yulie went because his mother forced him to go, and even though he was old enough to easily say no, he was respectful. Mary, Bea, Henry Lee and his wife Alfrieda, along with all their kids, went to the church too. Robert directed the church choir. Mary, Bea, Alfrieda and Yulie all sang in the choir. As messed up as Yulie was on drugs, that’s how beautiful his voice was.
Mr. Jim and Mary had watched Yulie. They watched him self-destruct, and they watched him work, and they watched him self-destruct as he worked. Oftentimes he would be so messed up that he would fall to his knees. The cooks on either side of him would pick him up by his elbows so that he could keep working. Rarely did he miss a step or a beat. He never fell behind in the rushes.
“The boy gonna die,” Mr. Jim had told Mary frequently. “Ain’t nothing we can do,” he’d said.
Mary would cry. “I know,” she’d respond. “Goddamn world.”
“Ain’t the world,” Mr. Jim would say. “Ain’t his color neither. Can’t say why some people are weak like that, but he’s one of them and he’s gonna die.”
“That why I love him?” Mary would ask.
Mr. Jim would hug her then hold her tight. “I done taught him how to cook and I taught him how to be a man and stand up on his own feet. It’s the goddamn drugs. Maybe Mr. Charlie responsible for that.”
Mr. Charlie. Mary’s boy Eddie, her oldest, referred to Bill as Mr. Charlie. To his face he called him whitey or cracker. Eddie didn’t like Bill, probably more because he went with his mother than because he was white. Eddie’d heard Henry Lee’s story about how he lost his leg, about how he’d gotten charged but the white man hadn’t even though the white man picked the fight and drew a knife first. Being younger and understanding less, Eddie was vicious, more so than Henry Lee or the gainfully employed black men. This was because Eddie had nothing to lose, at least not yet.
“I’m sick of it all,” Mary would tell Mr. Jim sometimes, specifically referring to life in general and to Yulie in particular.
“All you can do is love him and support him,” Mr. Jim would say.
