Cletha B

Boy things have sure changed around here Miss Cletha since you been gone.  Yesterday I heard screamin' and yellin' from somebody's front stoop across the way and you would never guess what they was fighting about.  They were talking about Cain.  They were raising Cain talking about Cain and how he was able to find a wife when there weren't anybody on the earth but him and his daddy and mooma.  I think some of the arguers figured out that Adam and Eve had many children, but I think some of the other ones hadn't figured that out and couldn't have figured out what that meant for Cain even if they had.

Some of them was young.

When you was here everbody be arguin' 'bout which kind of drugs they was goin' buy.  But that's not the way it is now, Miss Cletha.

You wouldn't recognize the place.


I remember when I used to say that welfare checks wuz spent on firecrackers ever New Year's and 4th of July.  Now at the time I didn't think that was all true but I knew I had a good point.  I don't think that's the case any more.  You really wouldn't recognize the place.

I look around and I like the paint color, but I remember you had to say somethin' against it before you left.  You said it looked like baby poo.  It didn't to me.  It looks good.  It's not great, but there's this fake Italianate color scheme that was real popular ten years back so of course we just caught up with it.  The dark brown is rich and not quite chocolate.  It's pretty dark but no one would think it was black.  And the golden tan color isn't quite yellow and it's more colorful than beige.  I did like the grey better against the great big sky we have here behind us, but as far as colors go, it looks good now too.

You wouldn't remember how much your house stinked.  You wouldn't remember how loud hat dog was when it got petted so loud people called the police on you thinking that was the best way to report an animal being tortured.  You wouldn't remember the one time you said something nice about a black person.  And you wouldn't remember how many good things you had in your life.  You were determined to see the bad and you certainly saw a lot of that.