Do Lord Remember Me by Julius Lester

Author:Julius Lester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Night

There wasn’t a doctor in the country who would’ve given such a prescription.

“I want you to smoke a cigar before you go to bed every night,” Doctor Carter had told him.

That had been thirty years ago. He was dead now. Looked like a white man and talked like a colored one. Doctor Carter told Reverend Smith once that he got tired of colored acting scared around him because they thought he was white and the whites talking about “niggers” to him. So he practiced talking like a Mississippi sharecropper and after a while, couldn’t talk any other way.

He’d been born and raised in Washington, D.C. His family was well-to-do and were at the top of the Washington Negro social elite. Like many light-skinned Negroes, they passed for white when it was to their advantage. Doctor Carter had gone through Harvard and Harvard Medical School passing. “I ain’t ashamed, Reb’n. I always knowed I wanted to be a doctor among our people in the South and I wanted to get the best education I could to be the best doctor I could. And let me tell you something! I lived as a white man for eight years and had a chance to study’em up close. The only thing that got me through was knowing that I didn’t have to be white all my life.” He laughed his high-pitched cackle. “Now, Reb’n, I looks at your body, listen to your heartbeat, and look at the results of these tests, and I can tell that you been living under a lot of stress and tension. That’s how come you got this here ulcer and that’s what the pain in your stomach is. You eating yourself up, Reb’n. Now, I could give you a whole bunch of pills and all like that, but I guarantee you that if you smoke one cigar before you go to bed every night, and stop trying to save the world, that ulcer’ll go away. If you don’t do it, I guarantee you that you’ll be dead in five years.”

Reverend Smith exhaled slowly on the cigar. He was in his pajamas and robe and sat on a wooden chair in the darkness of a small room at the rear of the basement. The only light came from a naked bulb at the foot of the stairs. He could look through the doorway and see boxes and piles of junk stacked on shelves and strewn across the floor, dirt covering them like a layer of skin.

She had been after him for years to clean the basement. From where he sat he could see the ten-inch round picture tube of the first television set, the old washing machine with the hand-wringer, issues of Life and Look magazines going back twenty years stacked high along the walls, Josh’s saxophone, Carl’s violin, and things he wouldn’t recognize any longer to save his life. But he had never been able to throw any of it out, though he knew he should have. How could he? Things were memory, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.