What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker by Damon Young

Author:Damon Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

9

Broke

Wilbur and Vivienne Young raised me to be a Christian, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that we were practicing Christians. I mean, we were Christians, technically, and they both grew up as regular Baptist churchgoers like most other decent and respectable black folks in the fifties and sixties. But Christianity in the Young household felt like more of a benevolent and perfunctory guide for proper Jesus-living than any sort of concretized edict. Like perhaps Jesus had given us the keys to His condo while He spent a weekend in Myrtle Beach, and just hoped we didn’t set His kitchen on fire. Christianity was a reasonably priced Airbnb.

I was taught to pray before every meal—a ritual I still follow today. (The efficient and immature “Jesus wept. Amen,” was my go-to food prayer until I graduated from Canisius, and switched to “Lord, thank you for this food that we are about to receive, through thy bounty through Christ our Lord, Amen,” which I hoped was appropriately pious enough to convince bougie black girls they could introduce me to their aunts.) The Lord’s name was never to be said in vain. And there were Bibles around, somewhere. Not a swarm of Bibles, but just maybe two Bibles, which were mostly used to store birth certificates. But we never actually went to church ourselves. The only time I went was for funerals and weddings and if I happened to be spending the night at Brian’s house or one of my grandparents’ houses. (Also, I’d attend Mass at St. Barts on holy days and holidays and Wednesdays and Kennywood days and whenever they decided it was Mass-attending time there.)

We did, however, worship at the church of Kool-Aid, and our devotion was fanatical. If you were to randomly peek into our refrigerator at any point, searching for something to drink, you’d likely find orange juice and you’d probably find milk, but you’d definitely find a half-gallon container of Kool-Aid, made with a sugar-to-granular-Kool-Aid-powder ratio of 18:1. We used so much sugar that you could plant a serving spoon in the bottom of the pitcher and it would stick straight up, and you’d need the force of five Thors to pull that nigga out. If there was no Kool-Aid in the fridge, it was because it was currently being made. And if it wasn’t currently being made, there was definitely a conversation happening somewhere about who drank the last of the Kool-Aid because that person was slacking on their Kool-Aid replenishing duties and needed to step the fuck up. “Who drank the last of the Kool-Aid?” was both the most asked question in the Young household and a threat.

We were so zealous that I can tell you which flavors go best with certain types of meats. For steaks and burgers and other types of heavier beef, grape is the best choice. If you’re eating seafood—such as Mom’s fried whiting, which I used to split in half, lather with ketchup, and make Giant Eagle white bread sandwiches with—orange Kool-Aid works best.

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