The Future Has a Past Read Online Free PDF Page A

LOVES. Believe me. If somebody is not there to HELP you, what else are they there for? Answer me, please.
    Well, I was talking to myself, but I was practicing for my children. Boys have to be careful too.
    I brushed all that off my mind and new thoughts came into it. I rushed home and picked up my babies and the cake I had made earlier to take to the Shakys’ house. I headed straight there. I meant to give Mrs. Shaky some part-time grandchildren. She might not love them as much as she would have loved her own from Lorene, but she was full of love for just “youngsters,” as she would say.
    I wasn’t trying to pay her back for the many times she fed me when we were poor and I was growing up. I wanted to give her back some of the love she used to put in those sandwiches and cookies and everything else she gave to me. And others. Cause love does make the world go round. Sure does.
    Poor Heleva Lorene Shaky.

A Filet of Soul
    Part I
    Life is so big, so big . . . so huge, with so many things in it sometimes you wonder why some people get so little out of it and others find a way to get so much. But, then, I reads a lot and I read where your character is your destiny. Well, that means that the life that makes up that character is just too downright important not to think about.
    But, is it something else, too? Something born inside you, that shapes and sifts the things that happen to you when you are young? Things that shape your thoughts about life and how you reacts to it? Even your dreams? Your choices? Now, I have seen a lot of things in my life and I know most everybody has a dream to love somebody and be loved by that somebody in return. That may go to character too! Like, how lonely are you? How much in need are you? After your character is born and grown, how slim or how great are your chances? For happiness?
    Luella cried last night. Again.
    This town is a little, ole place, I reckon like a many another little ole town in the world. A few well-off, maybe wealthy rich folks and a heap of poor folks. The people who has the most live on one side of town and us, we live over on this side of town. They white, we black.
    But we have a clean little town on these four or five blocks; not all of it, but most of it. Cause some folks you can’t teach em nothing much; but that kind live on both sides of town.
    Lining our streets we have great big ole tall, beautiful trees. Some planted by our grandfolks or our parents, so they old, old and big and wide and beautiful. They set off the streets with the little, mostly wood houses set back from the street. And peoples here take good care of their lawns and all. Plant flowers and such.
    But it seems like it’s a old folks town. Ain’t too much to do after your day’s work but eat and sit out on the porch til you go to bed. Young people leave here bout soon as they get out’a school. Going somewhere else to college or something, or just going somewhere else, period.
    I still live in my parents’ home, rest they souls, they dead now, both of em. Me and my husband took care our parents til they died. I married after I graduated school. Had children; they grown and gone now too. Husband dead; worked hisself to death. Sometimes I ask myself: For what?
    Anyway, I’m alone now. Yes, sir. And I get lonely . . . sometime . . . but I’m so glad not to have nothing to do but what I want to do that I just keep to myself and mind my own business. I ain’t old yet so I work two days a week, sometimes only one; just depends how I feel.
    See, it’s too hot here to get too busy at anything in the summertime. Even the flies and the mosquitoes buzz a minute, then sit and rest a couple of times on their way to bite something. It’s that hot! Yes, mam! I work my yard, food and flowers, in the evenings or early mornings. Once that sun near bout hit the middle of the sky, I’m gone on in and pulling my shades down. And in the winter it’s too cold to think of bein lonely when you trying to keep