How to Become a Butcher

Abstract

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• How to Become a Butcher
• Keith Hood (bio)

Lay the foundation for a bloody career of decapitating poultry and slicing the flesh of cows, pigs, and other livestock by being born Negro, in 1924, the second of seven children birthed in a misshapen, low-ceilinged, four-room house in Inkster, Michigan. You receive Lincoln Logs for Christmas when you are five and imagine designing a new house with cleaner lines and a higher ceiling that does not risk brushing your father’s head. Decide to become an architect.

Grow up with other large families, all of them Black like you, on a street full of bicycles, tricycles, and scooters with wheels that are dirt-caked because Inkster streets will not be paved for another forty years. Walk the gravel streets on your way to school, admiring the Sears kit bungalow on Cherry Street around the corner from your house. Admire one of your classmates, Eleanor Hicks, the girl who lives in the Cherry Street bungalow.

Learn reading and arithmetic from your father. Master numbers better than your older brother and other siblings. They can all count to one-hundred and beyond, but you do sums in your head. Your siblings call it magic. So does Eleanor. Impress your teacher who doesn’t believe in magic. Your father’s proud smile warms your heart because you aren’t yet aware that he’s tricked you. Accede to your father’s request that you join him peddling vegetables from your garden, door to door. His pushcart’s spoked wheels are taller than you. A scale is chained to its slatted wooden side. Spinach and cabbage five cents. Onions seven cents a bushel. Eggs from yard chickens, ten cents a dozen. Handle the money. Make change.

“Great job, son,” your father will say. “You know, we need to be selling more than eggs and vegetables.”

Take a family trip to Detroit where Gratiot Central Market and other meat packers are happy to give your father pounds and pounds of discarded “chitterlings” that he plans to sell at five cents a pound for the upcoming July 4^th holiday. Clean and wash the stinky things, cut them up, put them in buckets, put the buckets in ice on your father’s pushcart. Bask in his widening smile as the day progresses. Make change as the pig entrails sell out.

Ask to be included in a special beginning algebra class for eighth graders. Stare at equations on the blackboard and discern from the corner of your eye how the teacher catches your gaze, appreciates your gaze, a gaze like a kitten’s when it’s about to pounce on a ball of string. Determine that equations are important. Your teacher gives you a gift: your first slide rule. Show it to Eleanor. She looks as if you’d shown her some intricate language, which, of course, you have.

Consider the slight weight of the twenty-five-cent coin in your palm. That’s your weekly payment for cutting meat and packing vegetables into wicker baskets. The food cart is replaced by a pick-up truck where you sit in the bed with the foodstuffs and the money box. [End Page 2]

Thank your father for the quarter while thinking this is not going to cut it. You need Set squares, T-squares, and protractors; perhaps, for fun, an abacus. Take odd jobs in the neighborhood. Shoveling snow, planting flowers, mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow again. The seasons chart your life. Your customers love you, the light-skinned ambitious boy who points out the angles of their houses and roofs. Hum jazz tunes as you work. Sing Billie Holiday’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” to Eleanor and feel the blush and tingle when she says, “Nice voice, better than Billie or Fred Astaire.”

Retrieve the Detroit Free Press and Detroit Evening Times from your door step every evening and develop a newspaper reading habit. You’re responsible for collecting mail, too. The Detroit Tribune: Leading Negro Weekly of Michigan arrives in the mailbox every Monday. Your father mostly subscribes to read the classifieds. You like the news and the comics sections...