lessons

My mother says: When Mama tried to teach me to make collards and potato salad I didn't want to learn. She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk and eggs, stirs. I watch grateful for the food we have now —syrup waiting in the cabinet, bananas to slice on top. It's Saturday morning. Five days a week, she leaves us to work at an office back in Brownsville. Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long. Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking. She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it into the buttered, hissing pan. Wanted to be with our friends running wild through Greenville. There was a man with a peach tree down the road. One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket with peaches. Wouldn't share them with any of us but told us where the peach three was. And that's where we wanted to be sneaking peaches from that man's tree, throwing the rotten ones at your uncles! Mama wanted us to learn to cook. Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn't fair girls inside and the boys going off to steal peaches! So she let all of us stay outside until suppertime. And by then,