Big John is an ex-con who lives in the halfway home at Ebenezer Baptist.
Big John was tall, almost as tall as Tyrell and much taller than Dwayne. He was thick-bodied by nature too, but he looked a little sunken, dehydrated from age and wrinkles, as he was near fifty nowadays.
His biceps all flexed as he folded laundry. He wore only boxer shorts, his big-boy booty straining the tight fabric, his fat hog barely fitting in the front. He ain’t got baby dick like Dwayne, you could see that, his dark-skin dingdong visible through the thin white fabric of his drawers.
From Tyrell the Mandingo
Deacon Malcolm would say Dwayne must pray with Big John — he was big on fellowship — and whatever reason Dwayne gave for not doing so, Big John was sure to report it to Deacon Malcolm. Big John wasn’t a snitch, exactly, he was just a bit of a retard. He ain’t got no filter about what he say, and he ain’t seem to realize not everyone be following rules all rigid-like like he do. He assumed if Dwayne broke a rule, he mighta not realized it, so he just blab it to the deacon or to Pastor Cherrymore like it ain’t no thing.
From Tyrell the Mandingo
Big John was the church’s live-in groundskeeper and hootie-hoo of the halfway home in the basement. He was a bulky-body, smoothface cat — he grew up on a farm and spent his adulthood on a chain gang, got farmboy shoulders flecked with grass cuz he was finishing mowing the church lawn. He wore only his denim overalls, which used to be blue as the heavens on high but now was grass-stained and faded to a off-gray. His thick fleshy arms was grass-coated like his face and his bearish body, and his skin slippered with sweat from the sunlight that done shone upon his shimmering dome.
The lawn was done, so Big John beleagured his eight-ball into the leaning chipped-wood shed behind the church. That was where he kept the clippers and weedwhackers and whatnot. His powerful chest was constrained by the overalls he wore, and his too-tight underwear was soaked in sweat. The cool shade of the shed becalmed his sun-shiny shoulders.
Big John ain’t heard Malcolm approach, so he startled and stopped his bopping. He usually got a hop-a-bop beat in his feet, and when he mowed the lawn, he stepped fine in time to the thrum and hum of the engine.
One them hands roamed down Big John’s sweaty back to his thick-as-thighs buttcheeks, and Big John rattled and sighed. Malcolm kissed him on the nape, then wrinkled his nose at the intensely sweaty smell and the grass clinging to his smoothness. He got some old faded prison tat there, some kinda arcane gang sign, between his shoulder blades. It was barely visible now cuz it blended in with the deep brown of his skin.
He lived in the basement, actually in the laundry room — he could share a room with another man, as there were other bedrooms down there, part of a halfway home for ex-cons on the outs from the big house, but Big John got a bed set up in the corner of the laundry room by hisself instead. He do all the laundry for the church programs and the halfway home, so it made sense for him to lay his dome there too.
Big John was already off to his own room, the laundry room, and Deacon Malcolm followed him. It smelled of dryer sheets and sweat in here. Big John got a bench press and some weights in the corner near the door. Malcolm been getting after him about wiping that bench press down or it gonna smell like Big John’s big booty forever, and that was gonna make the other clothes getting washed in here smell the same.
Big John sat on the edge of the bench press, undid the straps of his overalls and took off his shirt. His muscles were thick like girders, and his smooth chest gleamed with sweat and flecks of leaf litter. He done spent years swinging sledgehammers on a chain gang before coming to the halfway home at Ebenezer Baptist, so he got well-worked arms, powerful and fleshy, not vascular and taut like a gym bunny.
Big John bin jerking dingdong for a long time, cuz he was a booty boy in prison. Once a nigga got his nays ignored enough, he don’t know how to say ’em so they count no more.
From Thumper on Parole