Amazing grace

On the evening of June 17, in Charleston, South Carolina, a terrible evil met the incomprehensible grace of God. In the aftermath of that bloody encounter, nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church lay dead and the grace of God was again revealed.

One step ahead

I still don’t understand so many things. Relationships. Love. Family. Once upon a time—a long time ago—I thought I knew what those things meant. I thought everything could be nailed down to simple black or white, right or wrong, innocent or guilty. For me, there were no intervening shades of gray—only two absolutes that infallibly showed one thing or the other. I didn’t know or care to think about the nuances of human nature, of life itself, which could produce such interminable variations in the color on life’s complex canvas. If I had known then, I might have asked about the lack of display of affection between my parents, or why they chose to remain together all their lives even though the very act of doing so was paradoxical when measured against their conduct.

Ashby, Baby Ras, and Talker

Baby Ras is dead now—murdered before he was in his nineteenth year. Ashby is destitute and mentally unbalanced, aimlessly walking the city’s streets where he has become a permanent fixture. Miraculously, Talker has managed to stay out of the Castries hellhole prison—built to accommodate eighty inmates, but which, until recently, housed over three hundred—for the past six years. He continues to live in New Village with a pretty, common-law wife, and their two children.

They were all children once; each with his own childish dreams interwoven with his parents’ expectations. They were once blissfully unaware of the knife-edge reality that lived just beyond their childish comprehension—until it violently reached out and seized them the instant they set foot in its dread, dark domain.

When She was Mine

My daughter left home early on the morning of Wednesday, 25^th April, 2007 and returned on Saturday, 28^th April, 2007 at approximately 9:00 p.m. Before she called on Thursday evening to inform me of her whereabouts, her mother had already given me the news, which she had obtained in the afternoon from our daughter’s same-age friend, at whose parents’ house our daughter had taken up temporary residence. My wife had sounded sternly triumphant when she broke the news—as though she had just accomplished an unparalleled feat that had brought her no joy.