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Prologue: The Last Picture of Innocence
I was about three years old. My grandma took me by the hand and sat me down next to her in our backyard. Ours was a dismal excuse for a yard in the projects, with scattered patches of uncared for grass and unsightly weeds. I wasn't sure why we had to sit there in the sandy mess. Still, we quickly sat there in the searing heat of that summer afternoon, with our backs turned toward the highway, with the sun shining straight down into our faces, just beyond the uneven stretch of sidewalk,where cars passed along the narrow road behind us.
I sat, oblivious to what was going on. I was carefree then, sitting with my tiny hand resting on Grandma's thigh as she boldly knelt in the dusty, white sand. We were dressed in summer clothes. I sported a tanktop and shorts, while Grandma was wearing a multicolored, sleeveless blouse, striped across from top to bottom, and a skirt. Grandma, being a churchgoing woman, never wore pants and any skirt she wore rarely ever stopped above her knees. This was one of those days for exceptions. She was in her early fifties and still a very attractive black woman and her beautiful, slightly bowed legs were to die for. Her honey-brown skin was flawless. Back then, she had very little gray to show for the hard times she’d come through, working in the cotton fields. I looked up at her as we sat there, snuggled tightly side by side.
"Look thataway," she told me.
I followed her gaze to the back porch. There stood my uncle Cliff, a handsome, mulatto man with rich, amber-colored skin and silky locks of curly, jet-black hair. He was holding onto a tiny black box and expectantly looking our way.
"Trent, do like this," he said, looking straight at me and smiling.
I was confused at first as to why we were supposed to look at him and smile. I couldn't yet grasp the purpose of the box he held. Despite that, I smiled. I smiled a wide, sweetly childish smile, one of blissful oblivion and promise. At that moment, the strange blue cube on the corner of the box burst before my eyes into an unexpected flash! That was my first introduction to a camera and that one smile was captured on film. It was a smile so real, so untarnished, and so innocent that, when I look at it today, it so easily reduces me to tears. I am lucky to have this photograph, my last picture of innocence. It is my only reminder of a time full of love and without an ounce of confusion or shame. My entire life was ahead of me. Left untarnished, I could have become anyone still. In that smile, I see a clean slate of a little boy whose life was, as yet, unaltered by certain unspeakable events that would soon take place.
When I finally settled, I realized how the altering of my life forced me to spin off much too fast, surpassing all stages of blamelessness, causing me to often crash and nearly burn. Feeling like the oddity of life, I prayed often, and wondered if my prayers would be heard in time. Inside, it felt that not even praying was going to rescue me from my internalized shames. I felt my life was center stage and I was nothing less than its spectacle. As a child, I grew up feeling left out. All the way into my adulthood, I hoped that my prayers would bring relief to my downtrodden life and heart, because they both were always on the verge of crumbling. Concealing inner sufferings, as I began to grow, so did the seeds of those misfortunes, just from the mere thoughts of them.
So often I dwell on this, wishing that the little boy in the picture had stuck around. If he would have survived, if that sweet smile shined on just a little bit longer, then maybe ‘’I” wouldn't have had to grapple in the facade of loneliness that engulfed me in this unforgiving world. He didn't, though. He suddenly died within the coming of the turmoil that happened almost as quickly as the tiny bursts of radiant blindness that disintegrated from his eyes, from the flash of my uncle's camera. Like so, my days would forever become distorted before me and I pray, one day, it is all for a purpose as beautiful as the smile I left behind.
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| Last Picture of Innocence - 'Nito |
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December 13, 2011
Chapter 1 "Short Cut"
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Coming December 20th via eBook
January 2012 via Paperback.
Brought to you by Author Incog. 'Nito.
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