The record playing right now outside this jail cell is “Amazing Grace.” The crowd has rolled into a rousing version that is leaking through every crack in the walls. My uncle told me that a slave trader wrote that hymn in the 1700s. The man was an obscene human being most of his life, maybe all of it. But it doesn’t matter. We worship that song. Our souls are saved with it. We sing it to bury our dead.
