This Other Eden

by Paul Harding

that despite all the spiritual & intellectual convictions by which my God & my Scripture have fortified me since I can remember, & in which I have wholly believed if appallingly never felt—that all men are my brothers, all women my sisters, all souls my family—I nevertheless feel a visceral, involuntary repulsion whenever I am in the presence of a living Negro.

He muttered about Noah and dead families buried in common graves and Grammy whispered to him, Hush, think of what a glorious month in heaven it must have been while it rained down here, all those people arriving, freed from all the evil their hearts had been set on since every one of them’d been little kids.

Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.

It was like the prophets in the Bible. They didn’t have any special powers of seeing the future. They saw where the present was at, was all. They looked at where the present was at with eyes that saw and ears that heard, so the future that would come from it was as clear and simple as adding one plus one.

What a sad gesture, murder, though. What a foul, cowardly little gesture. Her father had led her into that temptation and she had given over to it.