All the Sinners Bleed

by S.A. Cosby

But if you had asked Sheriff Titus Crown, he would have said that anyone who believed that was a fool or a liar. Or both. And if you had an occasion to speak with him after that long October, he would have told you that maybe the foundation of Charon was rotten and fetid and full of corruption, not only corruption of the flesh but of the soul. That maybe the rocks the South was built upon were shifting and splitting like the stone Moses struck with his staff. But instead of water, only blood and ichor would come pouring forth. He might touch the scars on his face or his chest absentmindedly and lock eyes with you and say in that harsh whisper that was now his speaking voice: “The South doesn’t change. You can try to hide the past, but it comes back in ways worse than the way it was before. Terrible ways.” He might sigh and look away and say: “The South doesn’t change … just the names and the dates and the faces. And sometimes even those don’t change, not really. Sometimes it’s the same day and the same faces waiting for you when you close your eyes. “Waiting for you in the dark…”

Men like Scott, men consumed by their egos and their desire to assert dominance at the top of hierarchies only they could see, didn’t have the capacity to set aside their petty aspirations even in the face of death. They craved power and control in any quantity or amount they could find.

People who said facts don’t care about your feelings had never had to tell a father his son was dead and before he died he’d become a killer.

Titus didn’t doubt the veracity of his conversion. He knew from firsthand experience how coming within kissing distance of the Grim Reaper can change you. What annoyed him about Top Cat was the overabundance of self-righteousness he now possessed. It was a trait common to the recently saved. Especially if one suffered from some form of dependency in their previous unsaved life. It was like they traded a secular addiction for a sanctified one.

Waiting for the world to shed tears for your pain was like waiting for a statue to speak.

Scott was the type of man who complained about the world being too sensitive these days without ever acknowledging the irony of his own fragility or privilege. Where some saw equality, he saw conspiracies against his manhood, his identity. He would tell anyone who would listen that he had the biggest house in the county and a Jaguar and a Hummer because of his own hard work, not because he was white or the son of the richest family in the county. Scott seemed to think he was a brave new soldier in the current culture wars.

To cement their perceived dominance, the Daughters had erected hundreds of Civil War monuments across the South as the Red Summer waned. Most of them were made of low-grade bronze or limestone, mass-produced and erected as fast and inexpensively as possible. These effigies served two purposes. To create a false narrative of honor and sacrifice that Confederate sympathizers could embrace in place of the shameful pall of treason that was their actual birthright. And to remind Black Southerners that to some of their white neighbors they were just escaped cattle meant to be sacrificed on the altar of the Lost Cause.

Black boys who may not have been able to truly articulate how seeing that statue every day on their way to school made them feel but knew without a shadow of a doubt what that statue meant.

“A lie can be halfway around the world while the truth is still pulling up his britches,”

Preston thought capitalism was great if people who looked like you were the ones sitting in the Capitol. For everyone else, well, sometimes it was like trying to climb a greased pole in mittens.

“What if me trying to hold the world together is what keeps me from falling

All I do know is violence begets more violence and all violence is a confession of pain. Hurt people tend to hurt people.