My Darkest Prayer

by S.A. Cosby

“Bless your heart,” which is Southern for “Fuck you, bitch,”

“I’m just saying she probably makes good money. Shit, she getting paid to do what a lot of women do for free. I ain’t judging her. Nothing wrong with sex, brother.

Safety is an illusion. There is no safety. Just downtime between tragedies.

“You came in here with a blood-alcohol level so high we could have lit your burps on fire to roast marshmallows.

I don’t think there is anything more emblematic of the damaged American psyche than a poor white kid insulting a poor Black kid for being poor.

You never forgot that first hit. It’s like a door opens in your mind and you spend the rest of your life trying to find the key to lock it. The ugly truth is that there is no key. You destroyed it when you got your first taste. So you spend the rest of your life trying to keep that door shut with your bare hands.

But as long as you’re Black and breathing, you’re going to run into people like this Carpenter boy. And make no mistake, no matter how we see you, the world is going to see you as Black. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that. It is how the world treats you because of it that’s wrong. Now, I know your father says violence is never the answer, but sometimes it’s the only viable option. It’s not fair, but the real world isn’t fair.

The ass whooping I gave him didn’t make him a better person. It just made him a better asshole. It taught him subtlety, not humility.

I’d then have to counter with my own hard-won wisdom. A lesson I have learned from all the Victor Cullers and Ray Carpenters of the world. A succinct philosophy that can be summed up in four words. Talk shit. Spit blood.

Funeral business was the last place where segregation was openly tolerated in America. You can have your interracial marriages and mixed-race babies and white hip-hop artists and Black rockers, but when you died, it was still the amount of melanin in your skin that determined who lowered you into the ground.

I’m sorry that he’s dead, but I bet he went to Hell on a scholarship,”

Confession can be good for the soul but terrible for the flesh.

“No one ever buries an evil man, Nate. Death makes everyone a saint,” he said.

But there are times when even the Word of God is no protection from the tyranny of evil men,”

“Punch a man in the face, he might still lie. Break his fingers joint by joint, and he’ll tell you how many dicks his mama done sucked,” Skunk said.

And as far as Laurent go, somebody required that son of a bitch’s soul in Hell,”

“Ain’t gotta believe in God to think some people deserve to go to Hell.

I abhor the scent of cheap weed and fear,” he said.

That’s the tragedy of this thing we call life, isn’t it? Either none of our prayers are heard or all of them are. Even the darkest ones.