12th
When the police started to question him, he would have to give them a clear and cogent explanation as to why he’d moved into a neighborhood where he wasn’t welcome, why he’d filled the house with guns, why he’d been prepared to use them.
But Ossian didn’t have a coherent story to tell. He had the shards of his family’s history: the legacy of a half-remembered moment when the world was full of promise; the dreams his mother had sustained during the bitter descent into segregation; the weight of his name … And he had his own memories, trailing backward from Garland Avenue to the Jim Crow South, backward to the dusty streets of his boyhood home, to the tidy kitchen of the house his father built, to the tiny school where the black children learned their lessons, to the riot of trees and tropical plants tumbling down the banks of the Peace River, to the smell of burning flesh wafting across the placid water …
- Arc of Justice
