This week’s column is the fourth in a series of excerpts from the author’s memoir, “True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope & Clarity”
After being summoned to his office at church that night, Grandpa was not gone for long, but when he reemerged, the serious look in his eyes and the taut lines in his forehead and jaws said that something was wrong.
He stood in the foyer just outside his office, staring toward the pulpit. He beckoned with his hand. I looked around, wondering whom he was calling until he pointed directly at me.
“Me?” I asked, touching a finger to my chest, my lips moving but making no sound.
Grandpa nodded.
“What for,” I wondered. “Was something wrong at home?”
The boys had come to church with me that night. But (my wife), still pregnant and nearly due, wasn’t feeling well and had stayed home. I sprang from my chair and hurried from the pulpit through the sanctuary…
“Come on, John. I just want you to take a ride with me.”
…Grandpa and I rounded the corner at 18th Street and Komensky Avenue and saw the fleet of blue-and-white police cars parked outside my apartment building.
“Oh my God!” I gasped. “What happened? What’s going on?”
Grandpa pulled to the curb and I jumped out of the car before it was even parked. I ran into the building and dashed up the stairs as fast as I could. I ran in, my heart and mind racing.
“What…where’s…where’s my wife? Where’s my wife?” I asked, rushing toward the living room, where a swarm of police officers stood. I quickly scanned the room and saw (my wife) sitting on the couch. She looked shaken. I rushed over.
“She’s all right,” a police officer said.
“What happened?” I asked, shaken and angry. (My wife) seemed too shaken to speak.
“Sir, someone shot through your window,” a police officer said. “The bullet crashed through the glass and lodged in the floor here,” he said, pointing.
“A bullet… What? Awww man, you got to be kidding me,” I said, trying to compose myself. “Where did it come from?”
The cops showed me the hole in the living room window. It was about the size of a baseball. Then they showed me the round that had torn through it…
My eyes fell on the spot where the bullet had landed. And I was even more shaken. It was in front of the television, the same spot where our boys normally sprawled out on their bellies in the evening before bedtime each night to watch TV.
(My wife) had been lying on the couch watching television when she heard the glass breaking, and then something hit the floor…
I knew we would never find out where the shot came from. But that didn’t matter. What really mattered was that one of us could easily have been killed but we had all been spared.
No matter how troubling, I could not allow myself to dwell on it, if I was to maintain some degree of sanity. You could never afford to take it all in. You never fully ingested all the madness, at least not while you lived in it, or it could incapacitate you.
You saw it, but you didn’t. You heard it, but you didn’t. You convinced yourself that things were not so bad. That this was how life was. You counted your blessings. You moved on.
I hugged (my wife). She said she was okay. The cops finished their report and left. Then Grandpa and I drove back to church.
All the way back, I kept thinking that I had just one more thing to be thankful for — but I was convinced more than ever that I had to find a way to get my family away from here.
Email John Fountain at Author@johnwfountain.com
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