A man can only work so long for another man before his head explodes, left to squeeze down his ambitions to the space this man allows for him to breathe, to think, to dream. A woman preserves her dreams inside a space her boss man doesn't know exists. She knows how to put on her humility, to cover herself in it and wait to breathe another day, on her own time, where she doesn't permit the man she works for to infiltrate her thoughts.

Our nearest neighbor was carted off the other day for putting his fist through the wall again, for attacking the same wall he'd just slammed his wife's delicate frame into. The commotion sent a small quake through our apartment, my parents' wardrobe at the quake's epicenter punctuated by a wave of trembling aftershocks. It's bad enough he couldn't breathe. Then here she comes breathing just fine, her day at work no less trying, her tribulations no less suffocating. Yet showing up that night breathing in his face, asking how his day had been was more than her man could take.

It was a simple impulse reaction, gripping his wife by the shoulders, driving with full force into the bedroom wall before backing away, his hands at his temples looking to get a grip on his anger. She scrambled through an open closet door before agitation could wind its way up again inside his clenched fists. He took aim instead at a vacant spot above the dent the blade of his wife's shoulders had left in the wall plaster. Saw in her crumbling silhouette the incarnation of every boss man, the weight of a million feet resting on the back of his neck, crushing his windpipe.

Later that night, my father escorted the man's wife to the precinct house, assured her that my mother and he would stand by whatever she elected to do. I listened for a key in the door to signal my father's return. My mother took up post in the hallway leading past my bedroom door. She stared long at the hulking mass of my father laboring to remove his overcoat with that earnest, somehow hurt, mostly relieved look only a doting wife can muster before shifting her staring to me. Her look said, 'Talk to your son. Help him understand. Tell him the things only you can tell, things that he'll only hear from another man.'

She wanted my father to prepare his son so I might have words at my disposal when the time comes to have the conversation with the neighbor kids, the lot of them left to choose sides along battle lines drawn between mother and father. She wanted him to assure me that my father is not that kind of man, that I am not that kind of man, that the neighbor boy, if he can help it, doesn't have to grow to be that kind of man either.

When I asked what might bring my father to help a man who would lay hands on his wife, he took care to remind his son that every man deserves to be judged in the same color light. "How bright are the jewels of his crown?" he pondered. "How thick is the dust on the soles of this man's feet? How calloused are his hands?" He presented his own bruised knuckles before me in living testament to the persistence of life's hardships.

"You must ask yourself, how heavy is the weight around this man's neck? How deep are his regrets?"

In the end, the man's wife had the police drop the charges against her husband. After all, she understood the boss man, recognized the strain it placed on her husband though she desperately wished he'd find some means to redirect his contempt in a way that didn't involve her. She would press and drop charges against him a half dozen times before their eldest son, Ramon, and I could graduate high school.

This was my first practical life lesson brought to the end of my nose by actual events making the lesson, rooted in what not to do, impossible to dismiss. It was a miserable tale bearing an unfortunate truth about your average man who, lacking the temperament to set aside his grudges in the space between workdays, allows his animosity to stew, stirs the pot until the time comes when he must breathe the same air with this man again. One look into those soulless eyes is all it takes to bring the rage to a boil inside his temples again.

Had he only learned to adopt his woman's stance, train himself to live like she does, free of any burden that's not staring her straight in the face, he'd at least have that small amount of time to himself, to live again, to breathe, to wander the safe haven of his dreams free from the boss man's suffocating presence.

Here’s the thing about brown skin. It can convey a million varied tales with scarcely a change in hue. My complexion contains a mystery of where I’m from, where my people are from, how much sun I’ve endured. If you hadn’t seen me from Easter one year to the following New Year’s Day, you’d have no way of knowing that my summer was ablaze, a relentless sun toasting my skin. With the first fall of winter, frost setting up, red undertones begin to shine through. Still there is a bottom to my brown, a ceiling on how black I get each year.

My sister and I grew up in a quiet little corner of CT. With time, we cultivated our respective sets of friends, our zones of comfort. Early on, the color of our skin was of little consequence. As people of color, our collective numbered too few to be threatening–flakes of pepper resting in a teeming mound of sugar, cat whiskers drowning in a bowl of milk. The little bit of solidarity we amassed among those adorned in related shades of brown barely drew passing interest. That’s before the lot of us turned fourteen or fifteen, the lure to couple, to pair off with somebody pricking our young minds. Then our color became of grave concern.

Home was our sanctuary. The nearest branch of our family tree is rooted on either side in Harlem. My sister and I went from standing out in one place to finding on visits to New York new ways to relate: double-dutch and hair braids, ball games of all sorts played on an endless expanse of concrete. Grownups and old folks encountered in the lobby of our grandparents’ building considered us mannerly, deemed our complexion rich. Those roots helped to sustain us, connection to our life’s blood boldly rejuvenated with each passing remark. Roots that extend far south (ostensibly West African), West Indian, Blackfoot Indian–undoubtedly European as well given the rough hand colonization played in anchoring a long history of gradation across the globe.

I went south for college, attended an HBCU, its heritage steeped in the color of my skin. Surrounded by faces that resembled mine, I could no longer rely on my color to make my mark, being labeled the smart black kid in class no longer providing sufficient distinction to hang my ambitions on. I applied myself like never before, my worth cemented in the potential I saw reflected in faces that could easily have been my face.

Today, the cycle repeats itself. My progeny embody the whiskers in a new bowl of milk, roots of their tree extending to include yet another of New York’s fine boroughs–Brooklyn, a separate string of Caribbean islands, Lucayan-Arawak on top of Blackfoot Indian, a quick brush through the Middle East. Let’s hope the affiliation is enough to sustain them.

So ask me again: Where am I from? Where are my people from? How long have I stood in the sun?

The year I was to turn fifteen I was sent to live with my maternal grandmother in Picayune, Mississippi–the kind of place that time moved slow on, drug a long finger across her skin, left a smudge. I had never known such a place.

They have something down here called a stink bug, claimed to possess as its special power the ability to put off a stifling odor, meant to warn other stink bugs of impending danger–but only after it’s been squashed. I've come to think of myself as a sort of stink bug, cast from my home to serve warning for my two younger sisters who were left to endure whatever threat I was supposed to be fleeing. How the perils in Mississippi are meant to be any less than those in New York is beyond me.

My first full day in Picayune, two of the local boys got it in their heads to wet me with their water guns. Their eyes gleamed with the thrill of each squirt aimed in my direction. The sound of their taunts filled the air: “Enhhh, Enhhh, Enhhh!” I stood staring, wondering what those boys meant to accomplish by wetting me until my dress was a tattered mass of jet stream tears, my hair lifted in several places, water dripping down either side of my face from make believe wounds.

The boys eventually grew tired of me–a moving target that wouldn't seem to move–and continued on their way shooting streams of water at the ground, at each other, into the wind. My grandmother, who witnessed the attack from her porch window, told me to warn those boys the next time they attempt to squirt me that I will lift my dress and make it rain on the whole world. She sent word by way of their mothers or grandmothers or whoever most held sway over the root of their devilment. Batted her eyes against a persistent sun, hung the message on the edge of a tilted sky listing from the weight of the burden it was sent to carry.

By nightfall that evening, the sky was alive with the spectacle of events leading up to a storm: the low rumbling of thunder that escalates to a bone-rattling clap, the scent of rain as yet unseen transported on steam-drenched billows of wind. A hollow brightness filled the sky giving some hint as to the celestial whereabouts of the storm’s inception. Together the storm's way of proclaiming, ‘Ready or not, here I come.’

A flash of light ruptured the soft underbelly of swollen cloud cover and the rains began to fall, in gargantuan droplets at first: sphitt, splok, splook–obviously from a common source yet strangely isolated in their onset. The rain eventually settled into a steady rhythm, the downpour having worn smooth the frayed edges of ruptured sky.

I screwed up my nerve to pose the question through Gram’s cracked bedroom door as she and I settled down for the night. “Was all this my doing?” I asked above the patter of raindrops keeping time on the rooftop.

“Silly girl,” she replied, the titter in her voice showing the faintest hint of delight at the prospect that her words had carried, that her eldest granddaughter had grown to consider another person’s way of seeing the world, an outlook that had eluded my mother’s grasp under the same teaching.

“Magnificent forces exist out there,” she explained. “Lightning, sunshine, drops of rain; the rainbows they conspire to produce. Vital forces, as undeniable as you and me. Yet none of them is small enough to fit between the tips of your fingers. The sky might on occasion heed your wishes, but it will never bow to your will. It’s best you flush any such notion from inside your fertile mind.”

She switched off the light resting on her bedside table before I can manage a response. The night air placed a hush over the space surrounding us signaling it was time for sleep, not time for any further question asking about sunshine or rain or the sky's regard for my wishes one way or the other. I lay in the darkness contemplating my connection to those magnificent, outside forces. Had I been older, I would have recognized the coincidence between the timing of the threat Gram prescribed and the start of the rainy season in the Mississippi Bayou. Any younger and I wouldn't have appreciated the kind of mojo a threat like this–mired in sexual innuendo–would have on the locals, the men especially.

“Evening, Miss.” The man tipped his hat, resting a foot on the porch step, a lazy arm stretched along the length of the handrail. “Is the sun going to shine tomorrow?” he asked, his eyes as wet as any part of the sky, the brim of his hat, the tip of his boot.

“It didn't shine today,” I replied. “Might not shine tomorrow either,” I told him, reciting the words Gram had scripted for me.

Each night, somebody stopped by to ask about tomorrow’s sun. Not always the same somebody, but every night without fail somebody came to ask.

Midway through the summer, with the soybean crop in jeopardy not to mention the little league baseball season, a coalition of townsmen descended on Gram’s tiny three room house stamping mud from their boots as they made their approach. The racket echoed off a sky held low by days of endless cloud cover beckoning Gram and me onto the porch before the men could get themselves fully organized. They seemed small standing down around Gram’s front porch, heads bowed, hats twisting by their sides between nervous fingers like a gathering of school children assembled before an unyielding headmistress. Gram obliged them in this role standing steady on her perch, peering at and beyond them with the same glance.

I stood silent by her side studying the horizon for some cosmic event to intervene and calm the situation brewing between us. The sky seemed on the verge of another outburst, Mother Nature still unsettled by the water gun assault launched against me. Fast moving streaks in silver and gray circled the heavens twisting into one another as if bullied by a common adversary. The treetops disappeared in a mysterious haze giving the impression that an angry sky might at any moment open up and consume the earth leaving Picayune to spend the rest of eternity locked in bitter turmoil.

Eventually one of the men mustered the nerve to speak shaking me from my daydreaming–they’d come to see if I would remove the curse. After much conjecture and posturing, Gram instructed me to step to the edge of the porch, to hold my arms outstretched pointing skyward. She had me speak to the sky like a mother would a restless child.

“Be still,” I said. “Be still.”

Within days the rains stopped and the clouds began to part leaving the townsfolk forever in my debt.

Miss Spinnaker says death resides inside each of us, lies dormant suppressed by an abundance of living flesh. Life, death’s vacuum fresh container, sealed tight by an overwhelming desire to remain among the living. It’s only when the balance slides in the opposite direction that death begins to surface, emerges from its container in startling spurts. Likely conversation from a woman whose own existence is living proof of the subtle distinction between dying and getting older–walking backward into the moon until the sun can no longer claim us, time on earth a penance we each must pay in order to earn eternal life after death.

I tapped her apparent expertise on coping with a lonesome existence. “Why is it that everybody leaves me?”

“It would be too simple of me to say life is fleeting. But life is just that, a train moving against all our will at times. Best if yours is a slow train, running along a smooth track. A train so slow you’ll have chance to stroll alongside its easy locomotion, set up however you like, climb aboard awhile then step down and let the train pass by if you decide that’s best.

“But, take heed,” she warned. “No two trains ever pass the same way twice. Even a train you know will be different if ever it comes your way again. You’ll be different, too. So pay special attention if ever you spot a slow train comin’.”

I sensed Gram’s voice inside the room with us, felt her hand at my back. For the first time began to see in Miss Spinnaker compassion over curiosity, genuine concern over meddling interest. I channeled my questions to Gram through her, my ears longing again for the sound of my grandmother’s reassuring tone. “How will I recognize which train is mine?”

“A slow train will make itself plain. Trust in that.” I thought she might put me off again, watched as her teacup clanked against unsuspecting teeth, her lips taking a protective stance. She studied the rim of her cup, dabbed her tongue at a runaway drop of tea before setting the cup down again.

“Ever have a dream where something is waiting on you–a bus or train, a fast moving apple cart–whatever your form of transport?” she pondered. “Still, you can’t seem to get yourself together to leave the house. You touch the door over and over again, each time retreating for one thing after another: your gloves, your scarf, a clean handkerchief. Then your face needs touching up, your hair another primping. Most times in that dream, you wake up before connecting with whoever or whatever is waiting on you.

“Every so often you do make that connection, force yourself outside to find your bus or train or apple cart just pulling up. That’s when you recognize it, a break in the universe, that tiny speck of time where no one exists outside of you and your person moving in perfect lockstep. You find that train, you hang on to it for all it’s worth. You hear what I’m tellin’ you?”

Time holds no warmth though it has a pulse. It cannot dance yet maintains a precise rhythm. It possesses the power to move things, bring things to a standstill, but never wavers in its intent. Time is endless yet its stride, the measure between one instant and the next, is infinitesimal. We are most pressed for time while life still stretches out ahead of us. The more time on our hands, the less generally we have to look forward to.

The speed of time is what you make it - watched tightly, time scarcely moves then neither do you; spent lavishly, and time will just as quickly run out on you. Time is measured according to the tick of a clock, the minutes slipping past; the rise of the sun, the years unfolding in our wake; the span of a lifetime, our meager existence marked along the timeline of eternity.

The world has turned on its axis a billion times over. Any story we have to tell has undoubtedly been told before. Yet we enter each day anew–the break of dawn a chance at new life. We’re born into this world. We rise, we strive, we shine, we glow. Eventually our light will be extinguished. With any hope, our story will linger on. A story that has been told and retold inevitably comes out differently in the hands of a new writer. The voice may not yet be as eloquent as a Baldwin or Morrison or Langston Hughes, the technique not as polished. But a new writer possesses a fresh perspective, a new take on things. I took Wally Lamb’s southeastern CT–I Know This Much is True and added color. I painted the landscape black and brown and tan and blood red. Found fascination in the circumstance of people who at best draw passing interest in Lamb’s account of the place he and I both call home. As a new writer, I’m not yet on Lamb’s level, but I have a story to tell, a perspective to lend–a renewed energy, a different light.