The One Way Out

In the face of Angie’s reluctance to discuss it, Paul went to the Library and researched the Rosewood massacre. There was very little information available there, but from some old newspapers he discovered that a young white married woman in Sumner, claimed that a black man had raped and beaten her one morning after her husband had left for work on the early shift. Suspicion immediately settled on the nearby black community of Rosewood, and relationships between the young white men of Sumner and the town of Rosewood took a sudden, sharp downward spiral. After a couple skirmishes with individuals from Rosewood, the men of Sumner eventually moved in on Rosewood, shooting.

Women and children escaped by running into the nearby marshes. Two white brothers who owned a train, eased the situation somewhat by giving the women and children a ride to get them out of the neighbourhood. The sheriff smoothed over the situation with the Governor, and nothing came of the incident.

Paul spent a couple summers with his cousin Ezra at his apartment in DC. Ezra was an engineering student at Howard University. Though they were cousins, they had never met before they left Jamaica. Paul’s first trip to DC was arranged at the parent to parent level, by mail. But when they met the two cousins got along very well together.

Much as he enjoyed Angie’s company, Paul lived for his summers in DC. Life was so much freer there. He did not need to be constantly looking over his shoulder, and as a student, he could always get a job. For every summer he spent in DC, Angie spent a week with him there. She had never left Florida before, and was dumbstruck by the casual ease with which black people interfaced with whites in the nation’s capital.

The four years he spent in Gainesville were indeed transformative years. He achieved his stated objective of getting a bachelors’ degree in Agricultural Science. However, he was brought face to face with the basics of his faith as well as his own mortality. He made a paradigm shift in his focus on God. He abandoned the laid back stance of the lazy, hazy estate days – the days of partying, cricketing and drinking, and placed God at the center of his life. With Angie as his mentor, he learned that the Christian faith demanded the complete surrender of self to God; it called on him to live his life for God’s glory. As he would find out, this was much easier to do in Gainesville where there were fewer distractions than in DC. DC offered “the good life,” inspired as often as not by spirits that were far from holy. His new stance on life earned him some gentle teasing from Ezra and his friends, but he also gained a lot of respect.

Paul’s transformation was not only spiritual. The all pervasive Civil Rights Movement impacted the student community across the nation. Paul wondered how would white America, accustomed as it was to lionizing its pioneers as self-made men, ever come to terms with the basic tenets of the Christian faith – love your neighbor…..do unto others…yet the Church thrived in the south.

It was a paradox to Paul. Did they worship the same God as he did? The God who saw virtue in the good Samaritan; who reminded the Hebrews to respect the stranger in their midst for they were once strangers in a foreign land. How could a man, he wondered, go to church on a Sunday, eat Sunday lunch with his family, and then put on his white robes and hood, and go out to kill black men for no reason other than that their skin was black?

He enrolled in DC for the Masters programme in Agricultural marketing. He never missed Gainesville. The gang had broken up, each pursuing his own path. But he missed Angie sorely. She now ran the library at Sumner. Distance was their enemy. During the two years of his master’s program, he managed two trips to Sumner, and Angie twice came to DC. They kept up a strong correspondence, but nevertheless felt themselves drifting apart. Paul saw Benny occasionally, when he went to New York, and Papa once organized a get together for the three of them in Philadelphia. Great fun!

Papa married his high school sweetheart in a huge wedding, and settled into the family business. Benny was doing freelance writing for a couple New York journals. Phil was wrapping up his master’s programme to go home and get married. His Dad was anxious for him to come and deal with their business problems. Paul made his own plans to go home to Jamaica.