HE STOOD like a sentry guarding old Smithy’s rum-shop, his eyes as black as the coals Ma cooked with, or the black birds she warned would pick out our eyes if we didn’t stop being so hard-ears—her warning always followed by the tired refrain, “Hard-ears yuh wun hear, own way yuh does feel!”
“Everything that happens in the universe has an impact on who I am, how I live, and what I write: thought, word, deed. Everything I think, I write, I speak has an impact on the world; like the...