Damned If I Do

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which these stories have appeared: Callaloo, Fiction International, Idaho Review, New York Stories, Story, and Triquarterly.

“Age Would Be That Does” also appeared in Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African American Fiction, ed. Clarence Major (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).

“Randall Randall” appeared in Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe, ed. Charles H. Rowell (New York: Westview Press, Perseus Books Group, 1995).

“The Appropriation of Cultures” also appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXII, ed. Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors, 1998.

Douglas Langley owned a little sandwich shop at the intersection of Fourteenth and T streets in the District. Beside his shop was a seldom-used alley and above his shop lived a man by the name of Sherman Olney, whom Douglas had seen beaten to near extinction one night by a couple of silky-looking men who seemed to know Sherman and wanted something in particular from him. Douglas had been drawn outside from cleaning up the storeroom by a rhythmic thumping sound, like someone dropping a telephone book onto a table over and over. He stepped out into the November chill and discovered that the sound was actually that of the larger man’s fists finding again and again the belly of Sherman Olney, who was being kept on his feet by the second assailant. Douglas ran back inside and grabbed the pistol he kept in the rolltop desk in his business office. He returned to the scene with the powerful flashlight his son had given him and shone the light into the faces of the two villains.

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