by Daniel Davis Clayton

It was a warm southern night in Emory, Texas; one in which the wind barely blew and the sun winked its closing eye in shades of golden purple, when I made my first sacrifice to God. I was 17 winters older than birth and I pilgrimaged to the backyard with a trash bag filled with my most treasured possession. On innumerous wrinkled leaflets lay three years of hand-written poems of self-consciousness and records of my own inner struggles.

One by one began the fire. The rising smoke, my offering in spirit form. Of course I had typed all of those words and data entry-ed them into electronic existence, but those pages, tear-stained and yellowed, burned into the ashes of my lamentation just as Abraham offered his own son's life unto the Lord.

Fast-forward my story past college and three loves and maturing and virginity lost and reclaimed to today; tonight rather, sitting on an apartment balcony in Essex county New Jersey with the warm northern wind barely blowing and the sun having already set to reveal the world's darkness. I sit here thinking how wise I once was to offer such a gift as my only possession to the heavens. Perhaps it's due time to do so again.

After receiving my political training from Participation 2000, I and 31 other 20-somethings were administered our mysterious work assignments. My destination was Parsippany, NJ to work on a mayoral race but behold, someone wise stated, "You guys aren't sending him, a black male, to Parsippany." And I scratched my head. I thought I had left Emory behind.

I thought I had escaped the clandestine attitudes and actions of the south for my father to fight while I travelled Nerthernwardly to learn the ins and outs of political battle. The escapee, the boy who ran to West Point to learn the subtle details of Negro Uncle Tom coup de tat. The boy who never played sports because of 7 surgeries + rehabilitation time + school/study - 1 recess a day = no chance to learn the football plays he so yearned for. So he learned to play with his pain in words and offered them up to Jesus when he was 17 winters.

Remember that little Negro boy, trained though physical pain for political POWism if need be and preparing to come back to Texas and put his size 13 foot in the behind of backward mentalities who is now sitting on a balcony in Liberty Corner, New Jersey, making a second sacrifice for the ideology of the American dream. Yes, perhaps you will remember. Do you still remember your dreams?

You know, my father is a veteran...as I will become. A veteran of Viet Nam and being black in Emory, Texas and Rains County (where a black man was burned alive in the summer of '99). I remember a jail sentence and moms not letting us visit. I remember being 10-years-old and listening to death threats made by coloreds and non-coloreds alike on the answering machine commenting on that day's battle strategies.

At old East Texas State University (home of Sam Rayburn) I studied Art; and now in New Jersey I study the Art of War.

And though these words may contain naiveté, you perhaps may recall a personal sacrifice made for the ideology of betterment, and that is the genius that filters from barely blowing wind in a place quite similar to where you are sitting onto some wrinkled piece of paper to be cried over, data entry-ed, electronic mailed, and burned for lamentation.