The Love Child's Revenge by Nicole Bailey Williams

Author:Nicole Bailey Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767931069
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2008-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

For the next few hours, Ishmael drove me around Camden, showing me where the brothers had grown up, where Isaac had stayed with his foster mother, and the neighborhood where Isaac had hustled. Then Ishmael took me to the tree-lined streets fronting large single homes where he had stayed after being brought into the foster-care system. Seeing the contrast between the environments stoked a dormant fire within me. All of my experience had taught me that people who had the world delivered to them on silver platters didn’t appreciate their birth circumstances, while those born into poverty spent their days cursing their lot. Would I have been an appreciative, hardworking person if I had been born into financial comfort? Or would I have taken my condition for granted like the Harrisons or the students at Moultrie State whose dorms I had cleaned? Would Isaac have been a stronger person if he had been taken into Ishmael’s foster home? Would Ishmael have succumbed to the pressures facing impoverished urban males if he hadn’t been given that solid support from his foster parents?

It was as if he had read my mind as those thoughts passed through my head.

“I used to feel what some call survivor’s guilt when I finished high school and I saw the problems that Isaac was having. I kept asking God, ‘Why me? Why was I selected to be in that good home with good foster parents while my twin brother had to tough it out in the rough part of Camden?’ It used to eat me up. That’s part of the reason I stayed here that extra year. I knew that I didn’t want to do anything, be anybody successful, without my brother by my side. Life would be almost corny without him,” he said with a laugh.

“Do you still feel the guilt?”

“Sometimes. Like when something comes harder for him. I’m always thinking that it was the training I got from my foster family that makes that obstacle easy or nonexistent for me. And my brother just got dealt a bad hand,” he explained, looking into my eyes as we sat at a red light. “It’s times like that when I question God,” he admitted, seeming ashamed.

“I have questions like that, too,” I said, downplaying the anger I often felt at being born into my circumstances, which, while not horrid, had made me into the monster that I felt like.

“I think that the questions make me—us—double-check ourselves. It’s people like us who God uses to make big, powerful statements. Like with the work Isaac and I do, we’re just trying to right some of the societal wrongs that we see here in the city,” he said, gesturing to the world outside his car.

“Camden has so much to offer, but the political leaders have pretty much been opportunists. For example, why would any official agree to have a prison built on his city’s waterfront? That’s prime development property, and it could be turned into an outdoor theater, a restaurant district, or even condominiums.

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