Quítate la Máscara

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

Part of my hospital chaplaincy duties is to write a reflection on how it’s going. Identities may be altered for privacy. All the writings are here.

—

I’ve seen love. I mean, pure love. The kind that builds you, that bursts wide open and free, the kind they tell you about, but you were afraid to believe.

A nine-year-old boy comes into the trauma bay with deep, jagged lacerations all over his back. Car accident, roll-over; dad and children nearly ejected, going fifty. His shirt is shredded. His back is really torn up, almost ribbons in several places, blood filling his shorts. He’s fidgeting, squirming, but not from his wounds. He’s trying to sit up, eyes darting, looking for someone. He’s trying to tell something to the paramedics, to the nurses and doctors, to me. 

Medicine, he says in a choked whisper, medicine for my sister. She has a new kidney. Medicine.

A second later, his four year old sister is wheeled in—they had been in the same car accident. She’s in shock. Her brother keeps saying, Medicine, for my sister. She needs her kidney medicine.

A nurse replies, “On it. I’m on it, little man.”

I go to the nine year old, pull up a seat, and tell him, “You’re a good brother.”

“Thanks,” he says, finally resting his head. The nurses move around us, not missing a beat, and there’s just me and the kid, eyes locked, his eyes on fire.

“What happened?” I ask him.

“I heard the car inside make a boom, like a firecracker,” he says. “I knew something was wrong. I knew it! I grabbed my sister … and I put myself around her, because … because I didn’t want glass to get in her face.”

I remember his back. The lacerations. 

Suddenly, I’m crying. I lose all professionalism. I’m just crying.

“You’re a hero,” I tell him. “You saved your sister’s life.”

“But her medicine?” he asks. “You’ll make sure she gets it? She takes it everyday for her kidney. It was the one that I gave her.”

“Yes,” I tell him, trying to smile through flooded eyes. “Yes. You’re a good brother,” I say again. “What’s your name?”

He says, “Angel.”

Of course it is.

I sit with him, quietly, as the medical team begins to work on his back. He makes no noise, except to ask how his sister is doing. 

I hold back tears. I feel angry, that something like this had to happen to Angel and his sister, that we live in such a world where no child is safe from destiny, from fate, from the universe, from God, where kidneys don’t work and cars roll over—but I think about Angel covering his sister, and that on our tiny fractured little spinning rock in the random cold chaos of meaningless collision, where the world can explode in glass, one child didn’t hesitate to die for love. I think it is awful that they have to be here in this hospital, but my heart stretches to this other place, where love is powerful and real, and that within lawless disorder, very beautiful things can still happen, and that perhaps pure love must be born through pain, through the life of another. 

you did not kind friend.

The LIT History Series is for the Legends, Innovators and Trailblazers that have shaped our culture.

It is widely believed that the “Lone Ranger”, the famous cowboy of the TV show and the movie, was inspired by a Black man named Bass Reeves.

Reeves was born a slave, but he escaped to the West where he eventually became a Deputy U.S. Marshal, an expert marksman, and a master of disguise with his Native American sidekick. Blacks were a huge part of the Western frontier despite what’s told to us in pop culture or taught to us in the classroom. “The kids who are learning history in our schools are not being told the truth about the way the West was,” says Jim Austin, founder of the National Multicultural Heritage Museum. “I bet you nine out of 10 people in this country think that cowboys were all white - as I did.” (x)

Cherokee Bill, born Crawford Goldsby, was a notorious outlaw whose father was a Buffalo Soldier. His reputation and career as an outlaw rivals the reputation of Billy the Kid. Bill Picket was a “famous” Black cowboy who toured the U.S., Canada, Mexico, South America, and England, and he was inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame 40 years after his death. (x)

And black cowboys are still here, they do exist. 

That’s a huge part of history that was also erased from the history of America. We need to bring attention to this, because it’s unfair that black people along with other people of color have been erased from this narrative.