ABSTRACT
Her uncle had a heart attack when she was seventeen and it did not look as though he would live. He was a testy hard-edged fellow. Had never darkened the door of a church. For as long as she could remember his speech had been salted with curse words she didn’t even know. He drank too much. He smoked too much. And he was known to announce from time to time that black people didn’t have souls (only he didn’t use the term “black people”). She knew that he was going to hell. Everything in her Southern Baptist upbringing assured her this was true. Later, as she listened to her aunt desperately voicing the only thing a loving wife could possibly believe in this moment of fear and grief-that her husband was a good man at heart, that God couldn’t possibly relegate him to an eternity of torment-she said nothing. She simply sat there sickened by her privileged truth.
