I’m writing to let you know that you won 2nd place in the
Intercultural Essay contest. I loved your essay, “A Dash of Pepper in
the Snow.” It’s what I was hoping to find when I started this contest.
Essays that really explore intercultural and race issues, that aren’t
afraid to look at them honestly and openly. And I loved the ending. I
am sure that your essay will enlighten many.

You are invited to receive the award in person, where you’ll have some
time to read. If you can’t be there, the award and money will be
mailed to you after the event. You should be hearing later on from the
organizer of the Soul-Making Contest, and can question her with
anything else you need to know. If you do plan to attend and read, and
need help excerpting your essay, please let me know. I made that offer
last year and it really helped the readers.

Soul-Making Literary Competition Awards Reading
Koret Auditorium, SF Main Library, Civic Center
Sunday Afternoon, March 21st, 2010
Library opens at noon. Doors to the Koret open at 12:30 PM. Program
begins promptly at 1:00 PM. A reception follows.

Thank you so much for entering, and for giving me the chance to read
your honest essay. And let me know you received this.

Best wishes,

Tara L. Masih

TARA L. MASIH INTERCULTURAL ESSAY PRIZE
Sponsored/Judged by
Up to 6,000 words.Judge’s Comments:

I am looking for essays dealing with matters of culture, race, and a sense of place, either within the smaller microcosm of self-identity or within the larger environment of family, society and world interactions. I seek essays in the traditional form, my definition being the conscious shaping of nonfiction prose around a central idea or subject. In E. B. White’s words, you will be putting your “finger on a little capsule of truth,” using reality to point to your truth, not fiction.

For more information on submitting click this link.

Each time I come down here I walk away with some insight or appreciation for our family’s geographic roots, what it means to be from a town of 500 and more importantly what it means to have escaped. More than anything this last trip I am committed to writing a book proposal that will help me excavate the landscape and rich themes of American religion,
dislocated sexuality, mental illness and addiction so carefully placed in my family.

It never fails that when I leave Grady, when I’ve wave goodbye to my cousins and kiss my grandmother on the cheek, tears always seem to gather in my eyes. Life on the other side of the train track is freedom. This last time my grandmother, Muh Deah, had a more poignant reaction.

“Goodbye Muh Deah,” I yelled as I walked toward the screen door.

“Don’t say goodbye to me,” she snapped back, her body slumped over in a chair facing the TV. She’s unable to hide the pout on her face.

“Alright then, farewell.”

She waved her hand without even looking up from the TV.

I never realized how trapped she must feel when we drive off.

~ From Bernard Cooper’s essay “Marketing Memory.”

As I got closer I could see blood spilled onto the streets and a young Latino male laying beneath a police car. He had to be in his late 20s, early 30s. From the way the cops were acting, he was already dead. Then, when I saw rescue workers cover him up under a white sheet and carry him away, I knew he was dead. It’s one thing to see that kind of a thing on Law & Order. It’s quite another to see it for yourself. It was hard to know if the blood was from gun shot wounds or a knife.

Then I read the following chilling account in The New York Times:

One Dead After Attack on Transit Worker
By AL BAKER

A New York City Transit worker walking home after a late shift, three muggers armed with a curved knife and a bystander who somehow got caught in the middle: they all converged on a dark and rainy street in Upper Manhattan late Thursday in a blood-soaked frenzy that left the bystander stabbed to death and two others — including the transit worker — hospitalized.

Hours after the midnight attack on West 139th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, detectives were still trying to sift through the details of the deadly encounter.

As the day wore on, it appeared that the bystander, Flonarza M. Byas, got involved either as a good Samaritan trying to help the struggling transit worker, Maurice Parks, or inadvertently collided with the mugging. Earlier theories — that he might have been one of the assailants or that he might have jumped in to prey on the conductor once the muggers knocked him down — were being discounted.

One thing was clear: As of late Friday, investigators said it appeared that the subway motorman was a victim who decided to fight back — just as officials said he did when he was mugged in the city in 1994.

This time, Mr. Parks was attacked from behind, hit on the side of the head and knocked to the ground after he emerged from the subterranean subway tunnels at West 135th Street and walked about three blocks, the police said. Once down, the assailants started beating Mr. Parks and took a denim bag he had packed with clothes and papers. The muggers — detectives believe there were three men in all — pulled a knife and Mr. Parks pulled one too, the police said.

The conductor apparently carried the blade for just this reason, so he could defend himself, one law enforcement official said. But who stabbed whom first in this case is an open question.

When the blades were wielded, the tally of wounds was long: Mr. Parks, 39, of Manhattan, was stabbed in the abdomen and slashed in the hands; Mr. Byas, 28, was stabbed in the chest, back and leg; and Hector Cruz, 21, was stabbed twice in the abdomen, the police said.

The official said that investigators believe Mr. Parks was stabbed by Mr. Cruz and that he — in turn — stabbed Mr. Cruz and Mr. Byas. The police said they believed Mr. Byas was homeless and said he had received a summons an hour before the attack for trespassing in a nearby park. But Mr. Byas’s fiancé and his brother each insisted he had been employed as an accountant and was not homeless.

“He was a really good person, a person I really loved a lot,” said Stephanie C. Diaz, 22, who said she and Mr. Byas were engaged to be married last year. “We had a lot of plans for us; it’s just hard to see that go away.”

One official said Mr. Byas “wandered into the middle of it, unbeknownst to the victim, Parks.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing, said that Mr. Parks appeared to believe Mr. Byas was an assailant so he stabbed him. “That is what it looks like,” the official said.

Another official said another possibility is that Mr. Byas might have mistook Mr. Parks for a criminal.

“It’s possible he thought Parks was the aggressor,” the second official said of Mr. Byas. “He probably stepped in to help, but it might have been difficult to tell who was the aggressor and who was the victim, Parks or the others.” The official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, added of Mr. Byas: “He could have been stabbed by both of them, for all we know.”

In the chaos, 911 calls were made. When uniformed police officers from the 26th Precinct arrived on the street in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood they were flagged down by Mr. Cruz, who was bleeding, and Leandro Ventura, 15, who initially characterized themselves as victims. Mr. Parks and Mr. Byas were lying on the ground next to one another less than a block away to the west. Mr. Parks identified Mr. Ventura as one of his assailants, the police said, and the three wounded men were taken by ambulance to Harlem Hospital Center, where Mr. Byas pronounced dead at 12:46 a.m.

Mr. Ventura, meanwhile, was taken into custody and interviewed at the precinct station house, the police said. He was later charged with first-degree robbery, even though his relatives said he was being wrongly accused.

“He implicates himself in robbing, but tries to put himself away from the stabbing,” the first official said of Mr. Ventura, adding that investigators believe Mr. Cruz was wielding the knife.

Two knives were recovered as evidence — the folding knife with a curved blade and a straight knife that Mr. Parks is believed to have pulled from his pocket. Detectives were seeking a third assailant whom the responding officers initially saw, but who is believed to have fled. They were checking video cameras of nearby stores.

As for Mr. Parks, a conductor who became a transit worker in 1997, he was recovering after surgery on Friday, his mother and a spokesman for his union said.

Officials said it was not likely he would be charged criminally.

In New York, it is legal for someone to carry a knife provided the state penal law does not define it as illegal, such as a switchblade or a gravity knife, for example, according to prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys. Many objects — such as a legal knife or a baseball bat — can be classified as a “dangerous instrument” if they are used in a crime, the analysts said.

“It’s a common question in criminal cases, whether what someone had in their possession fits the definition of these few illegal knives, or whether they knew that the knife was illegal,” said Thomas M. O’Brien, an attorney with the special litigation unit of the city’s Legal Aid Society, who said he could not comment on the case in Manhattan. “Just having an ordinary knife is not a crime.”

At Mr. Parks’s bedside was Roger Toussaint, the president of the Transport Workers Union, Local 100, said the union spokesman, Jesse Derris. Transit workers were seen on Friday coming and going from the hospital at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street.

And Mr. Parks’ mother, Mona Parks, 57, who lives in the Bronx, spoke outside the hospital, saying she was upset that her son had been so seriously hurt, but relieved he had survived. She said she had spoken to him and that he whispered that he wanted some water as he slowly regained consciousness after surgery.

“I’m glad he did what he did, otherwise he’d be dead,” said Ms. Parks. Mr. Derris said Mr. Parks, “works vacation relief, meaning he covers different lines on the numbered trains when people are on vacation.” He works nights, Mr. Derris said, and got off work at about 11:23 p.m. on Thursday.

Ms. Parks and a martial arts instructor, Little John Davis, said Mr. Parks was a dedicated student of martial arts and was physically fit. “I’m sad that it happened,” Mr. Davis said. “But it’s good that somebody had some training to be able to take care of themselves.”

Ms. Parks said her son is not reckless and that his heroics were borne of necessity.

“If he had an opportunity to run he would’ve run, but there were four of them,” she said, apparently mistakenly including Mr. Byas in the group of assailants. At Mr. Ventura’s home at West 141st Street, the teenager’s older brother defended him. George A. Ventura, 21, said his brother was walking home from playing basketball in St. Nicholas Park when he saw the altercation and stopped to help one of the stabbed men who was screaming for help. Mr. Ventura said his brother flagged down a police car.

“I know he had nothing to do with it,” said Mr. Ventura, who said his brother is a student at Washington Irving High School. “I know his friends, I’ve never seen my brother hanging with older dudes in my life.” He added: “He’s a good kid, he’s not a troubled dude, he always listens.”

George Ventura said that the police called the family home after the incident and that when he and his mother, Yolanda Escoto, went to the precinct, officers said the teenager was a witness. It was not until Friday morning that the family learned he was a suspect, said George Ventura.

The teenager’s lawyer, Ismael Gonzalez, said, “He’s going to plead not guilty to the charges.”

Relatives of Mr. Cruz also came to visit him at the hospital. “He’s a good kid,” said his sister, who declined to provide her name. “He was hanging out with the wrong people.”

Anybody who knows me knows I HATE rats, but they are all around this lovely city. I’ve seen big rats in Arkansas, Louisiana and Missouri. The rural ones seem to keep their distance. There’s nothing like a New York City rat. Their presence paralyze me. Walking along the sidewalks on trash night I often opt to take the streets because it’s not uncommon to see three or four digging through the trash. The sound of rustling plastic means take the street or even cross the street. I seem to be a magnet for their presence.

I’ve seen them in my building, (Not my apartment but in the hallways). Look in the subway tracks for about five minutes and one will scurry along.

But when the woman screamed, she might as well have said “A rat!” The vibe from the scream said it for her though. Within seconds, a gigantic, at least foot long gray rat, was exactly where I had been sitting. He didn’t flinch that humans were around.

As I crossed the street I saw the screamer.

“You know, I was just saying to myself ‘I sure hope there aren’t any rats around here.’ No sooner than I said that I see this big thing.”

“I’m glad you saw it and said something. I see them all the time in New York,” I added. “So much for my little break.”