by Oscar Baker III | Illustrations by Aziza Asat
What’s Written in Blood
Night sinks in deep. It’s August 2009; I’m 18 years old, six-foot-nothing, and brown: half-Black, half-Mi’kmaq. I’m eight beers deep, which is nothing for Kent County, New Brunswick, and I’m lost, stumbling through the dark trying to find myself.
It’s party weekend on the res, and I’m heading to my cousin Colton’s place, a beat-up single-wide trailer, its front lawn strewn with empty beer bottles and boxes. I was raised on stories of men in my family who fought, who drank, who left. I thought that was the blueprint for my life.