Episode 2

David Johnson walked up the creaky wooden porch of his house and reached for the black door. Even among the other old, worn down homes around him, his residence was particularly decrepit. The blue carpet on the living room floor was stained with spots of yellow. The knobs on the kitchen cabinets were rusting brown. Their dinner table, or the square card table they put in the middle of the dining room, was missing a peg on one leg, causing it to stand unevenly.

In the living room on the blue sofa sat his grandfather, a thin, lanky elder with a short, often uncombed, gray Afro.

“Hello dere, son,” Turner said with his reading glasses on, looking through the various papers on his lap. He had a heavy southern accent that strained against his elderly vocal cords. “East Central called earlier. Said ju was fightin’ again.”

For a long time, Turner had once regretted the day he made the decision to teach David how to fight. He had always tried encouraging David to pursue his education. But it wasn’t that simple. His short temper was one thing. But when it was coupled with his ability to pick up even the most advanced boxing techniques in a short amount of time, he was a very dangerous young man to mess with.

In middle school, he was teased relentlessly. By sixth grade, David had thrown his first punch. From then on, his focus in school had been fighting, not learning. And he defeated all challengers, which earned him three school transfers, eighteen suspensions, and the county record for the most detentions in a semester, nineteen of them occurring in his freshman year alone at East Central.

“There was a misunderstanding,” David said with a monotone voice.

“It always is,” Turner replied casually, with most of his attention still on the papers in front of him. In the past Turner had gotten angry, had shouting fits and the rest of it with David and put him on punishment. That didn’t happen anymore. The fact of the matter was that David was telling the truth.

Contrary to his perceived nature, David was potentially smart, very capable in fields of science and electronics. But every attempt at advancing himself was stifled by some street punk or sports jock who wanted to make a name for themselves by beating the great David Johnson; or by skeptical teachers, unable to recognize the intellect inside the warrior, accusing him of cheating off the so-called “honor students” when he turned in an A+ paper.

His grandfather had been telling him that he was a gift from God. The old man had once been angry and bitter and sad about all the things he had endured in his life. But over the years, Turner Johnson had forged a relationship with the Lord, and had found a measure of peace, the kind of peace, Turner would often say, that transcended all understanding.

But for his grandson, however, both peace and God were things that David’s hardened and downtrodden spirit weren’t ready to accept. Oh, David Johnson believed in God alright, that much was for certain. But his relationship with him had its…complications.

If God would give me more, then I would be more, David often complained.

Episode 1

David Johnson hated everything. He hated the air that reeked with an awesome stench, the eroded and broken sidewalks, and the roads that were sprinkled with trash. The tired and half destroyed houses on his block were almost as insufferable as the dead grass and long weeds surrounding them. Many of the neighbors who inhabited these homes were utterly without kindness.

There was once a sign near the county limits of this neighborhood that read: Welcome to Craft Village. That was a long, long time ago. Now the final two words on the old, rusty, half dangling sign was covered in black spray paint. And crudely etched in below the paint, someone had used a sharp object to carve in the words “The Box,” which was what the east side of the city of Union Cross had been called for as long as David Johnson could remember.

“I can’t stand this place,” David said as he was walking home from school.

David was lighter than the other black kids at East Central High School. His skin was like a golden brown marshmallow perfectly toasted on every side. David Johnson was a brooding fourteen year old with a generic body figure – 5’8, 167 pounds with short, neatly cut black hair. He wore an orange sweater, black sneakers, and blue jean pants. There was a fresh, circular bruise on the side of his face.

David Johnson had never known his parents. His father disappeared not too long after his mother got pregnant with him. And his mother died in the hospital on the day he was born. The doctors said there had been “complications” with his birth. Complications, David always thought, seemed to be the word that had come to define much of his life.

The only person in the world that seemed to have his best interest was his grandfather and legal guardian, Turner Johnson. Decades ago, Turner was a professional boxer from the South. In the prime of his career, people called him “Turner the Fist Burner.” But like David, his life had been complicated. At the height of his career, when he was the undisputed welterweight champion, as well as the number one ranked, pound-for-pound boxer in the world, Turner’s first wife squandered away the unimaginable wealth he had garnered on an affair she was having with one of his own managers.

And by the time Turner was through with the courts, judges, lawyers, and mediators, he barely had enough money for the clothes on his back. And so he moved to Union Cross, took a factory job in “The Box,” made a new family, and had a daughter who would grow up to become David’s mother. She was gone now. And Turner’s second wife had lost her life to a bout with cancer ten years earlier. All he had left now was his grandson.

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