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.