Introducing...ME!
SILVER STREAK Who Am I? Hartsel. Clifton. Shirley. Put them all together and you have no idea for sure what you’re going to get sight unseen. I am a Black man from Waterloo, Iowa. Iowa – not Idaho. And yes, there are Black people in Iowa, a whole lot of them. It wasn’t until I wrote my latest book, The Night Eddie Sallis Died , that I came to know how Black folks got to Iowa, or why I was brought up by parents who were so over-protective of me and my siblings. In school, I excelled in reading and writing and took to it like a bird takes to flying. Being the eldest, the experiment, the first, I had to brave it outside of the home alone on my own and it would be my lot in life it seems. I knew I liked boys at an early age, an age too young and innocent for sexual attraction. By the time high school came around, the social constructs had conditioned me to hide myself. By graduation time, “that really quiet nice guy” was about to face yet another area of unc...