It was 3:00 in the morning and that cathedral was now abandoned due to a seemingly uncontrollable mold infestation, but the city refused to allow it to be torn down because of its long history. So why was the bell going off? Was it a ghost? And why only once every ten seconds? It was the loneliest and most haunting sound ever, and I could barely contain my heart's erratic thumping. This was not right. Could there actually be a ghost in the bell tower? A string of murders in the nearby neighborhoods already had some of us feeling a little apprehensive, and now the cathedral bell was gonging in...

Last month, on my sixteenth birthday, I had received some pretty nice gifts from my family...my eighteen-year-old step-sister Beverly included, but no gift in the material sense could compare to the emotional and spiritual gift that I had received during my walk on that hot secluded beach that Sunday morning. The gift of overwhelming pride for who I really am, was astonishing enough, but the realization that my people had been walking this earth for thousands of years, was nearly enough to buckle my knees. Respect for my family's heritage, and for my newly formed sense of pride, were more...