"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning." – Louis L'Amour
The year is 1875 within America. It had been 10 years after slavery had been abolished, but of course this was the beginning for many tragedies and rules that were set to put their once slaves and their future generations apart for years to come.
A young boy by the name of Antony hadn't grown up in the same times as his parents who were once slaves themselves. He was born two years after the 13th amendment, although he was very young he wanted to learn more and read. So he was eventually sent to school to get a somewhat good education. After several months he'd eventually noticed that other people not of his same skin color were giving him dirty looks and would stare at him, even whispering to each other but not so that he wouldn't hear them. Some would walk directly into him bumping him as he walked back home, some would even push him to the ground and run away. They called him words that he hadn't yet understood the meaning of but he knew they must have been bad words.
His parents would go on to notice the way he'd come home with his clothes being dirtier and more damaged as the days went by, bruises and other injuries soon followed as the abuse continued. At the table where Antony, his 3 brothers, 2 sisters and parents would eat at, Antony had asked "mommy, daddy why am I being called mean words and getting hit all the time. The other folk are so mean to me" he says as tears pour down his face. The boy's father tells him "Antony years ago me and your mother before you or your brothers and sisters were born lived in a time where the white folk kept us as slaves. I worked on a farm in the fields as a boy your age while your mother who was older than me worked in the house with massa. Believe me when I say this, these are better days than the times we lived through. You won't always be treated this badly in time it will change" Antony looks at his father and says angrily "I don't want to be treated like this, I did nothing to those folk out there. I want those better days now I'll change it someday!"
The next day Antony is on his way back home and he is seen by one of his usual abusers with a young woman. The man and woman walk behind the boy and begin to taunt him, after noticing that he paid them no mind the man picked up a rock and threw it at the boy's head knocking him to the floor. "What's wrong black boy you dropped something" the man says as he and the woman laughs at him. Antony now angry reaches into his pants where he had stashed a knife and ran up to the man to stab him. The man step aside and tripped Antony with his foot, he then sat atop the boy and began punching him across the head repeatedly, pining the boy's hands to the ground while blasting him with curses and insults.
The woman horrified at the on going beating seeing the boy begging and bleeding more from the initial rock throw begs for the man to stop but he looks at her and says "You're telling me to stop? This fucking slave boy just tried to stab me obviously he doesn't know of his place. Someone should've taught the little one to respect his superiors, infact I'll give him a good ole masters beating" as he continues to punch the boy his increasingly bloodied fist. After a few more seconds of the beating the man gets up off the unconscious boy and walks away with the woman.
Antony wakes up a few hours later at night and gets up stumbling to his feet, with increasingly blurry vision he sees the small puddle of blood he had been lying in. Grime stuck to his face along with his shirt, he looks around for a nearby place to wash off his face and clothes. He walks over to a river along side the road, crying and sniffling all the while cleaning up himself. He walks back home and his mother who had been more than worried about him sat outside the small house they lived in till he got home. Seeing Antony from a distance she ran up to him and asked him in a shaky voice "are you okay, what happened to you? Did those mean people do this?" Antony looked at her and said "I'm tired and I have a headache. I just want to go and sleep" while he began to lay on his mother's shoulder falling asleep.
Waking up to a faint sound near him Antony could slowly distinguish it being the voices of his parents arguing. He can't properly discern what they are saying but he gets up from the bed and feels the back of his head, noticing the bandages wrapped around his head all around his face gives him great concern about his injuries.
He walks up to his parents and ask them what's wrong, surprised that he is standing and actually concious they hug him and tell him they tried their best with the doctor to save his eye but it was beyond repair. He hadn't even noticed till their words hit him but he couldn't fully see as he did before, he had thought it was because of the bandages but that was to cover the part of his eye that had a quick surgery done to it.
After several months of him healing and his parents having trouble with getting the police help which fell upon deaf ears. His other siblings eventually also began to go to school but on the opposite side of the city from where Antony did. Antony once he had fully healed would walk his siblings back and forth from school everyday, he didn't attend the school with them because he knew he'd be looked at funny for his appearance, but his sacrifice of an education lead him to work which he got a fairly good pay for the few hours he had done for the day.
A year had finally passed and things were going very good for Antony, until the woman and man from the year prior saw him again. They had been seeing him for a while walking with his siblings back home for a few days. The man had a small gang of people with him, some of them had a few dogs on chains while they were walking towards Antony as he was walking home his siblings. "Black boy, you remember me?" the man had asked Antony, not remembering who the man was Antony replied "no but could you please allow me and my family to pass by we have to go home now" the man pissed at the boy for that answer punched him knocking him out.
Waking up, Antony soon realized he had been kidnapped along with his siblings who were all tied up with him on the trunk of an old tree in the middle of a field. The man had laughed and asked the question again to the boy and Antony instead asked back why is he doing this, he then got angry again and grabbed Antony's jaws at the side and spat in his mouth. The man ordered for one of his friends to untie one of the girls and he grabbed her by the back of her neck and said to Antony "If you're not going to fucking remember she sure would" the man had pulled his pants down and began to force himself on her. For several agonizing minutes Antony and his siblings pleaded for him to stop and let her go but he didn't stop until he finished pleasing himself with the girl. The mans friends were visibly disgusted by the act yet they still watched with some turning away after a while. Once he was done he told one of them to pass her to the dogs which they did. Throwing the crying girl towards the dogs Antony watched in horror as they tore her apart mauling on her as she screamed for help. Three of the mans companions would then pour oil all over the children as they kicked, screamed and cried. The man then walked up to Antony and said "now you'll remember me" as he lit a match and threw it on the children. The group of men all watched the children light up in a blaze as the entire tree soon was covered in flames. They only left as their crys were no longer audible. The rain soon fell putting out the flames after a few minutes and as the rain continued to fall a man had walked up to the tree seeing the burnt bodies tied to it.
"Now what happened here" the man had thought to himself, he then heard the faintest sound of a breath coming from one of the bodies. He then investigated the nearly dead boy whilst the smell of burnt flesh litter the air around him and smiled looking at him. He then cut himself on his hand with a small blade he withdrew from his pocket and placed it directly over the boy's mouth "seems as though your will to live is strong boy, here have some of my blood and once you're all healed up you could tell me all about the events of this day"
"New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings." – Lao Tzu
End Of Prologue