Everyone in Siler City, NC, knows about North Chatham Avenue. They know the street the way one knows a dark secret. Both whites and blacks shake their heads at its mention. Even though the town feels shame about the dilapidated homes that line North Chatham,
I look like a witch. Tumpa has painted my eyes thick with kohl, my lips bright pink, my toenails vibrant blue. During this daily ritual my mother calls long distance from England on my mobile phone. “How is everything darling?” “Fine, everything’s fine,” I answer.
Jon Christopher Buice doesn’t look the part of a gay-bashing killer. Sitting behind a blue steel mesh in bleached white prison garb and T-shirt, the brown-eyed, baby-faced convict, even at 26, could pass still for the ordinary white suburban teenager he once was. Jon Christopher
During a recent visit to a maximum security prison in Virginia, where some 2,000 men are caged, I asked the warden to describe his most troublesome problem. I expected the usual answer – shivs, drugs, rapes, cellblock violence. Sure, he replied, all that is here.
As soon as Manuel Zuniga heard the news, the fate of his younger brother, Pablo, flashed before his eyes. A television station in Austin, Texas, was reporting that a young Hispanic man had been stabbed to death in the middle of the night on a
