The Unmarked Birth

June 30, 1987. North Little Rock, Arkansas. The air hung thick and humid, the kind of Southern summer heat that pressed downppĺ on your chest like a damp blanket. Cicadas buzzed their relentless song, a soundtrack to a world that felt both familiar and strangely distant. Somewhere in the labyrinth of streets, in a house that held its breath against the encroaching night, a baby boy entered the world. Me. John Black Sr. But that name, that simple string of syllables, feels less like a birthright and more like a borrowed coat, ill-fitting and unfamiliar.

They say your first memories are a kaleidoscope of sensory fragments: the scent of your mother’s perfume, the rough texture of a favorite blanket, the warmth of a loving embrace. Mine? Mine are a void. A vast, echoing emptiness that stretches from the earliest flicker of consciousness. It’s as if the film reel of my childhood was spliced with missing frames, leaving gaping holes where crucial scenes should have been. I’d look at old photographs, my parents’ faces—John L. Curlett and Teresa Lucielle Black—a blur of polite smiles and stoic poses, and feel a disquieting disconnect. They were there, undeniably, but the emotional resonance, the palpable thread of connection that should have bound me to those moments, felt severed. There was a whisper of something else, a persistent hum beneath the surface of my existence, a feeling that the narrative of my beginnings had been carefully curated, the rough edges smoothed over, the inconvenient truths tucked away in the shadows. It was a subconscious awareness, a persistent itch I couldn’t quite scratch, that the story of John Black Sr. began not with a bang, but a deliberate, almost surgical, excision.