Sonny Boy

I remember what I wore on the day I almost shot my head off at age three: a navy blue sweater with a red and blue plaid kilt. Some thoughtful soul had arranged my hair into a half-dozen thick braids down to my shoulder blades, each one clipped with a small red plastic barrette—the type little girls still wear and that are often molded into the shape of flowers.

My near-death experience took place when I was playing with an old rifle in the sky-blue concrete storage shed affectionately called "the little house" adjacent to my grandmother's home in central Florida. The gun was wedged between some old furniture and boxes and, unobserved, I worked quietly to pull the trigger while trying to peer down the barrel. On that fall afternoon, instead of my head being blasted to kingdom come, I walked away with a thick trickle of blood oozing from a skinned finger snagged by a rusty trigger. I also remember the fear in the eyes of the adults in my family as they gathered around me and my wounded finger. What I did not know at that time was the reason behind those fearful looks: decades before, my grandmother had lost her eldest son, Emory, to domestic gun violence. The historical subtext that was part of that moment would haunt me for years to come.

My subsequent encounters with guns were also, thankfully, near misses. There was the time that my father almost picked me off after coming back from a family vacation. My parents used to take me and my three siblings on two-week-long vacations to visit extended family during the summer. Upon our return, my father would go through the house with a handgun to make sure no one had taken up residence during our absence.

It was past midnight after one of these trips when my mother sent me into the house before my father came back out to give us the standard all-clear sign. The only item I was responsible for carrying into the house was my walk-with-me doll, Crystal; she was just my height at age eight, with the same shade of brown skin as me. Clutching her hard plastic body tightly to my chest, I made my way down the carpeted hallway toward my bedroom. Suddenly, the figure of my father loomed in the hallway in front of me. He stood there with his legs spread and his arms outstretched before him, and at the end of his arms was a handgun pointed directly at Crystal's head. Somehow I knew not to move or say a word. Over the play of seconds, I watched recognition slowly dawn in my father's eyes as he lowered the handgun before erupting,

"What are you doing in here? You were supposed to wait outside until I came back to get you!"

Realizing that this was now the moment to talk fast, I responded quickly, "Mommy sent us in."

I found out later that my father, so shaken by the incident, had shared the news with one of his sisters that very night of almost shooting his oldest daughter.

My next gun encounter was a couple of years later. My sister had discovered the very same handgun at the top of my parents' closet in one of my mother's old purses. I recall that the inquisitive culprit gathered all four of us kids together with the promise of showing us a gun. The rest of us didn't believe it of course, but proof was quickly produced when the sibling in question used a chair to reach the top of the closet and pulled down an old beige leather handbag. Reaching inside, she extracted the small black revolver. Remembering this revolver from past experience, I was afraid to touch it, even if only to take it from her and put it back into the purse. I watched another sibling reach out to weigh the gun gingerly between her small hands before I came to enough to snap, "Put it back!" Regaining some...