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3 Black When I was fourteen and my pop quoted Yeats for the last time in his loaded Irish accent, my grandmother stood there trembling in blackness wringing out the tears that ran across the creases of her yellow over-ripened face. I was just a boy in my own blackness, my lungs blackened from each Drum I rolled, thinking of my pop and his bitter, black coffee. When I was seven, he taught me about custody and culture, a hand-me-down story of how he burned, or rather ran with those who burned, a Protestant shop in Enniskillen, a story about ashes, about never going back to see Ulster’s black sky, his mother, his father, his eldest boy in the blackness, in the graves. ...

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