![]() I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. ![]() Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. It would strike him with wonder, then, and hope too, that such things happened, And though he would know better, he would take heart, and he would open his eyes, and walk. ![]() He would picture the feather coming loose from the bird, up in the clouds, half a mile above the world, twirling and spinning in violent currents, hurled by gusts of blustering wind across miles and miles of desert and mountains, to finally land, of all places and against all odds, at the foot of that one boulder for his sister to find. And if one day, trekking across some vast open field, despair should take hold of him, he would stop in his tracks and shut his eyes and he would think of the falcon feather Pari had found in the desert. He would walk as far from Shadbagh as his feet would take him. He would choose a direction and he would begin to walk. ![]() He would wait until winter passed and the spring thaw set in, and he would rise one morning before dawn and he would step out the door. 11-His days in Shadbagh were numbered, like Shuja's. ![]()
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