On Being Man

A journey from doing toward being.

For the Caribbean man who has done, by every visible measure, what he was asked to do — and has begun to sense that the life he built to hold him no longer quite holds him.

The man in the quiet

Something has begun to ask a question he has no language for.

Picture him. A Caribbean man, somewhere between forty and sixty. From a boy he was taught what a man is: be strong, provide, carry yourself well, keep your troubles to yourself. He learned it in the yard and on the block, in the way the men around him carried themselves — learned it so thoroughly it became invisible to him, the way water is invisible to a fish. He built a life. He holds a great deal together. People lean on him.