WILLIAM
ALM No.93, September 2026
ESSAYS
I first met William in sixth grade at Sea Park Elementary School in Satellite Beach, Florida. There were a lot of military kids in the school because Patrick Air Force Base was only three miles away.
William’s father was an Air Force pilot, one of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen. Their unparalleled success in WWII led to the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948. I rarely saw William’s dad, and what little memory I have of him is that he was an imposing man, especially in his olive-green Air Force uniform.
William’s mom, on the other hand, I often saw. She was light-skinned with freckles on her cheeks. Her soft face conveyed the gentle person that she was. I can still picture her, doing laundry; washing and folding the endless mounds of clothes for a family of nine, or bent over an ironing board pressing her husband’s shirts and pants. I never knew then, or since, another family with so many kids. I did know that William’s family were devout Catholics, but at that age I knew nothing about the possible connection between being Catholic and having lots of children.
William’s home was a stone’s throw from both our junior high and high schools, which were adjacent to one another. Across the street, on the other side of Highway A1A, was the Atlantic Ocean. The sea’s breezes brought the salty tang into our open hallways and open classroom windows, beckoning us to flee to the beach.
It was a magical time and place in our young lives; little that I understood that until we moved away, to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” a Bob Seger lyric from his classic song, “Against the Wind,” summarizes my adolescent ignorance.
I was at William’s home often enough that even today, a half a century later, I remember his siblings’ names and can visualize their faces: Leon, Anna, Patrick, Frank, Monica, Greg, and William.
Willam was my best friend through 10th grade, when my dad got transferred to New Jersey. William was one of only a handful of African Americans in the schools we attended. At that age I never thought of William as Black; he was just William.
We were both athletes and ran track and played basketball. William ran the hurdles and I ran the 440-yard dash. But it was basketball we were devoted to, which we played every year together. Behind our junior high school were four asphalt paved basketball courts, fenced along one side where the street was.
During the summers and school breaks and on weekends, we played for hours at a time. Other friends often joined us; Jerry, Bob, Lou and Doug. In those distant days, the schools were always open, year-round, so when we needed a break from the hot sun we retreated inside the school for shade and to drink from the hallway water fountains. We burned our endless adolescent energy every day we were on the courts. Our sweat-soaked tee shirts and our boundless, teenage vitality that we expended on the hard courts, kept our athletic bodies toned and strong.
The next time I saw William was when I visited him at Emory University, in Atlanta. He’d won a full scholarship to the prestigious private university and was a junior there when I next saw him. I was living at my parents’ place, at the time, in Ringgold, Georgia. I was under a psychiatrist’s care after a suicide attempt and my life at that time was bleak. Since leaving Florida eight years before, I’d spiraled down into a shroud of shadow. I was lost. I made one disastrous decision after another.
Seeing William again was wonderful and uplifting. He was the same generous and sometimes goofy guy; just the grown-up version. On weekends we spent hours in the Emory gym playing basketball. It was as if nothing had changed, except the lapse of time. I felt the dense, dark cloud around me begin to lift. My renewed connection to William brought me hope for the future.
Over the next year, I spent nearly every weekend with William, playing basketball, going to concerts (free tickets because William wrote music reviews for the Emory Wheel, the student newspaper) and just hanging out, discussing everyone from William Faulkner to Jimi Hendrix to Thomas Merton. William was always the smartest guy in the room.
William graduated a year later and moved to Washington, DC, to begin his training to become a Josephite priest. He completed five years out of the six-year program to become an ordained priest. After much prayer and contemplation, William decided not to become a priest, in part because he did not want to be a lifelong celibate and he envisioned marriage in his future.
William ended up in Mobile, Alabama, where he married and fathered a daughter. He worked for the Catholic Diocese in an arcane position that I never fully understood. I ended up in Florida and then Georgia, where I married and had two children. During these years William and I lost touch. Twenty-six years later, when I did an internet search to find William, I learned of the horrific event that would forever change William’s life.
On a hot July afternoon, in 2012, William was busy barbecuing in the yard while his wife, Julie, and daughter, Angela, were making dinner preparations in the kitchen. William heard Julie’s scream and dashed into the house. There he found a masked man, holding a chrome pistol and demanding money. The intruder was unstable and threatened to kill everyone. William, a big guy at 6 feet, 4 inches, wrestled with the gunman trying to get possession of the gun when a shot rang out. William dropped to the floor. The intruder fled. The crime was never solved.
An ambulance transported William to the hospital. Scans showed that the bullet was lodged near his lung and spinal cord. Surgery was not an option.William was paralyzed from the clavicle down. He was a paraplegic. A single moment in time brought unfathomable catastrophe.
I asked myself how could any just God permit such a horrific act upon such a worthy and faithful soul? But to William, that instant of time, when that bullet ripped through his flesh, only cemented his trust in God. God had challenged him to deepen his relationship with the Almighty and to be a beacon of God’s light in even the darkest of days.
William’s unswerving devotion to God, even in the face of incomprehensible circumstance, is inspirational. Who among us could rise up in the face of such a calamity? Certainly, not me. William is the best of us. Hands down.
William and I stay in touch through phone calls and thus far, once, my wife and I have visited him and his amazing wife. Their devotion to each other, to their daughter, and to their Church are the sum total of their lives.
I secretly hope that William’s remarkable and irrevocable faith will mysteriously rub off on me. William is a beacon of belief in God that we should all recognize, if not emulate. I am lucky to call him friend.
Jeff Hyndman is a retired, part-time dog walker who lives in an Atlanta suburb with his wife, their dog, Carmela and their cat, Chelsea, who pretty much runs the show! His personal essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines.
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