Rosary girls

2

This is the other city, the one William Penn never envisioned when he surveyed his "green countrie town"between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, dreaming of Greek columns and marble halls rising majesticallyfrom the pines. This is not the city of pride and history and vision, the place where the soul of a great nation was created, but rather a part of North Philadelphia where living ghosts hover in darkness, hollow-eyed and craven. This is a low place, a place of soot and feces and ashes and blood, a place where men hide from the eyes of their children, and remit their dignity for a life of relentless sorrow. A place where young animals become old.

If there are slums in hell, they will surely look like this.

But in this hideous place, something beautiful will grow. A Gethsemane amid the cracked concrete and rotted wood and ruined dreams.

I cut the engine. It is quiet.

She sits next to me, motionless, as if suspended in this, the penultimate moment of her youth. In profile, she looks like a child. Her eyes are open, but she does not stir.

There is a time in adolescence when the little girl who once skipped and sang with abandon finally dispatches these ways with a claim on womanhood, a time when secrets are born, a body of clandestine knowledge never to be revealed. It happens at different times with different girls-sometimes at a mere twelve or thirteen, sometimes not until sixteen or older-but happen it does, in every culture, to every race. It is a time not heralded by the coming of the blood, as many believe, but rather by the awareness that the rest of the world, especially the male of the species, suddenly sees them differently.

And, from that moment on, the balance of power shifts, and is never the same.

No, she is no longer a virgin, but she will be a virgin once again.At the pillar there will be a scourge and from this blight will come resurrection.

I exit the vehicle and look east and west. We are alone. The night air is chilled, even though the days have been unseasonably warm.

I open the passenger door and take her hand in mine. Not a woman, nor a child. Certainly not an angel.Angels do not have free will.

But a calm-shattering beauty nonetheless.

Her name is Tessa Ann Wells.

Her name is Magdalene.

She is the second.

She will not be the last.