They came through the hollers with the winding clear streams, lush overhanging trees and ancient rocky hillsides wet with dew and morning fog. They drove in old jalopies and walked over the mountain roads. They came from Haysi, Dante, Big Stone Gap, Wise and other small towns near the Kentucky border too small to have a name.
On the outskirts of Garden City, Kansas, along the smooth two-lane road, past the silos and the grazing cattle, a few semi trucks are parked in the dusty gravel lot below the tall, yellow Super 8 sign.
There, in the desert the dark storm clouds drifted across the jagged horizon. The July air was dry as a bone. On the hot ground, the rock and cactus, through the high thorny brush she sat silent, crouched low, her hair wild from the helicopter above, her brown eyes squinting in the desert light.
In southwest Virginia, amongst the graves, a soft weeping can be heard through the rustle of leaves in the trees. Debbie Stanley is bowed down, crying on the gravestone of her son, Jessee James Stanley, on the one-year anniversary of his death.
Welcome to baptism by firehose, the emotional conclusion to a weeklong annual spiritual convention for the congregants of the United House of Prayer for All People in Washington, DC, on the last weekend of August.
2502 Pomeroy Road in southeast Washington, D.C. is a lonely, dark place at night. A long road up a steady hill, turning into the apartment complex there’s only one way in and one way out. It’s the perfect place for a murder or revenge.