Austin Clarke was a writer who was long fascinated by how we are both nurtured by and damaged by the communities that surround us - and most particularly how Caribbean and West Indian communities in mid-20th century Toronto both nurtured and damaged young Black men. In this reading, recorded on stage at the Harbourfront Reading Series in 1991, Clarke reads the final story from his collection, In This City, which presents the lives of Torontonians as they love, fight, explore, fear, intimidate, feel dispossessed, disobey and search for unpredictable moments of grace both within the confines of their communities but also in the cold and sometimes violent communities that lay beyond walls. The title of this story references a well-known Negro Spiritual, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, which laments the pain of life from a point of view (the slave) that was almost unheard of in the dominant culture which inspired it. The song later became significant as one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most moving anthems. Clarke’s retelling slyly reverses the roles and instead of a motherless child, a mother laments the loss of her son. And it can’t be ignored here that so many times when we see the way the poor are forced to interact with brutal figures of authority, violence is the response. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The audio for this episode is from In This City by Austin Clarke. Copyright © 1991 by Austin Clarke. Used with the permission of the Estate of Austin Clarke. It is also used with the permission of the Toronto International Writers Festival.