Excerpt: Hidden Agenda && American March to Present Time && Well, Mr. Grouchy

Lucas was questioning everything now. Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Pigments, of course, were the answer, but why were the pigments those colors? Why is there not blue grass and green skies and pink forests with orange dirt? Was that all God's doing or was it someone else’s doing? Was there a reason for why everything was the way that it was? Did God have a reason for it?

Two hundred and three hundred years ago when there was slavery in the colonies of America, had God been the one to decide that the Africans would become enslaved or was it someone else who had? Had it been God who had influenced that person's decision or was it all God who had decided that the Africans who lived and worked in Africa would be forced to take a long trip along the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, risking their lives and their health, in ships that were way too crowded for a person to even imagine having to go in them back then, freezing below deck while white settlers were above deck and able to move around? Why was it the Africans? Easily the Africans would have enslaved the Americans or the English or French or even Japanese if they had wanted to, surely enough. Had it been in the African peoples destiny that made it be them who were enslaved? What was the motive? Money.

Was that reason why everything that had happened had happened? Of course not. Money had nothing to do with Caleb being gay and having to go to Boston. Money had nothing to do with his parents throwing him out of the house, did it? His father was a priest but did that really have much to do with it? Probably. His father was proud of his reputation. He valued his honesty greatly and by the time that everyone had heard that he, Caleb, was gay it was too late for his father to turn back. He had to do something so that his church would not stop to go against him. Everything had a reason, he knew, but what was that reason and why did they have to follow it? The motives were money. Always it was money. Money was everything, and everything was because of money.

The British had come over to America in hopes for new life, land, and money. Wealth back then was measured in the means of how much land a country had. In the case of England, there was a lot of land. With each new piece of land that the country had acquired there was more wealth added to the country as well.

The wealth soon became in merchant supplies rather than in land. When that came, King Charles the Second had installed the Navigation Acts. Those acts made it so that the colonies lost much of their freedom in selling and later along the road when King James the Second, brother to Charles, had made the Navigation Acts even stricter and calling them Staple Acts. The colonies had to pay more and more money to sell their goods, taxes became enormous, and everything was going downhill for them. The enlistment of slaves became necessary for the colonies to keep the large plantations going and to make it so that they colonies could get the money that was needed to purchase supplies for themselves. When King Charles II and King James II added their new laws, was it on impact from God or was it on their own will? Did God come up to them one day and say 'I want you to have your colonists help their farms and plantations by hiring slaves from Africa' and that was the end of it?

How much did God actually control? Now not only was Luke questioning his faith but he was also starting to question the lands upon which he grew up.

Having lived in Massachusetts, the North, there were not slaves from his part of the country, but there were still many people who were slaves before who came up to the North in hopes for freedom and maybe passage back to Africa. The slaves believed in God and even had their own faith and language (African languages before the slave trade started and soon they began speaking Gullah, a mixture of African languages and English). Were they punished by God because they believed in different things than the colonists did? Or was there a deeper, truer answer, than that? He was not sure. And of course, there were no time machines. He could not ask the colonists their reasoning behind everything.

Back then was when faith began to be lost for many people. The Great Awakening had returned the faith to many people, but others still lost it. What would his life be like if his ancestors had lost their faith around that time instead of gaining it even more than they had before? Would Caleb's parents have less faith or would their faith still be as strong as it had been before?

Of all the things for a boy his age to wonder about when he was alone in the alleys of Boston, Caleb had to wonder about his faith. He was strange in that way, but it made him realize that not everything was about God. Though many things were, many were because of the people that God had created. God meant everything to some people, and He meant nothing to others. If this was the reason, then why was he questioning himself so much? His faith, what he had believed in all his life, turned against him, and why; because he was gay?

The bible, he recalled, had never said anything about that, or maybe Caleb had not read in between the lines of it enough. He probably should have because if he had read between them he might have uncovered the meaning when he was younger, naive, and he would have been able to stop himself from falling for a guy.

The argument going on inside his mind was like the Civil War back when Lincoln was president of the United States. He halfway thought it was bad of him to be losing his faith and to be gay, but the other half of him thought it was fine. He felt terrible either way. North verses the South, gay verses being straight, and religious versus being Atheist and not believing in God. His mind was going a million miles an hour and he was not sure how long it would be before he would give up on it all again. The thoughts inside his mind were making him mad.

It was starting to get dark out. The sun setting was perfect for him. He was able to be himself in peace. Until his phobia of the darkness began to settle in to his body. Everything was going nuts. His brain was freaking out because of the darkness, his mind was going nuts trying to think about everything that had gone on, and his body was shivering from the coldness of the outside.

The civil war inside his body was getting bloody. The 'slaves' were being beaten, and the different opinions of his mind were going nuts. Everything, and everything else, was not right.

'If God never cared about the slaves because of their religion, then he probably doesn't even care about me,' he thought to himself. 'If my father only ever cared about the money and not losing his job, then why doesn't he care about me? Does anyone care about me?' Then, it occurred to him who really cared about him. His friends did. You can't make people be your friends and have them genuinely care for you. He knew that. Everything around him made him want to think that this was done with and that his death would be simple and he would remain in Purgatory all his life, but he knew it was only just beginning. He was newly turned seventeen and his life had only just begun. Everything was starting over again and there he was, living on the streets.