A DARK AND GALVANIC NOVEL THAT BLENDS SATIRE, POETRY, PHILOSOPHY AND SPIRITUALITY TO ILLUSTRATE THE PLIGHT OF BLACK MEN IN AMERICA, Black Sheep is about the rise, fall, and rise again of a grad student turned miscreant named Duce. 

Life was hard knock in the Upper 9^th Ward of New Orleans, LA, where Duce grew up in a rotting shotgun house with his mother and younger brother.  He and his best friend, Jason, were both intellectually gifted teens who struggled together to find a place in society, while abiding in the mar of drugs and poverty in their community.  Duce and Jason’s tenacity however, set them on opposite pathways – Jason became the neighborhood “Dope Man,” and Duce became a “College Boy” at Southern University, a historically black university in South Louisiana.

At Southern, Duce was a campus leader – a fiery orator and talented writer, who chaired campus advocacy groups, spearheaded social justice rallies, and labored part-time at a halfway house for juvenile delinquents.  By Duce’s senior year, it seemed he had it all – honorable grades, an attractive, high-society girlfriend named Dana, and a scholarship to attend grad school at Big State, a large flagship university in a rural midatlantic college town.  When he graduated, Duce was flying like an eagle.

But when he arrived at Big State, culture-shock knocked him off his high horse.  The happy-go-lucky townies patronized him, while his all-white thesis committee derided his thesis on black men in the criminal justice system; calling it everything from ‘impractical’ to ‘dangerous.’  Feeling isolated and misunderstood, Duce sought asylum in Havana – an alluring and astute senior from Brooklyn, NY.  Duce and Havana had a passionate and enigmatic love affair, veiled in wonderment and surrealism.  But with Dana still in the picture, Duce became tangled in a web of lies and chaos.  As he juggled two loves, while reluctantly making concessions with his thesis committee, his life began to unravel.

Ultimately his world crashed and he lost everything.  One day, after wrestling with his thesis committee and arguing with Dana, Duce tried to bandage his woes by visiting Havana in Brooklyn.  That night, three black men carjacked him, with all digital and hard copies of his 67-page thesis in his car trunk.

Beat and bitter, Duce took a leave of absence from Big State and returned to the Upper 9^th Ward to rewrite his thesis.  However, when he returned home, he felt estranged from his community, his family and his self.  His drug dealing best friend, Jason, was supporting Duce’s family with drug money.  And although Jason encouraged Duce in his meager efforts to rewrite, Duce couldn’t enthrone the spirit or vision for his thesis.  He had not emotionally resolved the irony and ill-fate of losing his thesis to the type of black men he wrote it to help.  And after his college mentor died, and Dana left him, Duce began to battle with depression, bereavement, and anger.  He started avoiding love ones and consorting with a young woman, named Crystal, whose hardships drove her to cocaine.  As Crystal’s drug dependence grew, Duce became co-dependent. 

Eventually, Duce’s life drifted into a bizarre dimension.  After Crystal stole five grams of cocaine from a drug dealer, a menace named Lucifer implicated Duce in the theft.  An evil and cryptic man, Lucifer followed and harassed Duce, inexorably driving him to the brink of insanity.  It seemed no one, not even Jason, could help quell Lucifer’s wrath.  So, Duce fled New Orleans and went to live with his uncle in Jersey.  Subsequently, the FBI identified Duce as a suspect in the elusive “war on drugs.”  They petitioned him to set up Jason, but when he refused to comply, they turned him over to local authorities and kept him under surveillance.

While under local jurisdiction, Duce was mandated to drug education.  There, he met a young black counselor named Coby.  Coby felt spiritually compelled to break Duce’s defenses and help him through his trials.  In sessions, he preached black empowerment and explained the social forces aimed at demonizing black men.  With Coby’s help, Duce realize that Lucifer, Jason and the FBI were all pieces of the same puzzle, posted on a platform of government corruption and thug life.  However, as Coby helped Duce overcome his demons, he began to unleash the ghosts in his own past.  By fate, Duce and Coby had a history together, and the connection they had could be the insight they needed to make life make sense, or the dagger that would rip their souls apart.