[Editor’s note: If you haven’t read “Hope: A Novelette,” you should. This article is, as the title suggests, a kind of epilogue to that piece. But it can be read separately, and it’s published below as such.]

A few weeks back, I stopped on my evening jog to chat with a neighbor whose yard piqued my interest. He and his wife moved in two or so months ago and immediately murdered their grass. I’d never seen anything quite like it. It was as if they took a flamethrower to it. It was there one day and — poof! — gone the next. Then it came back almost as quickly. Only not the same grass. Different grass. Better grass. Beautiful grass, but with no sod.

As it turns out, the husband owns a landscaping business, and he did in fact murder his grass. I asked him how he managed to get new grass so quickly without sod. He tried to explain it to me. “I do spriggin’,” he said. “Saves money versus da sod, but you gotta do it right.” We stood there for half a minute or so, admiring his handy work, which really was quite impressive.

“Maybe you can come by and take a look at mine,” I said. “I’d like it to look more like yours.” I gave him my address, although he didn’t need it. You can see my house from his across a small lake. “Stop by anytime. I’m always home. Unless I’m not.”

A couple of days later, he showed up at my door dressed like he just came from a business luncheon at a country club. Or like he just taught a get-rich-quick seminar. Pink polo shirt tucked into some navy slacks which fell neatly on a pair of monk straps that would’ve been stylish in Manhattan a decade ago. He’s black, my neighbor, and he’s retired from the military.

We talked about grass for a spell, and it was hot, so I invited him in. I have a framed print of the banner art from “Hope” on one of the shelves around the fireplace in my great room. He noticed it and asked about the black man in the illustration. I recounted a short version of my story, which doubled as a CliffsNotes summary of the article. Sorry, the “novelette.”

“Is it lack of opportunity or lack of structure?” he asked, referring to the unfortunate economic plight of young black men in America. It wasn’t a question I was anticipating. “I don’t think –” I stopped, then started up again. “Listen, as a white man, I’m not in a position to pronounce on it authoritatively, but based on my experience, lack of economic opportunity is a big part of black underachievement in America.”

We were standing up, which felt awkward. “Have a seat,” I gestured towards a table in the breakfast nook. He went over and sat down. I offered him a Keurig. “Too damn hot for that,” he said, matter-of-factly. He was right. But I fixed myself one anyway.

“It’s lack of structure. And discipline,” he said. “You know I was talkin’ with some folks the other night,” he went on. “And I told ’em I ain’t got no use for reparations.” “Oh yeah?” I wondered, as the Keurig emitted that gargling sound it makes when it’s finishing up. “No use,” he said again, emphatically. “They got minority scholarships, minority this, minority that — all we gots to do is use ’em.”

I sipped my coffee and told his life story for him, to myself, in my head. He went into the military early, deployed (to Iraq, Afghanistan or both), survived, retired, started a landscaping businesses and now lives off that revenue stream and monthly military benefits which, between them, make him reasonably well-off, particularly if his wife works too. He preaches structure and discipline because that’s what he learned in the military, and the rest of it — the anti-reparations line, the implicit notion that black people, his people, are too lazy to avail themselves of the myriad opportunities at their disposal and so on — is propaganda he picked up from conservative media which likes a black convert, and absolutely adores a hyper-patriotic black convert who owns a small business.

I was, in a word, wrong. Or mostly so. Unprompted, he proceeded to regale me with his actual life story and it began, stereotypically but to my surprise given his ideological bent, with poverty and teenage drug sales. The journey from that to where he is now, a mere 25 years later, was nothing short of dizzying. He did, in fact, pursue any number of educational and work-related opportunities tailored to minorities and he was stymied and stonewalled at every conceivable turn.

By his own account, he was the “dumbest m-therf-cker” in every room he ever entered, and like a lot of black men in America, he was subjected repeatedly to Kafka-style encounters with bureaucratic processes and procedures designed specifically to slow him down and, in one instance, to put him in jail for something he not only didn’t do, but couldn’t have done.

He prevailed each and every time, in each and every circumstance, a track record he attributed mostly to God, but which was quite plainly the result of an indomitable personality that wore down and exhausted a system that would’ve (and routinely does) oppressed and broken a man less doggedly determined.

Eventually, he enlisted, deployed and proceeded to parlay his veteran status into additional opportunities of every conceivable sort from education to loans to parking privileges (he’s the fittest disabled man I’ve ever come across). Suffice to say if there was a benefit to be had from military service, no matter how small or how obscure, he was going to find out about it and get hold of it, the same way he did benefits tied to his status as a minority before he enlisted.

What was missing from this man’s extraordinary tale — and this omission was for him inadvertent, but it’s deliberate when white conservatives hold people like him up either as paragons of black achievement or, more insidiously and excluding the military service, evidence that blacks have more than enough in the way of race-based carveouts and thus don’t need reparations — was any recognition of just how asymmetrically arduous his path to relative prosperity was, and by extension, any realization that the almost comically demanding nature of that road was directly attributable to the color of his skin.

He didn’t view all the administrative hoops through which he leapt to secure “minority this, minority that,” as he put it, as annoyances. Nor did he conceptualize of his military career as an arrangement which required he risk his life in exchange for a measure of financial security, a Faustian bargain which well-off, upper-class whites historically aren’t required to enter into. All of that was, in his mind, just what he had to do to get ahead. He seemed genuinely unaware of how comparatively little someone like me had to do to wind up in the same economic position these some years later.

Here we were, two men separated in age by just a year, living in the same neighborhood (or at least in the same general vicinity) under quasi-comparable economic circumstances, but with one of us having run an obstacle-ridden marathon through a figurative (and when he was overseas, literal) mine field to get here, and the other (me) having moseyed here drunk, doing more or less whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted to do it, answering to no one for anything at any point.

“I gotta tell you,” that’s an incredible story, I said. “Do you think all that’s doable for –” I stopped myself again. F-ck it. It was my house. “For most black people?” “Or for most people in general,” I added, hastily. He wasn’t offended. At all. If one of us was racist towards black people, it wasn’t me. “If I can do it, they can,” he said, flatly, almost as if “they” referred to a category of people to which he no longer belonged.

I was halfway through my coffee and I didn’t want any more. It was indeed too hot for coffee. I tossed the rest in the sink and we went out onto the back porch. “You wantin’ to do the back yard too?” he asked, of the grass overhaul. “Yeah, but I gotta get irrigation back here first.” “You ain’t got no irrigation?” “I do. Just the three zones, though. Front, and the two sides. I need to have a fourth zone put in back here.” “I can do that for you. This week,” he said. I nodded. “I’m serious, I’ll knock dat out in a half a day.” “Oh, I believe you,” I said.

We went back into the house and he gave me three business cards for his landscaping company. “Give them two extras out if you can. I’m always tryin’ to grow my accounts,” he said. I started to tell him I didn’t have anyone to give them to. That this was the first in-person conversation I’d had all week, and maybe for two weeks. But there was no point in getting into all that.

We walked through the great room again on the way to the front door and he glanced back over at the “Hope” print. He said it again: “If I can do it you can.” He hurriedly rephrased. “Not you ‘you.’ I meant ‘they.’ If I can do it they can.” “I gotcha, my man,” I said, bidding him a good afternoon and closing the door. “No,” I thought to myself, once he was gone. “They can’t. And neither could I.”