Sides of a Coin

By Marlon Clarke

Black North American teen, Abimbola Prince, is disillusioned by his aforementioned African name. He grew to hate it from the moment he started school several years earlier. He goes from allowing all people to butcher and make fun of his name, to cutting it in half and cutting down his self-esteem with it.

Abimbola must now fight for his self-respect in more ways than one, before it's too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669842910

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Sides Of A Coin

Marlon Clarke

Copyright © 2022 by Marlon Clarke.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 08/18/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

For my two sons Omri & Eesah.

This one’s for you guys

Be your best.

Chapter One

My name is Abimbola Prince, that’s A-B-I-M-B-O-L-A Abimbola. And Prince like the singer. I liked my last name, hated Abimbola. My dad said he gave me that name although my mother urged him to name me Sean to avoid me being teased. Instead Sean became my second name. Dad said he called me Abimbola because he had a few African friends around the time I was born that suggested he name me Abimbola. Out of all the African names, why did he have to go with that one? Why not Akeem, or Koffee or even Kwame like my little brother? No, dad just had to go with Abimbola. And to top it off, it’s a girls’ name as well as a boys’. So whenever people heard my name, they automatically thought I might have been a girl just because it ended with an A and probably because it had the word Bimbo in it. But then once they met me, they thought I was Somalian, because of how I looked. I got teased all the time. My dad was from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and my mom was from Tobago, that little Island right next to it. But they didn’t meet until they moved to Toronto Canada in 1967, just before they had my sister. I was born two years later. They had to adapt to life in Canada. Took them 16 years to do that, Now here we were, in the summer of 1984 riding along in our 1979 caprice to our new home in America. Now we had to make yet another adjustment. Back to what I was saying earlier, everybody butchered my name. Hated it.

Kids would always say.

What’s your name Abimo-what?

A-bimbo?

A-bimbo-a-dick.

Dad says my name is a Nigerian Yoruba name meaning Born Wealthy. Now I wished somebody would wake me up when we became wealthy. I mean we weren’t poor or anything but far from wealthy.

As we continued driving along the road, I looked over at my dad as he spun that steering wheel like a pro. Prince is his name, well Calvin Prince to be exact. Now my grandparents gave him a name like that and he names me Abimbola. And my mom Tina was sitting right next to him looking beautiful as she was. She says when she met dad he told her his name was Prince. So she asked for his last name and he said, Prince and she asked Your name is Prince Prince? He told her It’s Calvin, but just call me Prince. Mom was 5 years younger than dad. They didn’t really have much in common except us. Not that the age difference had anything to do with it. They were just very distant and only got along on occasion or at our expense. She didn’t even know how old he was at first because he told her his age didn’t matter. Whenever she had to do some sort of business transaction and was asked dad’s age it would go like this.

And how old is your husband ma’am? And she would simply say.

I don’t know. This would always leave them looking at her