‘I want you to doubt me’: Zayde Wisdom’s against-all-odds journey to the draft

By Scott Wheeler Mar 30, 2020 34
Zayde Wisdom’s earliest memory is of one of the many times his grandmother, who he calls Kitty, picked him up from school. He can’t remember exactly how old he was. He was young. Maybe kindergarten. But he remembers the rest like it was yesterday.

He remembers Kitty handing him his after-school lunch. He remembers turning his nose up at it and demanding McDonald’s. He remembers her answer, one he’d heard before: “No, we don’t have money for that.”

And he remembers the two things that came next: a drive to the food bank and a return to a home without electricity.

At the time, he understood the food bank as the place he sometimes went to pick up meals for the week. But he never really understood why the lights would go out. His mom, Mairri, would tell him that people were working on the power lines.

“Oh, it went down in the whole neighbourhood,” she would lie.

Roughly a decade later, he...