The Black Rose

A retelling for children, based on Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives (George Ronald, 1937). The words in quotation marks are 'Abdu'l-Bahá's own, as Ives wrote them down.

A boy stood in the corner of the room, hoping no one would look at him.

His name we do not know. We know he was about thirteen. We know he had come a long way that morning — all the way from the Bowery, the poorest, roughest streets in the whole city of New York — because a kind lady named Mrs. Kinney had gathered up a crowd of boys and brought them to meet a special visitor. And we know one more thing: he was the only boy in the room with dark brown skin.

In those days, a boy with dark skin learned to expect cold looks and cold words. So he did what he always did. He found a corner. He made himself small. He waited for the room to forget he was there.

But the visitor did not forget him.

The visitor was 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and He had crossed half the world. When a big box of chocolates came out, He did not let anyone else pass them around — He carried it Himself, boy to boy. And when He reached the corner, He stopped.

He looked right at the boy. Then He turned and looked around at all the boys, so not one of them could miss what He was about to say. Here, He said, was a black rose.

A black rose. The most beautiful flower in the whole bouquet.

You could have heard a pin drop. And the boy in the corner — the boy who had spent the whole morning trying to disappear — was suddenly the boy everyone wished they could be.

'Abdu'l-Bahá was not finished. He picked up one long chocolate, dark on the outside, sweet all the way through. He held it softly against the boy's cheek, looked around at the other boys once more, and wrapped His arm around the boy's shoulders.

He was showing them all something true: that dark is beautiful, and dark is sweet, and how much a person is worth has nothing at all to do with the color of their skin. In God's eyes, every single one of us is a flower in the same garden.

That night the boys walked home to the same hard streets they had come from. But one of them walked a little taller. He had something now that no one could take away — the morning a holy Figure from the other side of the world had looked straight at him, in front of everybody, and called him a rose.

This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see "A Black Rose" and Portals to Freedom by Howard Colby Ives.

Ives, H. C.. (1937). *Portals to Freedom*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/ives_portals_freedom