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Another weekend shooting. Another black man killed.

On my regular Sunday morning walk this week, I chose to stroll through the St Monica's Road area.

I saw the tarpaulin-covered death car and the too-late arriving Police Command Vehicle, complete with what looked like a sleeping policeman.

I walked on. Coming off Front Street, passing Alexandrina Hall and going along Court Street, I was jolted into realizing what was starkly and sharply different.

On Front Street, I saw a street of brightly decorated windows and sparkling Christmas decorations.

But Court Street was a street of white metal roll-down shutters and black metal bars and grills.

One street was visually and psychologically open, the other locked down and hiding.

On that rain-drenched morning walk, I realized I had received a fresh insight into two Bermudas - one black, one white.

One relaxed and open, the other expecting trouble.

Black commerce shutting down, white commerce staying open.

Black businessmen hiding from customers. Blacks hiding from fellow blacks, black gunmen shooting black people in black areas.

With the raindrops on my waterproof jacket's hood sounding like a far-off machine gun, I walked on thinking.

Monday morning's front page showed a face under a backwards turned baseball cap. His T-shirt slogan read "GUNIT". Around his neck was a gold chain that had a gold number "42" suspended from it.

On page two, there were four other faces. None of them wore hats backwards, slogan T-shirts or had big gold chains slung around their necks.

Clearly these four were different from the man on page one except for this triple commonality - all five were black, male and Bermudian.

But the difference was like that between open Front Street and shuttered Court Street.

The face above the gold chain had made the news before. Two years ago, with his family, he protested to the prison authorities about the treatment his brother was receiving in Westgate Correctional Facility.

His brother had been jailed for causing someone bodily harm.

The other four faces also make it into the news but for different reasons.

Usually it is because one or other of them is doing something in the community, for the community or is advancing some commercial enterprise.

It is obvious black Bermuda has further sub-divided and is about as divided as Front Street is from Court Street. But is this sub-division new? Black Bermuda was once divided by class. Education was the leveler but that old class difference dwindled.

In its place, a division best described as a separation between ordinary black Bermuda - a now almost classless group - and underclass black Bermuda, the new group.

Underclass Bermuda seems to model itself on perceptions of ghetto life in black America.

As such, this new group lives within a self-created cocoon. It has its own social values and codes of behaviour. It lives within self-defined little geographic arcs and sub-arcs.

But every now and again, it breaks out of these self-assigned boundaries.

Not for the first time, there was a breakout on Friday night. In this year, there have been more shootings than fatal road accidents. That's a new and awful Bermuda record.

Do the majority of Bermudians really care? Do the majority of Bermudians have the attitude displayed by the Court Street merchants? Ultimately, do we really feel and think, "They are not like us?"

But they are us. We cannot simply shutter them out as, for too long, Court Street has tried to.

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