"Know what I was tellin' you 'bout the countries and all?", Jason asked me. Earlier, at the playground, he'd pointed at the swirls and patterns left in the mulch, contours of the overflow from last night's storm, and told me that it looked like countries. "Yeah, I can see it - like countries on a map.", I'd answered, and then went back to pushing the girls on the swings, skimming their heels across the recent puddles as they soared and dropped, like birds. The sky was still stormy, low clouds, but the rain had faltered earlier in the morning, and the wet playing fields were now drying slowly.
We were on a flat bulldozed plain, greened playing fields surrounding us, fringes of trees/forest in the distance. We were waiting for our session to open up, at the indoor skating rink, which was cheap, and fun for the kids. Skating has an exuberance to it, based on its danger, especially for beginners. Blades on ice. There's a point where the kids realize the tragicomic potential of falling, and start doing it deliberately. And of course it's still right, to catch their fall, to hold them by the hand, to laugh and wobble together back into balance. Because that's what we do, we catch, and stand strong, for these kids.
The sky was still stormy, low clouds, but the rain was past. I would have preferred to take the kids hiking, let them burn out their energy on a trail, but the forecast was rain. Our mission was to provide inner city kids a safe and entertaining experience in nature, which isn't likely to happen, if they're wet and cold. So...skating, and a playground. I knew that we were in for trouble. With these kids, you have to keep moving. Once they've been too long in one place, they get restless, bored, start looking for ways to kick up trouble.
Jason is ten years old, has Cherokee blood, and is a nature savant - fascinated with animals and nature. When we went into the woods he lived exuberantly, noticed things that everyone else missed. A few minutes before, he'd been at the center of a harassment, a half-ring of older kids around him, Tania and Keisha the ringleaders. I was too far away to hear voices, but could read the postures. Jason stood hunched but still defiant, a hurt cringe to his opposition as the other kids swayed at him. The exuberant loom of a fight dissipated as I started to walk towards the group, and the kids scattered.
I'd let it slide because that's usually easiest. Adult involvement in playground complexities is usually met with a shunned silence by the kids, or else an escalating outburst of accusations and injustices, referencing neighborhood intrigues and long-standing grudges. Easier to nudge the storm off-course, than try to negotiate with it. I'd broken up enough fights between these kids, to know how to preempt them.
Later, Marissa, one of our new leaders, came up to me - she'd seen the conflict too. "I'm calling them your girls, because they were in your car.", she said. "They've all been ganging up on Jason. Tania and Keisha are the leaders. They're the ones doing it. After they finished with him, he got all small and hurt and went off by himself. I tried to talk with him, but you know how it is. He didn't want a grownup trying to fix things for him. You need to talk with these girls. They're the ones starting things". She was calling me out.
Marissa is a major in the army. She's an order and structure person. From the first trip she came on, she's been hard on the discipline. And I'm the chaos. So we clash pretty regularly, in a respectful way. Because we both have the kids' best interests at heart. Marissa grew up in the projects, so she takes these kids pretty personally. "I was a bully in school. I knew how to fight, and I'd take people on. I regret that now, but I know how these kids operate, and I'm not going to put up with any crap from them.", she told me once. She's taught me a lot about leadership, about setting expectations, about standing up for victims, about the power of positive conflict. She's brave about what she is willing to take on, and bold about how she does it.
I walked onto the basketball court, where the kids were playing. They knew why I was there, but kept playing, ignored me. I had to take the ball, to break the game up. "Tania and Keisha, I want to talk with you.", I said, repeatedly, asking the other kids to move on. They didn't. Tania and Keisha tried to slide away, muttered wisecracks, refusing to take me seriously, or meet my eyes. "Fine. You want it like this. Here it is. Both of you need to pull back, and starting acting better. You can't be picking...", I started, "Is this about Jason? Because he the one be starting things! He said we was goin' to hell!" Tania said.
Tania was older, 13 or 14, her body brinking on womanhood. They were both taller than me. I remembered how, a few years back, Tania had shown me the knife she carried, a decently vicious flick blade, held with a child's casual awe of weapons, of the trappings of grownhood. She was daring my reaction, younger kids clustered around her. "That's a pretty nice blade," I'd said, blood thrumming up, "But you can't take it on the trip. You got to leave it at home." and she'd half-met my eyes, nodded, as if we were equal in respect.
"What this is about is respect...", I started, voice edging louder, and Tania cut me off again - "This ain't right! He the one be messing with us...". "No, you need to listen to me..." I yelled back, and then Keisha chorussed in, playing the righteous indignant as well. I ramped up further, voice toning louder and lower as my anger flared, and I realized that this was becoming a power conflict.
Keisha's younger than Tania, still lanky, but even though they're supposedly not related, I know there's strong blood between them, probably the same father, their faces close enough to be sisters, the same strong surly set in their jaws, athletic carry, a brave dark flash in their eyes. And I respect their strength, their fire, how they carry that easy assumption of leadership, how their youth carries them forward, towards what seems to me a meat-grinder of poverty and drugs, of crime and early motherhood, school drop-outs and desperation.
I've been doing trips with these kids for years now. Hopewell Addition is a low-income neighbourhood, subsidized housing, rows of small two-storey brick housing. When the kids throw signs, it's "W"s, for "Wilson Place", which is the street they live on. I don't know why we call it Hopewell, and the kids don't know either. On Saturday mornings, the teenage boys are already standing around smoking weed, waiting for cars to drive up. There are usually empty bottles of liquor and drug bags scattered around the neighbourhood, from the night before.
One house burnt out two years back, and hasn't been repaired yet. Sometimes when I look through the broken, soot-filmed, windows, I see the bright gleam of a feral cats' eyes inside, like a resurgent and vengeful force. I once asked one of our kids what he would think if I, as a white person, moved into his neighbourhood. "For real?" he asked, struck by the question. "Yeah. For real", I said. "I'd think you was a crackhead.", he said, with full conviction. He was 8.
When we bring the kids together, we break all the natural lines and territories drawn out. In our deliberate innocence we let spill feuds. We bring kids together who are neighbors but never play together. We upset the natural dynamics, the tenuous balances of the neighborhood.
The bloodlines at Hopewell are complex: within a few blocks of two-storey low-income housing are a number of hierarchies and clans. We try to avoid the politics, but when we go door to door, handing out permission slips before the outings, we see some drastic disparities. Some houses have big flat-screen tv's, and in others, children are sleeping tangled on the floor, amongst a mess of clothes and piles of junk, stray kittens and the smell of stale sweat.
We don't often meet fathers, more often grandmothers, or women caring for children not their own. Some houses have so much money that the only reasonable explanation is the young men on the street, smoking weed and making deals with the cars that drive up. I imagine the fierce, poor pride of those who aren't connected to dealing, who set example to their children by their poverty. I imagine the men and fathers who are absent, in jail or dead or with another family.
Tania, Keisha and I yelled back and forth on the basketball court, crescendoing. The other volunteers watched from a safe distance. I was afraid of escalating, and afraid of backing down. I was afraid of being humiliated, and afraid of humiliating them. I was afraid they might try to hit me, and the consequences of that. I was afraid they might walk away, in a mocking and dismissive way that would force me to escalate further.
But I couldn't back down, because I knew that they'd transgressed. They'd picked on a younger child. Jason had not earned their abuse, whatever he'd said. I knew that, because I knew them. To my surprise, the girls backed down, conceded grudgingly to my anger display, dissipated inoffensively. I was surprised that the fight had ended so gracefully.
Later, Jason sidled up to me, unacknowledgedly grateful, and we settled into pace together, while walking to the ice-rink. "You know how I was tellin you bout the countries before? That's how it is. There's good people and evil people, and the evil people are going to hell...". I could see the core of the clash that I'd watched from afar, mapped the links in Jason's mind, his vision in mulch like the confirmation of a prophecy, his clear boundaries between the heavenly and the hell-bound. He had told Tania and Keisha that Satan would claim their souls.
"They were calling him dirty boy, picking on him cause he lives poor.", Marissa had said earlier. Jason did live poor, helplessly so, lived apart like a visionary, collapsed sometimes in brief seizures, lived most brightly and exuberant in water, splashing brave and bold in rivers and streams. I connected him with John the Baptist, rapt with visions, aflame with the transcending power of water, wandering lost in wildernesses. Jason couldn't swim but he always went far and deep as he could when there was water. Once when we were swimming at a quarry, we lost track of Jason, looked out at the water, and there he was, swimming for the other side, in a lifejacket.
We called him back, but he ignored us, kept going, so I swam out to get him back, caught up with him at the center of the water. "I'm going to the other side!", Jason told me, and I remembered how epic the farther shore had always been as a child. I remembered swimming with my father, pulled out by an undertow under the hot sun at Hellshire beach, and later crossing a lake in Austria, swimming briskly against the water's dark cold to reach the other side. Both had been epic adventures, seared in my memory. I realized that I was now sharing such a moment with Jason.
I wanted to go with Jason, to take him across, but the group was getting ready to leave. I regret now that I didn't, and won't again. "Hold on to my shoulders", I told him, and then swam him back over the dark emptiness of the water, both of us bright in the sun and warm with our blood. "You swim so strong!", he said, and I felt the strength of my pull against the water, like my father's when we were pulled offshore by the riptide, the "undertoad" as I thought of it then, a deadly malevolent force beneath the waves, slow-waiting to feast on drowned corpses.
My father had told me to hold to his shoulders, and I had, even though I imagined striking bravely out on my own, outswimming him to shore, or maybe even rescuing him. I was five at the time. He'd had the voice of command, and had swum so strong that day. We were lucky to have lived. I imagined that Jason saw me like I'd then seen my father, strong and weak like a child sees an adult's otherness. But I'd gotten him back to shore that day, and I'd just stood up for him, against the girls.
"I understand where you're coming from," I told Jason, "But you have to think about what you're saying. For example, I'm Buddhist, and we don't believe in hell. Christians do, but we don't". I wanted to forestall his preacher urges, to undermine his contrarian drive, his biblical instinct to attack his enemies with righteousness. I saw the shock in his eyes, and then the mull. He respected me.
"So whatever you may believe for yourself, you need to think about how what you say, affects the people around you". I told him. I knew he wanted me to justify his stance, but I wasn't going to do that. I wanted him to know that there was only so far you can push people, and that lecturing others about hellfire wasn't going to get him very far.
Jason dropped back, and as we walked across the parking lot to the skating rink, I felt a stormy flush of anger. I rarely escalate like I had at Tania and Keisha, never rage, and yet the rightness of it was a rush, a cocooning thrill, something that once let loose is fluidly addictive, like a rainstorm settling into a river, a fire flaring into its own.
I felt a lonely apartness, wondering whether I'd pushed too hard, or said the wrong thing, instilled a rebellion. My uncertainty came from unfamiliarity - I work hard to hold back my emotions, to see the other side, to empathize, rather than attack. I went back, parsed the conflict, and felt the rightness of my position, felt the hushed halo of a male rage, as if I'd tapped a rare and solemn ritual. I remembered how I'd felt, as a child, when my father got angry, how dangerous and uncertain it felt, like everything breaking around me.
One of the younger boys, six or seven, caught up with me. He was wide-eyed, and hesitant, as if he thought I might attack him too. I knew instinctively that he'd seen male anger before, and was approaching me now from braveness, and a mix of curiosity and fear. Maybe to protect his siblings, even though he wasn't taller than my belt. "So where we goin' now?", he asked, hand reaching up shyly. "We goin' skating.", I answered, as I took his small hand in mine, and we walked together.