Because I Said So (10 page)

But we both warned Joe to check his ghetto walk and talk at the door when he visited the schools. We made him wear Polo shirts
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and khaki slacks with belts. We threatened him about his grades.

We even tried to force him back into volunteer activities.

But Joe had his own volunteer project going.

We had put in an application at a new school whose mission was exciting: It promised to groom students for the twenty-first century with a curriculum that emphasized science, technology, ethics, and spirituality. Students would learn how to negotiate a

“potentially troubling world” by studying world cultures and learning how to become “peacemakers,” according to its literature. Acknowledging the central realities of diversity and community, the school would “mirror the rich mosaic of the San Francisco Bay Area, reaching across its wide spectrum of race, culture, and economic circumstances” to draw its student body.

Joe had decided that this sounded like a great opportunity for his friend Devon.

Devon was a kid who could benefit desperately from the support that only a private school could provide—and he could con-tribute much to other students’ understanding of the troubled world. His father was out of prison and pretty much out of the picture; his mother was struggling to support her children on a lot less than the cost of one year’s tuition. Beneath his serious street face, Devon had an open sweetness and unabashed curiosity about the world. Though guarded and awkward when I first met him, he soon revealed a deep heart and optimism about the future. Although he struggled in school, he had not lost his motivation to learn. But he was walking a tightrope, and his academic experience and support in the next few years seemed vitally important.

The school’s co-director of admissions, a charismatic young black man, appeared to be scouring the Bay Area seeking out underprivileged students like Devon. He had met Devon and liked him, and encouraged him and his mother to apply. They were thrilled. So Joe quietly took it upon himself to tutor Devon and help him with his application. Devon chose to write his application essay on his relationship to God. Joe edited it. The night before school tests, I could hear him on the phone with Devon:
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“Okay, now no cheating. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” Late one evening, I heard him reassuring Devon,

“You’re going to get in.” I kept in touch with the admissions co-director and Devon’s mom, to keep the process rolling. And then I held my breath for all of us. I was proud of Joe’s empathy and compassion, but I knew that his personal version of “community service” did not have the institutional stamp of validation that counted on school résumés.

While we middle-income parents of eighth-graders sweated through winter with our eyes on the high school prize, a tide of violence quietly began sweeping through the city. Thirteen African American teenage boys were killed during our children’s eighth-grade year. A young man whose sisters had tried to save him from the street violence that had claimed his mother was shot. Three boys on their way to high school were killed in their car. A fifteen-year-old was gunned down leaving a YMCA dance. Another boy was mistaken for someone else and killed; his cousin was shot a week later, on the day of the boy’s funeral. “Kids are dying right and left here,” Devon’s mother exclaimed to me one day.

The violence blew in across the city like afternoon fog off the ocean, settling deep into pockets of town—Lakeview, the Excelsior, Sunnydale, Hunter’s Point—and leaving others clear and untouched. Some of the murders didn’t even make it into the
San
Francisco Chronicle.
None of the white, middle-class parents I knew talked about them. I wondered if they even knew about them.

Would we have known had it not been for Joe’s impassioned updates on the subject? If one of the shootings had happened at a middle-class public school, San Francisco parents would have mobi-lized around it immediately as a school safety issue. But these happened in the shadowy places on the other side of those invisible lines. These are the things that we know without knowing.

My new friend Charmaine, however, took each one to heart.

Arriving at our house looking particularly weary one day to pick up her son, she told me how hopeless she had started to feel. She went to memorial services for boys she would never know, wrote notes to their parents. She treated them as if she knew them. She
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couldn’t help but think about how hard someone had worked to raise them right, and how easily that care could be destroyed in the flick of a trigger finger.

In the end,
Joe’s new identity hurt him with the elite high schools and didn’t help Devon either. Joe didn’t get into any of the top private schools. Though he was accepted at the new school with the exciting mission, which was under-enrolled, Devon was not. The cost of a full scholarship was just too high, we heard; there were other kids with better grades, and his application had come in late. So it wasn’t that they didn’t think they could work with him. At least not officially. It was that it didn’t seem worth it. Unlike Joe, Devon would not be free to reinvent himself.

“It’s probably better that he didn’t get in,” said the mother of a white student who was admitted to a few private schools, thinking she was providing some consolation. “He’d be on the bottom of his class there, but at a public school he won’t.”

The new school could be
our
chance to get Joe out of the ghetto, however. For months, it had been our salvation, beaming like the neon one-way sign on a fundamentalist church, pointing the way back to our side of the invisible line. But a curious thing happened the day we went to the school orientation. Out of about four dozen students who had been accepted into the first class, only two were black. The smiling African American students pictured in so many photos in the brochure were a lie. Some of the bright new freshman faces even belonged to kids from wealthy suburbs with excellent public high schools. Like that of all the private schools we had seen, this school’s vision seemed to reflect what white liberal parents would like to be true rather than the real truth, a fantasy that makes it easier for us to live with our choices.

One of the two black students there was a longtime friend of Joe’s, a middle-class boy whose parents are both African, and who is being raised by his black African-born aunt and white American uncle. I knew that top colleges accept many more stu-52

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dents from immigrant African or biracial families than they do lower-income children whose families have been in America for generations. But how could there be any hope for the future if high schools did that too? “They’re looking for kids like him,”

Devon’s mom told Joe, referring to the boy with African parents.

“They’re not looking for kids like my son.”

“This school says they’re preparing kids for the future,”

David whispered to me during the orientation, rolling his eyes.

“This isn’t what the future looks like—it’s not even the present.”

In the end, we were just too uncomfortable there. We withdrew Joe’s application. I realized then that all that time while we were thinking that Joe was moving off on his own, he had been moving us with him.

Fortunately, Joe had also been accepted to a fairly diverse public arts high school, where admission is based more on creative talent than on grades. But Devon literally slipped through the cracks of the public school system. While his mother pestered the school district and while the better public schools filled up, his application simply floated around for months like a plastic bag on the city’s windblown streets. Finally, he was assigned to the lowest performing high school in the city—one of the lowest in the state—a troubled school that is also notorious for gang violence.

After last year’s shootings took two students’ lives there, the school’s principal was quoted as saying he expected that other students would not make it through summer to return to school in the fall. I asked Joe how Devon felt about his placement. “He’s scared,” Joe said.

On the afternoon of eighth-grade graduation, their last day of school together, I drove Joe and his friends back to our house for a sleepover. These could not be the goofy kids I had driven around all year, all braces and giant shoes, smelling of greasy onion rings mingled with boy sweat. With their slicked hair and suits, their cologne and corsages, they looked positively suave. I savored the sight of them in the rearview mirror. And for a moment that I knew wouldn’t last, I imagined them like this ten years from now, all young professionals getting together downtown after work.

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• • •

Summer is here again,
an end and a beginning. Joe’s bedroom now doubles as a sound studio. In the room where his growth is still penciled on a doorframe, my teenager has created a website to introduce the world to Bay Area rap. He brings kids up from the projects to record songs. He brings Devon over to make beats. He’s still angry that Devon didn’t get into that school, but he thinks his friend has a good future in rap. According to Tupac, Joe says, just as television news kept the horrors of the Vietnam War in front of America’s eyes, rap keeps the inequities of life in our ears.

Street life has warmed up with the weather. Teenagers cruise by at night and pause at the corner, their basses sounding the thumping throb of nowhere to go.
Some people want us to go
away,
sings the hip-hop group Frontline.
No, aint goin’ nowhere,
we here to stay.

A stone’s throw from that corner, a few summers before my diagnosis, an apparition appeared at the chapel of Ave O Maria Immacolata. The Virgin Mary, with cascading hair and flowing robes, showed herself to the faithful on the verdigris gable of the chapel’s roof. She came only at night, enveloped in the scent of roses, and disappeared before the morning light. All summer long, carloads of the desperate and the curious quietly climbed the hill at night, where an altar of candles and flowers had been set up on the sidewalk. Though the parish priest warned that

“intangible items” require a rigorous investigation before being recognized by the church, the faith of the parishioners was stronger than reason. It was said that in Mary’s presence an

“overwhelming spiritual sense” washed over their bodies like the holy waters of baptism.

The Virgin appeared two days before the murder of two teenage lovers who were shot while picnicking in Precita Park on a sunny day, kids who must have thought their lives stretched out ahead of them. The Virgin left at the end of summer, but other miracles followed in her wake. Most recently, it’s been said that the hands of a teenage boy bled with a rose-scented oil, so much
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that the priest put it in a bowl and used it to bless those who attended the evening services.

It has been almost two years since my cancer treatments ended and nearly three years since my diagnosis. My hair is down to my shoulders, although the curl has never come back. Neither has the cancer, though. I’m in a new phase—the “survivor” phase.

With breast cancer, you are a survivor unless the cancer comes back to kill you. So I live sometimes in a surreal dream of uncertainty, but uncertainty about the future isn’t solely my domain.

At night before bed, I rub my hands and body with rose oil.

Then, sometimes, I lie awake worrying about the future of Joe and Devon and all the boys who now fill our house.
They don’t
have a prayer,
the old saying goes. But then, I think, they do have prayers; prayers are something they have plenty of. They are living on teenage life force and their mamas’ hard work and prayers.

They’re praying too,
prayin hard for better dayz.

“Jesus Walks” is the name of Devon’s favorite rap song this summer.
God show me the way because the devil’s tryin a break
me down.
The other night, when he was at our house, Devon wished me good night in a way my sons never would. “I’ll pray for you, Camille,” he said. I’ll pray for you too, Devon, and for all the other boys with chunky medallions and falling-down pants who come to our house to rap their hard, silly, hopeful songs.

I have to tell you, I still hate rap. But just when I’m ready to ban it from our house forever, I hear a phrase from that vulnerable place in the rapper’s steely heart: the sweet nostalgia for his mother’s love.

It’s a love that is, well, like my sons’ love for me—a tenderness and a sheltering that make me think of that day on the soccer field when Joe’s fierce eyes told me he was with me in the fight for my life. As much as he’s changing, that has stayed the same. “I love you, Mom,” the super-cool voice croaks from his bedroom sometimes, just before he drops off to sleep. Then, quietly, waiting until he’s at the edge of consciousness so he doesn’t know, I brush his forehead with a kiss, a blessing, and savor that glow before the night exhales its darkness and the moment is gone.

Thirteen

J a n e t F i t c h

The Americans sit at a table
in León, Spain, when the evening at last takes the bite off the heat, watching the couples, arm in arm, strolling in a steady procession past the cafés and cathedral. The wife envies how they walk in step, speak quietly to one another, couples who may have known each other for twenty, forty, sixty years. She marvels at how they still walk close to one another, muster a conversation, when she and her husband have nothing left to say across the gap of a very small table.

Their daughter sprawls in the third chair. Thirteen years old, and for years she has watched the rocky ride of their problematic marriage. The older she gets, the more obvious it becomes that her mother and her father have nothing left between them. And they have grown less able to conceal it. Or perhaps feel less need to do so—their girl is older, understands more. Perhaps they are tired of pretending.