Relentless Pursuit (37 page)

The ride over to Catalina was rough. After an initial burst of energy, the kids were quiet, either sickened by the whitecapped sea voyage or anxious about what lay ahead. But once land came into view, they were mesmerized by the island's rolling green hills, stone cliffs, and high ridges, where palm trees that looked like giant green lollipops stood sentry. The ferry dropped the Locke campers at the base of the science camp. After disembarking, they attended a brief orientation, ate lunch, and assembled at the shore for the first activity of the day: snorkeling.

There were several groups enrolled in the Marine Science Adventures Camp that week. Most of the kids came from suburban schools. And except for the Locke campers, they were all grammar-school-aged. The main facilities—the dining hall, fish hall, conference room, bathrooms, administrative offices—were located at the foot of a long sloping hill, ending at the seashore, which hugged a small, sheltered bay with a dock. A wide and dusty dirt path ran up the center of the incline, dividing the camp into discrete little villages of wooden-floored tents on either side. The Locke kids were assigned the village farthest up the hill on the right, far from the other campsites.

Just hiking up the hill from the beach and mess hall was a challenge for some of the Locke kids, many of whom were overweight from too much junk food and not enough exercise. Locke students scored about the same on the state physical fitness test as they did on the California Standards Test: 3.5 percent of ninth-graders met fitness standards. Before the camp was over, several would have to be helped to their tents, their leg muscles cramped and aching from unusual activity. But a little physical discomfort was a small price to pay for being on Catalina. The air was clean, the hills were green, the water and sky clear blue. The kids practically skipped up the path, free and easy, unencumbered by cares.

Snorkeling was scary. They were being tested—from the minute they were made to don the heavy black wetsuits to the second they had to put their faces in the water. But they did it—even the ones who couldn't swim. That night, the first and only hint of trouble surfaced. The kids were on a “trust walk” in which certain kids were blindfolded and others were designated to be their guides. The walk was interrupted by three camp officials who took Rachelle, Jill, and Corey aside. It seems that some of the boys had been down the hill at another school's bathrooms and had threatened to “get” the little kids later that night. The camp officials were joined by two security guards, who threatened to arrest the offending kids and send the rest of the Locke campers back home. A big lecture from the teachers followed, and the mood went from sweet to sour in seconds.

“It's because we're from South Central,” sighed Juliana. The boys reacted to the dressing-down by turning up the volume. Rachelle feared that things were going downhill fast.
I feel like a combination babysitter and parole officer.
Worried about the long, cold night ahead, she ordered everyone to remain in their tents, and she took a few of the girls aside and hammered home the point. She had overheard the boys talking about penis size; they were wondering if they could sleep with the girls. Rachelle did not want to have any Catalina babies!

When the kids awoke the next morning, it was as if none of the unpleasantness from the night before had occurred. After making their own lunches, they went to the plankton lab. When they arrived, one of the camp counselors asked them what group they were in. They started naming gangs and tagging crews, then rapping and break-dancing. The counselors gawked in amazement, and then the rest of the staff filed in to watch the show, too. While it was nice for the kids to get the attention, Rachelle was offended:
I know you all have probably come from someplace like Idaho where you've never seen a black person, much less a dancing black person, but this is not a circus and my kids are not here to entertain you.

Later, the kids went on a long hike to Catalina's Sandy Beach for a lecture on sea ecology and a swim in the bay. Just minutes into the hour-long hike, when they were climbing a steep ridge, still within eyesight of the camp, the stillness was shattered by what could have been the sound of a gun blast. The kids froze in midstep, their eyes trained in the direction of the noise. Below, they saw a tent, just like the ones they had slept in, crushed by the weight of a huge branch that had broken off from an aging eucalyptus tree. The randomness of the violence, even here, was unsettling. They walked on in silence for a few minutes.

The final adventure was kayaking. The kids all strapped on their orange life jackets and jumped into their very own, very tippy kayaks. It took Shandrel, the man-sized football player, dozens of tries before he got out beyond the shore, and the boat must have capsized dozens more times once he was out there. But he never gave up, not even when confronted by several sharp, protruding rocks that formed a kind of strait leading out to the open water. Navigating through the choppy canal was difficult. Many kids shied away, clearly daunted by the rough water—until Rachelle paddled up, raised her arm in the air, fist clenched, and shouted: “BALLS TO THE WALL!” They all then dutifully fell in line behind her, like ducklings trailing a mother duck, and paddled like mad through the shoals.

They had a campfire each night. The first night, as they gathered on the beach, they lay in the sand and used a laser beam to pick out the constellations—and to find some of their own. Kenyon located a single star for his constellation and called it the “Kenyon Star,” because “it looks down on everybody on earth and sees all.” Then he saw two stars and called them the “Kenyon Nuts.” “Where?” chided Rachelle. “They're so small I can't see!” Everyone cracked up.

Normally, all the different groups attending the camp gathered together on the final night and put on a skit to present what they had learned. Locke was exempted. The Locke campers skipped the campwide awards ceremony, too, holding their own private event in the middle of their tent village. It worked out well, but it was hard to miss the message—intended or otherwise: Locke kids were different.

At the final campfire they had a share circle. The idea was for the campers to confide their biggest fear about the trip. Jovan, an African American boy whose father had died when Jovan was a month old, started off. “I was afraid of the woods,” he said. Then came Akira, a tiny child from a renowned gang family. “I was afraid of touching sharks.” Deangelo volunteered that he had been afraid of the water. Kendell stood up and said he was afraid to come on the trip without his “homeys.” Then he thanked his new homeys, naming every person around the campfire—blacks and Hispanics alike.

When Rachelle spoke, there was absolute silence: “I was afraid of the sharks,” she said. “I touched them, but I don't know if I really overcame that fear. But the BIG FEAR, the thing that scared me to death, was being a first-year teacher and having to teach you guys. I was afraid you would eat me alive. I was so scared, and sometimes I got frustrated and pissed off. But I love you all. You have made this the best year of my life. You have taught me so much. I want to thank each and every one of you!”

That night as they made their way back up the dark path to their tents, Pedro, one of the more mature kids on the trip, asked: “How come you so nice, Miss Snyder?”

“They pay me the big bucks, Pedro,” she said with a sigh of contentment.

         

Later, after they had arrived safely on the mainland, the kids were driven back to their homes. One group of four boys begged to stop at the McDonald's, about ten blocks from school, before being dropped off. But not one of them would get out of the car; they insisted on using the drive-through. They explained: they were wearing blue, the color of the Crips, and the McDonald's was located in Blood territory. They did not want to be seen and identified as the enemy. Two of the kids had been jumped before by gangbangers; why risk spoiling one of the happiest times of their lives?

         

Hrag's kids had a field trip, too. It was an annual affair for the biology department at Locke—at least for as long as Vanessa Morris had been in charge. Every spring she and a cohort of sympathetic teachers took several busloads of kids to Cabrillo Beach to see the amazing grunion runs. The spawning of the grunion, small silver fish, takes place each year from March through August, during high tide, along certain California beaches. It is a you've-got-to-see-it-to believe-it tour de force of nature. The action occurs late at night under a full or new moon, when thousands of grunion swim up the beach, seemingly on cue, wriggle into the sand, drop their eggs, wait for them to be fertilized, and then wriggle back out in time to catch the next wave home. The sight of millions of silvery scales shimmering in the sand under the light of the full moon is simply unforgettable. After a year or two, the field trip had become one of Locke's rites of passage.

This year it had been an on-again, off-again proposition. So much had been going on at Locke that Morris had become distracted. Just as she was feverishly planning for the new School of Math and Science, her best friends at the School of Social Empowerment had announced plans for a wholesale bail. She had a cold, and she didn't feel up to the trip. But the biology teachers had promised their kids and set the date, and it didn't seem fair to cancel for a cold. So it was on. Just. It took a lot of last-minute scrambling to make it happen. Jinsue was out buying the food just hours before they were scheduled to go.

Hrag's sister, Gareen, had flown into Los Angeles the night before. Hrag had planned to take Friday off to spend it with her. But then the field trip was put back on the schedule. Gareen was a sport. She sat through six periods of biology in Hrag's classroom that Friday and happily agreed to tag along to help with the field trip that night.

It was so strange. Hrag had kept the details of his private life secret from his kids all year long. It didn't take him long to figure out that being Armenian was not an issue he had to worry about with the gangs in South Los Angeles, but by then he had already decided his students didn't need to know who he was, or where he was from, or how he came to be teaching them. But it was uncanny the way they picked up on things. They could tell he wasn't
American
American. And they were right. He had been born in Saudi Arabia. When he started kindergarten in the United States—a year too early because his aunt enrolled him and mixed up his birthdate—he spoke no English. So he understood how it felt to be a foreigner, how hard it was not to belong, especially as a kid. It made him particularly empathetic toward the students he now taught, but that was something he had never shared with them. Part of his cover was blown the minute the kids saw Gareen. “Oh, Mr. H, that's your sister!”

Hrag was nervous about having her in the classroom. His lesson for the day was a student-performed play about Darwin. It would be a tough one to pull off, particularly with his rowdy fifth-period class. But the kids poured on the charm for Gareen. They acted like angels the whole day.

The field trip that night was another matter altogether. He was uneasy about it right from the start. The night before he slept badly, tossing and turning until the alarm went off. Things didn't feel right. As the day wore on, he became more and more anxious. In all, some 240 kids lined up after school with signed permission slips. For reasons no one could determine, only three of the four buses they had ordered were available to take them to San Pedro, a beachside town fifteen miles south of Locke. Rather than send some kids home, Morris and the others jammed them all in, eighty to ninety to a bus, for the half-hour ride to the coast.

Hrag was the only adult on his bus, and he stood the whole way. The trip was surprisingly hassle-free. The only incident occurred when some white kids saw the bus and gave his students the finger. The whole bus got quiet, and then one kid turned to Hrag and said: “Mr. H, you should never have brought us!”

“Why?” asked Hrag.

“Because we're ghetto!” he replied. With that, the whole busload of kids burst out laughing.

The buses arrived at around five-fifteen, and the kids piled out and scattered. Within minutes they were everywhere—in the water, in the bathhouses, on the beach, in the tide pools, scrambling up the cliffs of the park. And there was no organized way to keep track of them.

Morris had been picky about which teachers she included. Her team from the new School of Math and Science was invited, but she asked only a few people from the science department, reasoning that it was her field trip and she wanted only those teachers who had made a contribution. The result was some ruffled feathers and, on the trip, too little adult supervision. Though Dr. Wells showed up later that night with two of his children, and some of the SE folk stopped by in a gesture of goodwill, there were never more than ten adults present at the same time over the span of the eight-hour field trip.

For a while, the smell of the barbecue drew all the kids back to the picnic area, where they lined up for hot dogs and sodas at a dollar apiece. The teachers did the cooking and serving. The kids were very appreciative, and when they forgot to say “please” or “thank you,” Taylor reminded them. But Hrag remained wary. A strange dynamic was developing between the Hispanics and the blacks. In class, they got along just fine. But here at the beach, things seemed racialized. The kids had completely segregated themselves by race. At one point, Hrag looked over at Taylor and said, “I feel like something's gonna happen, Taylor.”

There was plenty of time for things to go awry. They wouldn't be heading back to Locke until nearly midnight, and the schedule was loose. After dinner, the kids would go to the fire rings for a bonfire. Then they would do a tour of the aquarium and watch a short film on the grunions. Finally, it would be back to the beach to watch the fish do their thing until eleven-thirty or so, when the buses would take them back to Locke. Hrag and Taylor were worried. This field trip had it all: water, fire, and darkness—the perfect ingredients for a disaster.