A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  At our first session she sat across from me at a small round table, a thick manila folder containing the sum total of my printed life in front of her. She casually let me know that I wasn’t the normal kid on her roster.

  “So, where should we start?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The GED test is in June. What do you want to work on?”

  I laughed. “How much time you got?”

  “Well, what do you want help with?”

  “Everything,” I said. To her credit, she was not fazed.

  “Okay, let’s dig in then,” Joanna said, opening a math book. “This is a shitload of material to cover,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just because it’s an alternate track, doesn’t mean it’s easy. The average high school graduate can’t pass the GED test.”

  “Good I’m not average then, right?” I said, trying to play it off.

  She exhaled deeply, but teased right along. “Let’s hope not.”

  When we started working together Joanna spoke of this enormous balloon of information hanging over my head, representing everything I had not yet learned. We both tried to ignore it—all it did was overwhelm us—but it floated there in our presence, just like she described.

  Like putting my shoulder into something heavy, I felt the world offer a little more give. There was a link, a cause and effect between what I did and what I got, which appealed to me. I could control more aspects of my life and started to respond to that sense of ownership. As the pressure released, I found room to move and space to breathe. It became clear to me that life is a series of choices.

  With the privileges came freedom, so I was out of the house on my own more often, regularly going to the YMCA or playing basketball at one of the parks down the street. Park Slope was like an oasis in Brooklyn, located between some of the borough’s roughest neighborhoods. But things bled over boundaries. A few blocks from the Boys Town residence was a large faded brick elementary school, William Alexander Middle School 51. In the back was a high-gated metal fence, surrounding black pavement of basketball hoops with fresh white nets. On the weekends, the park was a mix of higher-income white kids and black kids from the nearby public housing.

  One Saturday afternoon I was alone at the courts waiting up against the fence for the next game. Another dude came wandering through the court. He had sleepy eyes and wore a Yankees hat, Jay-Z style—clean, its brim a flat line. Short and thin, he carried himself as if he had a Napoleon complex, preemptively on offense. He was looking down at his phone, swaggering around like it was his backyard, making comments about the game.

  “I’m on next,” I said to him, leaning back on the fence.

  He ignored me, but started shaking his head and laughing. I was allowed out only for an hour so my time was precious.

  “I called next,” I said. “You gotta wait, man. You weren’t even here.”

  “You talking, man?” he said.

  “Fuck yeah,” I said, putting my weight back onto my feet.

  “What you say? What?” he said.

  “I said I got next.”

  He waved me off and circled a little around the park, talking to someone on his phone.

  When the game ended, he wandered back onto the court, grabbed the ball, and started shooting. I had about six inches on him, had quit drinking and smoking, and had been lifting weights; it wasn’t even a contest. Though I always found it unfair to fight smaller guys, I hated reckless mouths.

  “Yo, gimme the ball,” I said. “I’m next.”

  “Fuck out of here,” he said, still shooting.

  “You gonna give me that ball or we got a problem.”

  “Yeah, motherfucker? What’s gonna happen?” he said, about to take another shot.

  “Keep shooting your bricks and find out.”

  He stopped for a second, like I cut him. Shaking his head, he mumbled under his breath. He hung still a moment, waiting. Then he fired a chest pass at me and walked off. “A’ight,” he said, just floating it there. “A’ight.”

  About thirty minutes later he was back with one of his friends, a guy about my height with a rippled chest, tattoos up his forearms. “What now, pussy?” he was saying, but I wasn’t looking at him. Now Yankees Hat had a .38 revolver pointed right in my face. I dropped the ball and backed up to the fence.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d had a gun pulled on me but it’s something you never get used to. Pulling a gun is like signing a contract; if someone pulls a gun on you he better use it. And if he doesn’t, you have to get yours and use it.

  “What’s good, pussy?” they were shouting over each other, shouting and weaving an alternating rhythm between them.

  “What’s all that shit you was talking?”

  “You think we’re pussy out here?”

  “Who’s pussy now!”

  A gun in your eyeline washes the world away. Everything blurs and fades. There’s just the gleaming black and the thump in your chest. As I was cornered back to the fence, I gradually sidestepped to the entrance and then backed out of the park. “Yeah, pussy! That’s what I thought,” they yelled after me. I could hear they weren’t chasing me because their voices remained distant and I heard no footsteps. “What’s up now, motherfucker!” I just kept running up to Sixth Avenue.

  My ability to retaliate was limited, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it. But I had no phone, no quick access to my old neighborhood, no way to round up anyone. The program saved my life again that day. And I felt like I passed some kind of test.

  There was a trade-off, though. I was impressed at how I reacted but annoyed that it had happened at all. I had let my guard down, didn’t even have an antenna up when the guy took off after we first had words. I forgot that the safety in Boys Town didn’t transfer out into the world. Reading body language, sniffing out potential danger, are life-or-death skills and mine had gone rusty. I had lost what I had already earned the hard way, and it almost cost me my life.

  “How did you get here?” Joanna asked.

  “I ran,” I said, trying to catch my breath.

  I was late for our session because someone at the house had stolen my MetroCard right off my dresser. Joanna helped me with writing, with math, with everything on the GED test. But she also had an intuitive grasp of the big picture—that I was living in a world where things like that would happen all the time. In my experience, schools didn’t seem to care what happened to me before 8:00 a.m. and after 3:00 p.m. But those things are as important as what’s going on between first and last bell.

  Some days when I was overwhelmed, Joanna helped me move the goalposts. She taught me that the final result is not the measure that counts; people can’t be viewed in a vacuum. What matters is the distance between where you were and where you end up. How do we grow relative to ourselves? That giant balloon floating over my head was over everyone’s head, so it’s meaningless. I loved her for making me see that.

  It got to the point where Joanna and I would get so sidetracked talking that she started to schedule me as her last student. She had an amazing grasp of language that inspired me, even when she was just talking. I’d end up staying for hours talking politics, race relations, family dynamics. I’d show up with fast food from McDonald’s and we’d get into a thirty-minute conversation about how corporations exploit impoverished communities. Tutoring would bleed into therapy or larger discussions of the world. Any one thing might trigger it. She would eventually return to the algebra or history lesson, but it ended up seeming small in comparison.

  It was important to me that reciprocity was a part of the learning process. Eventually, I got the sense that I was teaching her as much as she was teaching me. She’d ask in-depth questions about my life and her curiosity would peak when I went into detail. It made me feel like the hardships I endured were a thing of value.

  I once read that for a child to grow, he needs roots and wings, a comfortable home base, and the self-confidence t
o fly on his own. Boys Town gave me both. First, it gave me my childhood back. I’d led a life of self-sufficiency since I was six years old; the residence gave me a respite from that. The second thing it gave me was the room and support to mature. A few weeks into my GED program, I made my case at the family meeting and earned a bed in the Achievement room. I tried to make the place my own: I hung up basketball and football posters, family pictures, a Nerf plastic hoop over the door. It was the biggest room on the top floor, with a couch and its own bathroom. The room had slanted ceiling beams, skylights, and windows onto the street where I would sit and watch the world go by.

  Achievement was designed to function as a bridge back into society, so there was no longer a card or point system. All the consequences became natural: normal parenting things like getting positive praise or being forced to stay in your room. There was a self-directed component too because the family teachers couldn’t keep track of everything you were doing at that level. Your independence is kind of the point. One of the things I used my free time for was something I had never done before: read. Reading was a new outlet, a way to seek solitude and sanctuary that I never knew existed.

  Just as I became open to a different kind of role model, two perfect ones appeared, almost divinely. First, Damon handed me a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He preached so passionately about his hero that I cracked the book immediately. Malcolm rose from nothing to become one of the most powerful and influential men of the twentieth century. As a young boy, Malcolm’s father was killed, likely by white supremacists. The stress on his mother triggered a nervous breakdown and the state confined her to a mental institution.

  Seeing my own story through his was powerful. We both had been through troubled homes and the juvenile justice system. By sheer force of will, and education, he rose like a phoenix. He would debate kids from Oxford and Harvard and embarrass them. He blew through the library catalog and read the dictionary cover to cover. The first time I saw the word “astonishing” was in Malcolm’s autobiography; I looked it up and started using it, arming myself to converse with a different class.

  I connected fiercely with Malcolm’s passion for justice. Though I hadn’t even thought about it in those terms, that feeling was always in me. “They cripple the bird’s wing,” he once said, “then condemn it for not flying as fast as they.” I could relate to the mix of activism and the street that Malcolm embodied—to his aggression, his purpose, and his power.

  Malcolm was a credible messenger to me. He grew up in a single-parent home, in poverty; had done and sold the drugs, had been in the streets and in prison. So when he told me to leave the streets alone, clean up my act, and focus my fight, I listened. He didn’t lecture on personal responsibility from a perch; he had been down in the hole. His message was I am you and you are me and we can do this.

  I learned about the forces of white supremacy, the need for our people to control our own destiny, and the level of brutality blacks have endured in this country. Though these issues obviously affected me, I had never really put much thought into them. In fact, my interaction with white people had been mostly positive across the board: Christine, Marty, Joanna, Ms. Oglio. Opening Malcolm’s book and learning history through his eyes was like being thrown in the deep end of the pool. He never stopped sounding the drumbeat against institutional racism in America. That book was one long awakening.

  He was such an imposing and powerful presence—even on the page; the only person I knew like that was Dean Walton back from my junior high school, who could move crowds off a simple word or action. Malcolm was in control, unafraid, and unapologetic. He was the pure embodiment of righteousness and justice. He loved his people so much that he made the ultimate sacrifice for the cause. I’d been a fighter my whole life, but not always for the right reasons. Malcolm was interested in love and unity; he was about channeling the fight toward the systems that oppress us. In reading his book, I was full of energy, anger, and love for people that I hadn’t even met.

  Malcolm’s pursuit of knowledge was a huge inspiration and aspiration for me. Through him, I recognized that books are the gatekeepers to many of the answers we seek. Malcolm led me into African American history, which I’d had little to no exposure to. Haiti’s history of early independence, its routing of its colonial masters, and the heroism of L’Ouverture and Dessalines are some of the first things we learned at a young age. But in America, if you miss a couple of days of school in February, you won’t encounter African American history at all. Malcolm taught me about the larger world and helped me understand the context of who I was.

  The other book I read up on the couch in the Achievement room was Dreams from My Father, a memoir by a then-rising politician named Barack Obama. I felt a kinship with this mixed-race senator with a foreign background, a funny name, and the gall to think he could change the world. I identified with Obama’s feeling like a foreigner in America, and then a stranger in Africa. His visit to Kenya to meet his family there affected him profoundly, allowing him to pull back the lens on his own identity. I thought of Haiti, how I’m both fully separate but entirely connected to its people and its land, how it contributed to the person I am.

  Obama was the future and he introduced me to what things might be. He was political and polished, but still a child of Malcolm’s. In the forty years between the two of them, progress had been made in society and their ascensions reflected that progression. Malcolm was the consummate outsider, the revolutionary shaking the gates open; Barack was the chosen one who would walk through, rising to the top of the establishment while always remaining himself. These men are giants, and their very existence gave me a sense of who I wanted to be. They were so far ahead in the distance, of course, but at least I knew which direction to face.

  As the end of my two-year sentence approached, I made a decision that most reflected how far I had come: I chose to stay at Boys Town for an additional year. Being away from the street and from my home for so long gave me perspective. I was standing above something and seeing things I couldn’t see while down in it. Like how insidious an influence my old world had been. My few visits home on the way to the GED school were a stark reminder. Park Slope and Boys Town were so much more conducive to my new lifestyle, which was still shaky and precarious. Though I stood more firmly inside my new self, the street had a magnetic pull that I still couldn’t trust myself to be around.

  With Joanna’s perpetual support and help I passed the GED test and immediately enrolled in BMCC, which Boys Town helped me pay for. No one in my family had ever attended college, and the burden of that actually felt good. With college on the horizon, I wanted to put myself in the best position to succeed. I wasn’t going to get anywhere unless I stayed exactly where I was.

  College blew my world wide open. I had only just learned it existed a few years before and then I was there, as hungry and motivated as any student on campus. To someone who had been at the mercy of others for so long, college was liberating. I could pick my own classes, which were up to me to attend, and I was surrounded by a diverse group of students with years of schooling on me. And the women: smart, sophisticated, beautiful women with no interest in tough guys or clowns. I’d be lying to say they weren’t an extra motivation. Iza, Joanna, and my professors all helped me with the workload. They saw the student I could be, rather than just the deficits I walked in with. There were all these things college students had prepared for their entire lives—the intricacies of applications, schedules, financial aid forms, computer use, and independent learning. I entered with none of it.

  But just thinking about my future turned into me looking forward to it, which itself was turned into something almost magical.

  I’d always assumed you had to have all the advantages to succeed, but I learned it’s not true. Ambition and passion count for more, and they carried me through. I embraced my new role as a college student and used it to describe myself any chance I got. “I’m a college student,” I’d say, loving the sound of it, t
he new stature it conferred. I had been saved, and on that campus, I finally felt worth saving.

  I worked a series of jobs while at BMCC, most of which were set up by the Canadas. But one of my early jobs came about by chance. An optometrist who lived on my street saw me sweeping the steps out front one day. We got talking and she asked if I was looking for work and soon I was handing out flyers for her. Just living on a block where people owned businesses—and the opportunity that afforded—gave me an advantage I hadn’t ever had.

  As I was working, in school, and on the Achievement level up in my own room, a perceptible distance grew between me and the rest of the house. Sometime during the semester, that distance turned into resentment. I began to rebel against a system that I felt was crushing me, not letting me move or breathe. I was pressing against the sides of a box I had outgrown.

  There’s the ideal time to leave everything; it’s a bell curve with a sweet spot in the middle and a steep decline if you miss that window. I was eighteen and had mastered the entire program, but still asking permission to use the bathroom or get up from the table. I was still getting constantly punished over infractions, sent to my room, even put back on subsystem, back to the card and the points, which felt like an insult. “You guys fucking know me!” I’d yell at the Canadas. They’d send me upstairs and I’d stew on that couch: I don’t need this shit anymore. I was the grizzled veteran, mature and bitter and dying to get out. Close to thirty kids had passed through the system and gone home since the day I walked in that house. I had grown out of BT. But I remained, the fixture larger than the space.