Magic, Kids, and Detroit--long anecdote

[Ebony AKA AngieJ]

I wrote:
> "..I took an instant poll--do you believe in magic and superstition 
> in real life?  In this particular class, all of the students said 
> "no" save one.  As we moved on, his tablemates asked him 
> why."Because... magic *is* science," he said, as if this was the 
most obvious thing in the world."

Scott wrote:
> --All but one said no? I would have thought that more would have 
said yes. When I was there age I thought that I "knew better" than to 
believe in magic, but still desperately wanted to...

My kids are the opposite, Scott.  They believe it, but they don't 
want to.  :-)

Consider the source.  My students have been identified by our 
district as TAG, but they are growing up in Detroit, Michigan.  If 
you know Detroit well, you need not read further.  ;-)  If you don't, 
I'll try to explain where the sentiment was coming from.

Not too many good things have been said about Detroit in my 
lifetime.  When I went to college, I had fun hearing all my buddies' 
perceptions of my hometown.  After all, we've been called the first 
Third World American City.  Hundreds of houses are burned down every 
October 30 in a pyromaniacal event known as Devil's Night.  In the 
eighties when I was growing up, the crime rate was astronomical, and 
while greatly improved, it's still not Candyland now.  

My students are a lot like me, Scott.  I had good, hard-working blue 
collar parents.  I was a bright kid, and they sheltered me from a 
lot.  I always told college friends that Detroit wasn't so bad... and 
it isn't.  I loved it enough here to come back.  But I grew up in the 
eye of the storm just a few years before my students' time, and for 
some strange reason, I want you to show what my students' worldview 
is, so you can understand where they're coming from.

Here's my personal crime report, and it's one of the better ones.  My 
dad was carjacked twice--first time in 1995 wasn't successful, the 
second time in 1998 was.  Dad stumbled home confused, carless, and 
injured, and died ten days later of a massive heart attack.  Gunshots 
were as much a part of the city's music as vehicles, helicopters, and 
sirens--growing up I heard gunfire all the time, and random bullets 
hit our house and car on two different occasions.  (This is why I 
have a great deal of trouble with the sudden outcry in recent years 
about how our violent, trigger-happy culture is influencing children 
for ill... why wasn't their a bipartisan demand for gun control when 
school violence first erupted in the mid to late eighties in our 
urban centers?   I'll save you my usual rant.  :-))

No, we didn't sell drugs.  No, there were no gangsters prowling the 
streets.  My dad was a mailman and my mom stayed at home so that my 
sisters and I wouldn't become statistics.  We lived in a neighborhood 
consisting of elderly people who planted flowers and fussed at my 
sisters and I from their porches.   

Yet gun violence claimed the lives of a half dozen of my childhood 
friends... again, I'll spare you the rant.  My mother, sisters, and I 
have all been assaulted with a weapon.  Three of my uncles are 
walking around Detroit and Brooklyn with bullets inside of them.  So 
is an aunt.  I'm a godmother twice over--my best friend is raising 
her children alone, as their father was shot to death seven years ago 
at the ripe old age of 18.  My cousin was shot in the stomach the 
year I went to college... after a long battle and much prayer, she 
lived.  Our house was burglarized until we were forced to get an 
alarm system and security bars, and every school I've ever attended 
or taught in here gets broken into at least once a year... all right, 
I'll stop at the tip of the iceberg.  

The local economy isn't very diversified, either.  It consists of 
fast-foot joints, liquor stores, gas stations, Chaldean-run mom and 
pop groceries, drugstores scattered here and there that all close at 
8 or 9 p.m., one SuperKmart on the edge of the city, beauty supply 
stores, hair salons, and churches.  That's it.  If you want anything 
else--a sit-down dinner or a new suit or a Borders book--you have to 
drive to the suburbs.  There is almost no downtown commerce.  I 
thought was the way all cities were until I began to travel and 
realized with shock, "Nope, it's just us."  I've never seen anything 
like this.  Transplants are horrified by how "dead" this city is.  
They stammer, "But don't over a million people live in the city?  
Cities half this size have --fill in the blank--."  Oh, well.  We 
don't.

The no-brainer solution for most Americans with the means would have 
been to move into the suburbs, as a few family friends did, but no 
one in my extended family even considered it an option.  My mother's 
position in a nutshell was "Like nothing bad ever happens out there.  
And I'm not about to chase after *them*... whenever we move in, they 
move out, and then we'll be dealing with the same old element."  You 
see, living in the concrete jungle was far preferable to the open 
hostility (and sometimes more) that family friends faced when 
moving... we were not, and are not, wanted in all but a handful of 
the many local suburbs.  

The unique racial and ethnic polarity of the metro Detroit area is so 
profound that sociologists have dissected it, and all of my college 
friends who've come up to visit have picked up on it.  (That's an 
entirely different post, though.)  Suffice it to say that some of us 
were lumped into the "urban underclass" not by default, but by 
choice... including most of my students' college-educated, gainfully 
employed parents.
 

Summary of the above:  my students, bright as they are, are growing 
up in a real-life dystopia.   

They enjoy books like Harry Potter with gusto, they identify with the 
characters, they love the fantastic and the improbable.  Yet even as 
much as they love the series, at the deepest part of them, they don't 
buy it.  Not really.  They are drawn to the idea of magic and fantasy 
as all children are, but they reject it as being Too Good To Be 
True.  

In order to grow up in Detroit without becoming a statistic, you must 
turn cynicism into an art form.  You learn to detach early in life... 
if you think about the blight, and the crime, and the 
institutionalized racism, and the utter hopelessness of the situation 
all at once, it will destroy you.  That's one script I've seen play 
over and over again in lives all around me ever since I can 
remember.  My students' parents, and their teachers, are for the most 
part realists.

I haven't shared with the list much of the *other* side of my 
classroom Harry Potter conversations.  Ask them who their favorite 
character is and they're very vocal.  Ask them about what will happen 
or who should be with who or why the books should or should not be 
banned... they'll talk your ear off.  Ask them which character they 
identify with or admire... a sizeable number of them draw a blank.  
Then ask them if they believe in magic and the supernatural... they 
will look at you as if you're insane.

So, to break it down into terms that they can understand, I tell them 
stories.

I tell them stories from my own life and childhood.  I tell them 
about walking home from the DOT stop on Dexter Avenue sometime around 
May 1994.  Glad that spring had finally arrived after a long, harsh 
winter.  Taking care that you didn't get broken glass or discarded 
Coney Island carton in your sandals.  Staying completely alert but 
strangely tuned into your surroundings, with the nonchalant 
withitness that characterizes inner-city residents.  Making sure your 
jewelry was hidden or removed--I was assaulted during my freshman 
year of high school when, lost in a daydream, I'd forgotten to do 
this before leaving school.  They nod... they can relate to this.  
Every Detroiter I've ever met has their own urban nightmare to 
share.  

Then... I tell them about noticing flowers half-hidden in litter-
strewn, knee-high weeds.  I tell them about the green clover that 
thrives in the cracks of sidewalks and gutters in my own 
neighborhood, and how it was always good--if I stumbled upon it 
before I saw it, the first I'd notice was the faint scent of fresh 
greenery that crushing it between my heel and the sidewalk had 
released.  Or if I was taking my time on my own block, I'd search for 
the all important four-leaf one... and no, I never found it.  ("But I 
did!" one or more of the kids invariably exclaims.)

Once they're warmed to me, I tell them about being ten again, laying 
in the grass of my grandmother's tiny garden plot, pretending that it 
was a field, looking up at the space in the sky between the houses--
and playing cloud games.   Or standing on tiptoe next to my mother at 
my window in the middle of a winter's night, utterly amazed at the 
amber sky and the white-blanketed world--and I still haven't found 
the words to describe the way that a new snowstorm hushes the city 
sounds, cloaking them in silence. 

And then I stop.

All the kids I've ever encountered can relate to this... and then 
they tell me what they've noticed.  And when I take the poll on magic 
at the end of the hour, quite a few students have changed their minds.

Detroit is a paradox.  So are my students, and when I think about it, 
so are most of the kids in this city.  So am I.

If we accept those three statements as givens, then a belief in magic 
and the supernatural is automatically assumed.  This is why the kids, 
once they thought about it, reversed their votes.  For even children 
born in the eye of a storm are children.

And our stories are so rarely told... I can't identify with the 
protagonist of *A Hero Ain't Nuthin' But A Sandwich*, for instance, 
and neither can most city kids.  I do identify with Lauryn Hill's 
*Every Ghetto, Every City* (explores the universality of urban 
childhood, sweet yet shadowed) and R. Kelly's *I Wish* (laments his 
gunned-down childhood playmates and family members)... both grew up 
in situations like my upbringing, and the first time I heard each 
song, I had to pull the car over and cry.  

I am not joking.  Even six months after I first heard it, two points 
of Kelly's song (which stayed at #1 on the urban charts for weeks and 
weeks on end this fall--and it deserved to) still make my eyes 
sting.  When he tells his dead loved one "it's all right now--we're 
out the 'hood now," in that instant, I think of my best friend's 
dreams, ended by teen pregnancy and single motherhood... and I see my 
father's eyes.  He wanted so much for me because he'd wanted so much 
for himself.  I'm "out the 'hood now"... but my best friend isn't 
yet, and my father didn't quite make it.  

Then he addresses society at the very end: "instead of the world 
throwing stones at me... somebody pray for me".  That one lyric 
expresses the feelings of my students, and they say it to me all the 
time.  Deep down, my black and Hispanic children are fighting against 
all the negative messages that mainstream society and their own 
cultures constantly feed them.  I know that fight... the script is 
subtler now than it used to me, and that makes it even more 
dangerous.  

I think of my mission as this.  I have to prepare these children--and 
that means any child--to run a race.  They're starting a little bit 
behind the other runners... several generations behind, in fact.  
Many of them have the equivalent of sprained ankles, broken legs, 
even mild dehydration.  Even the healthy ones are

"When I say go, you've got to run," is the unspoken message I'm 
trying to convey when I teach.

The kid-racers look at the other runners, many yards ahead.  Then 
they look at me as if I'm an alien.

"You expect us to run?  But look at them!"

"Sure, look at them.  They're farther ahead of you.  Many of them 
have better running shoes.  And a few of them don't much like the 
thought of you running.  But you've got to run."

The kids still look at me as if I have two heads.  "Well, can't we 
stop the race for a minute so we can catch up?  That's only fair."

"Well... we tried stopping the race before.  Some of the runners in 
the first heat caught up.  A few even passed 'em up.  But the judges 
are leaning towards not letting that happen again.  The feeling is 
that it's your own fault that you got here late... they were right on 
time, so they by rights get the head start.  After all, *they* didn't 
make you late, did they?"

This is nearly the last straw for them.  They don't mention the fact 
that they didn't qualify for the race until a few moments before.  We 
all overlook it politely.

"And you expect us to run?" they say.

"Not only that, you must run.  There is no other option.  And not 
only must you run, you've got to win.  Injuries, late start, and 
all.  You have *got* to win, win fair, and win every time.  You'll 
have to run twice as fast, grin and bear the pain too.  They may even 
change the rules in the middle of the race.  But you must win."

"You're crazy!"

"I know.  I also know you can do it."

"How can you be so sure?"

My reply is not in words.  I unzip my coach's jacket.  They see a red-
white-and-blue ribbon... and the glint of a gold medallion.

You see, I love my students so much because just a short time ago, I 
was one of them.  I'm not sure what saved me from death and injury 
and teen pregnancy and STDs and (the most common disease of all here) 
despair and hopelessness and counterproductivity--whether it was Mama 
or Daddy or the care of a loving Creator or teachers who didn't 
assume all urban kids were stupid or something innate or a 
combination of all those things, I don't know.

But magic just about sums it up, don't you think?  :-)  This is why I 
fight tooth and nail to teach my curriculum undiluted.  These kids 
need to be able to think on their feet, they must be creative, and 
they must be able to dream.  They're good children--and I want them 
to grow up to become good people.  On top of that, I want them to 
*earn* good standardized test scores and report card grades--the 
icing on the cake.  When the script tells you constantly that you and 
people like you are stupid, that your school system is failing and 
can't produce any decent graduates, and all sorts of other negative 
things, it's always nice to have your refutation of the propaganda in 
black and white.  When the book *The Bell Curve* was published and 
publicized, I didn't get mad... I just thought of my SAT scores and 
grinned. I want my students to be able to do the same thing.

Re-reading this post, I am sure that it was pointless.  I've both 
said too much and said not nearly enough.  There are just some things 
that can't be explained... like magic.

Take heart, Scott.  There's hope for my students after all.  And 
thanks so much for your post... think of us fondly, and send a prayer 
our way.  We need as many as we can get.

--Ebony AKA AngieJ