by Lisa Fenn
Navid had an expectant glow about him too. He said that listening to me gush about Leroy and Dartanyon had fueled his eagerness to grow our family. “You realize you light up when you talk about them, right?”
“Well I don’t know about that,” I said. “I just think they’re really neat kids.”
“You talk about them like a proud parent,” he said. “It’s invigorating to see how quickly they have affected you.” Whether I noticed it or not, Navid detected a maternal instinct welling within me, and it expanded the boundary lines of his fatherhood dream. “I could see Lisa starting to love these boys like sons,” he would write in one of his adoption application essays, “and though I initially wanted a biological child, I realized through her experiences that I could love any child powerfully. Color, race, and blood do not define a family.” Navid and I were unified in this overarching decision to adopt, and agreed to adopt a child from Cleveland to honor both my birthplace and the impact that Leroy and Dartanyon had made on us. However, we remained deadlocked on one significant aspect of this choice: the age of our prospective child.
I voted to adopt a teenager, arguing that we would never be younger than we were at that moment, allowing us maximum energy to devote to a child with significant physical or emotional needs. “I would rather adopt a kid that no one else wants and give them a chance to know love,” I said. “That’s what this world needs.”
This made Navid nervous. He wasn’t interested in parenting as a means of social justice. He wanted to hold babies. He wanted to kiss squishy toes and say “Oogly-googly.” He’d delivered fifty babies during his medical residency, each time visualizing the day when he would welcome his own. And until that happened, my husband remained the only man in the history of our church to volunteer for Sunday nursery duty.
“I just think parenthood is something we need to grow into,” he said. “We don’t know the first thing about raising teenagers, let alone teenagers with complicated issues and physical disabilities.”
In the forefront of my mind was Leroy and Dartanyon, and what great kids they were. How hard could it be to love them and care for them? How much could kids like them achieve in a peaceful, supportive home like ours?
Then we met Erin Joudrey, the social worker assigned to conduct our home study. She was a jovial woman charged with assessing our marriage, adoption goals, communication styles, and family histories. Though she worked with children of all ages, her niche was coordinating foster placement for teenagers with attachment disorders and violent behavioral tendencies. Clearly, this was a sign.
“Navid and I have talked about adopting an older child like that,” I said. “Tell us, what type of parents succeed in those cases?”
“Honestly, it’s the nice Christian families who fail most often. They think that if they just show a child love, God will take care of the rest,” she said. “But it’s not that simple. The parents who succeed tend to be the ones who grew up in extreme dysfunction or abuse themselves.” These parents could handle school expulsions and kids hurling vulgar insults at them, because they themselves endured similar chaos and lived to tell about it. In other words, Erin said, crazy tolerates crazy.
I looked around at our well-appointed home, with its custom-coordinated throw pillows on the window seat, my golden Emmy Awards gracing the mantel, and an Ivy League diploma hanging on the office wall. Before I could even consider the clothes hanging in rainbow order in our closet, Erin confirmed what I suspected, and what Navid hoped: “Sorry, guys, but you’re not crazy enough.”
CHAPTER 8
ELEPHANT IN THE HOOD
A story, most essentially, requires change. The agent of that change gives each story its contour. The characters grant the fingerprint. If there is a formula, I suppose it can be briefly summarized this way: introduce the character, sketch his backstory, present him at the moment of conflict, and carry us to the result. To the change. We explore the mighty outlines of a character’s life before the conflict—the greatness that lifts him into the place where strangers care. We introduce the first hint of the problem, and then travel through the character’s struggle with that problem, and how he is changed by it. If a story succeeds, we are changed from the sidelines, just a tiny bit.
Here, in this feature I was developing for ESPN, both Leroy and Dartanyon had a compelling backstory. But there was something more magical and also far more delicate to capture and convey: their bond. Dartanyon carrying Leroy gave their connection physical form, but it was the jokes they traded, the songs they sang, the looks they shared, and their infectious wit and irreverence that provided the purest and richest vein of their story. But how to frame those moments—this largely intangible and kindred knowing—as reflections of their bond and in the context of a sporting season in their lives? And simultaneously paint the challenges of their lives outside the shelter of their friendship?
Friendship, as a theme, is easy to state and difficult to show. There was no schedule of events for Leroy and Dartanyon’s brotherhood, and few visual images of how their relationship served as a catalyst for the change so central to the story’s structure. Presenting a friendship in proper measure and in real moments was an assignment unlike any other I had attempted.
So quietly, I continued following them through their arduous routines, waiting for convincing moments. I met Dartanyon at the bus stop for his ninety-minute ride to school, just as the sun poked up. I followed him and Leroy through more classes, more weight-lifting sessions. I tagged along on class field trips and attended team fund-raisers. Though they were animated among their peers, Leroy and Dartanyon’s gregarious laughter was replaced by muffled, monotone voices once it was just the three of us, as though I were a parent chaperoning a date. Directing them to “Be funnier on this take,” or “Say that again in a warmer tone,” or asking how they felt about one another, only exacerbated the problem.
Most features can be shot in two to ten days, yet after the better part of two months in Cleveland, I still struggled to capture the magic. While my colleagues investigated college recruiting scandals and chased Bret Favre in and out of retirement, I sat in Big Ma’s basement watching two boys watch The Simpsons. At times, the journalist in me was unsure what I was looking for, but I knew these were the places to look. And although it appeared painfully unproductive and fiscally irresponsible from a managerial perspective, Victor allowed me to keep going back—in part because he trusted me, and in part because for the time and money spent, I needed to come back with a story.
What I found along the way challenged my own life story and my own patterns of thinking. As a child on the white side of town, I grew up believing that with willpower, one could overcome any circumstance. This is America, where people succeed or fail based on individual effort. And yet as I sat on Leroy’s front porch, and as I met Dartanyon’s extended family, I was struck by how hardship engulfed multiple generations of families. Nearly everyone I met was some combination of uneducated, unemployed, poor, tired, and drug-addicted. Why wasn’t the “determination + perseverance = success” formula working? Why hadn’t Dartanyon registered for the SAT college entrance exam? Why did Leroy owe $2,000 for a cell phone he never owned? Why did Big Ma have to calculate the cost of gas to pick up Leroy from lifting practice? Where was Leroy’s father? Why had none of Dartanyon’s brothers completed high school? Why weren’t they all just trying a little harder?
“You ask an awful lot of questions,” Leroy said one afternoon.
“And you don’t want those answers anyway,” Dartanyon added. “They’ll just depress you.”
My questions were met with reticence, for the only white people who came around here asking questions were the police, Leroy said, and nothing good ever came of that. On several occasions when Kameron’s white crew van pulled up to Big Ma’s house, neighbors bolted indoors and shut the blinds. “They all think you’re with the Drug Enforcement Agency,” Big Ma said. “You’ve got everyone calling up and down the street warning each other.”
“That’s just how the world is,” Leroy said. This was his sole explanation for the difficulties around him.
“It doesn’t have to be,” I said. “What would you like to change about your life?”
Leroy gave me a cockeyed look for thinking that changing anything in East Cleveland was going to be as easy as changing a lightbulb.
“I guess if I could change something, I’d find a lighter legless dude to carry around,” Dartanyon replied. They routinely reverted to jokes—the easy, comfortable way out of my abstract questions.
“I’d change the ‘hit him or I’ll hit you’ ritual,” Leroy said, suddenly serious. “I hated that.” He explained that, beginning when he was eight years old, his mother tried to toughen him up by ordering him to fight friends and strangers alike. Katrina would yell, “Hit him, Redd! Whup him good!” Leroy choked back the tears. He hated every swing, but he knew that if he refused to fight, his mother would beat him even harder with that nasty switch from Big Ma’s backyard. With “hit him or I’ll hit you,” you were going to get it one way or another. In her defense, Katrina was following the law of the streets, like all of the other mothers in the hood who didn’t have fathers around to protect their boys. She needed her sons to command respect on their own, just like her brothers and her uncles had. But all Leroy learned from this ritual was to loathe confrontation, and that extended to questions like mine.
Hit him or I’ll hit you. Because that’s how the world is.
I thought of Coach Robinson’s early words to me—“This world’s got nothing for them.” I wanted to be more than a turkey lady—I wanted to emanate curative love and unconventional solutions. But I fell short, in part because there was an elephant in every room I visited. That elephant was me.
At times it felt like a charade—this suburban Ivy Leaguer roaming around East Cleveland. Neighbors greeted one another in excited tones but rarely acknowledged me. Neither Leroy nor Dartanyon introduced me. And why would they? I was the reporter lady forcing lame smiles, meddling with my invasive questions, and scrunching my nose at the cigarette smoke curling between us. Though I told myself that I was not fearful of this side of town, I was at the very least skittish. I was uncomfortable with their lifestyles, their decisions, and, as our social worker Erin had put it, the craziness of it all. Why couldn’t they just stay in school, get jobs, pay the bills, and say no to drugs? My white privilege taught me that these were simple, universal choices equally afforded to all Americans.
But as I pieced together the tenuous details of their personal stories, one fact grew clear: few had chosen poverty, any more than I chose my advantages. Families like the Suttons and Crocketts were born into sets of disadvantaged conditions that cascaded into subsequent negative outcomes. As children, they attended underfunded schools and returned home to overstressed single parents unequipped to nurture their emotional development. As teens, while their parents worked, many turned to the streets for a sense of belonging and a cure for boredom. They moved frequently and experienced regular episodes of hunger, homelessness, and unemployment—not to mention the drug exposure, teen pregnancy, and lower graduation rates that dog lower-income youth. And from there the cycle ensnares anew.
My growing sense was that Big Ma, Katrina, and Arthur were not bad people. They were limited people. There were decisions they had made for themselves, and others that life had forced upon them. And as I began to understand the sheer complexity of their existence, I began to see them as people to respect rather than as mysteries to solve. I ceased my probing. I abandoned my questions. I stopped scrutinizing their conversations and got in on the jokes. I quit pitying their deficiencies. I settled in beside them to absorb their sadness and their sweetness, to listen and learn. I hoped to convince them—or perhaps more so, myself—that our differences need not separate us. And as we sat, I sensed the sacred whisper: These are my beloved.
“IF YOU’RE GONNA hang around here, you’re gonna have to learn the language,” Leroy said one afternoon on his front porch steps. “Let’s start you off with some beatbox. Try it like this: Boots-and-cats-and-boots-and-cats-and-boots-and-cats.” I envied his ability to reproduce hip-hop sounds and percussion instruments with his mouth. But though he methodically broke it down for me until we’d squeezed every last bit of cool out of the riff, I still bit my tongue and spit on myself, like a baby attempting solid food for the first time.
Dartanyon tried to console me. “Don’t worry, you can’t expect to get your black card in two months,” he said. “You gotta work to be this fly.” We moved on to video games, where the blind guy sat inches from the television and beat me mercilessly. They eased my distaste for tattoos by explaining how in lives of limited possessions and mementos, they secured their memories in ink. They taught me how to hot-wire a cable signal and boost my cell phone volume by putting it into a plastic cup. “Ghetto speakers,” Leroy said. “They work.”
And fortunately for my employment status, all our weeks of perceived idleness were working as well. Leroy and Dartanyon began to shine on tape, the unintended by-product of my assimilation into their surroundings. As my guard relaxed, their grace extended. I found that the key to producing a story on a friendship is to become a part of it, just as the key to understanding a community is to sit within it.
By late spring, Big Ma and I were calling out Wheel of Fortune letters together. She said I might as well call her Big Ma, like everyone else. She started greeting me with a hug and offering herself as an escort to the highway entrance whenever I left after dusk. “Next time you come, don’t wear those blue pants round here though,” Leroy’s uncle said to me with a soft wink and a stern nod. “You gonna get yourself shot.”
I was still the elephant in the neighborhood, but I was their elephant. And therein laid the pivotal, delicate change that every great narrative requires. I was capturing their stories, while they were refining mine.
BY HIS SENIOR year, Dartanyon understood just how physically strong he was. And after so many years of people looking at him like he was an anomaly for those funny eyes, he enjoyed standing out as a different sort of freak—a freak of nature. In late March 2009, he finished second in the Ohio state powerlifting championships and set an individual state record of 580 pounds in the deadlift. Leroy had his own success, capturing the Ohio state bench-press title in his weight class. So one month later, as we set out to John F. Kennedy High School on Cleveland’s east side for the Senate Conference powerlifting championships, the meet felt largely like a formality. Lincoln-West was the hands-down favorite.
Everyone in the gym knew who “Muscles” was, and Dartanyon’s competitive acquaintances circled around to shake his hand and beat on his biceps as soon as we arrived. A significant police presence lined the perimeter of the gymnasium. Dartanyon and Leroy wasted no time lightening the mood, turning the simplest moments into launchpads for entertainment. Dartanyon led stretching, and in between exercises, he moonwalked around the circle, checking on people and firing them up. “Leroy, touch your toes!” Dartanyon called. Leroy pounded around the floor beside
him as if searching for them.
“Oh, they’re at home,” Leroy goofed. After stretching, the two danced around the gym, cracking jokes and singing hip-hop like they were hosting a variety show. Yet the moment their names were called, the switch flipped. Dartanyon carried Leroy to his bench, both mentally locked in to the task at hand. With Dartanyon holding his hips, Leroy pressed 305 pounds, then 315 pounds, and finally 330 pounds. Not only did he outlift everyone in his own weight class by more than 100 pounds, he outbenched the entire gym, beating even the top heavyweight by 25 pounds.
“How does he do that with no legs?” kids marveled.
“If you think that’s amazing, wait till you see his squat,” Dartanyon joked.
Dartanyon’s bench press was always fifty pounds short of Leroy’s, but he made up for it with his deadlift. His first mark of 545 pounds instantly broke his own previous conference record by 25 pounds. Ten minutes later, he increased to 550 pounds. Lift. Squeeze. Hold. Got it. While waiting for his third attempt, Dartanyon walked over to the bleachers to check his cell phone. It was gone. He searched his pants pockets. His wallet was missing too.
“NOOOOOOOO!” Dartanyon flew into a rage. “Whoever stole my stuff, I’m gonna kill you!” He looked like he just might snap a neck, and the entire gymnasium stopped to see if he’d find the right one. Kameron grabbed his camera to resume filming Dartanyon as he flew around the gym, raving maniacally. I motioned for Kameron to stop. “But this is an important moment,” Kameron said. “He just got his stuff stolen. We’re here to film what’s happening. Documentary. Root word document.”
