A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  One of the things Boys Town drilled into us was the law of unintended consequences. “No matter how small you think the situation is,” Iza would say, “there’s a ripple effect you can’t see. Like throwing a rock in a pond.” Something small can lead to death or twenty years in prison. It happened all the time.

  Iza was half Puerto Rican, half Dominican, and short with long curly hair and a bright smile. She had a nurturing style that I was drawn to. The Canadas lived on the ground floor above the basement, with their two daughters, who were around nine and six at the time. Iza loved all types of music, was a skilled cook, and had as much medical knowledge as a doctor. She transformed that house into a home. From Christine to Ms. Oglio to Iza, I had always gravitated toward maternal figures, especially those in a professional capacity. I became attached to Iza, her mothering responses, her willingness to listen, her nonconfrontational approach. I didn’t even know how much I craved that.

  “Jim, we need to get you some clothes,” she said to me one Sunday afternoon. I was lying on the couch watching football and zoning out. All the other kids were down at the park, but I didn’t have my privs so I was glued to the house.

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “You just been wearing that denim outfit like every day since you got here.”

  “C’mon, why you knocking my clothes?” I asked jokingly. “Charles gave me this.”

  “I’m not knocking. You just got to mix it up. Plus you gotta get some pants that fit.”

  “Nuh uh. No way. This is—”

  “You can’t be wearing your pants all saggy. Who’s going to hire you?”

  “What? Hire me? I ain’t gonna wear ’em different just cause somebody says.”

  “Okay, okay. Look at you, all defiant.”

  She took me out shopping, got me some smaller pants, a couple of button-down shirts, sweat outfits. When we got back to the house she pulled out another bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s yours,” she said, with a mischievous look. “Open it.”

  I opened the box and pulled out a nice pair of matching red pajamas. I laughed. Every piece of clothing I owned was blue—Crip colors—and Iza purposely got me Blood colors as a playful shot at my old ways. It was almost like a dare, but I wore them.

  I felt like she was looking out for me, maybe even more than the other residents. After one of our family meetings was breaking up, Iza came up to me. She kept her voice low, knowing how embarrassed I could get. “Jim, can I be straight with you about something?”

  “Sure.”

  She waited for everyone else to clear out. “Let me tell you what I see. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have way too much pride. You have so much pride, it’s like it’s blinding you to everything else. Even the good stuff.”

  Ordinarily I’d react or shut down if someone criticized me like that, but coming from her, it didn’t feel like an attack. And she was right: I was too proud to apologize, too proud to admit my errors, too proud to back down. I was a bully who tried to run the house and intimidate the residents. I fed off of physical altercations—it’s why I sought them out—and I didn’t care about consequences and relationships like the other residents did. On the street, the person with the least to lose always has an advantage. But not here.

  When Iza would confront me like that, I would be very defensive at first. After she’d explain things to me in detail, with a rationale that helped me process it, I would calm down and apologize. It made me feel vulnerable to a certain degree, but not as weak as apologizing to men. Usually after I’d disappear to a quiet place alone. But Iza couldn’t work with me twenty-four hours a day.

  After a fight I had with Travis during a basketball game out back, Iza and Damon sat me down in the living room. They told me the agency was considering moving me to a secure facility, locking me up for a longer term, and notching me one step further into the system. They began to discuss a concrete plan about moving me, “adjusting my treatment,” they said.

  In response, I became more isolated and radioactive. The other kids had already had enough of my temper, my instigating, my penchant for destroying things around the house. After I punched a hole in the wall in the living room, Damon made me spend one Saturday doing all the spackling and repainting. Even Iza was getting impatient with me—disappointed, she said—which was rare.

  It all came to a head one cold Monday night about a year into my time there. I was in the living room watching a football game with Damon, Renaldo, Kareem, and Travis. Iza sat with a thick book on her lap, barely paying us any mind. I had the remote control and my feet were up on the coffee table, like I was “mayor of the house,” as Iza used to say. There were about five minutes left in the game when Damon told me I had to go to bed because I hadn’t earned my privs.

  “What? Fuck no,” I said. “I’m not going to bed.”

  “Jim, I just gave you an instruction and—”

  “C’mon D! Everyone else is staying up. Let me watch to—”

  “Jim, you didn’t follow my instruction,” he said, getting up and walking over to me. Not threatening, but assertive, his body blocking my view. “Now you’re going to earn five thousand negative points. If—”

  “There’s like two minutes left!”

  “Jim—”

  I got up and threw the remote control at the television. Then I flipped the wooden coffee table, knocking everything over, including Iza’s tea. “Jim!” she yelled, startled.

  “Okay,” Damon said, “now you’ve earned another ten thousand—”

  “Shit, man, you always on me! Get the fuck out of my face!”

  I turned to go upstairs and as I approached the railing I punched the big glass pane in the center of the front door. My hand went through it and the thick glass shattered everywhere; a loud crashing echoed through the hallway. I watched as thick red blood streamed down my hand. My entire middle finger was severed wide open, and I could see down to the bone, chalky white under the flowing red.

  Iza quickly grabbed a washcloth, wrapping it around my finger and pressing down. She put her hand on the back of my neck, seeing I was panicked. Damon made like he was about to speak but Iza gave him a glare, like, Let it go. She took me out to her car, holding my other hand as we walked down the street in the freezing night. We drove silently to the emergency room at Methodist Hospital: me with my hand wrapped up, staring out the window; Iza saying nothing. We sat in the waiting room all night. It took them a while to see me and even longer to stitch me up.

  When we got home, Iza fixed me a snack in the kitchen. I sat on the stool and she stood across from me. I was relaxed by then, the hours with Iza sending a calm flow through my body. While we were talking she noticed I was wincing when I put my hand down. She came around the island to look at my hand.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “For real. Don’t touch it.”

  “Just let me,” she said, wrestling my hand onto the counter. I let her. Something felt wrong.

  The bandage was coming off, there was still glass in my hand, and my finger was still bleeding profusely. She brought me back to the hospital, where I saw the doctor again. He opened it back up and then had to leave it open, unstitched. My hand was like a metaphor attached to my body: my rage was hurting no one but myself.

  On the drive home with Iza—I could see the sun coming up—I asked her why they didn’t sew it up again.

  “They couldn’t,” she said. “The doctor told me he wasn’t able to.”

  “Why not?”

  The streets were asleep, silent and empty. I could hear garbage trucks and birds, the quiet hum of our engine.

  “That’s the way it’s gonna heal.”

  I nodded like I understood, but I didn’t really. I stared back out the window.

  “It’s gotta be open,” Iza said. “It’s got to heal from the inside out.”

  11

  Light

  Kids
need to think that you care before they care what you think.

  —WES MOORE

  There are three flecks of light that poke through the loneliest moments in the system: letters, phone calls, and visits. They’re like candles placed outside pitch-black rooms. Yet I remained in darkness. During all my years away from home, contact from my family was scarce. This was partly due to cultural norms: my family subscribed to the idea that if you violated the community rules you had to pay on your own. I had burned my bridges, so it was my sole responsibility to swim alone. That feeling of abandonment cut my insides. I was exposed and raw, and—like a lot of kids do—I acted out.

  I’d watch other residents go home on weekend passes, see kids spend holidays with their families, often be the only kid left in the house. The hopelessness was crushing; there was nothing for me to look forward to, which in the system is like a type of death. Even when my behavior improved, and I could’ve earned a home pass, my family never approved one.

  Hindsight allows me to see how lucky I was. I was so vulnerable that had I gone back to Crown Street before I was ready, I would’ve found trouble or it would’ve found me. The walls of the system wouldn’t let me float back into my comfortable orbit. Being trapped kept saving my life. It was like I was incubating, not to be released into the world until I could breathe on my own.

  One Sunday afternoon Marty came by to visit. When he arrived I had just finished another blowout with Damon. Though they had opted not to transfer me out of Boys Town, conflicts were still regular. I had barricaded myself in my room so Marty came upstairs.

  “Hey, Jim. What’s going on?” he asked. “You okay?”

  I must’ve looked like a demon, wrestling my anger out in the open like that. Marty had never seen me in that mode before.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to step out of the moment,” he said. “You’ve come a long way. Don’t destroy all the progress you’ve made.”

  Not only was Marty my attorney, but I also felt duty-bound to him. He and Christine had gone far beyond their professional roles with me. They didn’t have to call me, visit me, talk to me the way they did, bring me in the way they did. My well-being was entirely disconnected from their lives. They chose to insert themselves.

  I just sat on the edge of my bed and nodded my head, sweating and breathing heavily.

  “Jim, did you hear me?”

  It was like he was behind thick glass. “Sorry. What?”

  “I said, I can’t pretend I know anything about what you’re dealing with.”

  I looked up. I could feel my heart rate sputter slowly, like a foot dragging across speeding ground.

  “You and I have nothing in common,” he continued. “Compared to you, I grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth.” His blunt honesty struck me. I was always wary when adults said, “I know what you’re going through.” They almost never did.

  I was trapped in a corner and Marty offered an opening. He promised to visit more if Damon gave him a better report about my behavior. It had gotten to the point where there was nothing for me to lose and no one to impress, which is dangerous at that age. Every kid wants someone to impress.

  A month or so later, around Christmastime, Marty and Christine followed through and came to visit. I gave them a tour of the house and introduced them around, basking in the fact that important people came to see me. They took me out shopping for clothes and sneakers, then to lunch. Being on the outside, without the other residents, made me feel all the more human. It made me feel normal again, a part of society. That day was like a breather, a break from my life. It was the first time I got to see Marty and Christine outside the barriers of my confinement. Because visits were so rare, it was all the more impactful.

  I stayed off subsystem and, as Marty had promised, the visits continued. I had mentioned that Renaldo and I were making music and Marty offered to give me his daughter’s electric keyboard. One day he walked me over to his house, a spacious brownstone a few blocks from the residence. Intricate metal railing led up to this majestic wood front door. I thought the Boys Town residence was impressive, but this place was next level—and he lived there all by himself.

  As we opened the door a dog darted at us like off a spring. It was a chocolate Lab with floppy ears.

  “Hamlet!” Marty yelled. “Down, Hamlet!”

  “Hamlet?”

  “Yeah. I love Shakespeare,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “If you have a chance, you should read him.” Marty’s face grew animated. “I’ve been to London a few times to see productions at the new Globe. It’s . . .” He drifted off. “Well, it’s something.”

  I nodded but didn’t for the life of me know what he was talking about.

  Marty was a literature enthusiast so his house was filled with bookcases raised to the high ceilings in room after room, and books piled up on the coffee table, his nightstand, even the bathroom. It was the first time I ever saw that many books in someone’s house; he had his own private library. More than the nice furniture or the square footage, I decided I wanted a house full of books. They spoke to something potent, intoxicating even: the power of knowledge.

  “You read all these?” I asked, scanning the spines on one of the large bookcases.

  “Some. Some not yet,” he said. “You know a book you’d like I think I have around here? The Human Stain. It’s a Philip Roth book about a black man living as a white man.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “He’s light-skinned, a professor, and he hides his blackness to assimilate, gain the advantages of the white world. But it backfires on him.”

  I thought about an old skit where Eddie Murphy dresses up as a white man and rides a city bus. When the last black person gets off, all these formally dressed waiters come out with cocktails and the bus turns into a party.

  Marty’s house was my first time inside that rarefied part of Park Slope, the one I previously glimpsed only through front windows. Being invited through the door was like stepping into another life.

  “Everyone put their hands together for his first time up here,” Ms. Oglio said from the front of the cafeteria. “Student of the Week, Jim St. Germain.”

  Our school knew how starved we were for awards and recognition, but more important, the system was built on positive reinforcement. They wanted to give us incentives for success. So every Friday there was an awards ceremony in the school lunchroom. At first, I dismissed them, likely as a defense mechanism. Why crave the impossible? But as I noticed my peers accumulating certificates and getting that spotlight moment, I wanted it too. We were not who people thought we were. We might’ve acted tough and street, but we were just kids. A small piece of paper had a colossal effect.

  That moment was literally the first time my name was called for a positive reason—not to see the principal or the judge or a police officer. But I was still not even out of the starting gate in terms of turning around my education. At Boys Town, most of my learning took place back at the residence under Iza’s guidance. She taught me the most basic rules of writing and reading and simple math. After school and on the weekend Iza would tutor me alongside her daughters, who were both in elementary school. She would give me a topic to write an essay on and return it to me the next day all red-penned up; then I’d rewrite it. That individual attention—and the fact that she felt that I was worth giving that individual attention—was enormous. It was like being carried across deep water.

  Just as things were opening up, I got a call one Sunday afternoon from my sister, Geraldine. She and I barely spoke—and she never called me—so my internal alarm went off. I took the phone from Damon and walked into the hallway. She didn’t waste any time: my father had kidney failure and was in the ICU at Jamaica Hospital. “From what I can tell,” she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know if he’ll live any longer.” My father had lived such a hard life and had dealt with so many illnesses that it was surprising he had made it this far. No one in the
family thought he would live very long.

  After I hung up, I sat glued to the steps of the front staircase. The weight of her words paralyzed me. Iza sat down next to me as questions whirled through my head: Was this my fault? Would my father die while I was in the system? What would happen to my family? “Jim, it’s okay,” Iza said, taking my hand. “Tell me what’s going on.” She arranged for a staff member to escort me to Queens to see him.

  When we got to my father’s room, a still form lay in a thin bed, buried under equipment. Somewhere in there, hooked up to tubes, draped in wires, and wearing a breathing mask, was my father. I sat down beside him and let it out, crying over the beeps of the machines. There was no life behind his eyes, though I still talked and asked questions. More for myself than anything.

  Despite our toxic relationship—all the carried heaviness between us—I still found myself strangled by the sense that I was losing him. As I got older I accepted that he had done the best he could, operated from what he knew. Family is family. Blood is blood.

  When it was time to leave I had to be physically helped out of the room. I had the feeling that once I crossed through the door, it’d be like crossing a threshold: my father would be gone. I walked out under the dull fluorescent light of the hallway, past the whispering nurses and the drone of the PA, preparing for a funeral home and a body. I recognized a new burden: it would be up to me to carry my family. Rarely do turning points feel like ones in the moment, but the world shifting under my feet was palpable that day. Everything banked and shook, and I struggled to keep my balance.

  A few weeks later, the ground moved even more. During my years away, my cousin Chrislie, whom we called Breeze, had gone much deeper into the street. Small-time hustlers are all trying to make enough money to hustle “OT,” out of town, a more lucrative enterprise. When I was arrested I was on track to go OT, where guys can sell product for four times what they can in New York City. The move is dangerous on two fronts. The law is almost always tougher in these more conservative states. The judges are much harsher, especially on young black men, whom they view as traveling hundreds of miles to poison their community and bring violence into their sleepy town. The local dealers also want to take you out for stomping on their territory. I had first introduced Breeze to the street and when I was away, he starting going OT. He thought he was moving up in his world, and got caught in the crosshairs.