A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  My mind was first set on becoming a lawyer. I’d grown up seeing the law as that authoritative force—the eyes watching, the hands ready to grab, the legs ready to jump. But so many people in my life proved that the law could be something else: a tool to shape and bend systems, to help people avoid dead-end alleys or jail pipelines. Role models like Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama and mentors like Christine and Marty all had law degrees. The law has historically been a weapon used to bring others down. But armed with it, you can make that power work in your favor. You can uplift and empower those same people who have been oppressed by it.

  In one of my college classes we read a book by Annette Lareau titled Unequal Childhoods. Its central thesis is that middle-class (usually white) families believe that systems were created explicitly for them. Consequently, these parents teach their kids to question systems and make demands on the machinery. The parents are constantly involved in their children’s schooling and organized activities in an effort to steer, influence, and change them. By contrast, poor families, often black or Latino, view systems as their nemesis, forces that oppose them. They don’t trust institutions and they don’t make use of them. Their experience tells them that institutions and systems are adversarial or apathetic to their plight. Consequently, their kids’ advocacy skills are hindered from a young age. It’s a feedback loop that they can’t escape.

  I responded viscerally to this framing of inequalities. When I discussed it with Dean Walton, he agreed. That’s why as he got educated and powerful he made a point to demand more from the larger systems and institutions. I heeded his advice, grabbing what was available and making it work for me.

  All of my professors at John Jay were impressive, but the one who had the most profound impact was Danny Shaw. He reframed so much of my understanding of myself, of the issues I faced, and of the world and its battles. Tall, slim, and muscular, with a bright smile and shaved head, he didn’t look like any teacher I knew. He had the thick New York accent of a cop on television. On that first day of his Race and Ethnicity in America class he laid out his singular approach to teaching. “One of the most important things for me is that everybody feels free to express themselves,” he told us. “I don’t care what angle you are coming from. Feel free to disagree, critique and oppose my views and teaching style. That’s your right.” As someone with a unique perspective and a nontraditional track, I responded to this invitation. It revealed that Shaw was an open person in the way the best teachers are.

  An Irishman with New England roots, Shaw grew up in New York City around blacks and Latinos, and attended Columbia on scholarship. He had traveled all over the world, putting his mind and body where his mouth was. He was constantly organizing or joining protests, hitting the streets for a cause, rounding up people and uniting their voices. Shaw was the real deal: a chieftain of justice.

  He hit us from all sides, assigning books about global poverty and screening Spike Lee movies. He gave us an article by Leon Trotsky about how cursing was a direct consequence of oppression and urged us to connect the reading to the use of the n-word in our communities. He peppered his lectures with Spanish, Portuguese, and Creole, which he spoke better than me. It wasn’t just his wisdom that impressed me but the width and depth of his compassion. He had inserted himself into the issues and had become a fighter in the truest sense of the word.

  One day after class, Shaw and I were discussing the latest reading, something about the exploitation of least-developed countries. Then he paused and looked at me with a gleam of fire behind his eyes. “I see a lot of anger in you,” he told me in his thick outer-borough accent.

  “Yeah?” I said, lightly. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Absolutely. And it’s good.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it’s fuel,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “And I’ll tell you what.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to use that passion to turn you into a real revolutionary.”

  He stoked that fire by turning me on to documentaries about Fox News, the Koch brothers, the Latin Kings and Queens, and Ronald Reagan, which taught me about the larger injustices that divide into all the little injustices I saw in my day to day. The ghetto was not a natural phenomenon; it was engineered by history, by law, and by policy. We didn’t create these neighborhoods and we didn’t bring the drugs here. It was brought about by forces much larger than us, and presidents from Nixon to Reagan demonized and exploited us for their own purposes.

  Shaw and I started to spend time together outside class. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer, even fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the New York City heavyweight championship. He took me to a gym in the South Bronx, which happened to be across the street from Horizon Juvenile Center. We were taking turns hitting the heavy bag when I mentioned that when I was at Beach Avenue, we were taken there for medical issues. He popped a couple of jabs into the bag and stopped. Then he just went off, like an uncoiled spring.

  “How long?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “How long were you at Beach?”

  “A week? I don’t remember.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “What for?”

  “Some bullshit. Dealing off my bike.”

  “All those fucking places are like cauldrons,” he said, his anger building. “A perfect storm of white supremacy, exploitation economics, and private enterprise feeding into a police state. The fucking worst. They should burn it to the fucking ground.”

  Shaw laid the groundwork for me to embark on an intellectual journey beyond the classroom. I was consumed by the idea that I needed to take in as much as possible. Some people are comfortable with their level of knowledge. They fit perfectly in their space, and carry no compunctions about what they’re missing. I was not one of those people. The gap between what I knew and what I wanted to know was pronounced, so I was never satisfied. The hunger to fill up that space became insatiable. The more you know, the more you learn about what you don’t know. So the space never gets filled.

  Christine was always looking out for opportunities—paid work, volunteer openings, community platforms. She connected me to a workgroup called the Youth Experience, through the Mental Health Association of New York, which assembled youngsters and picked their brains around issues impacting at-risk youth. Twice a week I traveled to an office in midtown Manhattan with large windows overlooking the city alongside fifteen to twenty kids from all backgrounds in the five boroughs. Over pizza and orange juice, we offered our perspectives on drug use, homelessness, mental health, employment, education, and juvenile justice. Once they gave me a platform to release all that I had absorbed, they couldn’t shut me up. Luckily, they wanted to hear all of it.

  The Mental Health Association offered me an internship and then a job as a youth advocate in Queens. My main duty was to help young people who were battling mental health issues and advocate for them in various capacities: school discipline, obtaining services, mediating family issues, or encouraging pro-social activities.

  On Friday afternoons, I would get together with all my kids and hold group conversations around issues that affected their lives: gangs, violence, drugs, and peer pressure. I was never condescending and never assumed that their problems weren’t pervasive. It was all about connecting to them at their level. To decompress and just to let them be kids, we would then take them to the movies, the park, or museums.

  These adolescents were already special, sitting on untapped and unrecognized potential. They were as talented, gifted, and resilient as anyone else—society had just convinced them otherwise. My main duty was to help them locate and utilize their God-given abilities.

  When I introduced myself to the adolescents and their families, I’d emphasize my two-sided nature: I was a counselor who could help them navigate the system, but I was also one of them. I could speak to the magnetic pull of peer pressure, my dependence on
weed and alcohol, fighting, losing friends to violence, quitting school, and doing time in the system. I would also emphasize, despite all of this, that I carried a sense of optimism. Fortunately, a group of individuals saw something special in me that I couldn’t see myself. Now I would dedicate my life to helping others discover those things in themselves.

  I did my best to cut through. To counteract what experience had taught them. They understood systems as things that beat them down, ignored them, left them exhausted and fed up. I wanted to break through that, step forward as someone who would lay myself down and become the bridge that would help them move forward, just as others had for me.

  17

  The Circle

  If the young are not initiated into the village, they’ll burn it down just to feel the warmth.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB

  One night, after a shift at Key Food, I descended the steps into the train station and froze in my tracks. I noticed my friend Edwin, whom I hadn’t seen in five or six years. The alarming thing was that he was in uniform. I’m sure my face dropped in disbelief. Edwin had become a police officer! I couldn’t believe it. Where I’m from, it’s very rare for people to become police officers. Unheard of.

  Edwin had always been a cautious dude and he spotted me coming his way, with that surprised look on my face.

  “Yo! What’s up, Ed?” I said, noticing a beefy white dude next to him, also in uniform.

  Quickly and under his breath, Edwin just started saying “Pale’w Kreyol. Pale’w Kreyol”—which means “speak Creole.” He’d always been a very careful guy; he didn’t know what I had turned into and didn’t want me to blow him up in front of his partner. As far as he knew, Buffett was coming over to talk shop about the game. Once I told him I was in school, interested in public service, he looked relieved and also surprised. We exchanged numbers and began keeping in touch, venting about the specific challenges we were each going through—something almost no one else could understand.

  I began to get invited for speaking engagements with different organizations that focused on juvenile justice, education, and at-risk youth issues. Whether I volunteered for such a role or it fell to me was irrelevant. I embraced it because nothing in my life—negative or positive—happened in a vacuum. I was the product of a much larger story.

  The first time I addressed a crowd was at a fund-raiser for Boys Town, which has a huge gala every year—tuxedos and hors d’oeuvres, white tablecloths and champagne. The crowd was overwhelmingly rich and white, with a large contingent of Wall Street donors and wealthy liberals. The smell of money pervaded that room and I took to the stage like a prizefighter, focused on winning them over. They had shown up, so they were ripe to give, but I needed to drive home how much they mattered.

  I explained that I didn’t wake up one day and decide to start selling drugs. Every day of my life had led to that choice. It came from a life of wanting, one I inherited at birth. I spoke to the rarity of my left turn: I was built up instead of torn down because of the people who did the work with me. The system itself doesn’t churn out college graduates. It takes a special place, people, and circumstance for that to happen.

  I hammered home that Boys Town was an enormous force for good, one that brought me onto the stage that night. That there were millions of kids like me, some a couple blocks away, who deserved a chance. That this crowd could be their door, their window, their path to a life these kids never even considered they were allowed to have. That helping those kids would create a ripple effect in their families, communities, and beyond. That when we talk about changing the world, this is what we’re talking about. It happens in rooms exactly like this one.

  I told them that when they looked back on their lives, what they will remember—and what people will remember about them—would be their generosity of spirit. “I can almost guarantee you,” I concluded, “that the only thing that will be on your mind is how you gave back and how many lives you have helped change for the better.”

  The response was electrifying. The crowd rocketed up from their plush seats and remained standing long after I left the podium. As I shook hands I could see wide smiles and tears across strangers’ faces. For the first time I saw that my story could do more than just exist as something to carry. It could work outward, be a shoulder and a sword and a symbol and a message. A lot of people opened up their wallets after that speech, and calls flooded in for me to speak to crowds: Family Court, public schools, local politicians, media panels, advocate training, youth justice forums, press conferences, school functions, Department of Probation crowds, and high-school graduations.

  My new role began to take shape. I would be a servant leader, one who could speak with both authority and humility, sincerity and realness. Push from below, help from above. Occupying both spaces for kids and families who have nothing to latch onto.

  It was all about communal uplift. Individual achievement meant nothing in the pool of collective failure. If I didn’t become part of the solution I’d forever be part of the problem. There would be no middle ground, and no sitting it out. The stakes were towering.

  When a job opened up at the Boys Town NSD on Bergen Street, Marty put in a good word for me, and the brass hired me on as a residential care advisor. This would be the ground floor, the front lines, and an emotional return to a world still fresh in my memory. Standing on the other side, with my scars and memories still crisp, was a powerful reversal.

  Working at Boys Town drove home that there was no distance between the kids and myself. I was them, and they were me. I had been exactly where they were sitting, intimately knew the fear that kept them awake at night, the anger that rose from their stomachs, the survival instincts that kept them looking over their shoulders. I could hear it in their voices and read it in their eyes: they felt the walls closing in on them.

  The only thing that lifted me out was the connections I made. It was my obligation to offer that same connection. I was hard on the kids, but it came from a place of love. I knew what high standards could do because I was a product of them. Damon saw things in me that I didn’t see myself and brought them out through force: by challenging me, by making me push up against the limits of myself. Iza kept me going, but it was Damon who lifted me up. The staff members who allowed you to do what you wanted were not the ones who changed you. It was the ones you raged against who made you who you were.

  The job at Boys Town sucked just about everything out of me. I’d come home exhausted and drained. I felt everything far too much and wanted to make everything right for each kid, a daunting task. I have no moderate setting, and have never been able to put just one foot in. Working at Boys Town was so personal for me that anything less than my all would’ve been an insult.

  During my time in the system, holidays were always tough. It magnified how alone I felt. I’d watch other families reuniting, parents taking their kids out for the day or home to see other relatives. My first Thanksgiving working at Boys Town was a fresh reminder that I had to hold on to my memories of that pain and abandonment. In fact, they weren’t even memories—they were present and real. They weren’t scars but rather open wounds.

  We held an early dinner that evening for all the residents’ families. A large group was sitting around the big dining room table, reminiscing, and enjoying a breather from the troubled water running through their lives. But this tall, shy kid named Jamal, who had no visitors, sat by himself on the couch the whole time. His body was slumped and there was a far-off look in his eyes.

  I noticed out of the corner of my eye that he grabbed the remote and flipped on the football game. I was in the middle of a conversation with a parent, but I had to cut it short. “Excuse me for a second,” I said, making my way to the living room.

  “Jamal, do you understand that you’re not allowed to watch television?” He didn’t even turn his head. “You didn’t ask permission.”

  He looked up as if seeing me for the first time.

  I continued, “Now I’m go
ing to give you an instruction to shut it off and if you do—”

  “Suck my d——,” he said under his breath.

  I should’ve taken a step back right there. I should’ve questioned what would make a normally polite kid say that to me but I didn’t. I stepped to him, taking up the space in front of him, a more aggressive reaction than necessary.

  “I understand you’re upset,” I said.

  “I said suck. My—” he started to say.

  “—Jamal, you earned yourself ten thousand negative points for—”

  “Fuck you, man!” he said, standing up and pressing his nose right into mine. His arms were electric, swinging beside his body like independent limbs.

  The wires in my brain got crossed. The Boys Town model ran full speed into my old response mechanisms. I was pulled between competing forces: a need to de-escalate the situation, and the instinct to not back down. I made it worse by challenging Jamal in front of everyone, which did nothing but raise the stakes and the tension.

  I’d forgotten what I knew about picking my battles and not pouring gasoline on the fire. I could’ve let the television thing go, worked to calm everything after his outburst, but I was subsumed in my own pain, which had been lying low until that moment.

  “Jamal, you are not going to—”

  “Get out of my face, pussy!” he yelled, spitting the words as he spoke. He threw the remote control across the room and it broke against the wall, the batteries popping out. Jamal started tossing books and smacking plastic cups off the coffee table. “Fuck you, you not telling me what to do! I don’t give a shit and you can’t say shit!”

  We stared each other down, the tension filling up the tight space between us. We were mirrors of each other, feeling the exact same emotion, but we couldn’t see each other at all. We were blind to the connection that bonded us. We were the same. The only difference was that I had a duty to his well-being.