My mother, my three brothers, and I lived in a small apartment in the Bronx. I tell people that we were the poorest welfare cheats that ever were. With welfare, and working for slave wages (which is all they paid even the most competent black women in 1958), my mother could barely keep a roof over our heads.
When I was six, we moved farther into the South Bronx. I remained under my mother’s watchful eye most of the time, but occasionally I was allowed to go to the store. One day, I was given a dollar and sent a block away to the A & P for some pork and beans. The young boy who approached me as I paid for my purchase was maybe eight and seemed very interested in being my friend. He was a raggedy little boy with a patch on his head where no hair grew because of ringworm. He asked if we could walk back together. I was thrilled. Since moving onto this block I had found no friends, so now I couldn’t believe my good fortune. The boy put his arm around me and said we were going to be best friends. He suggested we take a shortcut, which I quickly recognized to be a longer route, but I didn’t argue; he was my friend.
At the alley leading to the back of my apartment building, he turned on me. “Give me your money,” he said. I was in shock. The money was in my hand, some change balled up in the receipt. I couldn’t move. My new friend was robbing me. He grabbed my hand and began to take the money. I watched as if it were a movie. The thought came to me, Hit him with the can of pork and beans in the bag. He was intent on prying my fingers open; he wasn’t even looking at me. Hit him, hit him! I was thinking. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t hit him. He took the money and just walked away. My mind was reeling. What just happened? Why did the boy pick me? Why couldn’t I bring myself to hit him, to fight back?
I went home not knowing what to do. The sixty-one cents the boy had taken from me was quite a bit of money to my family. If I told my mother, she might come with me to retrieve our money. On the other hand, she might send me out with my brothers to find the boy. I was convinced the boy would fight, would probably beat up all of us. But it was too much money not to try to get back.
I told my mother what had happened. She and I went looking for the boy with the bare spot on his head, but he was long gone. I was surprised when, later the same day, my mother gave me another dollar to go buy some rice. She could tell how much my self-confidence had been shaken. I was so happy, and I started looking for the boy as soon as I left my building. All summer I looked for him. In my mind, he became the epitome of danger, of the “bad boys” outside. I had fantasies of smashing that monster with a can of pork and beans and watching him run home crying.
From time to time my mother took us to visit her friends. One evening we were being introduced to one of my mother’s girlfriends — the four of us standing in a row, each sticking out his hand and saying hello — when in he marched: the boy who had robbed me. The ringworm was mostly gone, but you could still see the spot where the hair hadn’t caught up with the rest. I expected this to be the moment of truth, but his head was down, and he seemed as shy as we were. He met Dan, then John; then it was my turn, and . . . nothing. He didn’t recognize me. He looked me in the eye and said, “Hi,” and that was it.
While my mother was off talking to her friend, I pulled my brother aside and told them this was the boy who had robbed me. The boy seemed eager to make friends, and tried to break through our icy response to him. He was no monster. He was nervous and no bigger than my brothers. After we left I told my mother, who later told her girlfriend, who ashamedly returned the sixty-one cents.
PS 99, our school in the South Bronx, was like most elementary schools in the poor communities of New York City: mostly black, with Latinos the next-largest group, and a few white students whose parents had not yet managed to flee the crumbling tenements. It was at PS 99 that my education about survival was broadened. As a young boy on Union Avenue I had begun to understand how violence worked, and I then believed that mine was the toughest block in all the Bronx. What I failed to understand was that our street was not very different from any of the other twenty or so blocks that supplied children to PS 99. And that those twenty blocks were not very different from any other twenty blocks in the South Bronx. On each block there were children fighting for status, for rank, for respect. Then all of those children were dumped together in the schools. The ranking order on your block meant nothing to children from other blocks, so school fights were inevitable and often brutal.
At PS 99 I began to appreciate that Union Avenue was really a haven. Even though we fought, cursed, and otherwise abused one another, the neighborhood boys and I lived in relative safety. It was when you set foot off the block that you were in enemy territory. Whether you could travel without being set upon by other boys often had to do with your block’s reputation. Children from Union Avenue were considered tough.
By the time I reached sixth grade it was recognized by all the boys in school that not only would I fight back, but I knew how to fight. This was particularly important for me because I was in the “smart” class. Many boys associated being a good student with not being able to fight, and by and large this was true. I quickly understood this liability, and so kept my rich school life and my love of books to myself. While some might have known I was in the “smart” class, they also knew that I didn’t act like it and that I had won more than my share of after-school fights. Anyone who messed with me would get a “hard way to go,” meaning he would not make his reputation off me.
Even so, getting home safely from school was a daily challenge. There seemed always to be a fight brewing. Many times you would not know whom a group of boys were waiting for until someone called your name as you went by. A lot was at stake if you were “called out.” The big issue among the boys was whether or not you had “heart.” Having heart meant that you were unafraid — that you would fight even if you couldn’t beat the other boy. In many ways, those of us on Union Avenue were a kind of warrior class in the Bronx. We disdained bullies and were not known to bully others, but were known as boys who had heart. The block’s reputation was strengthened or weakened each time one of us had to square off after school.
As an adult I have heard many times the debate about whether violence is part of our human makeup or a learned behavior. I cannot believe that humans have a genetic predisposition to violence because I remember clearly a time when I knew nothing of violence, and how hard I worked later to learn to become capable of it. My belief that violence is learned has been reinforced by years of counseling and teaching children and adolescents in inner-city Boston and New York.
I began teaching in Boston in 1975, just after receiving a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education; this was during the beginning of court-ordered busing in the Boston schools, a period of violent confrontation between blacks and whites. My students were white youths from the projects of Charlestown, East Boston, South Boston, and Dorchester. I counseled many children in those days who told me they acted violently because their parents told them to do so. The parents often gave instructions similar to those my mother had given my brothers and me: “Fight back, or I’ll beat you when you get home.” Many times, children as young as six or seven brought weapons to school, or picked up bottles, bricks, or whatever was at hand. When I asked them about their violent behavior, they often said their parents had told them to “get something and bash the kid’s head in.”
The children were telling the truth. In the more than twenty years I have spent counseling, teaching, and running programs for poor inner-city children, I have seen a steady stream of parents who have given their children those instructions. These parents — who are raising children in an urban war zone — have come to me with stories of children being victimized, again and again; of institutions doing nothing to protect the child; of the child coming home scared, scarred, looking to the parents for protection they could not provide; of themselves feeling as if they had no alternative in such a violent world. I tried to help these parents — often single women — because I understood their anger, their desperation.
Violence is in our history, and we teach it to our young: the Revolutionary War, the “taming” of the West, the Civil War, the world wars. Even when we teach nonviolence, we must use the example of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed by violence. I’m sorry, America, but beyond the rhetoric what we really teach is that might does make right. Poor people have just never had any might. But they want it. Oh, how they want it.
Because most affluent people in this country do not have to think about their personal safety every day, our society is still complacent about the violence engulfing our cities. Yet I believe we are approaching one of the most dangerous periods in our history since the Civil War. There are many places struggling with rising unemployment, hundreds of thousands of people growing up poor, and a new generation raised under conditions of war. If you wonder how a fourteen-year-old can shoot another child in the head, or how boys can commit a drive-by shooting and then go home to dinner, you need to realize that one doesn’t get to that point in a day, or a week, or a month. It takes years of preparation to be willing to commit murder, to be willing to kill or die for a corner, a color, a leather jacket. But children who are growing up under the conditions of war in many poor communities today learn to understand death and killing as matters of survival. The real role models in our inner cities — older boys and girls who teach the codes of conduct and enforce the rules of order — are now willing to teach children how to kill, and how to die.
Unlike today, when I was growing up there were some checks on violent behavior. Most fighting was done with the fists, in what we called a “fair off”: two people fought until one quit or was too hurt to continue. No dirty fighting was allowed — no kicking, no biting, no weapons. If someone violated the rules, he might be attacked or ostracized. The first rules I learned on Union Avenue stayed with me for all of my youth. They were simple and straightforward: don’t cry; don’t act afraid; don’t tell your mother; take it like a man. The group I sought to emulate was made up of boys seven or eight years older than I, the ones who ruled our block. We younger boys lived for their praise, and cringed at the slightest sign of dissatisfaction from them. They considered us their charges to raise.
This group was like other groups of boys growing up in America’s urban ghettos. They worked when they could. Some struggled with school; only one had gone to college, and that was on a basketball scholarship. They hung out on the corners and tenement stoops and passed the codes of conduct on to the younger group. This was before crack cocaine appeared in the cities, so there was no money to be made selling drugs. These boys were broke, with hopes and dreams but few opportunities. They took pride in what they had: “heart” and a fierce loyalty to one another and to the block. They had no clear leader, but two boys — Mike and Junior — were at the center of the group and seemed to have conquered the fear and anxiety of living in the ghetto.
To be friends with these two was beyond the hopes of most younger boys. What we got were some brief moments sitting or standing near them. Maybe they would let one of us play on their side in a stickball game if they were desperate for another player. But more than likely we would be told to get lost when they saw us hanging around, or we would simply be looked at as if we had lost our minds. The smart ones left immediately. Those who did not were run off with curses, ridicule, and sometimes a smack upside the head. We learned to read Mike and Junior like a thermometer.
To my amazement, I eventually became friends with Mike. It happened because we both loved the mornings on Union Avenue. Early in the morning, Union Avenue was a peaceful place. You could walk up and down the block without the usual concern about who might tease you, or laugh that your clothes were cheap, or that you didn’t have money for a haircut. Mike’s mother was unable or unwilling to care for him, and left him alone to raise himself as best he could. He lived on his own, in a basement apartment we called “the cut,” and he liked to get up early.
Mike and I established a Saturday-morning ritual: I would go to the cut and wake him, we’d get some breakfast at a local greasy spoon, and then we’d shoot baskets at the park. Mike was everything I wanted to be — handsome, athletic, tough, and, most important to me, smart. He read books and was proud of it, so with Mike I could be myself. He knew I was in the top class at PS 99. He knew that I read grown-up novels in the fifth grade. On weekend and summer mornings we talked about all kinds of subjects.
It was Mike I turned to for help understanding Union Avenue. He was the one who told me about “heart,” about gaining respect, about when to fight and how. Most of all, Mike was my protector. It wasn’t that he fought my battles — he didn’t. But when I was with him I was safe; no one would bother me. And as my friendship with Mike became known to others, my zone of safety expanded to areas both on and off the block. For a small boy in a mean ghetto, with no adult male to teach and protect me, Mike was a knight in shining armor.
One morning when I was eleven, I went to the cut, woke Mike, grabbed the basketball, and went outside to wait for him. Mike was intent on teaching me how to play basketball, and always made sure I got some practice in before the real players came on the court in the afternoon. While I waited, I was shooting the ball against a parking sign; then I missed the sign and hit a new car.
On our block, new cars were rare, and men were always yelling at us to quit leaning on their cars. A man coming down the block — a man I had never seen before — saw the basketball bouncing off his new car, came storming up to me, and yelled, “Give me that fucking ball!” It was Mike’s ball, and I knew that you didn’t let anyone take something that belonged to the older boys, especially Mike. So I played the little-boy role.
“Mister, this ain’t my ball. This ball belongs to —” I never got to finish the sentence. In two steps, the man was right on top of me, and I could tell he was trying to decide whether my impertinence demanded a slap. I cringed. He snatched the ball from my hands. “I don’t care whose fucking ball this is; it’s mine now.”
It was eight o’clock on a beautiful, sunny morning and my world had been turned upside down. What was I supposed to do about this huge man? Would Mike expect me to fight him? I was too scared. Tears rolled down my face, and I pleaded, “Please, mister, give me that ball. It ain’t my ball. I’m gonna get in trouble. That’s Mike’s ball.”
The man ignored me. He put the ball in his trunk, took out a rag, and began wiping off his car. I prayed he would drive off. Just then I saw Mike and Junior coming down the block. The man was much bigger than either Mike or Junior.
Mike saw my tears and asked me what was wrong. With shame hot on my face, I told Mike that the man had taken his ball. Mike asked why, and I told him that I’d accidentally hit his car with it. Mike laughed, approached the man, and explained, “Excuse me, but you have my ball.”
The man turned, looked Mike up and down, and said, “It’s my ball now, and that’s it.”
Then Mike did something I would later see him do many times when a situation was getting out of control: he became calm and his speech became very clear. He said, “Well, maybe you didn’t understand me, but that’s my ball, not the kid’s, mine.” This man should have known that no man could let another take his property, period. He could give the ball back with no loss of face — the code allowed this — but this man apparently didn’t know our code.
He looked at Mike and said, “I don’t give a fuck whose ball it was; it’s mine now.”
Junior shifted over to the man’s right, and Mike took a step to the man’s left, just enough so that the man couldn’t watch both of them at the same time. “Listen,” Mike said, “if you don’t give me my ball, I’m gonna kick your fucking ass right now all up and down this block.” He took a step toward the man. Junior shifted to where he could get in a good shot. The man pulled his keys out and took a step toward the trunk of his car. Mike’s hand went into his jacket pocket, and we could all hear the click of the knife as he opened it. Junior put his hand inside his jacket at his neck, where he kept a chain with a combination lock on it, a dangerous weapon. Both of them stepped toward the man.
The trunk opened. Everyone tensed.
“All right, here it is. I’ll give it to you this time,” the man said.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you will,” Mike said, then handed the ball to me and we walked to the park.
What came next was the most baffling part of living on Union Avenue: nothing. I mean nothing. I was filled with adrenalin, questions, and fear to the point of overflowing. But Mike and Junior showed no reaction to the incident. I tried to engage them in conversation, but all they would say was “He was an asshole. Forget it.” That morning, I could not concentrate on shooting baskets, and I kept glancing at Mike, who moments ago had been willing to risk his life for a basketball — or not for the ball itself, but for Union Avenue’s idea of being a man. How could he keep his emotions so under control? How could he switch from being ready to fight to the death, to making small talk about the upcoming stickball game, within thirty seconds? I knew what I was witnessing was very important. Because of the unpredictability of life in the South Bronx, you had to learn to dominate your emotions. You could not dwell on issues that caused fear or anger. Things happened, you acted, and you moved on. If you didn’t learn how to do this, the fear, the doubt, the anger would crowd your mind until there would be no room for any of the good things: love, friendship, laughter. Over the years I would see many people who had gone mad trying to survive the unpredictability and pressures of that place.
Boston, 1976: my daughter Melina was six and in the first grade; my son Jerry was four. The city was under court order to desegregate its schools, and most children were being bused. I remember the shock and horror of my daughter getting off the bus one day crying in fear and pain. Another girl on the bus had bullied her and had raked my daughter’s face with her fingernails, leaving four bloody trails down Melina’s cheeks. I was livid. My little girl, her beautiful face disfigured, her sense of safety destroyed, knew nothing about fighting. She told me that the other little girl had long nails just for fighting, and she showed me her short nails as evidence of her own defenselessness.
I did what every good parent would do. I called the school and the bus company and demanded a meeting. We met and talked. I wanted to meet the other girl’s parents; they didn’t show up. I wanted the girl suspended; the school couldn’t do that — she was only seven herself. I wanted extra security on the bus; they didn’t have the money. I wanted some assurance my daughter would not be attacked again; they would do their best. They did everything except give me what I wanted: a clear sense that they knew how precious my daughter was. That I would fight and die if necessary to protect her. That I could not look into her eyes again and see such fear and pain.
So I did what so many parents do when faced with the violence of this nation: I sat my daughter down and told her she was never again to let any boy or girl attack her without fighting back. I had taught my children that fighting was wrong, that hitting was wrong. But, like my mother before me, I didn’t want my daughter to be a victim. Under different circumstances I might have been able to put Melina in a safer school. But I was one year out of graduate school and teaching for a living, and had no money.
Unlike my mother, however, I knew how to fight. I knew about violence, and I was able to be very specific about what to do and when to do it. My daughter finished her school years with no love of violence, but never again was she a victim.
When I sit now with a mother whose child has hit someone with a bottle, or brought a knife to school, I remember how I felt about my daughter. There are few people, these parents think, who understand how afraid they are for their children — children who increasingly are afflicted by disabling anxieties and depressions. But I do understand the depth of these parents’ fears, and that they are scared for their children — not only because of the incident that has brought them to me, but every day, all the time.
“Fist Stick Knife Gun” is excerpted from Geoffrey Canada’s Fist Stick Knife Gun, © 1995 by Geoffrey Canada. It is reprinted here by permission of Beacon Press of Boston.
— Ed.
