Trouble

A couple of weeks ago I was standing half-awake in line at a convenience store when the customer in front of me whirled to greet me. He was a black kid, about 10 years old. He came up to the middle of my chest. "Good morning, sir!" he said with grinning verve and mischief. I liked him immediately. He counted out the change for what he was buying--a bottle of pop and a box of cornstarch--and I expected he'd march out the front door wearing the same indomitable smirk. He didn't. He took his sack and walked to the back of the store, where he started talking to himself and sliding the door to the pop cooler back and forth, open and closed, waiting with a look of glee for the clerk to come and bust him.

What's with the kid? I asked her. It had dawned on me by then that it was 9:00 on a Tuesday morning. It was a school day. Trouble, she said, with a theatrical tilt of the brow. Lots of trouble. He's here two or three times a day like this. I offered back that he seemed like a nice kid. Not particularly sassy. Oh, he's sassy, she assured me. He's a handful.

Looks like he needs some attention, I countered. I wish he'd get it somewhere else, she said wearily. I left the two of them alone in the store, locked in a battle of wills, him provoking and her resisting.

Afterward, and ever since, I haven't been able to stop thinking about this kid. Partly it's him. You could see by the way he carried himself, and the sense of humor he projected, that he was a very bright little boy. (One of the great things about kids is that you don't have to be around them long to get what they're about; part of the agony of childhood is being unable to do anything but wear who you are right out front.) There were intriguing discrepancies about him, too; despite his seeming to be a truant no one paid any attention to, he was clean and crisply dressed and well-groomed. I told a friend this, and he replied immediately that the kid's mother was probably a hooker. Huh? A lot of hookers dress their kids very well, he said. It's tied up with guilt about what they do and wanting their kids to look respectable. That's a pretty far leap and a racist one, too, I retorted. Yeah, I know, he said, only I see it happen around here.

I am also thinking of him because of me. I was a kid who needed attention, too, and for the most part I got it, and even so there were those times when I felt so invisible that I had a notion of what it would mean to fall through the bottom of the world without anyone's even noticing. This was really only a fantasy of mine, mind you, in a life of relative privilege and stability. All I'm saying is that I came to places where I could imagine those feelings, and gain a sense of how dangerous they are.

But this kid I'm talking about, he is very likely living it. And standing there in the store watching him, it was entirely too easy to think I could see his whole story unfurl in front of me. He's a black male, approaching or in the throes of puberty, and it won't be long before he looks like a black man. And since he'll be living in a world where even harmless sorts of acting out by black men are taken for signs of menace, he will be treated as a menace, and in time, unless he is very lucky or superhumanly strong, he will become what the world says he is. He will be a menace--mainly to himself, most likely, though there are exceptions.

I want to think I'm misconstruing the situation, and it's possible. Maybe he's home-schooled, or just moved here and isn't enrolled in school yet. Maybe he's been at home caring for a sick parent. Maybe the cornstarch he bought was really for cooking. Or maybe even if I'm right about the straits he's in, he'll still make it. It happens. Sometimes people make vibrant, useful lives in spite of enduring the most dreadful shit imaginable. There have always been kids who come around pestering shopkeepers. There have always been kids whose parents didn't give a shit or were simply too damaged and too neck-deep in surviving to do right by their kids.

But there have not always been so many holes in the bottom of the world for those children to fall through. And it has not always been a point of national pride to let them go ahead and fall. Americans have always been a callow people when it comes to the suffering of others: By geographical accident, the rest of the world's problems were remote, and here at home we were rich enough to ensure that truly abject poverty stayed out of public view. But until recently we did not expressly subscribe to the brute market logic that says, If those kids or their parents were worth a damn, they'd have the money and standing to make it just fine.