For Monday: Write questions you might ask Jones and Newman in relation to, ‘how to counteract the negative pull of peers?’
I was struggling to articulate a list of questions to ask LeAlan and Lloyd. I knew that this was not because they had nothing to say—not at all—but because I felt that the answers to such questions were already before us, that LeAlan and Lloyd—as well as their families and community—had spoken generously to us and we should be as generously interrogating the text for the answers. Early on in my reading I came across a beautiful passage of 'Ghetto Life 101' when Lloyd tells LeAlan, “I like the way we treat each other!” Probably because I’m reading now from the perspective of a learning teacher, I found myself dog-earing passages in the book with some sign or suggestion of hope. A moment of beauty. An entry-point for transformation. A need I could attend to. I began with the way we treat each other.
This is an (unfinished) list of possibilities.
1. “I like the way we treat each other!” p. 31
2. (elementary school principal) “…training teachers to look at the gifts that you bring with you.” 39
3. (LeAlan) “Other times we just walk on over to the lakefront, sit on the rocks, and kick it” 47
4. (Lloyd’s father Chilly) “Having fun. Sitting by the lake. Me and her putting our feet in the water together.” 71
5. riding the bus “…just ride to the end of the line…Mostly we just talk about anything that pops up in our mind.” 79
6. “So you can get beside a person. The person you think is the dirtiest, meanest person in the world got a side you can get to—if you know how to do it.” 111
7. (juvenile public defender) “I’ve never once seen a kid who isn’t a little boy…a kid sixteen years…six foot one, been gang-banging for five years, carries a gun, his father’s incarcerated…and I’ve talked to the kid and within five minutes (not because I’m a great person, but just if you take the time) within *five minutes* I see a little boy. And you have little boys over there who have never had a chance to be little boys…They can all be reached. Every one of them—they’re all savable. Every one of them!” 118-9
8. (elementary school council president) “He was very sensitive—he’d flare up and fight in a minute—but I could talk to him and he would calm down and talk to me. And it just seemed all he needed was someone to spend some time with him.” 122
9. “Beautiful day outside. Walking around, keeping my eyes on everything. Little kids out here playing, flying kites, having life…It’s more than just the buildings. You don’t know how it is to take a life until you value life itself. Those boys didn’t value life. Those boys didn’t have much reason *to* value life.” 141
10. “Kids around here have got to have more things to do. They need counseling. Get the teachers to put more emphasis on teaching them how to love and respect one another before they start teaching them how to add and subtract—because if kids are violent and show no respect, how can they learn anything?
Some way, somehow, we’ve got turn this whole thing around into a positive. I got hope though, ‘cause two negatives make a positive. That’s what I learned in math the other day.” 153-5
11. “People out here want to learn, they’re just getting taught the wrong things.” 160
12. (elementary school principal) “The majority of my children are more satisfied with a hug than they are with a buck. They want the closeness. They want somebody who cares about them.” 170
13. (LeAlan’s granddaddy) “Do not stop learning. Learning is the greatest form of happiness known to man.” 176
14. the entire quote “What’s up y’all…I’m not supposed to be positive. I’m not supposed to be educated. I’m not supposed to know what I know. But I do.” 177
15. “can’t nobody change but me.” 181
16. “I think what we need is to get people together and clean up around here so they can feel that they’re doing something good at least for once in their life.” 183
17. “You’d have to live here to see how it really is…” explore this 185
18. “I never go outside. There’s nowhere to go.” 189
19. “I believe we wouldn’t have let each other fail.” 198
20. “a kid…who can barely communicate his feelings (which is almost the usual characteristics of a child from the ghetto) when he asks himself the question ‘What is my reason for being? What is my purpose?’ what can he tell himself?” 200
21. “we must somehow find a way to help one another. We must come together—no matter what you believe in…Not me by myself. Not you by yourself. I’m talking about all of us as one, living together in our America.” 200
All quotations collected from 'Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago,' by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.
Margeaux Temeltas, July 1, 2007
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