Hope

I rewrote the story that was giving me problems--tweaked it more than rewrote it; the bones of it were okay, I think; I just removed some of the excess verbiage.

The main thing that bothers me about the story is not so much, at this point, the central character--I think he's okay (not great, just okay).  It's the overall subject matter:  the story looks at a black man suffering in jail, and what he does to lift himself up.  Do I have any right to discuss that topic?  It's so far from my daily life.  Also, isn't that a stereotype?  If I'm going to write about a black man, why does he have to be in jail?

But the problem is...the stereotype is also a truth, and it's a truth that a lot of white people want to ignore..."maybe if we don't look at it the problem will just go away."  But we can't just ignore the fact that a lot of injustices have been committed against black people, and especially black men, in the name of "criminal justice."  And those injustices have been committed by white people, at least 99 percent of the time.

I still don't know if I have a right, though, to tell the story about a black man in jail.  I do know that I wanted to write the story because of the black children I worked with at an elementary school in San Francisco.  They were wonderful kids, bursting with life and enthusiasm.  I was there (as a teaching assistant) about thirty years ago.  I often wonder what they are doing now.  I wonder how many of the boys made it into successful careers, good family lives. Some of them were the children of drug addicts or prostitutes.  They started with the deck heavily stacked against them. So the chances are pretty good that some of them just didn't make it.

I wanted to imagine one of them in jail, making a decision right there, at the worst moment of his life, to turn everything around...I know that sounds Pollyanna-ish.  Or just impossible.  But hopefully the story will reach someone, some day, who is actually suffering in jail--a good person who has given up.

Our country is so hard on children who are poor, black or Hispanic (or American Indian or south Asian) and living in a horrible neighborhood.  Part of me still lives with those children at that ugly, windswept elementary school in San Francisco's Ingleside District. Part of me still wants to protect them.  Or at least offer them some kind of hope.