Eshu's blues:
Field days for gumbo ya ya

by BAR columnist
michael hureaux

The
newspapers will lie

abt all
this.  abt these

12 year
olds throwing

stones at
the cops.  They

wanted to
get at some sun

no matter
what heavy

traffic
was coming down

on them.--
Ishmael Reed

Last summer, a young man I know picked up an automatic
handgun that he did not realize was loaded, and accidentally shot one of his
closest friends through the heart.  I
did not hear of this tragedy until months after it had transpired, just a
couple of weeks ago.  Both these young
folks were former students of mine, and I am still in the somewhat numbed shock
that urban educators use as a coping mechanism whenever a seat in the classroom
becomes emptied through violence, whenever the bottom drops out of reality and
kneecaps us.

Marvin and Brendan both left the program a while back, the
first young man having graduated two years ago, and the second, one of those
young folks who could not bring himself to formal academic discipline in any
consistent way.  Marvin had fairly good
organizational skills, so we were able to help him work his way through to
commencement, and up until the tragedy last summer, the last we heard of him
was that he was seeking to apply to one of these "one year wonder"  programs that have managed to pass for trade
schools in the last few years. Brendan we had to seek another program for, as
he was with us for two semesters and failed to receive credit either time, so
we needed to find placement for him in a program that we thought could better
suit his learning needs.   The reality
was that Brendan's skill level tended towards deep remediation, and when he
came to us, he needed an enhanced individualized education plan that our school,
due to its size, was unable to deliver. 

Ridiculous though it may seem, remediation, or special
education even in alternative schools is one of those areas which the
"efficiency" experts have managed to stigmatize in the name of achievement, and
hence, many students are now "mainstreamed" long before they should be.   While it is true that special education in
the past has been used to "track" students of color, it is also true that many
students of color, and many working class kids are in genuine need of special
education, or individualized learning plans.  This is very often true of students who come from homes where, for
whatever reasons related to family, basic survival or cultural distrust, there
is a disrupted learning atmosphere (domestic violence, protracted unemployment,
complete homelessness, etc).  The
education environment is not solely directed by political economy, but all the
good will and hard work in the world will not transcend the kinds of stress
noted here and its real impact upon people. 

"Many students of color, and many working class kids are
in genuine need of special education, or individualized learning plans."

Marvin and Brendan were both characters, and sometimes
devastatingly funny in a way that can rapidly bring ruin to the lesson plans of
those teachers like me who have a hard time hanging onto the "bad cop" persona
for months on end.   Both of them were
of that eternal fraternity of public school students who hang at the back of
the classroom, halfway engaged with the lesson plan of the day, forever
intrigued with computer games or the cultural trend of the moment.  Marvin had better command of math concepts.
Brendan constantly displayed high numeracy, but had very likely never been in
any learning environment where teachers could figure out how to scaffold outward
from the skills he actually possessed in such a manner that he could remain
engaged in a classroom environment.

By the time Brendan came to us, his trust quotient was so
low that he survived at our school through a time-tested method, that of
relying upon better prepared peers like Marvin in a self-created tutorial.  The problem was that Marvin's own
proficiency was limited, and it wasn't enough to carry Brendan through to the
achievement of academic credit on even a quarterly basis.  Still, we worked with this support unit
these two young people established for themselves as best we could, but it
turned out to be one of those instances where the center pieces could not hold
out against the wilder end pieces.   There
simply wasn't enough field independence -
or a consistent support/ learning environment away from the school - for
Brendan to make the grade, and so we had to move him on, for fear too much time
would be lost for him by remaining enrolled at Middle College, which at year's
end we concluded wasn't serving him adequately.

It's not easy to make a decision like that for a learning
community that wants to advocate for urban students, but one of the few
privileges left to critical pedagogy is that most alternative schools are small
enough and informed enough to make the decision to move a student on, as
opposed to having a student moved on by bureaucrats who are completely out of
touch with the specific blocks posed to the learner in question.  The important thing is not to engage in the
defense of a mistake, and our belief that we had enough resources at our school
to serve a student with the needs Brendan had was profoundly mistaken.  Things unfolded as they had to at a strictly
technical level, and sometimes that's the only option a teaching structure
has.   So we all went our separate ways
in time and space.  The sole positive
feature of the set-up was that the nurturing relationship Brendan and Marvin
formed through their enrollment at Middle College held, and Brendan
enthusiastically attended and celebrated Marvin's graduation, even though he
was not a high school graduate that year. 

"Our belief that we had enough resources at our school to
serve a student with the needs Brendan had was profoundly mistaken."

And that's how I like to think of the two of them, forever
in each other's corner, come what may. 
I can still hear their high pitched cackle the day I mistook a loud
argument about the computer game Grand Theft Auto for real threats to people who
they were shouting about blasting or running over.  I thought they were playing a loud game of what we used to call
"the dozens" which was getting out of control, so I asked them to step aside
with me to defuse the "situation."  What
a fool believes, as the old song goes. 
But there was no harm done, at least in that moment.

What puzzles me, as it does everyone else who knew these two
young men, the question the family of neither boy can answer, is how the
dividing line between play and the reality of what a firearm is became blurred.  I'm aware it happens all the time in this
country; people everywhere kill each other under the perception that a gun is
something to be gamed with.  Folks with
street cred say it's a notion readily found among street kids, where for many
urban adolescents, an acquaintance with firearms becomes as casual as the
presence of the television remote.  
Cultural theorists say it's the prevalence of violence in television and
film, in video game displays, in mainstream hip hop, etc.  Some simply say that it's an indifference
regarding life and death that falls upon young people too long accustomed to
both the wannabe and real gangsterism that prevails in too much of youth
culture, and it's true that Brendan's death at the hands of Marvin happened
over a weekend when three other shootings occurred in South Seattle.  Any of the above, or all, maybe contributed
to that moment when Marvin picked up that .32 automatic, "playfully" pointed it
at someone he cared for as a brother, and accidentally killed him.  I don't know.  Does anybody really know how they fall into place, how these
things unfold?

All anyone knows for certain is that there was no
animosity or disagreement between the two at the time of the tragedy.  But today, Brendan is dead, and Marvin, who
tells anyone who will visit him as he awaits trial for third degree
manslaughter that he did not know the gun was loaded, faces the possibility of
ten to twenty years in prison.  The
technical details of the moment are all we get as the state of Washington tries
to decide what it's going to do with the life of this young Black man who had
no previous major offenses.

"For many urban adolescents, an acquaintance with firearms
becomes as casual as the presence of the television remote."  

The larger terror at this moment is that it was in the
newspaper, and that the news of the tragedy got clean by so many of us - me, my
colleagues, and the peers of the two adolescents.  It was all just one more weekend, one of those lunatic moments
when one young Black man kills another young Black man, and once all the usual
sociological theorizing rolls by, no one really knows why, except that it
happened, and it's to be expected, somehow. 
The assumption "You know how those people are" continues to carry the
day in the great "progressive" enclave of the Pacific Northwest, and it creeps
between all of our ears, this desire of the owners of this country that we
should distrust and fear each other, or even ourselves.

Older people in my family refer to something called gumbo ya ya, which has a number of
meanings.  The mildest kind of gumbo ya
ya is just when everyone is trying to talk or sing their story at once, which
is what we all usually encounter at family gatherings or church dinners or
block parties.  Gumbo ya ya ratchets up
from there and can be benign or malevolent, the worst forms being the
internalized purge of civil war.  These
days, from where I'm sitting, it's looking like gumbo ya ya is still climbing
into the saddle.  

Between the recent death of Brendan Wilkins, and the small
war which is simmering between black and Latino youth in this neighborhood
according to both my students and Junior, who heads up the gang intervention
effort at the Southwest Community Center up the way, it appears to me that
things are falling apart just as fast as they always have.  More and more kids are fighting and killing
each other over the eggshells and the coffee grounds in the garbage.  There are nowhere near enough literacy or
work programs for adults, let alone young people.  There are not enough paying apprenticeships that will route our
young into work that pays enough to raise or support a family, there are not
enough cultural or after-school programs, and what remains of community health,
mental health and dental clinics are the newest hustle for the business
groupies, and on it all goes.

There is, however, a plethora of screaming distractions,
spectacular entertainments which celebrate bullying and the cheap shot as a
form of "relaxed exchange" and a growing acceptance among all our peoples that
the wholesale destruction of a different people on the other side of the world
is a wholly acceptable option in the pursuit of some allegedly benign
purpose.  To paraphrase the education
theorist Neil Postman, no tyrant in his wildest dreams could have imagined this
moment we live in, a time in which truths which do not amuse or entertain would
be casually swept under the carpet, to be dealt with once the feel-good
celebrations are over with. 

I'm tired of watching kids of color and other working class
kids kill each other, in serious or playful emulation of the political
gangsters who have driven this country since time immemorial.  If President-Elect Barack Obama is for real,
well, then Hallelujah, and the devil take those of us who never saw the glory
of the day in his face.  But may Obama
or whoever else be damned if they oppose what higher aspirations have been
raised among so many working people by this election.  The proof of the thing is in the whole picture, not just its
glossier aspects. 

michael hureaux is a
writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. 
He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the
country and performs his work frequently. Email to: tricksterbirdboy@yahoo.com