Last night I spent the better part of an hour blubbering all over myself convinced the world was going to hell and at the helm of this nosedive was Western Baltimore. All this really means is that I had just watched the season finale of the Wire, the best show to ever grace my television screen--and though that competition includes America's Next Top Model and from time to time Ghost Whisperer, that doesn't make the Wire any less brilliant (but maybe it makes me less brilliant?).
Season Four shed light on the question "Who are the Corner Boys and where do they come from?" by focusing on four kids all from varying hard luck backgrounds. Thankfully not all of them ended up as drug dealers. In the end, only two of them are drug dealers, another is sent to a violent group home and the fourth narrowly escapes doom when a cop adopts him. It's all perfectly uplifting and chills me to the bone when I think of the kids I volunteer with who come from backgrounds much like the boys on the show, specifically the homeless yet gifted student turned Corner Boy, Duquan.
Once a week for several months I've been volunteering at a transitional housing facility for homeless families where I do art projects with the children. To be honest, my motivation for volunteering was not just to bring some levity into the otherwise unfairly difficult lives of disenfranchised youngsters, but also to bring levity into my life by making dioramas. I really missed making dioramas. For so many years of school it seemed that every unit was capped off by making a diorama showcasing a scene from whatever we had just learned about: Amoebas, the French Revolution, where babies come from (well...maybe not).
If only grown-up jobs had units like we had in school. "You don't like answering phones? Don't worry. Next week we move onto emails and only revisit phones at the end of the semester!"
So I decided to volunteer with my friend Sarah who just really wanted to help kids via art therapy and had no evil diorama jonesing clouding her good intentions. We were well prepared for the emotional complexities we were about to face both by our volunteer
agency and our exposure to such films as Dangerous Minds and Dead Poets Society.
Of course we bombed
For the first class, Sarah and I had carefully designed a "Create-Your-Own-Adventure" game about "Hippo," a lovable purple (maybe gay?) hippopotamus traveling through a forest. We used obstacles that were based on building self-esteem as laid out by articles from Parenting and other magazines featuring covers with rosy-cheeked newborns in crisp Baby Gap. We explained the task at hand and told the kids that, just like in school, they would each raise their hands and then add their part of the story.
"Don't you know?" said one of the girls, "I haven't been to school in a year."
Bourgeois shame swept over us leaving in its wake a trail of flop sweat. I should mention Sarah and I are White and all of our students are Black or Hispanic. On that first day, we had no time to reflect on the greater significance of this because any hesitation on our part compelled the class to act out and our supervisor to run in threatening to withhold pizza parties while reminding the kids that we were working for free which only made us look like even bigger lunatics.
With Hippo officially DOA, we decided to let the kids draw for the rest of the hour. One boy drew a bloody massacre between horror icons, Jason and Freddy. Another drew himself eating a pizza, a thought bubble with a hundred dollar bill floating over his head. Some of the kids practiced writing their names using a $ instead of an S and posing like rappers. The oldest boy was 11, the youngest 6.
Our next session went considerably better. The children were to trace each other on big paper then paint their portraits within the outline. The kids were really excited but it became apparent pretty quickly that Sarah and I would have to do the tracing. Suddenly we found ourselves, these lumbering scary adults, hovering over children who we knew might have been sexually abused. We were panicked but the kids seemed to think it was all a good time and really enjoyed painting themselves. Finally, it seemed that not only had we chosen a project they liked, but we would make it to dioramas!
Over the next few months the kids got used to us and we got used to them. We encouraged them to draw, build, and paint whatever they felt like. Freddy/Jason massacres were a common theme. After we failed to convince them of the fun it would be to depict more light hearted subjects, we asked them to explore their creativity: Perhaps the blood could be made of red feathers or string rather than scribbled marker?
By the time we grew closer to the kids, it seemed that many of them were about to leave. The housing facility is a temporary home. After a year, the families receive a Section 8 (federally sponsored subsidized housing) and move out. Upon leaving, the parents or guardians on average earn 7-8 dollars an hour and most have more than one child. Some family situations are unstable with different guardians stepping in every few years. All this does not bode well for kids who've told me they want to be writers, lawyers, nurses, and who could be all those things if given the right circumstances. So what's to be done?
One of the great accomplishments of the Wire is that it shows how the decisions of city hall impact the community right down to the streets. Well, that makes it easy. We can effect change by voting for legislators who share our concerns! Sadly, the government of the Wire is infused with so much bureaucracy, politics, and greed that nothing seems to improve. The system stays broken cycling through an endless supply of neglected, mostly Black and Hispanic kids with few options other than crime. I for one am relieved that the real world doesn't operate like this...
I hope by the Wire's series finale next year things are more hopeful. If it can all get fixed on TV, then surely it can be fixed in real life. And afterwards, maybe our class will even make a diorama about it.