Feet on the Street by Roy Blount Jr. Read Free Book Online Page B

but many of them had to become less troublesome first. They had to be weaned to some extent from their sense of what love was like. “These kids have never found handshakes and nods and smiles rewarding,” said an administrator. “The only interaction that’s gotten them attention has been negative and obnoxious.”
    So these kids were kept in group homes or other residences, where they could earn points for making eye contact, shaking hands firmly, and eschewing temper tantrums or at least cutting their tantrums back from hour-long to half-hour. If they accumulated enough points, they were told, they might be able to go back home.
    â€œAdult attention is so important that kids will
take
violence,” said a man who, with his wife, ran a group home. “They’ll
make
you mad at them.” Because that’s what it had taken to catch their parents’ eyes. The man told of a boy who’d been “beaten by his mother. Badly. His body all . . . broken.” When the boy cried, and the man’s wife tried to comfort him, he’d say, “Nobody holds me when I hurt like my mama does.”
    â€œI’m a criminal,” said one blond thirteen-year-old, with what seemed to be a mixture of bemusement and pride.
    â€œNo, you’re not,” said his teaching parent, a man whom the kids called “Zap” and whom we liked a lot. “You made some mistakes, but you’re not a criminal.”
    â€œI stole a lawnmower,” he said.
    â€œA lawnmower?” I asked. “What did you want with a lawnmower?”
    â€œHis parents threw him out of the house,” explained Zap. “He took the family lawnmower with him so he could support himself.”
    â€œI ain’t staying here for no year,” one boy told us. “I’m going
home.
” He had recently complained, when served black-eyed peas and turnip greens, “We always get white people’s food. I want some black people’s food.”
    What did he call black people’s food?
    â€œWeenies,” he said.
    Another boy, “Ethan,” practiced his “guest skills” by showing us around his group home. He showed everything, including the cabinet where they kept the salt. And the salt in the cabinet. Every time I turned to talk to another kid, Ethan showed me something else. And shook my hand. He had scars on his neck that looked like claw marks. He was earning points toward going back home.
    â€œThey come in here,” an administrator told us, “with, oh, the mark of a barbecue grill on their back. Or . . . there is so much sexual abuse today.” Some kids would go home and get beaten some more and have to come back. “And they still defend their parents to the death. If the other kids say, ‘Your mama is mean,’ they get mad. They say their parents are the best thing in the world.”
    Slick and I should have known that New Orleans was not the place to go for unalloyed heartwarming. We did find poignant loyalty. I didn’t hear anybody say, “He ain’t heavy, Father, he’s my brother,” but we met one nine-year-old who had been going from foster home to “residential treatment agency” to foster home since he was three, when authorities discovered that he was being left at home all day with a loaded revolver to guard his infant brother. And we met a ten-year-old whose twelve-year-old sister was in a different residence. Christmas was coming up. The administrator who introduced us told him he could list his first, second, and third choices from the Sears catalog.
    â€œA tape recorder,” he said, “and if I can’t get that, a typewriter.”
    The administrator looked surprised. “You want a typewriter?” he said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œBut you said . . .”
    â€œFor my sister.”
    â€œWhat’s your third choice?”
    â€œA typewriter for my sister.”
    â€œThat was your