The Never-Young

I am on the train and there are teenagers too, a crowd of them. They are the Freddie Grays, the Michael Browns, the Tamir Rices, of my city. Pants too loose or else too tight. They are loud and obnoxious, or quiet and suspicious. I read the paper and it spits out facts about teenagers: murder rate, failure rate, crime rate. I look up, and see teenagers who seem to have come from nowhere and emerged from that place fully formed. I look at them and struggle to connect them back to the babies I have known and loved, the toddlers I have adored, the children I have cherished.

But there they were once. They had mischief in their eyes and maybe dimples in their cheeks. Their bellies were round and familiar beneath their pajamas. They clutched blankets and baby dolls, made ordinary objects into talismans, existed for long periods of time in magical worlds closed off to adults. They cried and needed comfort, burned with fevers, pressed against the safe, warm curves of grown-ups, sucked their thumbs, were scared of the dark.

I taught a student once, a third grader. He was small and dark and sharp-boned, and he carried a bright flame of intelligence and a brighter flame of fear and sorrow. He came into my class already wild, and would often retreat beneath my desk, where he would rock and bang the metal desk sides and cry with some pain I couldn’t fathom. I adored him, and over the year we built a closeness I treasured, but I knew he was also always skating on the edge of some permanent trouble, some place from which he could not be saved.

And so I imagined him often as a teen: facing down police officers or a judge or a prison guard. I imagined how he would appear to strangers: just another angry black kid, out of control, nothing there for us to love, no remnant of his child self remaining. I even imagined myself meeting him at some later time, and searching for the shadow of that boy who curled weeping under my desk, crying, “You’re being mean to me!” with all the hurt of the third-grader he was. I imagined that in that distant future place I too might fail to find compassion.

It is hard, no doubt, to imagine childhoods or even summon memories for young men and women who cause pain themselves, or show no remorse for acts of violence, or appear to exist in a place past caring. And all too brutally often it is even hard for our bigoted eyes to see young men and women — even children — of color as anything but a threat. But this is our job as adults, as the ones in charge of the lives and futures of these young people: to love them even when they have forgotten how to love themselves, to remember their better angels when those angels are buried deep beneath a concrete shell, to see past our own prejudice to the human being who is standing right in front of us.

Here is another, softer, example: A girl I tutored, a cheerful sparrow. We were reading Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and she was entranced. She so badly wanted Charlie to be the last one standing but she was not sure, until the final chapters, that he would be, and like all children (and most adults), she took great pleasure in the richly deserved disasters that befell the other four contestants. The tutoring program we were part of gave books to all the children every month, and the wonderful coordinator at my student’s school arranged one month for my student to receive Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You should have seen her face when I pulled out the book: pure delight and wonder. She thumbed through it endlessly and insisted that we read together — me from the library copy and her from her Very Own Copy.

But she’ll be a teen too someday in the not-too-distant future. She’ll be loud maybe, and maybe obnoxious too, and perhaps her jeans will be too tight or she’ll present herself in ways that earn disapproving frowns from grown-ups on the subway. And none of them — not one of them — will be able to imagine her as a child, curled at home with her favorite book, reading about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, who turned out in fact to be a kind and gentle hero.

Smart people might be tempted here to engage in a battle of statistics, to argue minority crime rates versus facts about racial disparities in school discipline, sentencing, use of solitary confinement, etc. But that would be beside the point. Because statistics can neither justify nor defeat empathy. Because we don’t need numbers to know that dehumanizing children is wrong.

And so for me, and I think for all of us, our guiding question must be not what these children will do to cause pain or damage to others, it is what pain or damage will be inflicted on them by us. In the end I fear far more what will be done to these children than what they will do to us, as small as they are in the shadow of America, and as alone.