Despite the glares from the two officers, I thought we’d escaped. Once the twins got on the bus, we’d be off. Then, with one foot in, Jackson, the verbal one, turned and yelled out to Marshall, the physical one, “Kick the car!” Which he did. Hard. And put a motherfucking dent in the side of the police cruiser. This action was not appreciated by Rochester’s finest. Before I could speak, both twins were in the back of the car, officers in front. I was still frozen when they peeled out, shouting, “Follow us.” It’s not easy for a school bus to tail a cop car driven by an infuriated officer, and we had no GPS to direct us from the corn field to the station, but somehow we made it. In the parking lot, I sent the bus with twelve remaining kids and three staff members home to Ithaca, an hour and a half away. I turned toward the police fortress, worried about the twins’ fate as well as my own.
It was the summer of 1990. I was 24 and the unofficial director of the Access to College Education (ACE) summer program. I’d taken the city youth worker job the previous fall knowing very little. Nine months later, I only was just beginning to understand. I was beginning to understand how the forces of institutional racism and class structure led kids in the sixth grade to garner suspensions leading to academic failure. I was beginning to understand that not everyone in my Ivy League hometown could reasonably aspire to its hallowed halls. I was beginning to understand the struggle of families borrowing to pay the light bill or gathering shingles in the front yard in hopes of one day reroofing their trailer.
But I was also young, full of idealism and energy. And I did know the twins well. I’d found them tutors, driven them to school dances, commiserated with their mother at 8am when they wouldn’t get up for school – on one occasion, I’d rousted them with a broom, maybe not my finest moment.
On this day, we’d come to Ganondagan, an American Indian heritage site located in a cornfield on a two-lane rural highway outside Rochester. I’d heard it was a good place to visit, but there was no internet to look at pictures, and a lot of open stark nothingness turned out not to be a great choice for fourteen rambunctious city kids.
It started with baseball caps on a dirt path. Jackson and Marshall were tough but no match for Robert and Evan, the biggest boys in the group. Some months later, Robert, a quiet kid who lived with his grandparents, would melt down in a group session becoming violent without a target. It would take most of my strength to restrain him, my arms hugging him tightly, no words sufficient for the pain he was trying to let go. Also in the future, it would come out that Evan was involved with his stepsister in a bad way. I would make the call to Social Services, the call which would break up the family. On this hot day, however, those boys were merely bullies, grabbing the twins’ hats and mocking them for their inability to retrieve them as they jogged down the road. “Get them, Francois, get them,” the twins yelled at me. A grown man chasing kids on a sacred site felt inappropriate so I demurred. “Ignore them, we’ll get them back. They just want attention.” This answer was wrong, very wrong. The twins, half in tears, told me I didn’t care about them and headed back toward the bus. The bus driver was there as well as Leslie, a staff member who’d stayed back. I let them go.
I didn’t know the bus driver was asleep. I didn’t consider that Leslie was physically unable to keep up with the twins as they continued walking down the rural highway becoming a shimmering mirage in the summer heat. I could have known two young Black kids on the side of the highway would draw attention. I wouldn’t have guessed that when the cops picked them up to return them to Ganondagan, the twins would yell obscenities at the officers for the duration of the short drive, making the cruiser dent the absolute last straw.
The officers disappeared once I was inside the station. The twins were in the care of a female sergeant, a woman with a tan face and calloused hands. She let me make a call to my boss. I wasn’t going to be fired. He was sending Michael Thomas to pick me up in one of the program’s cars, a retired cruiser, the irony not lost on me. I felt relief at keeping my job and grimaced at the prospect of the shit Michael would give me the whole ride back. The sergeant did the paperwork with a smile while maintaining eye contact with the boys. “What you two need is to spend the summer on my farm. Shoveling hay, mowing lawns, and feeding the animals,” she told them, the twins subdued for once. “Fuck, yes!” I wanted to yell. And I know their overwhelmed mom would be okay with that.
With the paperwork and details of transferring their probations to our county done, the sergeant moved on to her next case, and the boys and I sat quietly waiting for Michael. I was exhausted though I knew sleep was hours and many beers away. The boys were too. They were twelve.
I worked with Jackson, Marshall, Robert, Evan, and the others for another year and a half. Objectively, even before high school, the ACE program was a failure. Chronic absenteeism and behavioral issues plagued many of the kids. Teachers who seemed like partners in sixth grade grew indifferent by eighth grade. I wasn’t sure if I’d accomplished anything but knew I needed to move on for everyone’s sake.
But there were wins. The only boy Robert and Evan couldn’t bully, a boy who’d seen his father killed as a child, came to live with my family. He went back to his mother sooner than I wanted, but we remained close for many years and he became a good father to his children. Another boy did very well in high school and even made the football team as a lineman. I went to a game to cheer him on and sat near his father, a Greek immigrant who owned a diner in town. When the boy missed a block leading to a quarterback sack, a guy near us yelled, “Bench that fat
ass!” I had to leave before I got arrested. The boy’s football career was short-lived but he did make it to college.
I spent a long time thinking about how the afternoon in Ganondagan could have gone differently, finally realizing it was just a proxy for the lives of those kids, lives I dropped into and out of, lives with forces causing far too much struggle and pain.
Those kids would be in their forties now. More than half my life has passed and I’m still hanging out with kids, this time as a volunteer in another emerging program for families who’ve come to this country from troubled places halfway across the globe. The young woman who coordinates the program is the age I was at Ganondagan. She seems so much smarter and more composed than I was then. Perhaps memory can be overly critical, but I think she is and I’m happy about it.
I don’t need another arrest story.
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