Where Are They Now?

I was exasperated that they gave me the outspoken racist kid in the same cabin as the extra shy and tremendously hyper black kid.  I felt like I had so much that I needed to teach them both, but it was difficult to do when one was slyly slipping racial epithets into every conversation while the other was bouncing on the end of my arm, ready to dash into the woods the minute I stopped paying close attention and accidentally let go of his hand.

 

Of course, it was much easier to love the sweet black kid than the vitriolic white kid.  But since they were both five, and the racist boy was just parroting the evil that spewed out of his father’s mouth, I had to love and pity them both.  And teach them both, as much as I could, in a week, which was nothing at all.

 

Trevell said enough words that week that I knew he wasn’t mute, but he mostly “spoke” in signs.  He would point to my hair, which was him asking if he could braid it for me.  He would point to my camera, which meant “May I please take some pictures?”  He would catch my eye and then run away into the ravine, which was “Will you show me you care enough to come after me?”

 

Shane, who I repeat was five years old, coolly informed me that he had been having sex with his girlfriend for a year but he was getting tired of the b*tch.  And he didn’t want to have to share a bunkhouse with a n*gger.  And what the f*ck was this sh*t they were serving for lunch.  Whoa, I said.  Whoa.

 

They wanted to send both of them home – Shane for his utterly foul language, Trevell because he truly did run away about ten times a day, and I did, after all, have about twenty boys in my care, not just these two.  But I said no.  I was 19, idealist, I had a lot of energy.  I wanted to have the opportunity to be a good role model for these kids for six days.  Six days out of a lifetime is not enough days, but if they continued to meet good people who would each take their turn, then maybe six days could turn into sixty could turn into six hundred, and maybe these two boys wouldn’t end up trying to kill one another when they were teenagers.

 

Which they are now.

 

Had I not been 19, had I been 25 or even 22, had I been out of college and had some kind of way of making a living, I can tell you now without a doubt in my mind that I would have found a way to be a foster parent to Trevell.  Nobody wanted him.  His aunt or something was taking care of him and his brother, and I heard the nasty words she hurled at him when the kids were dropped off.  It was something along the lines of “don’t make me come back here and pick you up in the middle of my precious week without you,” only with lots more meanness thrown in.  A couple of weeks after Trevell went home, we saw him on t.v. during an adopt-a-thon.  His caregiver aunt or whoever she was had turned him in to Child Services.  She didn’t want him anymore.  I spent one sleepless night trying to figure out if there was a way I could take him.  Sometimes I still wish I had.

 

Shane ended punching me in the eye on our last day of camp.  It didn’t hurt – he was a little kid – but I cried anyway because I hated what I was sending him home to.  I hated that even though he and Trevell and I had a long talk about being kind to people, about not hitting people and not calling them the “n” word, as soon as I sent these boys home they would get daily lessons from the people in their lives that completely contradicted me.  I was a little bird chirping in a hurricane.  I really wanted to help them, and I just didn’t see how I could have any effect.

 

Trevell smiled at me, the first and last time, on the last day of camp, at the campfire.  And he pressed into my hand a length of green rope that he had clumsily braided, without saying a word.  This is the stuff of Lifetime movies, but it was really happening to me, and my tender 19 year old heart broke in half, because I knew that he would go home to no love and no attention and no help, and probably end up in jail or dead before he was twenty.  My heart broke for Shane, too, although my feelings for him were a little more complex.  The two of them, two smart kids in healthy little bodies, were such wasted potential.

 

Last weekend my Aunt Evie told me that one of the reasons she retired this year from being a kindergarten teacher was because of a little boy in her class named John.  John was Trevell and Shane all mixed together in one kid, one really smart, really wild, really needy kid.  My aunt asked her husband if they could adopt John and raise him.  They are over 60 years old now, so my uncle said no.  And she was too exhausted to keep dealing with them, without being able to help them.  It’s too much for me, she said. 

 

They are everywhere.  And what do we do for them?  What do we do?

 

I think I’ll go google Trevell now.  I won’t be able to find him.