Daniel: beloved by God & by me:
Morton, Bridget Balthrop
DANIEL: BELOVED BY GOD & BY ME FILLING HIS SIZE-TWELVE SHOES BRIDGET BALTHROP MORTON I took my son Daniel, who at thirteen, as his father says, is "hormones with feet," to see Spike Lee's Do the...
...Since I still act as Daniel's censor, I read what I could find about the movie, and agreed to take him when we could coordinate it...
...I know from reading the papers that drug deals go down on the fringes of the park, and that murders have occurred near the school...
...Each of us delighted in the early part of the film, with its deft characterizations: Mookie, the likable but irresponsible pizza deliveryman who prides himself on his paying job, but generally ignores his young son and Tina, one sexy bitch and the child's mother...
...So of course he questions mine...
...My son's junior high is renowned for its award-winning science program...
...I tried to say it was okay not to play football, but he just wouldn't listen...
...I looked from one young face to the other...
...he posted the sticker across his waterbed frame: Question Authority...
...That he admires their solidarity and their colorful speech...
...says violence is "impractical" and "immoral," whereas Malcolm X, whom Lee quotes last, says violence in self-defense can be acceptable, even "intelligent...
...DANIEL: BELOVED BY GOD & BY ME FILLING HIS SIZE-TWELVE SHOES BRIDGET BALTHROP MORTON I took my son Daniel, who at thirteen, as his father says, is "hormones with feet," to see Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing...
...Street Park, a public park in the heart of our city, in an area I've heard others call "Blacktown...
...Finally (his word), the night before school started, we managed to get it together...
...I've also seen the magnificent eyes of children learning to read, or speaking stories and poems extraordinary in their honesty and beauty, like six-year-old Eylenne's celebration of herself: I like black 'cause I got on black socks 'cause I'm black 'cause my Mama black and my sister is brown When I was Daniel's age, during the turbulent sixties and my own hormonal storm, I was subject to violent rages, during which I felt no control, only fury and the surge of blood through my wrists...
...the white man Sal, who makes pizzas and money, argues ineffectively with his sons, and brandishes a baseball bat when he's angry...
...Just around the corner from his school lies Lipscomb BRIDGET BALTHROP MORTON is a poet, free-lance writer, and mother of three who lives in Melbourne, Florida...
...And I don't...
...I've puzzled over what that might mean...
...But Daniel answers, "You don't understand...
...I kept wondering through this wacky and wildly disturbing film, how it would be to see it with a large audience...
...How does he envision the world...
...he wears black tee-shirts and likes rap and hard-core music like Black Flag and ice-T...
...Daniel merely smiled...
...Even if Spike Lee believes that, surely he sees that it's self- (and race-) defeating...
...Spike Lee's movie dictates no choices...
...I recognized early my potential for violence, should anger explode involuntarily...
...What else could they do...
...But the neighborhood itself, once the residents expected my presence, felt safe enough to me...
...Daniel and I watched together, but I was never more aware of how different points of view will color one's perceptions...
...What else could they do...
...Daniel's a skater, a "home boy...
...He said, 'I guess I'm not enough of a man.' It's really sad," Daniel said, "he doesn't think very well of himself...
...And how would he build the world of his dreams...
...I am an inadequate pacifist, because although I believe that humans on their best behavior inflict no suffering on others, I find I am rarely on my best behavior...
...They 're always fighting over there," Ethan told me, "and it's a holy city for all of them, Christians and Moslems and Jews...
...Radio Raheem, who roams through the streets and into the pizza parlor with his outsize boom box blasting Public Enemy's "Fight the Power...
...I am not patient, I lose my temper, I am sometimes verbally unkind, even assaultive...
...That he identifies with their struggle for equality...
...He stared out the window...
...A large black audience...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...There were four people in the theater that night, all of us white...
...I tried to talk about that, reminding my son of the old drunk, Da Mayor's, plea in the movie that they not hurt one another, how each single person might have planned and practiced nonviolence...
...Daniel, beloved by God and by me, thinks pacifism is, to use his vocabulary, "lame," though he's willing, when he's not too tired or too hungry, to see the value of a mother who will bring him a present from a peace demonstration at Cape Canaveral...
...he sometimes thinks like a black person...
...I also met men like John Holder, who worked with me in the park, but spent his spare time setting up a program to teach trades to the unemployed...
...No matter what Daniel says about violence or the need for an active self-defense, my thirteen-year-old son is not simply spinning the wheels on his skateboard...
...It reports one man's vision, a vision of frustration and waste in a culture and economy predicated on oppression and injustice...
...Mine and Dan's," Ethan said...
...Daniel's response to the Bed-Stuy riot in Do the Right Thing breaks my heart: "Sal had it coming ...I'd kill him...
...Somebody," he said, "has to worry about the next generation...
...But is it self-defense, or intelligence to destroy a pizza parlor in your neighborhood because it's run by a bigot...
...Ethan," I said, "this is your idea...
...And then he told me he'd tried to reassure that boy in the locker room...
...I asked...
...Daniel talks more about the fights, unfortunately a daily affair in our Brevard County, Florida, junior high schools...
...He hates to go to Mass, as he regularly tells me, but he's doing a fine job of filling his size-12 shoes...
...That he sees his black friends' flair and passion for living...
...I saw poverty there, and pain...
...I saw men and boys like Sweet Dick Willie, swilling beer on street corners because they didn't have jobs...
...But I am convinced that my own long road to salvation will result from my efforts to accept myself as I am and then direct my passion away from anger and toward the service of God's beloved, wherever they are...
...He ends it with two quotations, one each from Martin Luther King, Jr...
...and Malcolm X, whose faces smile out of flames in the movie's last searing image...
...Sweet Dick Willie and his friends, who hang out on the corner like Macbeth's witches, commenting on everything and doing nothing...
...In school, in global considerations, he's searching for answers and finding hope in a world that at times seems to defy all virtue...
...Monday afternoon after that first day of school, I picked an exhausted Daniel up from football practice in Florida's 90° heat...
...Until very recently, I taught young kids creative writing at the park...
...On the weekend Daniel's friend Ethan sat at our kitchen table, and asked me if I knew about the plan the two boys had devised for Jerusalem...
...The movie is too realistic to be a metaphor, in its joy as well as its violence and pain...
...One boy threw up three times before he quit, and Coach told us not to laugh, that he'd done a brave thing even to try...
...So why not turn it into a country of its own, a city-state like the Vatican, and let a council of one leader from each religion run the country...
...What made you think about it...
...Boys are dropping like flies," he told me...
...My concern is Daniel, and the age-old adolescent lament: "You don't understand...
...I worked there part-time for nearly two years...
...For today, at least, that someone isn't me...
...Or because someone else with power-a policeman, in this case-killed your friend...
...The public junior high school he attends has a large percentage of black students, and on more than one occasion, Dan's said to me that he has a black attitude...
...But Spike Lee doesn' t understand either, or his movie would have a clearer message...
...Nobody was laughing anyway...
...Daniel had been leading me toward the film since he first saw a bit about it on an MTV news program early in the summer...
...But this is intellectual wrangling, and I find my patience and my pacifism are tested most when I try to deal with real issues and the people I love...
...What else can any of us do...
...What else can any of us do...
...I became a pacifist, I guess in self-defense, to preserve my self-respect and do no harm to others...
...Daniel and I slid down in the cheap seats to watch heat and frustration erupt into violence in a black neighborhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 18
