What killed Robbie?
Hussain, Jane
REPORT FROM HARLEM WHAT KILLED ROBBIE? NOTES ON A NATIVE SON At 10:30 p.m. on February 2 in Harlem, a young black male with a gun ran toward a policeman. He ignored an order to drop the gun and...
...In the days between Robbie's death and his funeral, I avoided the news reporters and the cameramen who roamed the neighborhood asking questions...
...And on 129th Street today, wealth and power translate into drug money and guns...
...The people at the Children's Storefront will go on trying to open up for their 100 students all the sacredness and infinite possibilites of life, liberty, and happiness...
...I would catch an occasional glimpse of them both...
...How he would learn to deal with the corrosive humiliation of always walking in fear, the sinister exhilaration of momentarily inspiring fear, the rage of shame when his bluff was called-that was all still in the works when he died, a broken, unloaded gun in his hand, the victim of his own bravado...
...Some of the mothers suggested that Robbie, like other teenagers they had known, had run toward that policeman, gun in hand, in an act of semisuicidal self-destruction...
...But there is also a great resiliency in Harlem: amazing human spirit, people picking themselves up time and time again, promising themselves and each other to get their act together, to shape up and fly straight...
...You want to know what killed Robbie...
...We christen greed as profit motive and entrepreneurial spirit, and presume that these are prerequisites for democracy, freedom, prosperity...
...But wimps are not welcome here...
...Only later did I hear that Robbie had changed...
...The American male dares to pursue an impossible dream...
...Last year, Robbie and his friends used to hang out after school on the Storefront's wooden porches...
...How much of Robbie's anger was typical teenage defiance, and how much of it was his growing awareness of all the counts he had against him...
...people taking homeless individuals off the street and settling them into their own cramped, heatless apartments...
...Anger, impatience, and hostility to authority are familiar symptoms to teachers and parents of adolescent children...
...The day before his death, Robbie told his young girlfriend that he was going to "stop playing with guns...
...Harlem, even more than the rest of New York City, is a distillation of the best and worst in American life: a high concentration of degraded and brutalized people and a high concentration of heroic spirits...
...Elika returned to New York with us in August...
...But with the other mothers, I see self-hatred and despair in some of the children at the Storefront...
...Cruel to many of us, but more cruel to poor blacks living in Harlem...
...I felt like shouting at the reporters...
...They have realized that a system which enshrines social responsibility without individual freedom is basically flawed...
...I was walking along 129th Street on a hot summer day when he caught up with me on his bicycle, delivering a message from his mother about travel arrangements...
...I liked to hear their laughing and roughhousing outside as I prepared the next day's lessons...
...He looked like a black male in a dangerous neighborhood with a gun...
...JANE HUSSAIN Jane Hussain, a former teacher at the Children's Storefront, is writing a series of books for children.f books for children...
...He ignored an order to drop the gun and the policeman fired...
...Unfortunately, Robbie came back as well...
...He died for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with happiness understood as money, liberty as free enterprise, and life as something to be spent accumulating status symbols or to be thrown away in defense of one's macho image...
...Cruel words...
...Robbie was shot because he did not look like the average American child...
...Having attended perhaps thousands of parent-teacher conferences, on both sides of the table, I know there are no simple solutions, especially for a child like Robbie...
...Robbie was going to visit relatives in Alabama for the summer, while his older brother, Elika, was going to Chicago...
...We zigzagged our way back and forth across streets guided by their sense of which side was less dangerous...
...And now, although he couldn't make his fortune, you're giving him his fifteen minutes of fame: "Third Teen Slain by Cops in One Week.'" We sit back smugly, watching the socialist world crumble, assured by our leaders that its failures lay in underreliance on market mechanisms and personal incentives...
...Like all of our children, he knew that success in America is measured by wealth and power...
...I was often the last person to leave...
...I avoided them because I had no easy answers, because I was upset and angry...
...Harlem did not invent machismo, nor did America...
...Parents and teachers at the Children's Storefront had wanted to get the young teenagers out of Harlem for the summer, and we were hoping to enroll them in schools outside the city in the fall...
...He was both...
...Like most Americans they live in a world of billboards, store windows, and TV commercials, a world of lay-away plans, extended credit, and ads that promise rewards, privileges, success...
...Since my daughter, Amina, was also going to Chicago to visit my parents, she and Elika would take the bus together and look after each other...
...It was dusk when I walked a group of students home from the funeral parlor...
...The average American boy grows up playing with toy guns and violence-centered computer games-the more realistic the better...
...I last talked with Robbie eight months ago...
...I was grateful for their presence...
...We quarrel about such matters as deregulation, welfare, public schools, and whether to legalize drugs...
...When I locked up and we said goodby, the boys seemed to take that as their cue to leave too...
...Churches, community projects, soup kitchens, political campaigns...
...people marketing homemade food and crafts, wild and woolly ideas, art and music...
...It also has lots of ordinary people, like Robbie and his family...
...Robbie, a young black male growing up in Harlem, never had a choice between being one of the frighteners and one of the frightened...
...We don't need to read Franz Fanon to learn about the self-hating despair of the wretched of the earth...
...I prefer to see it as an angry, childish, macho act, not a despairing one...
...129th Street is not the friendliest place at dusk...
...He died in pursuit of the American Dream...
...Will we ever have the courage of the Eastern-bloc peoples to recognize that much more than reform is needed...
...When will we understand that a system that enshrines personal freedom without social responsibility is equally flawed...
...He was a student at the Children's Storefront (where I was a teacher), a round-faced, cheerful, inquisitive child often...
...How many killings do American children watch each week, long before they are able to distinguish between live and recorded footage, between documentary and drama...
...Last year, the Children's Storefront tried to grapple with twelve-year-old Robbie's behavior problems...
...Robert Cole died on the sidewalk, a thirteen-year-old boy with a broken, unloaded gun in his hand and thirty-one crack vials in his pockets...
...Like all of us, Robbie wanted to be successful and admired...
...How best to channel that anger...
...I first met Robbie in the summer of 1986...
...They are the sort to light one candle rather than sit and curse the darkness, hi memory of Robbie Cole, I curse the Darkness...
...I remember how he once tried to listen to friends' hearts with a stethoscope...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 8
