Once I was Young Too

I'm preparing some youth mentorship material, and a memory comes visiting. Some years back at a youth camp I had agreed to run, I lost a young man. Lost him to a more interesting world.

He was the most different in the group-- loud-talking, a bit of an angry edge, attention seeking and pants almost all the way to his knees. He was not interested in the other activities which got everyone else's attention. So I came at him with rules. I wasn't having his bluster. And he wasn't having me either. He quit. All of his 16 year-old self.

His mother came by the next day to talk to me. One of the students came up to me, said Anthony’s mother here. I thought- I'm in trouble with an American mama now. This is not Africa where a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. Here people's kids can be little terrorists if they want, call you all kinds of names and you just have to take it because "they gat rights" and they know it and it's their word against yours.

In my past I've taught inner-city schools long enough to speak knowingly on this. And I have seen a mother tear into a classroom like a tornado to confront her son over last night's family affairs, something about the mama's boyfriend. That's the memory that was playing in my mind as the boy's mama approached me at the camp.

By the time she was in my face I had dug my nails into my palms ready for war, forget diplomacy. If she was going to break my bones I needed to gouge out an eye-ball for a souvenir. She opened her mouth, and the angels sang- "Ms. Hall, I'm sorry about my son. Please forgive him and give him another chance." What! Not making this up.

First, I clearly recognized her accent as somewhere from Africa. I learnt the boy's parents were Ugandan immigrants and their son was born in the US. First-generation Ugandan American, caught between identities and the trauma of fitting in. This knowing gave me a completely different understanding, and a regret that I had not taken time to isolate the boy and listen to his story. I’d been overwhelmed with too many teenagers each demanding attention, so I blurred out the individuals that made the whole.

Anthony came back. It was in talking with him that I gained an understanding of his style which I had judged as obnoxious. I’d also told him I knew the style’s prison origin and what it meant and how ignorant he was to ape it blindly. He said he knew all about that but it was irrelevant. Contexts change.

This boy was educating me! He said the girls liked it, and if we adults wanted it to stop, we have to make the girls not like it. He was a peacock showing off its feathers to the peahens because he was at that stage in life. Who was I to argue with his reality? How he dressed became inconsequential, and we talked about more important things in life. 

I decided wasn't going to lose him again at this camp, because selfishly, I wanted him to remember me when he accepted his achievement awards later in life. I realized too that at his age, I was not a conformist either, and in fact, a relative had once come to school because I'd been suspended. How did I forget that I was once young too?