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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TheToo-RoughFingersoftheWorld Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamers, Bring me all of your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world. —“Dream Keeper,” by Langston Hughes There’s Your Problem T here’s your problem,” Mrs. Stockton warned me during my first week at Morton, pointing to a good-looking boy seated in the back right-hand corner of the room. Marcus wasn’t from Louisa County. He had grown up in an impoverished section of Alexandria, Virginia, one of eight children. His mother was a prostitute and an alcoholic. His father had long ago vanished from his life. Instead of attending school, Marcus had taken to roaming the streets with some of the tougher, older boys in his neighborhood. As a nine-year-old, he had been caught stealing, not his first offense, and the state had removed him from his home and sent him to live with foster parents in Louisa. As I write this, I wonder how I know these facts and whether they are all true. I must have heard them from Miss Broderick, the young school psychologist who worked with Marcus daily in individual therapy sessions. She had access to his personal files, and when she talked to me about his problems, sometimes referred to his past life in Alexandria. Still, I wonder whether, in my memory, the real “ 142 The Too-Rough Fingers of the World little boy named Marcus has hardened into the familiar stereotype of the urban, African American boy who is abandoned by his father, raised by an addicted and promiscuous mother, and enticed by the lure of the streets into a life of violence and crime. That stereotype fails to convey the psychological complexity of the troubled child in my class, the boy whose bravado and defiance masked, but could never entirely suppress, the fear and vulnerability that threatened to overwhelm him. All I know for sure is this: Marcus was a ten-yearold boy from a blighted, urban neighborhood in northern Virginia. He had gotten into serious enough trouble with the law that he had been removed from his mother and sent to live with strangers in the rural county of Louisa, a hundred and some miles from all that was familiar to him. He was functionally illiterate. He was homesick. And he was very, very angry. During the few months I taught his class, Marcus knocked over desks, stole money, ripped pictures off the bulletin board, urinated into a jar, and put his hands up a girl’s skirt. He bullied the weaker boys, terrified the girls, tried to blackmail his friends, made violent threats to anyone who annoyed him, and got into numerous fistfights, most of which he started by taunting other boys. “Your father is a god damn black mother fucker,” I once heard him whisper to a classmate quietly working at a nearby desk, and the two of them were quickly exchanging blows. Once he threw a pair of blunt-edged scissors at another boy, who ducked. The scissors were hurled with such force that they stuck in a bulletin board on the back wall. Worst of all, though, were the times when Marcus disassociated from the world around him and, utterly possessed by his inner demons, exploded in fits of uncontrollable rage. I learned to recognize the early signs: the low muttering to himself, slowly rising in pitch; the glazed eyes that no longer seemed aware of the rest of us in the room; the trancelike state. But I could never prevent that frightening moment when he gave into his madness. I couldn’t reach him then; I could only try to keep him from harming the other students by removing him from the class or sending for help. Even though they were understandably leery of him, some of the other children in my class were drawn to Marcus. This was especially true of the more adventurous boys. They admired his swagger and risk taking, and they recognized that he knew more than they The Too-Rough Fingers of the World 143 did about the larger world beyond their isolated community. “That’s the Washington Monument!” he shouted one day when a picture of the Mall appeared in the Weekly Reader. “That’s right near where I live.” And immediately he was the center of attention, spewing facts about the nation’s capital, describing its monuments, and telling what...

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