A Pianist's Final Piece: DeWitt's Descent

The following story was published in The New York Times, January 18, 1998

He had marvelous hands, magical hands. DeWitt White grew up poor in a Bronx neighborhood where piano lessons, not to mention pianos, were in short supply. But at 12, he discovered classical music and a prodigious talent for playing it.

By 15, he had played in student performances at Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, the New York Botanical Garden, performed so beautifully that he silenced and shamed those who judged him by his baggy jeans, his wild hair, his dark skin. He was raw, but his playing had a power, a passion, that portended greatness.

In school, he lacked discipline; at the piano, he could sit for seven hours straight. Through music he escaped troubles at home, troubles at school; he made sense of a world that seemed profoundly unfair. He had been born into a hard life, and in his teens, when his mother sickened and died, it only got harder.

He had a spark that prompted teachers, friends and counselors to reach out to him. One teacher said he made her believe in God: how else to explain a wellspring of beauty from such barren terrain? His talent, they thought, would be enough to save him from the drugs, violence and hopelessness that suck young black males in like a black hole. He believed it too. Music, he said, would be his way out of the ghetto.

At some point, he stopped believing. Most of the plagues of New York City—AIDS, homelessness, drugs, violence—came to roost, like crows, in DeWitt's life. In the last year, he became an itinerant, bouncing from borough to borough like a pinball, like nobody's business, which is just what he was.

The Monday before Thanksgiving found DeWitt, at 17, selling drugs on a desolate Staten Island street. Before midnight, he was dead of a gunshot wound in the back, one of the city's 767 homicides last year, one of 15 in the 120th Precinct.

DeWitt White fell through the cracks. For a parentless child, being loved by everyone could not compensate for belonging to no one. The system could not substitute for family. From one perspective, if anyone should have made it, it was DeWitt. He did not take every opportunity offered; he made bad choices. But from another, he was selecting from a limited menu.

"In our community," said one of DeWitt's former teachers, Gordon Walker, who is black, "there is more opportunity to do damage to yourself and others than there is to do creative work." For DeWitt, rising was hard. Falling was easy.

He was born on Aug. 21, 1980. His father was not around, never would be. His mother, Denise, had a hard life, a stew of poverty, abuse, teen motherhood, aborted education, drugs, and eventually AIDS.

The family—Denise, DeWitt, and his sisters Shanequa and Kamitra—lived in small Bronx apartments. They were poor and dogged by instability. At 15, DeWitt's older sister, Shanequa, moved out. DeWitt talked little about his home life, but his behavior told a story. By third grade, he was in special education classes at P.S. 86 in the Bronx. By sixth grade, he was frustrated, fighting and on the verge of expulsion.

A teacher named Robert Pape offered to take DeWitt in his regular sixth-grade class. Surrounded by bright, motivated students, DeWitt settled in and settled down. Time revealed two DeWitts: one frustrated, distracted, disruptive; the other focused, engaged, well behaved. Which one emerged seemed to depend on whether he felt loved and understood.

In Mr. Pape's class, he demonstrated precocious esthetic intelligence. He awed a Whitney Museum curator with his observations about art during a class field trip. When the class learned the basics of music, he elaborated on the simple tunes and became a regular at the class keyboard center.

Mr. Pape tried to have DeWitt decertified as a special education student; the Board of Education said no. DeWitt went on to Intermediate School 137, and back to the frustration and fights.

"I used to...