Looking out: Sheba and Zoe
By Brandon Astor Jones
"Kids lead a tough life ... Kids and my people have a lot in common ... Only our problems aren't solved by getting older. — Dick Gregory
Young people have a tough go of it no matter how you look at it, past or present. Nevertheless, many adults cannot begin to imagine how hard the life of a child can be.
For example, a story in the September 5, 1994, issue of New York magazine reads, "Sheba was 12. She spent her nights high, running the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant with her 20 year old boyfriend. She couldn't read. She had never seen the moon. Then Zoe, a stranger, decided to take her away and redeem her life."
There is a full page photograph of Sheba and Zoe, the former locked in the latter's embrace, that shows their combined and penetrating gaze. Their eyes are haunting and compelling.
I feel that I know them. Not personally, but I have known young women very much like them all my life: one, in unspeakable ways, silently requesting to be saved; and the other desperately trying to honour her requests. There are many Shebas in America, and too few Zoes.
Sheba's mother is single. She is a crack-sailor who cruises through motherhood in an oblivious stupor, navigating from one drug-harbor to another in her perpetual search for an elusive calm. She is no longer able to be there for Sheba.
Then one morning as Sheba was walking through a playground, four men accosted her. One of them raped her at gun point. Three of them stood by, with beer in their hands, and urged the rapist on. Despite her tough reputation, Sheba was no match for four men and a pistol.
Some time later Zoe, 21, then in her senior year at the University of California (at Berkeley), returned to New York for a visit. She heard through relatives that a young cousin had been raped. Sheba is the daughter of Zoe's father's brother.
Zoe did not know Sheba, but the news of her life and the rape infuriated her. Zoe later said, "I couldn't believe it. Nobody cared. Nobody had even taken this little girl to a doctor. I couldn't stand knowing that she was having a terrible time and doing nothing."
So Zoe, and two of her cousins Diana and Tasha, begged, pleaded and cajoled no less than eight friends and family members into pledging US$40 a month each to help support Sheba. That group of benefactors quickly grew to a dozen; some paid as little as $10, while others paid the $40, or whatever they could afford after Zoe took Sheba on to California. Sheba did not even know where California was, nor did she know until Zoe told her — that she should not be having sexual relations and certainly should not be having a 20-year-old boyfriend.
Back in a Brooklyn school, Sheba had 70 absences. Her grades were, at best, "unsatisfactory." Nowadays, Sheba is a first rate student. She loves reading. The first book she read was Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't. Now that her life is filled with so many choices, the title of Blume's book has become one of her favourite sayings.
She got an "A" in mechanical engineering and a "B+" in communications. She plays and enjoys basketball so well in fact that she plays on a boys' team. She is now getting ready to take on college preparatory programs. Because of Zoe's willingness to be there for Sheba, this is a real success story.
There are kids like Sheba all around us, but too often adults seem less than willing to acknowledge, embrace and support them like Zoe has. We must change that.
I have written a 26-page autobiographical white paper that candidly presents three parts of excerpted insights into my, and a young woman's, abused past that I think is still relevant even today.
If you write to me clearly stating that you are indeed an adult, requesting that I send you: Warning! Our Children Under Siege, And Why We Must Be There For Them — and enclose US$12 via an American Express money order upon which my full name, numbers and address appear (to cover reproduction of the manuscript and mailing costs) — I will send you a copy immediately.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G2-51, GD&CC, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]