Children Know What We Refuse To See

Not our child.

Not our problem.

But two weeks before Asteve'e "Cookie" Thomas was caught in the crossfire of dueling gunmen, she wrote a 13-line poem titled, "Where I'm From." Her family printed it in her funeral program, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland ran it on Saturday's Page One.

Anyone who read the poem was forced to consider what goes on in the head of a child from one of our country's poorest neighborhoods, no matter how hard we try to keep children like her out of our own heads.

Most newspaper columnists who write for a metropolitan paper receive the same troubling calls and mail whenever a child dies in a crime-ridden neighborhood in the city. They insist that life just means less in some neighborhoods. Not their neighborhoods, you understand. But some.

Cookie Thomas' own words, though, make it impossible to keep her loss at arm's length. No child can live in her neighborhood and not know the decay, the danger, but she chose to see something else. Her poem reflects the whimsy of young girls across America, the kind whose hair is still six shades of shiny and who skip through the day with hearts about to burst with the simple joy of being alive.

"I'm from the place when pictures wander around," her poem began, "where cats and dogs wander free … where you can wash and clean with the smell of things."

She was from the "garden of flowers that you can sniff and enjoy … the softness of lotions from my room … the place where ribs get cooked and cookouts happen … where clothes are flying everywhere … the place when trees take over."

The place Cookie left behind now reels from the loss of a child who loved dancing and softball and the sweet smell of hand lotion.

They know that business leaders aren't demanding to help. They know no elected officials from surrounding suburbs are rallying to save a fellow community in trouble. They know that one of the murder suspects was on the street that day because an outstanding warrant for his arrest mysteriously disappeared from police records.

They know all of this, and they know most of us don't care.

Public indifference is one of the enduring truths about poverty, which was captured in haunting prose more than five decades ago in Betty Smith's famous novel, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Reading Cookie's poem, I was reminded of the book's main character, a young girl with big dreams named Francie Nolan, whose family lived in a Brooklyn tenement in the early 1900s.

In one scene, 7-year-old Francie took her younger brother, Neeley, to the public health center so that both of them could be immunized against small pox. They arrived dirty from making mud pies, and the doctor was appalled at the sight of Francie.

"Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night," he said to the attending nurse, who clucked along in horror. "I know they're poor, but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Just look at that arm, nurse."

Francie remained silent, "the hot flamepoints of shame burning her face." But as the nurse wrapped gauze around her arm, Francie spoke up.

"My brother is next," she told her. "His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be surprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me."

The scene ended with the doctor turning to the nurse and saying, "I had no idea she'd understand what I was saying."

Well, yes.

The children know.

They always know.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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