In the summer of 1967, I took a job working for the Neighborhood Youth Corps in Little Rock. It was not a job I wanted—just one I could get. I was living in my mother’s apartment. She had assured me that I was welcome there. But I would need to work and bring in money if I meant to stay. I had worked at some job, been gainful at some mode of employment, every single day since I was twelve. Not to work, not to have a job, and to be idle was an unrecognized human state in my family. We were working people.
That summer I was twenty-three. I had a second-rate college degree. I’d just spent a difficult year teaching junior high and coaching baseball in inner-city Flint, Michigan. I was, I believed, spiritually “fatigued” and needing time to rest and reflect. I’d have been happy to stay home and read Flaubert. But that was not on offer, as the saying goes.
The name Neighborhood Youth Corps might summon up visions of clean-cut boys in spruce khaki uniforms, standing at attention on a parade ground while a government official reads a proclamation dispatching them to do what needs to be done for the good of all. The Corps may even have been intended to work that way when Lyndon Johnson made it a showcase program of the Great Society, by which poverty and social injustice would be eradicated from our land.
In Arkansas, however, the Neighborhood Youth Corps was a piñata from which those same government officials meant to get their mitts on a shower of federal dough, a laughably infinitesimal portion of which was earmarked to provide low-income (read: black) kids with “work experience,” which would—it was dearly hoped—keep them in school and out of the state’s hair. It was the summer of the Detroit riots and nine months before the murderous spring of ’68. Trouble was hotting up again in Dixie.
My job—to the extent that it could be defined—was to tutor twelve decidedly un-uniformed teen-age boys in the complex art of manual brush clearing, performed under the tormenting summer sun of central Yahoo. The state of Arkansas, it seemed, owned a lot of vacant land in Little Rock, which, surprisingly, it wasn’t using. Over time, this land had succumbed to sucker weeds and briars and red-brush saplings, all of which, it was determined, badly needed clearing. Or, at least, could be cleared—by someone. Use of the land wasn’t contemplated. Only clearing it. Much work done in the world is like this—virtually meaningless. Make-work.
Though not for me make-work. I was management—tasked and poorly paid to get down among ’em and impart the skills of swing-blade, of scythe, of axe and hatchet, of shovel and “come-along.” All things I knew about. My “men,” a dozen skinny black kids between sixteen and eighteen, took a skeptical view of how these lessons would be put into practice. They stood in a lank group around me, coolly observing me as I waded into the thickets and sweatily set the scythe or the sickle or some other vicious instrument into motion. I was demonstrating the skills. “See,” I said, looking fitfully up at them out of the dense bosk. “Make short strokes. Aim for the base of what you want to cut. Conserve your energy. Focus your efforts. Don’t flail. Be careful of who’s behind you.” (All sound advice for most occupations.) “Now,” I said, wiping stinging sweat out of my eyes and gaping. “Who’s ready to try it?” Hardly any of them were, a fact that they expressed by mutely continuing to watch me. One, sometimes two—the younger boys—would step forward as if their feet hurt, take whatever implement I was holding out to them, and merely stare at it, as though it were a weapon they were better off not having in their hands. Now and then, they’d try a tentative swipe with the blade or an awkward down-cut with the axe. Then they’d laugh and look around at their buddies, roll their eyes, and hand the job back to me for more demonstration.
These were not stupid boys. They weren’t being paid much, if anything. Only helped. The fact that I had a job that depended on them and was intended to keep them out of mischief and assure social justice and cure poverty conferred no mission on their lives. At their tender ages, they had already seen things—many things—that I hadn’t. They recognized hard, pointless, idiotic toil when they saw it. Possibly their fathers were practicing it that same hot summer day. All of it might come to them soon enough. But, until then, this was fine work for me to do.
And in that way the summer of ’67 passed: with me down in the underbrush, showing these black kids how work was done, while they calmly looked on, waiting for their futures to arrive. ♦
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