The voice on the other end said that it was, and Darnell asked for the editor. He needed to make some changes in the story he had written.
TWELVE
Someone knocked on the door at six-thirty in the morning. Mrs. Rock and Tamika were sitting at the kitchen table.
“I bet it's Larry” Tamika said.
“Not this early.” Mrs. Rock got up and went to the door. She looked through the peephole, then unlocked and opened the door.
“Good morning!” Mrs. Rock nodded to Mr. Green, the building's superintendent.
“Just thought you'd want to see this.” Mr. Green handed Mrs. Rock a copy of the Oakdale Journal. “I always knew that boy would be something.”
By the time Mrs. Rock had thanked Mr. Green for bringing up the paper, Tamika had run into Darnell's bedroom and shaken him. It took less than a minute for him to get into the kitchen.
“What's going on out here?” Mr. Rock came out in his bathrobe.
“Darnell's article is in the Journal today,” Mrs. Rock said. “Mr. Green brought it up. Here it is. Tamika, read it aloud!”
Tamika looked at the article, nudged Darnell, and started reading.
“Nobody wants to be homeless,” Sweeby Jones said. He is a homeless man who lives in our city of Oakdale. It is for him and people like him that I think we should build a garden where the basketball courts were, near the school. That way the homeless people can help themselves by raising food.
“You see a man or woman that's hungry and you don't feed them, or help them feed themselves, then you got to say you don't mind people being hungry,” Mr. Jones said. “And if you don't mind people being hungry, then there is something wrong with you.”
This is what Mr. Sweeby Jones said when I spoke to him. I don't want to be the kind of person who says it's all right for some people to be hungry. I want to do something about it. But I think there is another reason to have the garden. Things can happen to people that they don't plan. You can get sick, and not know why, or even homeless. But sometimes there are things you can do to change your life or make it good. If you don't do anything to make your life good, it will probably not be good.
“I was born poor and will probably be poor all my life,” Mr. Sweeby Jones said.
I think maybe it is not how you were born that makes the most difference, but what you do with your life. The garden is a chance for some people to help their own lives.
Darnell Rock is a seventh-grader at South Oakdale Middle School. The school board has proposed that the site that Mr. Rock wants to make into a garden be used as a parking lot for teachers. The City Council will decide the issue tomorrow evening.
“I think that's a good article, Darnell!,” Mr. Rock said.
“I typed it up,” Tamika said. “Only the newspaper must have added that little bit about the City Council/ ‘
“You got it just right,” Mr. Rock said. “Anybody can become homeless. You got to give people a chance.”
“That's really not what I thought I said,” Darnell said.
“I can't become homeless because I'm too cute,” Tamika said. “When you ever see anybody as cute as me being homeless?”
“What you think, Mom?”
Mrs. Rock sat at the table and picked up her coffee cup. The coffee had now grown cold. “I think I can see what you're saying,” Mrs. Rock said. “You're saying that being homeless doesn't just ‘happen’ to people. I think I'll have to think about it for a while. It's a good article, but I'll think about it some more and let you know.”
“I'm going to ask Mr. Baker if I can read it during announcements,” Tamika said.
THIRTEEN
Six kids on the school bus had copies of the Journal, and everybody had read Darnell's artide by the time the bus pulled up to South Oakdale Middle School. When Darnell and Tamika got off the bus, they saw four other kids reading the paper. Tamika took her copy of the Journal to a group of her friends.
“Way to go, Darnell!” Benny called from the front steps.
Darnell felt like a celebrity.
“Yo, Darnell.” Tony O! came up to him and handed him two typed sheets. “Check out Linda's article. She made copies and she's passing them out to everybody. She's got her friends saying her article is better than yours. No way!”
Darnell didn't read the article until he reached homeroom.
Teaching is a difficult profession. Teachers need as much support as they can possibly get. After all, we are dependent on them for our future. Education is the key to a good and secure future, and teachers help us to get that education. We must give them all the support we can. This is why I am supporting the idea of building a parking lot near the school.
There are some people in our school who think it is a good idea to build a garden so that the homeless can use it. Use it for what? Homeless people don ‘ t have experience farming and could not use the land anyway. This is just a bad idea that will help nobody and will hurt the teachers. The teachers give us good examples on how we should live and how we should conduct ourselves. The homeless people, even though it is no fault of theirs, don't give us good examples.
On Friday evening, at 7:00 p.m., the City Council will meet to make a final decision. I urge them to support the teachers, support education, and support the students at South Oakdale.
“I think Linda's article was better than yours,” Chris McKoy said later as they sat in the corner of the lunchroom. There were at least twenty kids gathered around their table. On the other side of the room there was another group, sitting around Linda's table. “In the first place, she's got that stuff in it about education, and you don't.”
“I don't see how parking a car is about education/ ‘ Larry said.
‘That doesn't mean anything,” Chris said. “When you're writing something you got to bring all that kind of stuff in it.”
“I liked Darnell's article,” Fred Haskell said. “Mostly because he used quotes. He's got what he thinks in his article and what that guy thinks. But what kind of name is Sweeby?”
“It's just a name,” Tony O! said. “And I like your article better, Darnell, because it's not sucking up to the teachers.”
“But she's still right,” Chris said. “We're supposed to be here for education and stuff, not to feed people.”
“So you think it's okay to have people hungry and homeless?” Sonia asked.
“It's not my business,” Chris said. “I didn't tell them to be homeless.”
“Then if you mess up,” Darnell said, “it's okay for you to be homeless, right?”
“I'm not going to mess up!” Chris said.
“You messed up already,” Tony O! said.
“Suppose I mess up your face!” Chris said, standing. He grabbed Tony O! by the shirt and pulled him across the table.
“Hey, man, he's just talking like everybody else,” Darnell said.
Chris pushed Tony O! away.
The first bell rang, and kids started to leave the lunchroom. Chris brushed by Tony O! on the way out and knocked his books out of his hand. Tony O! left the books on the floor until Chris had left the lunchroom, then started picking them up. Darnell saw that his eyes were glistening.
“Here comes Linda/' Sonia looked down at her hands.
Darnell put his milk container and silverware on his tray as he waited for Linda to get to his table. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that there were a couple of people with her.
“I read your article,” Jessica Lee said as she, Linda, and Mark reached Darnell's table. “I thought it was kind of stupid.”
“That's your opinion,” Darnell said.
“Are you coming to the City Council meeting tomorrow night?” Linda asked. “All you have to do is put your name in and you can speak. You can read your article.”
“I might come,” Darnell said.
“Good, I'll see you there.” Linda smiled.
In gym they had aerobics for ten minutes, and then free play. They played H-O-R-S-E for a while and then got into a three-on-three game.
The game was on for less than a minute before Chris got into an argument with Tony O!
Tony O! stood up to Chris, but Darnell knew that there was no way he was going to beat Chris in a fight. Chris kept calling Tony O! a punk, and Tony O! called Chris a turkey. Then Chris pushed Tony O!
The push wasn't that hard, but Tony O! reached out to push Chris back. That's when Chris punched Tony O! in the face. Tony O! grabbed the side of his face and turned away as Mr. Day started blowing his whistle.
Darnell watched as Mr. Day rushed across the gym, where the boys had formed a circle around Tony O! and Chris. Mr. Day grabbed Chris by the collar and dragged him over to the bleachers. He pushed Chris against the bleachers.
“You just stay there!” Mr. Day yelled.
He went back to where Darnell was trying to get Tony O! to move his hand from his face so he could see how bad he was hurt.
Mr. Day grabbed Tony 0!'s wrist and moved it.
Tony 0!'s eye was red and already starting to puff up. Mr. Day told Larry to go to the nurse with Tony O!, then went back to Chris and told him to follow him.
As Mr. Day stalked out of the gym with Chris behind him, Darnell knew that they were headed toward Mr. Baker's office.
After school Larry found Darnell and told him that Tony O! had gone home after seeing the school nurse.
“His eye didn't look that bad,” Larry said. “But he was mad. He was talking about taking out a contract on Chris.”
“Chris shouldn't have hit him.” Darnell looked away. He saw that the trees had lost most of their leaves.
“I think he don't think much if a teacher tells him he's messed up,” Larry said. “But he don't like it if another kid tells him.”
“Linda told him he was and he didn't say anything,” Darnell answered.
“Linda and you aren't regular kids,” Larry said.
“What you mean, I'm not regular?”
“Everybody's talking about you,” Larry said.
“That's funny,” Darnell answered. “You can say something and it doesn't mean much. You put it in the newspaper and all of a sudden everybody is getting all excited.”
“Aren't you excited about it?” Larry asked.
“Yeah,” Darnell said. “I guess I am.”
FOURTEEN
“You see anybody from the school?” Larry looked over the large crowd at the Oakdale Court building.
“There goes Mr. Derby and Mr. Baker.” Tamika pointed toward the front of the building.
Darnell felt a lump in the pit of his stomach. There were at least a hundred people at the City Council meeting.
Tamika led them through the crowd to where she had spotted Mr. Derby and South Oakdale's principal. The large, high-ceilinged room had rows of benches that faced the low platform for the City Council. Linda Gold was already sitting in the front row. Darnell saw that her parents were with her.
He had brought a copy of the Journal with him and saw that a few other people, grown-ups, also had copies of the paper.
The nine members of the City Council arrived, and the meeting was called to order. The city clerk said that there were five items on the agenda, and read them off. The first three items were about Building Code violations. Then came something about funding the city's library.
‘The last item will be the use of the basketball courts as a parking lot at South Oakdale Middle School,” the clerk said. “We have three speakers scheduled.”
Linda turned and smiled at Darnell.
“You want me to run up there and punch her out?” Tamika whispered to Darnell.
Darnell didn't know what Building Code violations were but watched as building owners showed diagrams explaining why there were violations. The first two weren't that interesting, but the third one was. A company had built a five-story building that was supposed to be a minimum of twenty feet from the curb, but it was only fifteen feet,
“You mean to tell me that your engineers only had fifteen-foot rulers?” one councilman asked.
“Well, er, we measured it right the first time”—the builder shifted from one foot to the other—”but then we made some changes in the design and somehow we sort of forgot about the er … you know … the other five feet.”
To Darnell the builder sounded like a kid in his homeroom trying to make an excuse for not having his homework.
“Can you just slide the building back five or six feet?” the councilman asked.
Everybody laughed and the builder smiled, but Darnell could tell he didn't think it was funny.
Somebody touched Darnell on the shoulder, and he turned and saw his parents.
“We have this ordinance for a reason,” a woman on the Council was saying. “I don't think we should lightly dismiss this violation. An exception granted here is just going to encourage others to break the law.”
‘This is going to ruin me,” the builder said. “I've been in Oakdale all of my life and I think Fve made a contribution.”
“Let's have a vote.” The head of the Council spoke sharply.
“Let's have a vote to postpone a decision,” the woman who had spoken before said. “We'll give Mr. Miller an opportunity to show his good faith.”
“What do you want me to do?” the builder asked.
“That's up to you,” the woman said.
“Next time you'd better get it right!” Tamika called out.
“She's right,” the councilwoman said.
There was a vote, and the decision was postponed. The builder gave Tamika a dirty look as he pushed his papers into his briefcase.
The city library funding was next, and eight people, including Miss Seldes, spoke for the library, but the Council said it didn't have any more money. There was some booing, including some from Tamika and Larry. Darnell knew that if he didn't have to speak he would have enjoyed the meeting.
“The issue at South Oakdale is should the old basketball courts be used as a parking lot, or should they be used as a community garden?”
“Who's going to pay for paving the lot?” a councilman asked. “Does it have to be paved?”
“It's my understanding that it doesn't have to be paved,” the head of the Council answered. “Am I right on that?”
“Yes, you are,” Miss Joyner spoke up from the audience.
“We have two young people from the school to speak,” the councilwoman said. “The first is a Miss Gold.”
Linda went into the middle aisle, where there was a microphone. She began reading her article in the snootiest voice that Darnell had ever heard. He felt a knot in his stomach. He turned to look at his mother, and she was smiling. On the stage some of the coun-cilmen were looking at some papers.
“I hope I don't mess up,” he whispered to Tamika.
“You won't,” Tamika said.
Linda finished reading her article and then turned toward Darnell.
“Although everybody would like to help the homeless,” she said, “schools are supposed to be for kids, and for those who teach kids! Thank you.”
There was applause for Linda, and Miss Joyner stood up and nodded toward her. Darnell felt his hands shaking.
Darnell's name was called, and he made the long trip to the microphone.
“When I first thought about having a garden instead of a parking lot, I thought it was just a good idea,” Darnell said. “Then, when the Journal asked me to send them a copy of my interview with Mr. Jones, I was thinking that it was mainly a good idea to have a garden to help out the homeless people. But now I think it might be a good idea to have the garden to help out the kids—some of the kids—in the school.
“Sometimes, when people go through their life they don't do the things that can make them a good life. I don't know why they don't do the right thing, or maybe even if they know what the right thing is sometimes.
“But I see the same thing in my school, South Oakdale. Some of the kids always do okay, but some of us don't. Maybe their parents are telling them something, or maybe they know something special. But if
you're a kid who isn't doing so good, people start off telling you what you should be doing, and you know it, but sometimes you still don't get it done and mess up some more. Then people start expecting you to mess up, and then you start expecting you to mess up. Teachers get mad at you, or the principal, or your parents, and they act like you're messing up on purpose. Like you want to get bad marks and stuff like that. Then you don't want people getting on your case all the time so you don't do much because the less you do the less they're going to be on your case. Only that doesn't help anything, and everybody knows it, but that's the way it goes.”
“You seem to be doing all right, young man,” the head of the City Council said.
“I wasn't doing too hot before,” Darnell said, taking a quick look over to where Mr. Baker sat. “But when I got on the paper and the Journal printed my article, then everybody started treating me different. People came up to me and started explaining their points of view instead of just telling me what to do. And you people are listening to me. The kids I hung out with, they called us the Corner Crew, are mostly good kids but you wouldn't listen to them unless they got into trouble.
“In South Oakdale some kids have bad things happen to them—like they get sick—and I don't know why that happens, but all they can do is to go to the hospital. And some kids just get left out of the good things and can't find a way of getting back into them. People get mad at them the same way they get mad at the homeless people or people who beg on the street. Maybe the garden will be a way for the homeless people to get back into some good things, and maybe seeing the homeless people getting back into a better life will be a way for some of the kids to think about what's happening to them. Thank you.”
There was some applause as Darnell turned to go back to his seat.
“Just a minute, young man,” one of the council-men called to him. “The girl said that these people don't know anything about raising a garden. Is that true?”
“It doesn't matter,” someone said from the audience. “I'm from the college, and we can help with technical advice.”