Notre Dame Club of Boston

It is four o’clock on a Friday afternoon when eight of us climb and squeeze our way into “White Lightning”—the affectionate name we have given to our Dodge Grand Caravan.  We set the GPS system for Hampton, New Hampshire, and within an hour, eight college-age students lie on the beach.  Half of us are Notre Dame students, and the other half are our fellow staff members from the Boys and Girls Club.  As we sit watching the sunset over the gentle waves, I imagine what my life would have been like in a different place or a different time.  Would I be sitting here thanking God for a beautiful day, a healthy family, and honest friends?  I turn my head and look at the profiles of the kids sitting beside me.  One is Italian, two are Irish, and four are Puerto Rican, and a thought crosses my mind, what would my life be like if I were born Latino rather than a “white girl” as children at the club occasionally refer to me as?  What if I were raised in a tenement building in Lawrence rather than my comfortable house in suburbia New Hampshire?  How different is my life from theirs?

After the sun sets, we squeeze ourselves back into the van laughing at our precarious positions.  Windows rolled down, sea breeze blowing, and my face smiling, I feel comfortable and secure.  Without encouragement or prompting, the Lawrence boys begin to create a “beat” as they call it.  A small smile tickles my cheeks, and I close my head and lean back.  Closed off from the highway zipping by my window, time stops as I listen to these boys—these young men—create poetry.  This poetry lacks many of the “traditional” rhetorical devices one might expect in verse, but it retains the “heart” of true art.  It echoes with emotion, with honesty, and with truth because the words that the wind carries out the window are tales of lives—their lives growing up in the streets of Lawrence.  They invite me to join by interjecting my own “bar” or “line” into their free-style rap, but I decline the offer.  I wonder what can I offer to a song about broken hearts, broken homes, and struggles against life’s vices? 

Suddenly, the song stops, and I hear a raised voice in the backseat.  “I just want you kids to know that we are the best Lawrence has to offer.  We are survivors.  We are brothers.  I would trust any of these guys sitting next to me with my life.”  Brotherhood.  Family.  Honesty.  Trust.  These values encompass, encircle, and unite our human experience.  Yes, we are dark, light, Puerto Rican and Dominican, Irish and Catholic, but at heart, we are kids learning to understand ourselves and others.  We are all kids, but a crushing, suffocating feeling envelopes my chest when Enrique says, “Are you guys ready to sit next to the bathroom at the restaurant?  Now that you’re hangin out with Puerto Ricans, that’s what’ll happen when we go out to dinner together”  Suddenly, reality and the “insidious subtleties of bigotry that still abide in the land” slap me across the face (Washington Spectator 133).  Of course I realize that bigotry and racism still exist, but at the same time, I confess that I prefer to ignore these “subtleties” of bigotry.  I hold my head high, comfortable in the thought that as long as I have not adopted these prejudices, I am not culpable for the sins and prejudices of others.  If I do not recognize the racial biases within my own community, then I can convince myself that there are no great differences between me and these boys from Lawrence.  The sad reality which intrudes on my conscious is that thanks to society there is a difference between us—a difference created by social sin, but it is one that I hope we can overcome in the next few weeks. 

Openness is the key to our experience at the Lawrence Boys and Girls Club.  Openness has allowed us to destroy the unacknowledged differences between us and the Latino college students with whom we work.  And I thank God that openness has allowed us a glimpse, if only a transient one, into the lives of these Lawrence boys for it is these boys who are teaching us that there are certain values such as hope and love that have no color, no ethnicity…only emotion.  This “sweet emotion” allows us to enjoy a long ride home in a van called “White Lightning” listening to the sounds and music of summertime.