10 August 2010 TUTORED by Allison Whittenberg, Delacorte Press, December 2010, 192p., ISBN: 978-0-385-73869-9; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-385-90742-2
"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second."
--from the Senior Thesis, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community" (1985), by Michelle LaVaughn Robinson (now Obama)
Life is "an issue of circumstance":
"Now he was really boxed into a corner. He couldn't steal. He couldn't get a job. What else was there to life?
"There was nothing to do but go home to a home that really wasn't his home. Go to his cousin's home and stare at the bumpy warts of ill-plastered walls and the mold spots on the ceiling. That big-eyed girl from the tutoring center was wrong. Really wrong. This wasn't the land of opportunity or milk and honey or gold-paved streets. For him, anywhere he went in America would be the third world."
After completing a juvie sentence for a break-in -- his latest run-in with the law -- seventeen year-old Hakiam Powell exits the foster care system and Cincinnati, departing on a Greyhound bus for Philadelphia. There, he can exchange some time babysitting Malikia, his cousin Lessa's newborn daughter, for a place to stay. Hakiam has an elementary school education, a record, and no references. Having seen a poster advertising it, he stops into the community center tutoring program that is set up to help those wanting to complete their GEDs.
There he meets Wendy.
"With that, her dad exited the room. She thought she was rid of him for the night, but he came back wagging his finger at her. 'Let me tell you something else, young lady. Martin Luther King was a great man, but he basically died for nothing when you look at this current crop. His dream of black and white children holding hands --'
"'Why are you giving a recitation on black history?'
"He continued, 'Who in his right mind would want to live next to those people, let alone hold hands with them?'
"'You're kind of sweeping through history, aren't you?'
"'If I had to live in a ghetto, I'd move.'
"'Dad, if you had to live in the ghetto, you couldn't move. That's the idea of a ghetto.'"
As a young man, Wendy Anderson's dad determinedly succeeded in leaving behind the misery and poverty of his childhood. Armed with his education and his career, he has raised Wendy in an affluent Philadelphia neighborhood where she attends a good school -- she being the one chocolate chip in that cookie. Dad is determined that she will attend a similar name-brand college. Wendy, who has her sights set on a medical career, wants the opportunity to choose her own college and, contrary to her father's dictates, is thinking seriously about the possibility of attending a traditionally-Black college..
Working after school as a tutor in the community center program, she is initially irritated by Hakiam's lack of motivation and brusque manner. But she is intrigued by what she hears of Hakiam caring for his cousin's preemie baby and soon she is spending time with Hakiam and Malikia, to the great benefit of both.
TUTORED illustrates how life is, in great measure, an issue of circumstance. It is a tale that will enlighten readers as to the reality that being Black does not tell one any more about who a person is than does being White. To consider what the four main characters -- Wendy, her dad, Hakiam, and his cousin Lessa -- have in common, is to recognize the impossibility of in any way characterizing the so-called Black Community (if, in the Twenty-first century, there really is such a thing). We see Hakiam standing in the middle of two young women -- the hyper-responsible Wendy and the criminally-irresponsible Lessa -- who are such radical opposites and who are conveying such radically-different messages to this frustrated-yet-tender-hearted young man.
In light of Wendy's father's contempt for lower class Blacks ("His favorite saying was 'I help poor people all the time--by not being one'"), it is fascinating to look at the First Lady's thesis which, in part, probes the 1985 attitudes of Black alumni as to their sense of obligation to provide assistance to the Black lower class.
It is also interesting to encounter a situation where -- to Wendy's consternation -- Hakiam and her father actually share an attitude that is opposite hers.
I began reading TUTORED with the expectation that it might be an enjoyable story about two teens from opposite sides of the tracks finding each other. I was really impressed to find that it is that -- and a whole lot more.
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