Thomas Hanks Journalism, Bednar, Sum ’02

Stabbing Clarence

As he sat down next to me, I braced for another unpleasant class period. Clarence spotted me early in the year and he knew I was afraid. I acted as if I didn’t notice or care but my heart beat faster and I suddenly wished I could leave whenever he approached- just walk out one of the many sets of double doors and go. I was in sixth grade, a white kid in a public school system predominantly made up of black and Hispanic kids. There was a lot of abuse.

You see, this was Carver Sixth Grade Center. Every public school sixth grader in Waco, a city about one-third the size of Austin, went there. By bus, car, bike, and foot 1,000+ sixth graders descended on Carver every morning to leave again at three forty. During the school day there were three main objectives: keep them quiet, keep them from leaving, and try to teach them something. This was because we fought, vandalized, and disrespected at every opportunity. Some of us couldn’t read, too.

There were no kids for us to compare ourselves to that we could say were less or more mature, and therefore no standard to measure ourselves against except each other. We fought for each other’s respect constantly, measuring each other mostly by how far one could be pushed. The kids no one messed with were the ones that messed with everybody.

So I knew that there would be some kind of problem for me before the class ended. Clarence wouldn’t have sat next to me unless he felt like messing with me. It had been easy for him in the past, probably pretty satisfying, too. We were physically about the same size but I thought at the time that Clarence was far meaner, far scrappier, far tougher than I. He thought so, too.

As Ms. Bozell began the lesson I took out a notebook from my large, light green plastic duffel bag and began to draw. I had a book I was reading in my bag, but I already knew that Clarence would try as hard as he could to distract me if I read. As I drew Clarence watched me, bored, but probably also fascinated by my concentration and feigned indifference.

I was a scared kid at Carver. Previously I had been in the same teacher’s class from third to fifth grade with a pretty stable group of peers, and had been comfortable and respected. The class was in a school surrounded by one of the many ghettoes in Waco and there were frequent fights, but these facts had only served to make me aware of the existence of oppression and had not at all prepared me for being immersed in that life every day for a year. In elementary I had been a kid that went to a poor school but I’d been treated lovingly. Once I moved up to Carver, we were all just the same: discipline problems waiting to happen.

We were also in competition. The masculine cult of violence was in full flower in our young minds, at least the boy’s minds, and what most boys thought first about any other boy was who was better and who was worse. This translated into who was afraid of whom. I was afraid of Clarence, so he was better than me. Then things changed, quickly.

I continued to absorb myself with drawing, hoping that the period would end soon, and Clarence made his move. He moved my paper. The straight line I had been drawing died like the growing sense of uneasy complacency at Clarence’s inaction- in a sad, scared little squiggle. I looked down at the paper with my jaw tight; "if you move my paper again I’ll stab you with this pen" squeezed out like the last toothpaste in the tube, and for a while Clarence sat back.

I had decided without thinking to assert my dominance. I needed it. I wanted it. I may have been so thorough about ignoring Clarence because I knew that bothered him. Perhaps I was bothering him just to get the chance to prove something. I don’t know anymore. Wound tight and scared I continued to draw, waiting for Clarence to make his move. I hoped he wouldn’t, but I can no longer believe that I didn’t think he would respond. It was a line in the sand; it was a standoff on Main Street with both of us reaching for our guns; it was bad versus good. I knew it without thinking.

I had been trained for this kind of experience. I never considered treating Clarence like the asshole he was and simply trying to scorn his advances or make him feel bad about what he was doing. I just took it and took it and cried myself to sleep at night with self-pity, hoping my parents would come ask me what was wrong but never once approaching them. Men don’t complain about their problems, they take it quietly or they fix it. That was what I thought it took and I desperately wanted to have what it took. I wanted to be a man.

So when Clarence moved the paper again I slammed my pen down on his hand point-first as hard as my arm could carry it to the table. I looked at him and I don’t know what he saw but I saw pain and embarrassment and a sudden reconsideration of whether to mess with me, and that was what I wanted. The ball was in his court now.

"Ms. Bozell, Thomas stabbed me in the hand!"

She looked at me, one of the quiet ones who talked to her during lunch and read Dante in class when she was talking about whatever social studies teachers talk about.

"I told him I would stab him if he moved my paper again."

Then she turned to Clarence, smiled a little cynical smile, and told him that I had told him what I was going to do, and he should be glad it wasn’t worse. My not making Clarence bleed kept me from being punished. He protested but feebly, and the rest of the period passed quickly.

After Clarence had been kicked out of school for fighting with a girl named Shawna Mims (a girl who, for some reason, decided I had AIDS and said so loudly and repeatedly) the reading teacher, Mrs. Graf, laughed in my presence for the first and last time. She hated Clarence and Shawna. Ms. Bozell and Mrs. Graf and all of the other teachers hated kids like them, kids who didn’t behave because they couldn’t or wouldn’t. Public school teachers still hate those kids, and those kids still hate them right back. That is because these kids were asking for something the system couldn’t give them. The same thing their parents probably hadn’t or couldn’t have given them.

For a long time I hated those kids too, especially the Shawnas and the Clarences that had picked me to abuse in a vain attempt to make themselves feel better. I was glad I had stabbed Clarence and I was glad both of them had to go to alternative, the place where all the discipline-problem kids went. They were out of my hair there. Now, though, as I realize that Clarence probably wanted me to be his friend as much as he wanted to hurt me and that Shawna probably didn’t even know exactly what AIDS was, I hurt a little. I hurt for them, for their lives then and whatever their lives are now, because I realize that they didn’t have what I had. I could take the abuse and not pass it on to others because I knew that somewhere someone loved me, someone wanted me and someone wanted me to be ok.

Shawna and Clarence probably didn’t have that then. My guess is that however many parents were in their homes at night, those parents were tired and angry and underloved themselves. They probably couldn’t show Clarence and Shawna the love they needed because they didn’t have it to show. Society told them and all their non-white brothers and sisters that they were not the norm, that they were less than enough, and that they deserved to be treated accordingly. Society told me that I was ok, especially once I grew up, and that if I applied enough pressure to my psyche I could shape myself into a being that deserved to be the master of the universe. That was how I learned to stab Clarence, by being told that boys don’t cry and boys don’t talk and boys don’t complain. By being told through movies, through TV, through the games I played and the ways my father taught me to deal with bullies (punch them as hard as you can in the nose, because it breaks easily and hurts badly but doesn’t really mess a body up too badly) that violence was duct tape for broken interactions. I was trained from the age of two or three to hurt.

Indeed, only as I write this do I finally begin to reflect on the actions of ten years ago with the weather eye of experience. Only last year I told this story in a speech, no moral attached, simply as one of those crazy things I did as a kid. I still don’t want to attach any moralistic conclusion to my story, but I do want to use my experience to point out that the actions of a second’s impulse, the violent slamming of ink and metal into another’s flesh, was not a crazy impulsive action. It was the logical conclusion to a situation created by Clarence and I for the benefit of the system in which we were trapped. Clarence played his role and I mine and in the end Clarence ended up in alternative and I ended up in Mrs. Graf’s class watching her laugh. She’s still laughing, Clarence and Shawna are still in alternative, and here I am. Out of the system, sometimes.