Plaquemines Parish : Some Words
Joe MF Wilson
I was a major part of running a summer camp. I was a major part of teaching shoelace-tying. I was a godsend. I was a new inexperienced half-assed slackery smartass gawky dirty-dressed young man overgrown white suburbs NYU brooklyn jazz video boy man turning into a school principal, in my mind sometimes: “Shaggy” some of the Diamond teenagers called me, “G-Raffe” some of the Diamond kids called me. Diamond Joe, you called me. I was a major part of playing some basketball, of crossing the road, of learning “ghost in the graveyard” in the baseball field, of getting some Christmas presents distributed (never fairly enough) off a school bus, of going to see a basketball game, to the zoo, of drawing, of making things, of talking about things, of structure and order, of fun and wildness, spaghetti dinners, movie nights, tournaments, holiday barbecues, snacks and fruits, health and life-skills workshops. Of sandcastles, of crab-finding, of snake and gator-fearing, of thinking about how/why to resolve things peacefully, of trying to be more understanding in this harsh world you know of trying to tell you about other worlds of trying to tell you how it’s tough it’s tough it might get harder it might get easier. You’ve got some choices to do more right, kid. My childhood was nothing like yours, so who am I to say anything? But you can do better, and yeah here let’s have some fun let’s do this now. We did trash clean-ups, we cleaned our community center deeply and thoroughly, we mopped, and I mean not some casual summer-camp or community service couple of hours--- we were sweating, working, needing to wash up hardcore afterwards, wearing gloves, cleaning up Filthy dangerous hurricane-impacted stuff, using grown-up tools, like grandpa sometimes showed (not mine, yours). You taught me to some new grammar, like saying “what it is” instead of “what is it?”. We had dance-off’s and mini dance-parties, to your some of your favorite hip hop/R and B radio station songs, you taught me how to “walk it out” sorta and the cupid shuffle, you taught me things about Louisiana people and being black and being white and having things and not having things and family values and school and nature and fighting and what food’s good and how to smile and how to bounce back and how to get upset when things aren’t right and how to contain emotions and how to be true to them and how to accept things. Yeah, what it is.
The kids who met me know I was trying. That much I’m sure of. I could’ve done better, I know that. I can do better. I know this. It’s alright, not all right, but alright.
Working with Diamond Kids:.Of therapy, of childhood, of just plain old religiously simple ethically complicated Good.
I gotta emphasize how I represented of the unfairness in life, the adult world, the white world, the weird outsider volunteer world, the man’s world, the immature extra-educated under-appreciative over-complicating so-much-potential so-much-vulnerability New Yorker world. I was power and I was helplessness. I yelled when I shouldn’t have, I made promises to kids that I didn’t see through, I called upon security guards in some cases when I shouldn’t have, didn’t in some cases when I should have, I invited people to be saved by the kids instead of the other way around sometimes, for every time I showed up for the kids I had to leave, for so many questions I could only think, “Yeah kid it only gets worse from here, so start following some rules of behavior.” Like Respect.
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