Saturday Morning Beating

I heard sobbing -wet sniffling, mouth breathing and little groans. It was coming from behind me. It was far away but unmistakeable. I looked and couldn't see anything. Then from the vacant lot, next to a trash-filled alley behind two foreclosed houses, I saw a small figure.

He is limping. Blood rides his panicked breath and almost hits my flannel shirt. He is ten years old and I know him. His left eye is swollen terribly. It is almost shut. I imagine him getting punched. I can see, smell, almost feel the beating. He is making a line for his house where he can feel safe again. I try and grab him and find out what happened. He doesn't say anything. He is afraid. He fears that they will get him worse if he tells someone. He goes inside. His mom isn't home.

Before I heard the sound, I was digging a hole with a young kid from our church. He witnessed the whole interaction. He was wide-eyed and frozen when I got back. "Are you ok?" I asked him. "Yes," he replied. In his world young kids don't get mercilessly beaten. He was in disbelief. "That was scary for me," I admitted to him. "Was it scary for you?" I asked. "Yes." We kept digging quietly thinking about what we just saw.

The kid just wanted to shoot some hoops. There is an old basketball goal in the alley behind one of the boarded up houses. Kids play there because there isn't anywhere else to play. Illegally dumped trash, broken glass, old tires and used oil containers line the court. It is no place anybody should play. If you're an elementary school kid on the block, there is no place safe to play. You just take your chances. Parks are the opposite of safe in the city. There are old guys who talk loud and drink out of brown paper bags. Older kids want to test you and hassel you. It is better to stick close to your house most of the time.

But even sticking close to your house is no guarantee. Later I learned that group of high school boys beat him up for fun because they were bored and there was no one to stop them. The beat him to a pulp, for no reason, on a Saturday morning.

Two hours later, he came out - cleaned up, still red marks on his face that would soon be black and blue. He helped me replace a bad brick in the foundation of the house our church owns. We were chipping it out with a hammer and pry bar. I let him swing hard and wild even though it might hurt my hands. He needed to hit something, to break something, to know that he wasn't always the one getting hit, the victim. He chipped the bad brick out with a few powerful smacks of the hammer. He gave it a real beating.