Last Wednesday, students at Chief Sealth High School gathered in the auditorium for a reading by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Chief Sealth High School is located just north of White Center, on the southern border of Seattle city limits, a neighborhood nicknamed Rat City and known for drug activity, gang activity, sex-in-public activities, low-income housing, and a certain excellent Salvadoran bakery. As the students crammed into the auditorium, one student told the student who was pressing him from behind, "I don't like it in the ass," and the student behind him said, "Oh, you don't like it in the ass?"
LeBlanc read from her book Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, recently out in paperback, and then she took questions (the questions she gets asked by teenagers, she said, are "smarter, more incisive, and more subtle than anything I've been asked at post-doctorate gatherings"). She managed to hold the students' attention, though that wasn't really surprising since she was reading and telling stories about, among others, a young heroin dealer named Boy George; a Puerto Rican teenager and mugger named Cesar who accidentally shoots his best friend; Cesar's sister, Jessica, who gets jailed for her part in Boy George's crimes and, in jail, gets impregnated with twins by a guard; and Coco, Cesar's girlfriend. One of the sections LeBlanc read was about Cesar and Coco's first meeting, when Coco was "short and thick" and Cesar "wanted to have sex with her," and about virginity and losing it. "Unlike good looks or real fathers or money," LeBlanc read, "virginity was democratic. Even skanky girls had it."
In most cities she visits, LeBlanc said later, she tries to do something that connects poor communities to her work. "Readings tend not to reach poor neighborhoods," she said. LeBlanc, who spent 11 years in the Bronx reporting Random Family (parts of it first appeared in the Village Voice and the New Yorker), was invited to the school by Gary Thomsen, a Chief Sealth teacher who read about the book last year in Newsweek. Thomsen's students are working on a multimedia project about the causes of crime and violence in White Center, and are trying to come up with strategies to reduce it. He thought LeBlanc's visit might give the students some perspective.
It also, apparently, has made some of them more interested in reading. The school has given a free copy of Random Family to any student who wants one. Before her visit, 60 students had asked for the book, and immediately afterward 40 more did. "At a high school like this, where the reading and writing scores are so low," Thomsen said, "to have a kid request a book--that's the first time I've ever seen that in 10 years here."
