When the Sea Cries

If you stand listening at the edge of the sea long enough, you can hear the cry of injustice echoing from its depths.

That's the cry that rises out of Patricia McCormick's novel, Sold, a heart-breaking tale about 13- year-old Lakshmi who is sold into sexual slavery and taken from her Nepali village to work in a brothel in India.

Her story, which unfolds in brief poem-like vignettes, is a cry for justice in a deaf world. And it's thanks to McCormick's remarkable skills as a writer that the reader, rather than turn away from the painful truth of this village girl's life, is willing to enter the dark, prison-like brothel that becomes her home, and where for the next year, despite the horrors of her new life, she manages to hold onto the slenderest thread of her own humanity.

Lakshmi's fate is all the more painful because McCormick shows us the simple life that she led in her village before tragedy befell her. As the story opens, Lakshmi is a child playing hopscotch with Gita, her best friend, bestowing affection on her little black-and-white speckled goat, Tali, and sharing secret sweets with her mother, Ama.

But it isn't a perfect childhood. Her family is poor and food is scarce, especially after a drought dries up the spring that brings water to the village. And her step-father gambles away whatever savings the family has collected. Yet Lakshmi is happy in the way that children manage to find happiness even in poor circumstances.

As the noose of poverty tightens around the family, however, the need for money (and a solid tin roof to protect the family from the heavy monsoon rains) becomes more acute, and Lakshmi's step-father decides to send her away to work. Lakshmi, a devoted daughter, goes willingly with her new Auntie, unaware of the fate that awaits her. She thinks that she's going to work as a maid in a rich woman's house like her best friend, Gita.

But Auntie isn't to be trusted any more than Lakshmi's step-father or her new Uncle-Husband, the stranger who takes her over the border and, finally, to the brothel where her life turns into a hellish nightmare with no end. Locked in a room for days without food or water, Lakshmi refuses to "work" until the brothel's madame, Mumtaz, slips a drug into her drink so that Lakshmi can no longer resist the men who force themselves upon her.

Each day takes Lakshmi further from her memories of childhood and her village and the innocent girl who once played with a goat in the clear mountain air. Each day that she spends in her room with bars on the window, a privy hole by her bed, and rats nibbling on the crusts of bread that she saves for breakfast, Lakshmi grows old beyond her years, knowing each night she must allow men to use her body... if she ever hopes to buy her freedom from Mumtaz.

But hope is like freedom ... a dream that she's not sure she can believe in:

This ache in my chest is a relentless thing, worse than any fever.
A fever is gone with a few of Mumtaz's white pills.
But this illness has had me in its grip for a week now.
This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.

In the end, hope doesn't kill Lakshmi. It keeps her spirit--and soul--alive long enough for her to save herself... with the help of a shy, admiring boy who feels compassion for her as he wheels his tea caddy through the brothel every afternoon, and with the kind assistance of a well-meaning American.

In Sold, McCormick has written a searing, stirring account of one girl's tragedy, a girl brought to the edge of despair, only to be spared at the last moment from the agony of losing her sanity... and her soul.

What will become of Lakshmi once she escapes the brothel? Will her family welcome her return, assuming that she can find her way back to the village, or will they find her "fate" too shameful to deal with and shun her? And will Lakshmi, given the loss of her childhood and the memories of what she experienced, ever live a "normal" life again ?

We learn in the afterward that Lakshmi isn't alone in her fate. McCormick writes that "nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families, intentionally or unwittingly, into a life of sexual slavery in the brothels of India."

With help, according to McCormick, some of these girls are rescued by aid workers who provide them with medical care and job training.

Perhaps that's what will happen to Lakshmi now that she's free. Perhaps she, too, can become one of the girls who are reintegrated into society.

As long as such injustice exists in the world, though, the sea will cry out in protest.

And sometimes that cry of protest will find a writer with the heart and soul of a Patricia McCormick, a writer who has shaped that cry into a story that magnifies an innocent girl's plea for help a thousand-fold... so that the world might wake up and listen.

For more about Patricia McCormick and her work, visit her website:

http://www.pattymccormick.com/index.php?mode=home

For interviews with McCormick, visit these sites:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6369325.html?nid=2788

http://pdfs.voya.com/VO/YA2/VOYA200612AuthorTalk.pdf

Heart Swimming

"Sometimes I understand something (an experience, an event, something someone said) in my head," writes Meg Kearney in the afterward to her young adult novel-in-verse, The Secret of Me, "but it's not until I write about it that I start to understand it in my heart."

It's through this kind of heart-swimming--writing and sharing her journal-like poems with the reader--that Kearney's main character, 14 year-old Elizabeth (Lizzy) McLane, comes to terms with her feelings about being adopted as an infant.

Her journey toward self-understanding isn't an easy one, even with a loving mother and father, as well as a caring older brother and sister (both of whom are also adopted).

That's because while Lizzy's life may appear to an observer as untroubled and relatively normal, the stability of her adopted world isn't enough to silence the doubts that she feels in the deepest part of herself or quench her desire to know her "real" mother:

When I was little, I used to think
she was like Mary Poppins,
and someday she'd come floating
back to me on her umbrella.

Not only does Lizzy have to deal with her feelings of doubt and abandonment, she has to do so despite the discouragement of her brother and sister, who fear their parents may perceive any expression of such feelings as a sign of ungratefulness, or, worse, disloyalty.

But in her heart Lizzy knows that she must confront these feelings or else the dreaded monster that threatens to drown her in fear, especially when she's feeling particularly low, will continue to haunt her.

Thankfully, Lizzy has close friends who understand her. And she has a gift: writing poetry. Swimming deeply into her own heart, Lizzy gains the courage to face the monster and, ultimately, learn through writing how to accept her feelings rather than deny them.

As she explores her feelings and painful memories in poems, she summons the strength to share these memories and feelings with her girlfriends, as well as with a newfound boyfriend who doesn't run when he hears the dreaded word "adopted," and, eventually, with her parents, too.

By facing her emotions honestly and sharing them with people who she trusts, Lizzy learns that she can speak about her past--and herself--in ways that not only ease her suffering and doubts but help her heal, as well.

This sense of healing comes, though, only after a deep and painful struggle with her feelings about being adopted--the secret of her life.

"A poet named Jack Gilbert says 'poetry is a way to eat your life,'" Kearney explains in the novel's afterward, where she shares resources about the adoption process and reveals that Lizzy's story was based, in part, on her own experience of being adopted as a child.

"In other words, by writing about an experience--hearing the words in your head, tasting them in your mouth, digesting them, putting them on paper--you can start to understand what they mean and how you feel about them. Some people never take the time to stop and think about their lives--not just think, but feel. That's what poems are for. They make us slow down. They help us make sense of our world."

Heart swimming in our own work means taking the time to stop and think about our life.

Not just thinking, but feeling.

As Kearney suggests, it's not until we write about something that we can begin to understand it in our hearts.

For more information about Meg Kearney, visit her website at http://www.megkearney.com/index.html


P.S. - Thanks to all of you who have stopped by this past year to join us in the water. We hope to see (and hear from) you again in 2007. A healthy, happy New Year to Wordswimmers everywhere!

Lost At Sea

You know how you can feel lost at sea when the fog rolls in and the sky is closed off and there’s no sense of water or land or distance, nothing except fog all around you--dense and gray and smothering--and you can’t tell where you’re heading?

That’s a little how it feels reading Robert Lipsyte’s newest novel, Raiders Night, a brutal, hard-hitting portrait of high school athletics and the desensitization that occurs among varsity football players in a world where victory is all that matters.

Lipsyte, the author of such classic YA novels as One Fat Summer, The Contender, The Brave, and The Chief, is a master of nuance and dramatic tension, and in Raiders Night he portrays in frank, crisp, unadorned prose the moral ambiguities of a high school football star’s life in chilling detail.

Take a look at this passage from early in the book when Matt Rydek, co-captain of Nearmont High’s football team and the focal point of the story, arrives at a party held as the season is about to begin:

Matt floated into the party a step behind Brody, who opened holes in the crowd with his smile. Brody reached out for guys to tap fists and girls to feel up. Ever since he was in PeeWee, All-Brody had acted like he was walking on a red carpet, but nobody ever seemed to mind. He could say anything to anybody. Guys trusted him in the huddle and girls couldn’t keep their hands off him. He had left the football in the car. He was looking to score tonight.

That sense of floating comes not only from Matt’s sense of himself as above the crowd--the victorious football hero carried on the shoulders of adoring fans--but from the pain pills (Vicodin) that he takes, along with steroids, to maintain his place in the stratosphere of high-school “gods.”

Here’s the next paragraph, as Matt makes his way into the party:

The beer and Vic buzz carried Matt over the upturned faces. “Yo, Matt... Lookin’ good, my man... Where’s Amanda?...Ready for hell, hoss?” He felt the words more than heard them, like hundreds of fingers plucking at him. Good thing Brody’s driving tonight. Matt grinned back at people, winked, tapped a few fists, squeezed a few soft arms that came out of the crowd to encircle him like snakes and then fell away, brushing the length of his body. He smelled perfume and armpits. He waved back at Pete, in a corner with Lisa. They talked about everything. Pathetic, Matt thought, then wondered what it would be like to have someone you could really talk to.

In these early passages Lipsyte shows readers the temptations of a world where the gods can have anything they want and raises the story's central question: will Matt ever emerge from this drug-induced haze, step off his pedestal, and actually see the corrupted world that he inhabits... and that he has taken a part in creating? In other words, will Matt come to his senses before it’s too late and someone gets hurt... or worse?

But it’s a challenge for Matt to wake up. That's because waking from this dream-like state may mean losing everything people tell him he wants in life: the adulation of the crowd; the adoration of the girls; the chance to play Division I college football at a powerhouse like Michigan; maybe even turn pro. These dreams aren't his dreams, yet Matt's not able to walk away from them to follow his own dreams. That's because he still hasn't confronted the personal--and emotional--price that he must pay to achieve such dreams.

Long ago Matt gave up his own dream of playing baseball to placate his father, whose dreams of glory as a former Ryder football player remain unfulfilled. Now Matt's not just a member of the team, he's one of the team's leaders... and he believes (or thinks he believes) that loyalty to the team is an unbreakable commandment, just as he believes it’s necessary to win in order to receive a highly touted offer from a Division I school.

On some level that he’s not yet aware of... but which he gradually becomes aware of over the course of the story... Matt knows that attaining and holding onto power through corrupt means may cost him and his friends their souls. But it's only after one of his teammates is abused during a team pre-season training camp ritual, and Matt does nothing to stop it before the ritual gets out of hand, that his growth as a character begins.

At this point, early on in the story, he’s still in a fog, his moral compass essentially numb. He is unable to see the truth or to stand up against the corruptness of the system, a system which he and his friends have come to enjoy because of the privileges that it entitles them to as football heroes. And the question persists as the plot unfolds: will Matt ever find the true courage to be himself and to stand up for what he knows, on the most basic human level, is right?

Here’s how Matt explains what has to happen to the player who suffered the abuse... and which the team is covering up for fear that news of it would destroy the team’s chances to finish the season and go all the way to the championship final. The boys–Matt and Chris–have been given tickets to a Yankee game and are driven in a limo to the stadium as part of an unspoken bribe to keep them quiet about the incident. On their way home after the game, they have this conversation:

Chris nodded mechanically. Matt turned on the mute until the driver pulled into the park-and-ride off the highway where Dorman had left his car. As soon as the coach was out of the limo, Chris opened the minibar and grabbed three little bottles. He flipped one to Matt.
“You buy that defense shit?” Chris cracked a bottle open and sucked it right down.
“Whatever it takes.” Matt was tired.
“What does that mean?” He cracked the second bottle.
Matt wondered if he was supposed to stop him from drinking it. “Look, Chris, you got to get past the past, pay the price. You want to play?”
“You don’t understand.”
Should I say I do, that I know about your crazy mother, that you’ve got to make a choice if you don’t want to wreck the team? Suck it up. We all do.
“We all have problems.”
“What’s yours?” said Chris. It sounded more like a question than a challenge.
“Got all night?”
That seemed to satisfy him. “You trust Koslo?”
“What’d he want?”
Chris’s face was twisted. “I can’t tell you.”
The limo pulled up in front of small house on a quiet old street. Chris drained the second bottle and dropped it on the floor. He got out without saying good night.
Matt drank his little bottle.

Here, Matt is still numbing himself, drinking to flee from his responsibility as the team's co-captain and from his growing self-awareness that the longer he remains silent about the abuse that he witnessed, the more difficult it will be for him to live with himself.

Again and again, Matt turns away from helping Chris until the plot reaches its climax, and Chris seeks revenge for the act of abuse that the team members forced upon him. No longer can Matt stand idly by, a passive observer, waiting for someone else to act. Yet even this act (which others perceive as heroic) fails to cleanse his soul... because he knows that he could--and should--have done something sooner to prevent Chris from seeking revenge.

Here’s how Lipsyte describes Matt feeling afterward:

He was a hero, and it felt bitter and wrong. Kids honked and waved on the drive to school. It took him almost fifteen minutes to make his way from the Super Senior parking lot to the big front doors, usually a two-minute walk. Kids wanted to shake his hand, talk to him, touch him; one jerk actually wanted him to autograph his photo on the front page of the local paper. It was his football picture. He pushed past the kid. In the lobby, teachers and staff applauded when they saw him. Mandy ran over and threw her arms around his neck. Cameras flashed.
You saved our lives.” She whispered into his ear, “I love you, Matt.”
It felt phony, dirty. He unpeeled her and trotted to homeroom.

How will Matt redeem his soul?

In the thirty pages remaining, the fog lifts, and the boundaries of land and water become clear again as Matt must choose between the team’s present needs and his own future.

His compass, numb for so long, begins to point north, and the reader, nearly overwhelmed with grief and sadness for all that’s happened in this story, can’t help but root for Matt, hoping he will choose to do the right thing ... and finally emerge from the fog.

For more information about Robert Lipsyte, check out his website at http://www.robertlipsyte.com/

Deep Diving

Some authors are blessed with a gift for characterization. They dive so deeply into the lives (and hearts) of their characters that you feel as if you're diving with them, slipping inside the character’s skin so deeply that you can feel the character’s pulse beating beside your own.

In her newest book, All of the Above, Shelley Pearsall, the award-winning author of Trouble Don’t Last and Crooked River, dives into the lives of a handful of teens in an inner city neighborhood in Cleveland OH.

The story begins with a tour of the neighborhood along Washington Boulevard: “...past the smoky good smells of Willy Q’s Barbecue, past the Style R Us hair salon, where they do nails like nobody’s business, past the eye-popping red doors of the Sanctuary Baptist Church, you’ll finally come to a dead end.”

At the dead end is a school, and within this school are a handful of students in a Math Club folding small pieces of paper into the world’s largest tetrahedron.

Tetrahedrons are “geometric solids with four faces,” according to Mr. Collins, the math teacher in whose math class readers first meet the story’s four main characters–James Harris III, Rhondell, Sharice, and Marcel.

Listen to each character's voice in these early introductions:

James Harris III: I don’t listen to nothing in Collins’ math class. Only thing I listen for is the bell. That bell at the end of class is just about the sweetest sound in the world. The whole class, I sit there waiting on that bell and watching the hands of the clock jump from one little black mark to the next. You ever notice how school clocks do that? How they don’t move like other clocks do; they jump ahead like bugs?

Rhondell: All the way home on the bus in the rain, I roll the word tetrahedron around in my mouth. I keep my face turned toward the steamed-up bus windows, and I let my lips try the word over and over without using my voice. Tetrahedron.

I wonder if this is one of those words that might get me into college someday. It sounds as if it could. Inside my mind, I keep a whole collection of college words for someday. Words like epiphany, quiescent, metamorphosis...

Sharice: Six people are already in the math room when I get there on Monday. This kinda surprises me a little. I take a look around the doorway first ‘cause if it’s only me and Mr. Collins, I don’t plan on sticking around. But then I see Ashlee and Deandra from math class. They are hanging all over Terrell (how desperate can you be?) And passing a bag of chips back and forth.

Marcel: Marcel the Magnificent, that’s me. After our math club meeting, I head on over to the Barbecue. Slap a big slab of ribs on a plate. Take fifteen orders at the same time.

“How you want your ribs done, ma’am, heat or no heat? Hot sauce or mild?”

“We got Blast off to Outer Space Hot, Melt the Roof of Your Mouth Hot, Tar in the Summertime Hot, Red Heels Hot, Mama Thornton Sings the Blues Hot, and Just Plain Ol’ Hot. Which you want? Yes, ma’am. Two Singing the Blues coming up. Napkins and forks on the right side. Fire hose on the left. We aim to please at Willy Q’s Barbecue. You have a good day, too, ma’am.” I slam the order window shut.

Ahhh. Feet up. Butt down.

In these initial glimpses, you can feel the pulse of each character immediately. You know who these characters are... and who they’re not. They’re not what you might have expected: dead-end kids attending a dead-end school in a dead-end part of Cleveland. No, they’re kids with attitude and personality, with hopes and dreams.

What comes through in each of these excerpts, aside from each character's unique personality, is the depth of love that Pearsall feels for each of them. She cares deeply about her characters, and in caring... manages to show us why we should care about them, too.

Look at James, for instance. Gruff, impatient, almost defiant, wanting to be anywhere else but in school. Yet he’s observant, he notices things, small things, like the way the clock hand advances ... and the need to be doing something else besides spending time in Collins’ math class.

This combination–defiant, yet sensitive–makes for an interesting mixture, a way of shaping our feelings about him, so that we expect James to stand up for what he wants, even if it’s dangerous to stand up, and yet we understand that he has a sensitive side, too, a side that makes him vulnerable, hence exposed to danger. That means that we fear him... and fear for him... at the same time.

And look at Rhondell. Dreaming of college on the bus ride home, dreaming of college words all the time, but saying them to herself, not wanting anyone to know her dreams, scared of what might happen if anyone finds out about them... or, worse, scared of what might happen if they don’t come true.

Notice how Rhondell collects college-level words, and plays with them in her mind as if they were precious stones, the key to her future, which is just a dream now. And the one word-- "someday"--letting us feel her longing for a future that’s better than the present she’s in now.

Rhondell's dreams are what help us understand and sympathize with her, just as her fear of dreams not coming true helps us understand what’s important to her... what she wants more than anything yet can't tell anyone for fear the dream might be lost once it's exposed to the light.

And then there’s Sharice who will have to learn how to stand on her own feet... or drop into the abyss and be forgotten. What will she choose? Does she have the courage to make friends, to share her heart and dreams with others?

And Marcel, sweet-talking, full-of-himself, oozing confidence, ready to sell customers his daddy’s barbecue ribs and sauce, a hard worker, but not so hard that he can’t let himself take a break when the line of customers slackens.

But is he all show? What’s he really made of? That’s what the reader wants to know. When the test of his character comes, it comes straight at him. What will Marcel do?

At the core of each character is a pulsing, beating heart, and each heartbeat breathes life into this story about what people are truly made of and how courage and perseverance can be found on Cleveland's inner-city streets.

In diving deeply into each character’s inner world, Pearsall tells a story that’s true to life. Some characters reach for dreams and get them, while others never get the chance to reach... yet remain standing, nonetheless. Together, their voices serve as a rich tapestry of lives linked in mysterious ways.

In the end, it's hard to leave Washington Boulevard. That’s because Pearsall has taken us deep-diving into the hearts of characters who we end up loving as much as our own friends and neighbors, their hopes and dreams mingling with our own.

For more information about Shelley Pearsall and her work, visit her website at
http://www.shelleypearsall.com/

And for a librarian's review of All of The Above, take a look at A Fuse #8 Production at http://fusenumber8.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-of-day-all-of-above.html