Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy's Life: A Memoir
Lee Stringer
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1583227016
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Like his brother before him, Stringer was surrendered to foster care, shortly after birth, by his unwed and underemployed mother—a common practice for unmarried women in mid-century America. Less common was that she returned six years later to reclaim her children. Rather than leading to a happy ending, though, this is where Stringer's story begins. The clash of being poor and black in an affluent, largely white New York suburb begins to foment pain and rage which erupts, more often than not, when he is at school. One violent episode results in his expulsion from the sixth grade and his subsequent three-year stint at Hawthorne, the "sleepaway school" of the title.
What follows is an intensely personal, American journey: a universal story of childhood where childhood universals are absent. We experience how a child fashions his life out of the materials given to him, however threadbare. This is a "boy-meets-world" story, the chronicle of one child’s struggle simply to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
at all fit on the doctor’s lips. At our first session. When I told him about Pee Wee. About feeling mad enough to want to kill him. A light had gone on in his eyes. Homicidal rage. Something he can sink his psychiatric teeth into. But weariness . . . “I have good news for you,” he tells me and I am reminded, when he says it, of my mother’s words when she came to collect Wayne and me from Mama’s house. “We are releasing you,” he says. “You are going home!” “Home,” I say thinking, Mama’s house.
and Andy choosing up sides for a softball game. And Steve picks me. “I’ll take Cav,” he says. “Stringer? ” Andy squawks. Like it’s the dumbest thing that ever hit his ears. “You’re taking Stringer?” And Steve screws up the stuff to say it again. “Yup. I’ll take Cav,” he says. A thing Andy just can’t get over. “Well you can have him,” he says. He says this with a sneer. A sneer that I take with me to the plate every time I go up to bat. And which reappears on his face again and again. Each
manufacturing, Peekskill remained at heart a small town. It wouldn’t do for my mother to be seen with her belly out to there and no husband in sight to speak for it. Nor was abortion a consideration. It was not a thing even talked about. Not amongst any of the people my mother knew. A few weeks later she checked herself into a home for unwed mothers. On October 6, 1948, she gave birth to my brother, Wayne Livingston Stringer. A “scrawny kid,” as my mother remembers it. Who could cry “loud enough
when they are all gone. And tries to retreat back across the room. But I refuse to let him go. “Try again,” I tell him. “The trick is to throw them edgewise.” He sighs before going at it again. A sigh that wants to know why I am putting him through this. But gives the second try a better effort. As he does, Mike Siegel comes clattering down the stairs. His parents are away. In Washington, I think. Spying the Alpo rig. And Sudak chucking checkers at it. He makes a point of addressing Sudak, not
in itself was frightening. He was, after all, my older brother. My hope was he would have an idea what to do. Say something, at least. Instead, he reached for his fly. And I followed suit. We stood there, exposed before the mute scrutiny of our two captors, for what seemed like a long time. Me thinking, but trying not to think about, what consequences might be in store for us if one of them pulled out a knife. Then Victor said, “Jiggle ’em. Get ’em hard.” For a second I just looked at him. It