The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers by Sampson Davis & George Jenkins & Rameck Hunt

Author:Sampson Davis & George Jenkins & Rameck Hunt [Davis, Sampson & Jenkins, George & Hunt, Rameck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781400105687
Amazon: 1400155681
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2007-10-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 3

SAMPSON

What It Takes

IVISIT CLASSROOMS ALL THE TIME, and I’ve been keeping an un-scientific poll of the kids I meet there.

“How many of you don’t live with your fathers?” I ask bluntly.

Inevitably, more than half raise their hands. Sometimes it’s nearly everyone. Often a student will pull me aside to share every detail of his or her father’s last visit, holding on to the memories tightly.

It’s obvious to me even before I ask the question which ones will raise their hands. They’re the ones not-so-silently screaming for attention. The ones who interrupt my anti-violence presentation with outbursts, the ones slouching in their chairs, the ones who can’t keep their hands off the kid next to them. The undisciplined ones who remind me of myself when I was a little boy in the same boat, hungry for guidance.

On one particular spring morning, I was at Peshine Avenue School in Newark, talking to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders about making smart decisions.

“I practice emergency medicine, like on the show ER,” I explained. “I’m born and raised here in Newark. I went to Dayton Street School and University High School, right around the corner.”

Every day that I report to the hospital for work, I tell them, I have to treat someone who ended up hurt and bleeding because he didn’t know how to work out a disagreement.

Then I launch into my presentation, starting with the story of a nineteen-year-old arguing with his eighteen-year-old wife about the care of their child. The disagreement ended when she pulled out a shotgun and shot him in the chest. On a slide projector, I show a picture of a surgeon with his fingers in the husband’s chest, attempting to save his life.

I figure I might as well start out with a domestic violence scene. It’s something I witnessed as a child and I’m sure many of these kids have, too. To stop the cycle, somebody’s got to speak up, even if it means pushing into the private world of these schoolchildren. So I do.

My presentation is part of a program called Cops & Docs, created a few years ago by Dr. Duane Dyson, a physician who was born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey. He wanted to shake kids up by sharing the grim realities from emergency rooms and urging them to take a moment to think before they act violently. He thought of this outreach program and gave me a call. How could I refuse? I jumped at the chance and have been a speaker for the Violence Prevention Institute for several years. I deliver the majority of my lectures with my friend Hashim Garrett, a victim of gun violence. At fifteen, he was paralyzed after being gunned down by boys he thought were his friends. We believe in preventing violence before it happens. One good reason is that it saves money; it can cost $34,000 to incarcerate someone for a year, and as much as $322,000 for a hospital to treat a gunshot wound to the torso.

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