The Whole Language by Gregory Boyle

Author:Gregory Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

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I first knew Juanito when he was a little kid in the projects. He was once on a mission to collect cans for his mom. Maybe he was ten. It didn’t take long for our conversation to dissolve into his crying, head bowed, clutching at his half-full garbage bag. His mom was pregnant with the sixth kid to join the household. Juanito’s dad, a gang member, had his homegirls beat his mom down yesterday, so she’d lose the baby. We think of the light loads a ten-year-old ought to carry, then we contemplate such a burden laid on one so young. You have to catch your breath. They say that when a rat runs right into a fire, know that it is being pursued by something hotter than fire. That was Juanito.

So, no one was surprised when Juanito found his way to becoming Grizzly, a gang member who drew “respect” for all the wrong reasons. When he was sixteen, I saw him in the projects and heard he had been gone. “Yeah, I got arrested, but I only did a week. A homie got shot and that was because nobody was watching the barrio. They’re all ‘scary’… ’Oooh… I’m on probation.’ ” As he told me this, he mocked his homies by trembling and doing the homie version of shaking in your boots. “So,” he finished, “I went down to take care of business.” The veneer is like marble, rock-hard and impenetrable.

Grizz was once chased by cops. “Not sure why I ran—I wasn’t dirty. I took off cuz I just didn’t want to be hassled.” He scaled a fence with some razor wire, and a finger got caught. He leaped to the ground, but part of his finger stayed on the fence. He told me that the cops saw the dismembered digit, were completely grossed out, and left. Grizz took what remained of his finger to the hospital and coldly said to the triage nurse, “Fix this.” And they did.

After way too much time, Grizz found his way to Homeboy and it was this sacred threshold place for him. Grizz found Homeboy as a hallway between his old comfort zone (which, let’s face it, was never that comfortable) and a new, bold answer to it. He found this safe area, a field of kindness, care, and attention. Somewhere between this old and new version was a fecundity of healing. Grizz had been convinced, like all the traumatized, that he only had three responses in his repertoire: fight, flight, or freeze. He could even recognize that his past behavior was not so much “bad,” but rather the understandable reaction to his deeply felt traumatic stress. He chose to no longer be victimized by his anger. “Besides,” as the homie Robert told him, “your past is like your ass—behind you.”

Homeboy Industries isn’t just a sanctuary and sacred place, it’s a petri dish cultivating an ability to find the sacred beyond this place. Someone like Grizz walks in and can’t help but attach to this cherishing community.

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