Scroll down a couple of posts to get to the beginning. This post is part of a series in which I reflect on how things could go wrong for us in a beautiful mountain town, with gorgeous trails, deer and elk, really nice people, fresh air, high mountain altitude. Why did we leave?
We are back in Illinois now, and my son, who is neurologically diverse, black, dmdd, and a little scary, but is basically a very nice kid, is much happier. He has black friends. He's found plenty of other people who are as disabled as he is or worse. He's on disability and doesn't have to wonder if he'll eat tomorrow which makes him lucky in his friends' eyes. He actually misses Cloudcroft although he was basically run out of there.
Run out? Yes, at some point some kid told him that if he came back to school, they'd put a gun to him. Now you'd probably be quick to say that there's two sides to every story, and I'm sure there are two sides to this one, but since I don't know them both clearly all I can say is that it didn't leave us much choice besides homeschooling and that didn't work either. But there were two other characters involved - a sister the same age, and a younger sister, and they weren't getting any education either. We needed to be back in Illinois where we could get some help.
It's fair to say that neither the school nor the kids knew how to handle him. And the kids were probably more important, since he wasn't the kind of kid who'd be arguing about B's and A's and colleges. He just needed to be accepted in a crowd and wasn't able to get that. And I'm sure he was partly at fault. He presented himself as a tough gang-banger who knew (from the internet) what Chicago was like, and they saw through it, because he didn't really want to fight anyone, and I don't blame him. For them if fists don't work guns will and if they even mention the guns they probably mean it.
On the other hand, being mountain kids and all, and all of seventeen themselves, they were very likely just mouthing off, and it never would have come to that. They didn't quite know how to take him. He went into rages every once in a while and this was scary since he was big and strong, and you could accuse them of racism (he did hear the n-word at least once) but I think they did give him a chance and also I think they would have accepted quite a bit of difference if he had handled it a little better. They weren't trying to pick a fight but it came out looking that way. And their reaction to him was way more important, in the end, than the teachers', or even the police, who went way out of their way to be fair to him.
While we were there some kid or kids, or perhaps grownups, were shooting wild horses when they wandered into town. Now this was a real tragedy and one I might write about. My son never did anything like that. Never got a gun, never hurt anyone, never even killed an animal. It was all just rage, the rage of being black where there were so few others like him, and where the first lesson he got in school was about slavery. That seemed to set him off in the wrong direction, and he's never come back, really. Though now, at least, he has some other black kids to talk about it with.
