Excerpts

The stark white sun was climbing toward noon, and the fields across from the cabin row shimmered and steamed beneath it. But the cabins themselves were shaded by the big river trees, and a friendly coolness came up from the slow green water. The shouts and laughter of children at play carried from behind the cabin row, along with an occasional splash when one of the kids dove off the bridge. None of their parents worried; the older kids watched the younger ones with a lot more care than might have been expected of them, and all could swim like fish by the time they could toddle down the riverbank. No Bridge-end child in Corbitt's memory had ever been hurt beyond the normal bumps and bruises of kid-life... except for what Shilo Bates had done.

The sounds of the children meant that all of the families were home from church. Corbitt's mom still went, but he had stopped going the year before. Corbitt's dad had gone only on special days like Easter and Christmas, maintaining that if God wasn't everywhere He wasn't anywhere. Corbitt's mom might have been a little sad when Corbitt stopped going, but she never tried to force him. Until these last few weeks, he could have easily believed that God rested between Sundays at Bridge-end.

Sundays were long, do-nothing sorts of days, and today seemed no different. Saturday's washing, fresh-smelling and clean even if faded and patched, still hung from lines between the cabins to be taken in that evening. There were scents of Sunday dinners cooking that made Corbitt's stomach growl when he recalled he hadn't had any breakfast. Somebody had their TV tuned to a baseball game.

Lamar Sampson, who had to go to church whether he wanted or no... because it was "healthy" for him, according to his mom... was gleaming with sweat out on the sunbaked road with his old skateboard. Toby Barlow, who'd probably never been inside a church in his life but was healthy as hell anyway, stood by the battered BMX that he rode almost daily from town. He was encouraging Lamar's moves with taunting and shouts. Corbitt skated the board too, as did most of the Bridge-end kids, but there was only one solid strip of roadway remaining and even that was buckled and rough. Toby could have afforded a board of his own, but the village of New Crossing wasn't much more than the Barlow's gas station and store, a garage, a farm and feed supply, and a few other shops among a cluster of houses, and it boasted no sidewalks at all. So Toby shared the Bridge-end board.

Lamar had a faded Transworld Skateboarding magazine his father had fetched back for him from Jackson last year. It had pictures of ramps like kids in California practiced on. Corbitt, Lamar and Toby had built themselves a small one from scrap wood. It was a nigger-rig, and full of splinters, but it worked. Corbitt's mind flicked from shadow to sunlight as lamar caught air off the ramp but landed on his ass in the road. The board skittered away while Toby snickered.

"Bastard!" bawled Lamar.

"Say it loud an' proud, jack," giggled Toby.

From the cool vine-covered shade of Number One's little railed porch came a stern voice. "Lamar Sampson! I swear I'll wash out that filthy mouth of yours with my yellow soap! Yes I will!"

Toby snickered again behind his hand until the voice added, "'Spect you 'bout due for another taste your ownself, Toby Barlow."

Toby changed his snicker into a cough.

Lamar scrambled up, rubbing his butt and grinning at Corbitt, who'd snagged the skateboard. Then Lamar turned quickly to face Number One. "Oh, I sorry, Miz Griffin." He gave Toby a jab in the ribs and the other boy echoed him.

Behind the row of flowers in coffee cans, a big round face nodded solemnly from the shade. "I should say. Such talk on a Sunday!" But Corbitt sensed a smile in the old woman's words.

The other boys looked down; Lamar at his big battered Pumas, sliced and scarred from kicking scrap iron, and Toby at his black-and-white B.K.s, almost new but already scuffed and dirty. Lama wore sun-bleached cutoffs, streaked with rust and grease, though they had been real 501s once and were still in better shape than Corbitt's. Toby was clad in ragged gym shorts, once red, now faded pink, their side seams split from being a year too small.

Lamar had just turned fourteen. Corbitt had read a lot of books in which characters were called "solid muscle", but words on paper could never describe the reality that was Lamar Sampson. His shoulders were massive, his upper arms huge, and his chest muscles jutted a full inch out from his frame, as stark and squared as if they'd been chiseled from honey-brown bronze. His washboard belly looked hard enough to bark knuckles on. The only softness about him was his eyes, deep coffee-colored and tending to shyness in a wide, flat-nosed face that turned serious only when he had to think much. Lamar didn't have the slightest notion how strong he was, and often broke things without meaning to... toys, tape players, and Toby's arm the summer before when they'd been wrestling on the riverbank. He was always sorry as hell about it... he'd spent a month in misery while Toby wore a cast. Once, when they'd been drinking, Corbitt and Toby had wrapped Lamar's chest with clothesline rope to test his strength. They hadn't noticed the wire core inside the cotton. Lamar had snapped it on the second try, but he still bore the stripes on his skin. Though outweighing Corbitt once over, Lamar stood just shoulder-high to the slender boy. Toby said he looked clumsy alongside of Corbitt, like a lion cub next to a cheetah.

Thirteen, Toby Barlow was a little taller than Lamar, and might have been called either chubby or husky depending on which of the other boys you compared him to. His hair was pale blond -- or would have been but for the brown dust -- and was sweat-shaded now to a creamed-coffee color. he wore it long and shaggy so that he reminded Corbitt of a page boy in King Arthur's court. He had on open, friendly face, a perpetual buck-toothed grin, and eyes of a deep smoky blue like the sky before a thunderstorm. The summer sun tanned him each year to almost the tone of a real Bridge-end kid.

Opening: closeup of computer screen and fingers tapping at a keyboard. The first words they type are these ...

I don't have a copy of Six Out Seven by Jess Mowry. This is surprising and unfortunate. It's surprising because I know I had one six months ago when I last rearranged my bookcases. I guess I lent it to someone and it's now been casually appropriated. It's that kind of book. It's unfortunate because I've agreed to write an essay about it and the deadline's looming. I check Amazon.co.uk. They haven't got it. I check Amazon.com. They've got it but by the time the book is shipped from the States it'll be too late.

I must have owned at least a dozen copies of this book in the past. But I lent them out or gave them away: to the Chicago English Literature teacher who'd never heard of it but should've, to the teenage gangsta lite who could use the perspective, to the cute blonde who needed some convincing that I was both literate and down. Like I said, it's that kind of book.

I scan my addresses and find I've still got a few numbers. I make some calls. No joy. Every single lend or gift has been lent or given away. It's like I said.

The cute blonde doesn't remember who I am until I remind her about the book. She says, "Oh yeah. I love that book. I think I must have lent it to my ex." If I can't be remembered for a book I've written then I guess being remembered for a book I've given is not so bad.

Cut to: right now. I try a bookshop, one of the major chains' flagship London branches. This is desperation because bookshops terrify me. In my experience there are two kinds of writer: those who love bookshops and those who are terrified. In my experience there are two kinds of writer: the bipolar and the balanced. By my judgement, these two pairs of denominations map each other precisely.

I ask at the information desk. The assistant asks her computer. The assistant shakes her head, she tuts, she pulls faces. I suspect delivering bad news is the highlight of her day. She says, "We did have it but we don't have it. We can't order it. It's not being reprinted. It's a dead book."

I stare at her. Is she crazy? If Six Out Seven is dead then it's protagonists--Corbitt, Tam and Ethan--must be dead too. So how come I could introduce them to you right now? If it's dead then why can I still hear its rhythms that pulse and roll and syncopate and crescendo? If it's dead then how come I know there's all these copies still in circulation in London, still being pumped around by the beating of the novel's heart?

"Excuse me?" This is the assistant. "Excuse me? But are you Patrick Neate?"

I say, "Yeah."

This doesn't happen much but it does happen. After all, this is a bookshop and I write books and, besides, my picture is in today's paper.

She says, "Since you're here, would you like to sign some stock?"

"Sure."

She asks the computer. The computer replies. She looks momentarily embarrassed. "Actually," she says. "We don't have much at the moment. We must be waiting on the warehouse. Maybe another time."

"Sure."

This is why bookshops terrify me. One day I'll walk into this shop and ask for something I wrote and another assistant who delights in delivering bad news will say, "Sorry. That's a dead book."

Cut to: montage of my teens. Three minutes or so. Soundtrack? "Don't Believe The Hype" by Public Enemy.

School. Yours truly studying hard, bent over a desk and then first hand up when the teacher asks a question. There's a spray can falling out of my rucksack. It's only for show. I was always going to be a writer, never a "writer." Jump cut to: South London suburban station. Poised with spray can when British Rail employee appears. In his office he makes me a cup of tea while he calls the local plod shop. All I can think about is what my dad will say and I struggle to front thug. Jump cut to: PE at Brixton Academy. Late '80s. S1Ws, Chuck and Flav... and me, awestruck. A white face bobbing up and down in a sea of blackness. Jump cut to: bus home from my private school; me tinkering with my vowels to avoid another kicking, knaiimean? Jump cut to: a series of firsts. The first Jordans. The first De La album. The first pair of 1200s. The first and last outing as an emcee...

Cut to: early 20s. I want to write books, of course, but I have to earn a crust. I'm a hip hop journalist. I'm in the US every other week. I'm meeting my idols, the guys who got me through school and college. I'm too young to know the golden rule: never meet your heroes, they always disappoint.

Interview after interview, rappers chant the same mantra. Rappers say they keep it real, rappers say they represent, rappers say they do it for the love and then, overnight, the cheddar. Interviews have become the journalistic representation of the hip hop form: rappers take the best bits of archetypal interviews and loop them like a breakbeat. Rappers have nothing to say. Rappers are down but they think "literate" is a mysterious part of the female anatomy best ignored.

Cut to: mid 20s. I'm writing my first novel. I'm reading Six Out Seven. Check yours truly: voraciousness cubed.

A hip hop novel with shades of grey. A hip hop novel with a complex but coherent moral structure. A hip hop novel with epic pretensions and characters tall, broad, and deep enough to fulfil them. Corbitt Wainwright is just 13 years old but he fights to find the moral up and the moral down in zero gravity. Corbitt is a black kid in a crack house, haunted by his past (real and mythological) and daunted by his future (whether fated or chosen). Corbitt is a literary representation of why hip hop works. He is oh-so-specific in his alienation. But tell that to the kid on the London bus who changed his accent to dodge a beating; that kid right there with the spray can in his rucksack and 3 Feet High and Rising on his Walkman.

I say all this to a cute blonde who's come back to mind for who knows what. I'm trying to convince her that I'm literate and down but I've just finished this book and I'm supercharged and I suspect I'm coming off a little scary. I convince her to take my copy. I can't convince her to stay. She promises to read it. She doesn't promise to return my calls.

Cut to: last week. I'm driving back from Manchester with Charlie Dark: writer, DJ, producer, renaissance geezer... South London born and bred. I've never previously met anyone who read Six Out Seven except through me but Charlie did. Charlie has a gift for aphorism. He says, "That book is a key text for aging B-boys."

When I get home, I track down Jess Mowry on the web and I find an e-mail address. I don't write much; I just tell him about my conversation with Charlie and how much his book touched me. I don't want to say too much in case he replies and turns out to be disappointing. I'm running out of heroes and can't afford to lose another. He replies the very next day. He says, "Thank you! I needed that!" Now I kind of wish I'd written a little more. Then maybe Mr. Mowry would have explained why he "needed that." Why could he possibly have needed my approval?

Cut to: right now. I'm standing opposite the shop assistant. I want to say to her, who the hell does she think she is to describe Six Out Seven as a dead book? I want to tell her about my conversation with the cute blonde. I want to tell her about my conversation with Charlie. I want to tell her that this book will never die if I've got anything to do with it. I recall my e-mail from Mr. Mowry and I feel suddenly important as a reader. I like the feeling. In fact, I suspect I'll never be as important in the way I write as the way I read and that's OK.

I don't confront the shop assistant with all the reasons she's wrong. But I do say, "Six Out Seven by Jess Mowry. An amazing book. You should track it down."

She makes a note of it. She says, "Come back in a couple of weeks and sign some stock for us."

"Sure," I say. "No problem."

Ends. Patrick Neate lives in London and Zambia. He is the author of three novels, including The London Pigeon Wars and Where You're At, an anthology of hip-hop writing. In 2001 he won England's Whitbread Award. He has published articles in many leading music magazines, including The Face, Mixmag, and Time Out.

Childhood Lost

While reporting on the inner city, I've privately told friends that the situation reminds me of a modern-day and Americanized version of "Lord of the Flies". As unemployment and drugs overwhelm the adults in these communities, the children take over. The children provide (a form of) security via the gangs. The children bring home the paycheck by selling drugs. And it's the children who take care of the children. I met one boy who hid scraps from his dinner table to feed a friend whose mother was lost to heroin.

Jess Mowry has, with a chilling, even omnious voice, captured this disturbing would in his novel "Six Out Seven", a contemporary tale of growing up black and poor. The book follows the travels of 13-year-old Corbitt Wainwright, who spends much of his childhood making sure he doesn't lose it. After putting down this 510-page volume, I came to the realization that there is nary an adult who plays a significant role in any of the children's lives. It's not that parents of Mowry's characters aren't responsible and caring -- though there are those who remain absent not only from the book but also from their kids' lives. It's just that the children, most of whom are in their early teens, are confronted with adult worries, particularly racism and urban violence, at a tender and impressionable age.

The absence of adults in this riveting story symbolizes the spiritual loneliness of growing up poor and black. I'm reminded of what a 12-year-old boy once said to me: "I don't have any friends. I just have associates. Friends you trust". The sense that there are not many in whom you can put faith is part of being a child in today's ghetto. It is the tension of so much wanting to believe in others and yourself, yet constantly being let down that Mowry has captured so brilliantly.

From the book's beginning, Mowry challenges stereotypes. We first see Corbitt, who lives by a riverbank, watch as his father his bussed off to prison for a questionable crime against a hateful white farmer. Corbitt is in many ways a typical adolescent. His passions range from fishing to skateboarding, and he has a particular fondness for reading. He struggles with his sexuality as he develops a crush on a flirtatious neighbor girl and wrestles with having a best friend who happens to be white. But his world is slowly shaken, first by his father's run-in with the farmer and then by admonitions from the white proprietor of a truck stop who Corbitt had always thought friendly to blacks. The man pulls Corbitt aside one day to earnestly warn him to recognize his place in life, to keep his aspirations in check. At that point, Corbitt begins to confront the ugliness of the adult world.

In the second half of the book, Corbitt encounters the ugliness of a children's world that has been perverted by poverty and neglect. A violent event turns Corbitt's childhood on its head, and he runs away to Oakland, where he meets up with 'Tam, an overweight 13-year-old gang mascot, and Ethan, an 8-year-old wannabe. Just the bus ride from rural Mississippi to urban Oakland changes the way Corbitt conducts himself, and his arrival into an always-look-over-your-shoulder street life alters his view of others.

"Still, Corbitt learned, to avoid all eyes and never smile, and keep his head up and walk as if ready to fight. He supposed that was being cool... (but) it felt wrong to have to act this way, playing a part that didn't fit. If you played a part long enough would you begin to believe it yourself? Would Oakland be different because it was a black city? Maybe when black people were all together they wouldn't be cruel to each other? That at least seemed logical."

Of course this is Mowry's point: As if if weren't hard enough to grow up with white adults who prejudge you, the immediate enemy may be none other than your own community. Indeed, Corbitt, 'Tam and Ethan face associates no older than 13 who turn on them and each other with a horrid and frightening regularity. After watching a drug-addicted young boy gunned down in a drive-by shooting, Corbitt asks: "We is still called kids here, huh?"

Mowry paints a world that (may seem) even more violent and neglectful than it actually is, but maybe that is his intent, to write an Orwellian portrait of what will be if we don't act now, if we don't find a way to a restore a childhood to these children. Yes, I wanted to assure Corbitt, you are still called kids. (Perhaps it is the power of Mowry's storytelling that had me wishing I could converse with the characters.)

I must confess that I approached this book with some trepidation. Gangs. Drugs. Children. The inner city. They become quite faddish for authors and screenwriters, and frequently nothing new is added to the discourse. Of course, Mowry adds some authenticity: At 33 and the father of four, he remains a resident of West Oakland -- although after the success of his 1992 novel "Way Past Cool", he moved his family from an abandoned bus into an apartment. Mowry's writing, while raw and unpolished at times (the streetwise dialogue of the Oakland children is particularly hard to follow), is both vivid and courageous in its descriptions of inner-city life. More important, though, Mowry is a splendid storyteller whose tough, no-nonsense prose rouses me.

Corbitt's flirtations with his neighborhood friend, Sherry, made me smile. 'Tam's battle with and the acceptance of his weight (he insists that people call him what he is: fat) made me laugh. But it is Corbitt, 'Tam and Ethan's resourceful efforts to retain their childhood, to carve out a decent life for themselves, which left me both hopeful and angry. Hopeful that they're successful. Angry that we -- the adults -- have been of such little help. As Corbitt muses toward the end of the book: "Black kids could think; it was just too goddamn bad what the world gave them to think about".

Mowry has a bold an original literary voice which should be listened to. "Six Out Seven" captured my heart and ignited my fury.

Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here - San Jose Mercury News, October 3, 1993

What the use in dreamin'?

The Reverend Jesse Jackson and novelist Jess Mowry have both confronted a perplexing modern truth.

"More black men die each year from guns than the total who died from lynching," Jackson has said, calling upon young African Americans to break the unwritten code of silence that prevents "snitching" on the bullies who plague inner cities.

Few characters in Mowry's powerful third novel, "Six Out Seven", are likely to heed Jackson's call. But Mowry does grapple angrily and honestly with the forces killing young black men; with individual and societal responsibility; with the complexities of modern racism, including drive-by shooters, who Mowry says, roam the inner cities "like the KKK's Afro-American auxiliary".

In its early chapters, "Six Out Seven" skillfully juxtaposes two parallel worlds that are destined to intersect. It opens with 13-year-old Corbitt Wainwright sitting in a tree, watching a "nothing-colored bus" haul his father -- a Gulf War veteran -- off to prison for beating a white child-molester.

Corbitt lives along a rural Mississippi river, in a village of old motor court cabins everyone calls Bridge-End. Every day, Corbitt hikes two miles across the steamy fields to Mr. Rudd's truck stop, where he washes the windshields of big-rigs and busses. When he's not working, he and his "best brothers" Lamar Sampson and Toby Barlow -- the only white boy in town -- live like modern Mark Twain kids, fishing, skateboarding and maybe smoking and drinking a bit as they talk out the confusing details of life.

These "jungle cats", as they call themselves, are wonderful characters -- children working their way up through the dreamy mist of innocence, searching for a meaningful next thing to cheat the nihilist nightmare that by all indications is their destiny.

Preternaturally wise at 13, Corbitt has never tried to get a real job, "because most everything he could do was already being done by grown men to feed their families". But he's also impatient with folks who only "do what's expected". He's been saving money, and now plans to offer Rudd a proposal: He'll set up a full-fledged truck-wash, and they'll split the profits 50-50.

Alas, Mowry masterfully kicks a reader's naive hope for a Horatio Alger tale out from under him, when Rudd -- one of the area's kindest white men -- lets Corbitt in on the philosophical underpinnings of his benevolence:

"you people are children, an' only a fool would hate children," Rudd says gently. "See, that's why you people always have such a miserable time in our cities. You just wasn't designed to understand complicated matters... When the goin' gets rough, y'all up an' blow your tops like frustrated children, an' break things. Your own things, likely as not, they way y'all done years past up there in Harlem, or Watts, or after that Rodney King trial."

Wounded, Corbitt brims with hatred for everyone white, including Toby. He angrily tries to squirm out of his own childhood, like a snake molting repellent skin.

Mowry's portrait of this rural southern town is so vivid that when Corbitt finally catches a Greyhound west to pursue a vague spiritual quest, the reader longs to return to Bridge-End, with its hypnotic river and warm, tight-knit community.

That's no wonder, since Corbitt's flight lands him in the scene Mowry's been painting in alternating chapters -- the ghetto of West Oakland. Here life tends to beat the childhood out of kids while they're still toddlers, the few adults in sight are smoked-out husks, and the enemy is as likely defined by the color of his bandanna as his skin color.

It's unlikely that an L.A. gang-banger will see much similarity to his Crip or Blood set in the skateboarding "Collectors" and "Leopards", the gangs Corbitt falls in with. But Mowry's Oakland cast is as compelling as his Mississippi crew, and anyone who's been an adolescent will glimpse themselves in these young men.

Mowry called his characters in his earlier book, "Way Past Cool", "Little Rascals With Uzis". That book gave him a reputation as a tough-guy writer. But Mowry's real strength comes from his soft side... When Mowry's story shows what's behind his characters' amorphous fury, the book throbs with awesome power.

In the world of "Six Out Seven", it is assumed that few outsiders know or care that economic injustice and racism's legacy have turned parts of America into storm drains brimming with pariah children. The kids know they're unwanted. One child's crayon drawing in a perfectly described shelter reads" "WHITEY HATES YOUR BLACK ASS AND WILL KILL YOU WITH CRACK". Meanwhile, Mowry's cops dismiss the ghetto as a "self-cleaning oven", in which African Americans kill each other so efficiently that the white man is spared considerable effort.

Mowry knows the pervasiveness of such of such thinking among the dispossessed -- he may even buy into the prevailing conspiracy theories. But he doesn't back away from the underlying complexities. His character, Beamer, for instance, is a crack baby who now slings the stuff for an older black dealer. "Kids not wanted. Kids not happy. Kids do crack..." Beamer says, cluing in a young friend to the how's and why's of the business. "Some kids gots somethin' missin' out their eyes. I see that, know I gots me a sucka."

So it is that Corbitt's rite of passage makes him a warrior in a war more baffling than any inter-tribal or anti-colonial battle fought in the jungle or out on the veldt. He winds up fighting on two fronts. The only real victory comes when Corbitt embraces a one-eyed, dreadlocked, 8-year-old urchin who's been selling sex in the bus station. Corbitt helps him recover a bit of his childhood, thereby giving him a shot at someday becoming a man.

Before Corbitt left for Oakland, Bridge-End's wisest woman visited him in a vision:

"Gettin' your dreams stepped on an' your trust betrayed gotta be the most hurtinest thing in this life, son," she says. "But you can't never stop dreamin' nor givin' your trust where you believe. Stop dreamin' an' tryin' to trust, an' you start hatin'. First it the whites 'cause you figure you can't never trust none of 'em. But, pretty soon, you start hatin' your own color folks 'cause you figure they lettin' you down somehow... not tryin' hard enough, an' makin' you look no-account right along with 'em. An' then come the time when you begin hatin' your ownself, 'cause you only born a nigger so what the use in dreamin'."

On a grim inner-city street, a young gangster tells Corbitt he and a friend are thinking about sharing responsibility for for a baby: "Ain't that a sort of African thing, man?" he asks. "Like the kids really belong to everbody?"

"If it ain't, it oughta be," says Corbitt.

With luck, Mowry's heartfelt, beautifully written book will make readers see that the kids he portrays are everyone's kids, and to let their dreams wither unnurtured is everyone's shame.

Bob Sipchen - Los Angeles Times - November 7, 1993