Rats In The Trees

Rats In The Trees was my first book, published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories about 13-year-old Robby, a boy from Fresno, California who runs away to keep from being put in a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone in the city, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals.

The stories were originally written to entertain and offer positive but on-the-real messages to kids at a West Oakland youth center where I worked at the time. Rats In The Trees portrays the conditions for inner city kids during the late 1980's... around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America"... which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into U.S. "ghettoes".

The times of "happy" black music were ending. So was the social-awareness and the kinship of Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained us during the '60's and 70's. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal and desperate years of "gangstuh rap", of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" were beginning with a vengenace that has only gotten worse as time passed and we entered a new century.

Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the happier days when black people seemed united in the common cause of freedom and social justice: and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something-- being cheated somehow -- even if they might not have known exactly what that "something" was, or were able to give it a name.

Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats In The Trees have come true -- the ever-increasing and senseless black-on-black crime, the "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" in U.S. inner-cities, the kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. (California, for all of its wealth, is now at the very bottom of the list-- 50th place of all the U.S. states-- in the quality of its public schools, although it has many expensive new prisons).

It was also predicted in Rats that "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" would move into "white suburbia", too-- as Chuck (an older white teenager in Rats) said: "Coming soon to a neighborhood near YOU!"-- and they have -- such as the tragedy in Littleton, Colorado. Does it seem as if a America has gotten "kinder and gentler" during the last thirteen years?

Now America is ruled by "King George II" and a new generation of war has been spawned... wars like Vietnam of the Nixon era that cost billions and billions of dollars and yet can never be won, while public services and education continue to decline and our cities become even more like war zones in which children die.

Do I have the power of prediction? I don't think so: but what I DO have are two good eyes and simple, God-given common-sense.

Rats In The Trees received the PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S. (blue cover with shoes), though I'm told that version is no longer available.

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Reviews

Oakland flavored through and through, these wayward stories by a new writer, who actually sees and hears the street life around him, quiver with real life. They breath, walk, strut, spin, cry and laugh. But above all, Mowry's people hope against hoplessness. Readers weary of the hassle-free narcissistic creative writing that has become the hallmark of recent fiction will find themselves in the hands of a natural storyteller with something deep, meaningful, and moving to say about the way we live now,

Al Young

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Grim and gritty

A quick trip on BART -- and a world away -- are the streets of Oakland. They're the real subject of Jess Mowry's first book, "Rats In The Trees", although the protagonist is a 13-year-old runaway named Robby, who arrives in Oakland with his skateboard and a few dollars and immediately falls in with a gang of friends who call themselves "The Animals". Through a series of connected stories they skateboard, hang out, and wonder whether it's worth the free six-pack of beer to let a "perv" pick them up. The stories are grim, gritty and utterly real, as they should be -- Mowry counsels children in Oakland. He also still skateboards -- "eight to ten miles a day, and not because I'm trying to prove something, but because I like it" -- and once lived the life of the streets. "I guess I was a normal happy street kid", he writes. "When you grow up in a certain place, everything there is 'normal' and everyday, no matter what people raised in Pacifica or Santa Cruz might think". The writing began in earnest when "I bought this Royal typewriter at a school auction last July for 10 dollars... one of the kids gave me a copy of 'Fiction Writers Market.' I know better than to ask how he got it.

San Jose Mercury News July 22, 1990

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Jess Mowry, who lives in Oakland, California, gives the of readers Rats In The Trees a modern-day story of tragedy and misguided fate. As a counselor to inner-city boys, he is able to capture not only their speech and their sense of hopelessness, of creating their own world where they can be more than what the "squids", or middle-class world thinks they are -- losers. And while these stories are presented as fiction, the character of Nathaniel, an aging skateboarder turned live-in counselor, seems close to Mowry's own story. In nine related tales, Mowry tells the short story of Robbie, a thiretten-year-old black runaway from Fresno who ends up in Oakland and is taken in by the Animals, a small street gang with their own rules and passion -- skateboarding. In these stories, the dignity and need for acceptance sought by these eight to fourteen-year-olds is examined through their complex society, replete with its own language and code of ethics. While the description of kids killing kids with Uzis and .45s may be hard to take, Mowry makes his audience read on, not out of pity, but out of respect and fascination. The starkness of style and the absence of condescension make these stories work and convey the newspaper headlines of "Kid Kills Kid" in a way unlike any other. These stories need to be read and pondered while the possible loss of part of an entire generation becomes more and more of a reality if the newspapers and television news can be believed.

Marianna Hofer, The University of Findlay, Findlay, OH

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Mowry's first book at once saddens, overwhelms and charms as it explores a realm unto itself -- urban gangs. A youth counselor in Oakland, Calif., fluent in street language, the author delivers nine polished and interrelated short stories about Robby, a 13-year-old runaway who lands in Oakland with five dollars and a skateboard. He is befriended by the Animals, a gang of dangerous but nevertheless vulnerable youths. Mowry repeatedly demonstrates how uneasy frailties surface despite hard veneers: characters wash down Ding-Dongs with beer, swear in pig Latin or unsuccessfully try to mooch matches from a convenience store clerk even as they tote .45 pistols. The Animals accept violence, knowing they cannot avoid fighting a local tough in a gun battle considerably less glamorous than "anything on TV". Often these teens simply hang out and talk frankly, pondering the trival of daily life as well as death and survival, wondering why "the world lies, man. 'Specially to kids."

Publishers Weekly, March 2, 1990

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Rats In The Trees: Jess Mowry (Penguin, $9) ''Street'' literature too often degenerates into the obvious-preachy laments about soulless kids and their drug-wasted environment. So these short stories, which present a nuanced portrait of a prepubescent Oakland skate-punk gang, are all the more devastating for their superficial casualness. Now being reissued after the success of Jess Mowry's 1992 novel, Way Past Cool, Rats treats normality both as an occasional incursion (''I hope all the shootin' get done before school start'') and as foundation: The Oakland kids perform the same cocky/frightened balancing act as the suburban ''squids'' they despise, only they do so in a place where it's easier to get an Uzi than a box of matches. As one youth counselor says, ''This ain't Sesame Street.'' But then again, Sesame Street isn't real. B+

-Nisid Hajari

Publishers Weeky, May 21, 1993