And then I became one of them.

I’d like to say it happened insidiously, imperceptibly, creepily –
first the denim shirt, then the leggings, then the insatiable desire to
handle school paste. But it didn’t. I made the decision to become a
classroom volunteer with my eyes wide open and my knees shaking. We live in
a nice suburb with a perfectly fine neighborhood elementary school. My
husband and I went to public schools ourselves and, good liberals that we
are, we always felt a little guilty about the homogenous, high-end private
preschool we’d sent our son to. We were disturbed by the barely veiled
racism and classism of so many parents we’d met there, who spoke of public
school as something their kids needed to be shielded from. We would send
our son to public school and we would make it work. It was the right thing
to do.

When, after a suitable period of procrastination, I finally put my name
down to help out for a couple of hours a week in my son’s kindergarten
class, I thought, OK, no big deal: I’ll pass out the snacks, I’ll feed the
goldfish, I’ll get to see how smart my kid is, then I’ll go to work and
forget about it. I didn’t imagine — couldn’t — how much help a
kindergarten teacher with a class of 27 kids and no such luxuries as a
regular paid art teacher or library aide would need.

On my first day of school, I sat at a little table in the back of the
room while the teacher, a woman so young and enthusiastic it almost made me
cry, went through the lengthy and complicated ritual of Circle Time. While
she was doing that, I was to go down the class roster and take four kids at
a time to my table and have them cut out pictures of pumpkins, paste the
pictures in sequence from vine to jack-o’-lantern, color the pictures and
try to write their names on their papers. After my first group of four, I
was in a panic.

In my fantasies of being Snack Mom or Fish Mom, I left out one little
possibility — that I would actually have to interact with strange
children. Oh, I’m great with my own kid, but I still get tongue-tied around
other people’s kids. I don’t want to overstep my boundaries; I don’t want
to be responsible. But that’s exactly what this volunteering gig
required. Some kids couldn’t get the pumpkin sequence right; I was
instructed to give them a few hints. But how many hints were too many? Some
kids couldn’t spell their names. Should I show them how to make the
letters? Some kids wanted to color their pumpkins purple or red. I was
supposed to gently prod them into thinking about the color of real
pumpkins. But, often, I didn’t have the words — I frantically tried to
call up bits of my high school Spanish. Naranja? Verde? Por favor? This
wasn’t trivial stuff I was doing with these kids; these were projects that
the teacher would have done herself, but it would have meant she’d have to
abandon other projects. What right did I have to be playing school?

When the teacher thanked me profusely — too profusely — as I walked
out the door in a daze, I knew that there was no graceful or decent way I
could get out of this. She truly needed the help. And if not me and the
other volunteers — always the same half-dozen parents, I soon found out –
then who? So I went back, because I was needed and because my son was proud
to have me there and because I wanted this school to be great, like
my elementary school had been in a far less affluent town.

I went back and got to know my son’s classmates: Cody, who loved horses
and who would rub his head against my shoulder, horselike, by way of
greeting; Angela, who was an aspiring writer and a bit of a know-it-all and
who reminded me of myself at age 5; Zelda, who had beautiful sparkling
black eyes; Alan, who was a chatterbox; meticulous Ann, who was always the
last to finish her work and it was always perfect; Felipe, who would shyly
tell me about his big brother, whom he adored. There were some things that
troubled me: Julio’s pants were always too small and kept unsnapping, but
it didn’t appear that he was going to get any new ones. And George’s cold
was hanging on for such a long time. I developed a great respect for
teachers, not just for the workload they carry, but for the emotional load.

I drove kids on field trips to the pumpkin patch and the post office. I
walked kids to the school library and helped them choose books. I mixed
finger paint and filled glue pots. I traced penguin shapes onto black
construction paper and measured heads for pilgrim hats and Native American
feather bonnets. (My husband’s most tedious assignment: helping 27 kids
sort handfuls of nuts for a graphing project — walnut, filbert, almond,
walnut, filbert, almond.) And this is what I got in return: a little time
each week where I was too busy to stress out over work; a flowerpot
decorated with each kid’s name scrawled in gold pen; and the persistent
goodwill of two dozen of my son’s peers. A year later, I hear, “Hi Mark’s
mom!” on the playground and at the mall and on the soccer field. I’m
tempted to tell them, don’t remember me, remember your teachers — I’m just
a helper mom. But I don’t. Because, at long last, I have school spirit. And
I like being popular.

Though she’d promised to try to stick it out until Sunday, when I’d
be allowed a visit, I’m not surprised to hear she’s gone already. That
afternoon I’d gotten a call from the supervisor, his voice strained. L.
has been threatening to leave, doesn’t need him or anyone else, can make
it on her own. But when he puts L. on the phone she’s quiet, almost
squeaky, resigned. Two of the other girls have been after her since the
day she arrived. They can’t tell if she’s black or white, think she acts
like she’s “all that,” don’t like the gap between her teeth. They corner
her in the hallways and challenge her to fight, later, in the basement,
with no staff around to get in the way.

She has no interest in fighting them, no interest in any of the
petty power struggles that determine dominion in this tiny,
self-referential universe. That disengagement is as central to her
unpopularity as her caramel-colored skin or her fancy vocabulary: There’s
nothing more infuriating than a new kid who refuses to play by the rules.
So the other girls keep poking at her, which is hard to take, she reminds
me, because she “has a lot of anger” — the loose, swirling kind that barely
remembers its source, that simply hovers, until it finds a trigger or a
target.

Tonight’s fight had started at the dining table. L. used a
polysyllabic word, showing up her less erudite adversaries, and they either
slammed down a dictionary (by their account) or threw it at her (by hers),
suggesting she look up those big words of hers before tossing them around.
She lunged, they fought, and she wound up ripping out a big chunk of one
girl’s hair, leaving a gaping bald spot, the quintessential mark of
humiliation. (Even 10 years ago, when I worked in a group home, “I’ll
snatch you baldheaded” was the threat of choice when things went sour
between the girls.)

“It was gross,” winces the counselor, with a nervous laugh that
includes some concern — enough to have made her call me — but also a
voyeuristic curiosity that demands collusion.

“I don’t know where she is right now,” the counselor continues. “I
hope she’s not hoing.” The word sounds silly in her prim, suburban voice,
and the implication — they’re all the same — infuriates me.

When I get to work the next morning, L. is already there, asleep on
the couch. She wakes up and bounces around the office, alighting on desks,
soaking up all the attention in the room, thirsty for more. “I looove
Nell,” she announces to nobody in particular when I walk by. “She came to
see me every week when I was in juvenile hall.” The declaration is clearly
preemptive: She has screwed up and is afraid that means I won’t love her
anymore. (In the rigid emotional economy of group-home life, that’s
generally how it goes.)

We take a walk and she tells me what happened. For two weeks, at
school and at home, these two girls pushed, pulled at her, found her weak
spots and went for them with the unfailing instinct of the trapped. The
staff finally got wind of the conflict and yesterday called a meeting in
which L. and her primary tormentor were each instructed to leave the other
alone. By calling each to task in front of the other, L. explains, the
counselors had inflamed both girls’ pride, practically guaranteeing the
blowup that followed.

L. regrets her AWOL, though she left not impetuously but because
she felt herself backed into a corner — the police were on their way and she
wasn’t prepared to go back to jail. She does want to go back to the group
home, though, and says she’s willing to take whatever medicine is
prescribed her in order to be allowed to do so. She felt it was a good
placement, relatively speaking, and that had been my impression too — to
the degree that any place that takes six to eight young women, each
carrying her own load of pain and rage, and throws them together in an
enclosed space can ever be called a home. L. wants my help in negotiating
her return.

When I call the group home supervisor, he is sympathetic but
hesitant. It was, apparently, quite a large chunk of hair, and the girl to
whom it belonged wants to press charges. But he knows that L. was
provoked and also that she really was trying, and doesn’t seem averse to
taking her back. He says he’ll talk to the social worker and the therapist
and get back to me. In the meantime, he suggests I call her probation
officer.

The P.O., who has not been easy to reach in the past, returns my
call immediately when I leave a message that L. is in our office. It’s
been less than 10 minutes since the group home supervisor promised to look
into L.’s return, but this woman’s voice is like a door slamming shut.

“I’ve discharged L. from the program,” she informs me. “She needs
to turn herself in.”

“Needs to” is one of the more frightening euphemisms you hear from
institutional types, used to describe actions that they themselves are
determined to compel. L. may have no choice but to turn herself in, but on
her lists of needs, which range from love and attention to a jacket to a
high school education, going to jail is actually pretty low. But until she
meets this “need,” I am told quite explicitly, she can forget about the
rest of them.

I tell the P.O. that L. knows she must turn herself in and is
willing to do so, but would like to have some sense of what her future
might hold once she hands herself over. Such an expectation, I am made to
understand, is ludicrous. We are talking about an offender, I am
reminded — someone who “ripped a child’s hair out.” (The fight, in this
version, is erased, and “child” status is reserved only for the single
designated victim, the other girl.) There will be no deals here, no
bargaining, no “working together.” I must deposit L. behind bars post
haste, and let them do with her what they will.

At this point I make what I will come to see as a crucial mistake: I tell her that no, I will not stuff L. into the trunk of my car and return her to jail against her will. I will try to use the relationship I’ve built with her to help her make the choice to come in. I will not end that relationship if she proves herself unable to come to that decision within the next half hour.

That, at least, is what I try to convey. But I am so stunned by the chill I hear in the voice of this woman with so much power over people’s lives that my delivery is, I suspect, whiny and desperate. Despite myself, I must be conveying what I really feel: I can’t believe you would do this to her.

Two days later, at her request, I bring L. back to jail. We stop at
a bookstore and she picks out a stack of novels — Toni Morrison, Gloria
Naylor, Jamaica Kincaid — which I’ll have to bring in to her one at a time:
You are not allowed to carry anything with you when you enter juvenile
hall. At a nearby mall, she chooses a lunch of milkshakes and candy, a
child’s last meal.

“Slow down,” she keeps saying as we drive the 20 miles to juvenile
hall; by the time we reach the exit, we are barely moving, and I have
become aware of how much it is costing her to submit voluntarily to a
system that has let her down so often. It is something she has never done
before, but I’ve promised to do everything I can to help her find a
placement. The dozen books are just a precaution, an indulgence: Neither
of us imagines she will be locked up long enough to read them.

As it turns out, she is kept behind bars for nearly six months, the
legal limit for someone who has not been sentenced for a crime but is
merely awaiting a residential placement. As far as I can tell — and I try
my best to find out — little effort is made during most of that time to find
somewhere else for her to go. I try looking for a placement, but find
myself nearly paralyzed. I can’t get any details from the probation
department, have to grovel and plead even for permission to visit, since my
role corresponds to none of the categories on the little blue visitor’s
pass: parent, guardian, custodian.

Meanwhile, L.’s childhood, actual and legal, ticks away while she
exists in a sort of sleep in her darkened room, reading W magazine by the
light that comes through the crack under her door. Every so often — when
another group home administrator explains why L. is not “appropriate for
the program,” when the guard at the front desk arbitrarily changes the
rules, when another court hearing is canceled without warning or
explanation — I get just a taste of the rage that is generated when
helplessness meets irresponsible power. Your mind looks for avenues, ways
out of or around the dreadful deal you’re offered, and then, hitting only
brick walls, quite naturally lashes out. That’s why there is such random
venting in juvenile institutions — the throwing and breaking things, as well
as the viciousness toward each other. Legitimate anger is blocked off,
dammed, until, as inexorably as water, it finds another outlet.

“With freedom comes responsibility” — that’s one of those
things adults are fond of telling children. What we tend to forget is the
corollary: When you take someone’s freedom, you assume responsibility for
her, particularly when you imprison her in the name not of her actions but
of her status. That’s what I am desperate to make these people understand:
the tremendous weight of the responsibility they’ve assumed by locking up
this child. They have forfeited the right to fail to return a phone call,
to profess themselves “not sure” why a placement hasn’t come through, to
act like petty bureaucrats under no obligation to tell you why your package
hasn’t arrived, or worst of all to blame her for their failures. They
must not fail her, unless they are prepared to admit it, and set her free
to fend for herself.

Like surgeons, in whose hands lives are laid, they don’t have the
luxury of indifference or incompetence. But they are not, of course,
compensated as surgeons, and I suspect they remind themselves of that when
faced with a “hard to place” child like L.

Just weeks from the legal
deadline that would probably mean being dispatched to a crowded temporary
shelter, I find a group home that will take L., and the probation
department agrees to let her go. The minute she is released, L. springs to
life — getting a job, enrolling in community college (she passed her high
school equivalency test in juvenile hall), buying new clothes and dreaming
of boys.

Things go well for a few weeks. Then there is an argument with an
administrator, L. throws something, the police are called. I am talking to
her on the pay phone when they knock on the door.

“Don’t worry about the police,” I tell her. “They can’t arrest you
if there’s been no crime, just because somebody wants them to.”

“They can if you’re on probation,” she reminds me.

This time, though, the police leave without her. The only
suggestion I can offer now is that she compromise, play the game, do what
is required of her to keep a roof over her head and stay out of jail. When
she thinks of these relationships as real, that’s when she allows herself
to get angry, and her anger is too dangerous to her now.

She says she knows, has been trying to do just that, but when she’s
successful at it she fears she’s losing herself. That is what happens to a
lot of young people who grow up in the system. In order to survive, they
allow themselves to become “institutionalized” — such skilled manipulators
that they don’t know how to form a real relationship. The thought that
someone else might come to know them inspires only fear.

But L., astonishingly and at great cost, has managed to hold on to
who she is. She has not become institutionalized; has not learned to
structure her identity in terms of, or in opposition to, the rules and
definitions the system would impose upon her. She is smart, she is honest,
and she keeps on trying her hardest. They’ve only got her for another year
and a half, unless they manage to push her into some act that will allow
them to criminalize her further. I find myself hoping that it’s not enough
time for them to ruin her.

In the movie “Face/Off,” Nicholas Cage, confronting an intransigent
female witness, uses the worst threat of all: “I’ll send you to jail, and
your child will go into foster care.” Any audience would get the menace
behind these words; it’s only the system itself that still clings to the
myth of its own benevolence.

It’s difficult for me to “counsel” young people who live under the
jurisdiction of the foster care system because the level of courage and
patience required of them is beyond what I possess. And it’s difficult to
advocate for them because they are so completely without recognized rights
to which I might appeal.

“You met me once,” L. screams at her P.O. over the phone. “You
don’t know what I need.”

Neither do I. But I do know that we owe her, owe all of them.
We’ve taken their freedom, their right to self-determination, and now our
obligation to them is tremendous. It is the same as a
parent’s, because we are claiming the rights of a parent. For the
authority we claim, we owe care in equal measure. That’s the tacit deal
between parent and child, but we make no such promise to those toward whom
we presume to act in loco parentis. “If you needed attention,” a
counselor tells L. in juvenile hall, “you shouldn’t have gotten yourself
locked up.”

A few years ago, my neighbor took in a troubled teenage nephew.
The nephew returned home and is now serving a 10-year sentence for
robberies committed just weeks after his 18th birthday. My neighbor’s
conclusion, after a recent visit: “There are two worlds. One is the
suburban backyard world where children do as they are told and all their
needs are met. It works. But people from that world are making decisions
about children whose needs are not being met, and that isn’t working.”

To say that the foster care and juvenile justice systems add insult
to injury is more than a metaphor. These systems have come to despise the
wounded children in their care. There’s no other possible conclusion: The
hatred is systemic. While it has grown fashionable to pay lip service to
the importance of “self-esteem” for adolescents, there’s no greater sin in
the parallel universe inhabited by wards of the state than pride: thinking
you might be worth something. To think well of oneself is to think oneself
entitled, better than, and then one must be taken down a peg. Youth and
adults grow equally willing, equally qualified, to execute this
taking-down.

It’s not too hard to see where the hatred might come from. It
hurts to love these hurt children. They are angry, and they will vent that
anger on whomever is nearest. Something is wrong with them, and if you
don’t want it to be your fault you’d better believe it’s theirs.

Inside juvenile hall, I get a glimpse of the L. the system knows.
She still tells the truth, but she hisses it, wields it. I know the face
they see, the one that so repels them, but I only see it when she is
under their roof.

On the radio they’re talking about rats, and I can feel my mind
shut down. A study has been made of the permanent — not long-term, not
remediable, but permanent — effects of the absence of maternal care. Rats
whose mothers fail to lick and groom them sufficiently wind up anxious,
easily startled, saturated with a chemical fear that never ebbs. I don’t
believe it.

When L. cries on my shoulder on a park bench and says, “I want to go
home,” I don’t say, “Where do you mean?” because I know that’s why she’s
crying. Until she turns 18, L. will not even have the legal right to do
what she has been forced to her whole life: take care of herself. But
somehow, she keeps growing, drawing water from deep below the desert of her
exile. With every word and action, she lets you know that it is not “too
late” for her (whatever that phrase might mean when applied to any child).
Fiercely, quixotically, she keeps fighting for that other life she has not
yet forgotten awaits her.

Most of the masterpieces of African-American literature were written during the age of epic struggle. And some of the best black writers of the post-civil rights era — Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Ernest Gaines — have set their most powerful tales in the bad old days when whites were more clearly evil and blacks more unassailably noble. But what about these days? How does the creative, socially engaged black writer tackle the murky racial complexities — and absurdities — of more recent times?

Any writer who does must contend with two rigid wings of America’s literary establishment: white folks who consider themselves so racially enlightened that they need never question their own attitudes; and black folks who want to make sure that those enlightened whites have a good impression — a “positive image” — of most black people, but especially of black people like themselves. The members of the white wing prefer books about the sort of black people they rarely, if ever, meet — poor rural folk or ghetto dwellers, victims to pity, gangstas to fear, blacks they can feel superior to. These arbiters of literature don’t mind hearing about difficult racial questions so long as they are presented politely and do not provoke anything like self-doubt. The members of the black wing of the establishment prefer tales of triumph over tragedy. They are not very keen on the absurdity of race. They want black literature to be safe, uplifting, mainstream. They want black writers to be careful what they say, especially when writing about the black middle class. The underlying concern — the source of their anxiety — is always the same: “What are the white folks going to think?”

Two strong new books, Jill Nelson’s “Straight, No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-up Black Woman” and Gwendolyn M. Parker’s “Trespassing: My Sojourn in the Halls of Privilege,” examine, in highly personal ways, America’s post-’60s racial conundrum. These books are both memoirs. Both are written by black women from affluent backgrounds. Both authors were born in the early ’50s. But their takes on what used to be called the Black Experience could hardly be more different.

One of the thrills of reading journalist Jill Nelson’s first memoir, “Volunteer Slavery,” was that the author clearly did not give a damn what white folks thought about anything. The book, published in 1993, used Nelson’s four-year stint at the Washington Post as a frame for the scabrously funny story of her life. I’ve always found the title a bit much: Surely, hacking for a prestigious newspaper at $50,000 a year is not exactly comparable to picking cotton from dawn to dusk and suffering the sundry atrocities of black plantation life.

But then again, everything about “Volunteer Slavery” was irreverently over-the-top. Take Nelson’s description of her white bosses’ attitude toward her: “I keep getting this creepy feeling that the Washington Post is doing me some kind of favor. It’s as if, as an African American, female, freelance writer, I’m a handicapped person they’ve decided to mainstream. The words to ‘Look at Me I’m Walking,’ the theme song of the annual Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, pop into my head.”

“Volunteer Slavery” was one of the rare nonfiction books to have a great subtitle: “My Authentic Negro Experience.” With that choice, drippingly sarcastic phrase, Nelson demolished one of America’s most cherished social myths: that there is such a thing as a genuine, all-encompassing black identity. Nelson — the daughter of a successful dentist and an “Indianapolis princess” who summered on Martha’s Vineyard — was unapologetically bourgeois and unsparingly honest in describing her family’s genteel dysfunction.

Given the squeamishness and racial hypocrisy of the American literary establishment, it is not surprising that Nelson had a hard time getting her first book published. The general readership in the U.S., though, is not as squeamish or hypocritical as the arbiters of literature, and once “Volunteer Slavery” came out, it did extremely well. In literature, as in every other realm of American life, money talks. When you write a bestseller, the establishment decides you must be pretty good after all. Nelson’s follow-up is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

“Straight, No Chaser” (the title is from Thelonious Monk’s hard bop classic) is something of a hybrid, two books wrapped around each other. One book is a sort of sequel to the last — like “Volunteer Slavery” with all the Washington Post material cut out. We learn more about Nelson’s parents and she recounts, in the same idiosyncratic voice, her relationships with men, the harrowing day when the authorities tried to take her infant daughter Misumbo from her, a hilarious 1979 rally where Afrocentric activist Queen Mother Moore tells her audience that “polygamy is the answer!”

The other book in “Straight, No Chaser” reads like a combination self-help manual and manifesto of sisterhood. In these pages, the quirky, edgy Nelson voice we know so well disappears. It’s replaced by a voice that is earnest and therapized: “I thought there was something wrong with me, that everyone else was living happily ever after while I could find no center of power.” Nelson urges black women to “seize visibility, voice and power.” There is much talk about the need for a collective identity or a collective voice or a collective agenda.

Often, Nelson segues from a fascinating personal story into a generalized, long-winded tirade. A lot of the material here is tediously familiar: the usual bemoaning of the loss of ’60s idealism; the boilerplate criticism of black stereotypes in the media; the obligatory brother-bashing, damning black men for everything from beating and killing sisters to dating white women. Instead of the Stoli-swilling badass of “Voluntary Slavery,” “Straight, No Chaser” presents a well-adjusted Jill Nelson, extolling the virtues of exercise, sobriety and community service.

On the one hand, I say: more power to her. Yet it bothers me that Nelson seems to have embraced the notion of racial authenticity — at least when it comes to black women — that she mocked in “Volunteer Slavery.” Her eye for the absurd is only half open. I worry that America in general and black America in particular may be losing a brilliant writer and gaining yet another preachy role model, exhorting folks to do, say and think the right thing.

How authentic is Gwendolyn M. Parker’s black female experience? In the early pages of “Trespassing,” this Durham, N.C., native tells us she is “the daughter of a pharmacist and a teacher, granddaughter to a banker and a businessman, great-granddaughter of a doctor who’d built one of the largest black-owned businesses.” Parker’s family life is notably free of drama and trauma. After the Parkers move north, Gwen goes on to a Connecticut boarding school, Radcliffe, NYU Law School, a two-year sentence in the whitest of Wall Street law firms, then an eight-year stay at the relatively multicultural American Express where she is, for the most part, a happy camper. When she quits at 36, she seems more motivated by professional ennui, a superachiever’s burnout and a desire to write than by anything explicitly racial.

Where “Trespassing” excels is as a subtle and elegantly written dissection of the sort of intellectual warfare that so many African-Americans must engage in. Back in Durham, Parker’s maternal grandmother, Miss Bea, knows the score. She teaches little Gwen that “intelligence was a weapon, a sharp, infinitely useful instrument, good for dealing with anyone but especially with white folks, who, as she put it, never expected colored people to have any brains.”

A junior high school teacher gives Parker a C because he assumes that the well-crafted poem she submitted was plagiarized. When the law school newspaper compares the LSAT scores of black and white students, it opens up “an age-old wound: the charge that intellectually, as a race, we did not measure up.” Parker becomes a “racial avenger,” feeling that she must constantly prove she is smarter than condescending whites. “I wondered,” she writes of her snotty law firm colleagues, “if white people, or at least those in the grip of this illusion of their own mythic superiority, were truly insane, or if they hypnotized themselves every morning in order to believe the absurd things they did.”

Absurd is the word. At their best, Gwendolyn M. Parker and Jill Nelson explore, humorously, poignantly, insightfully, the weirdness of America’s race and gender obsessions in this curious and uncertain era. Through the complexity and specificity of their voices, they remind us that there are as many different black consciousnesses as there are black people.