Hope awakens in poignant 'Sleepaway'

Mary J. Elkins, Special To The News

Friday, June 11, 2004

Lee Stringer is a recovering drug addict. In 1998, he published a memoir titled Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, in which he told of his 12 years living as a homeless man in New York City.

He now follows this critically admired work with a second memoir. This one, Sleepaway School, goes back to his childhood and adolescence. And like his previous book, it underscores the salvation he found in becoming a writer.

Stringer (referred to in this book by his given first name, Caverly; "Lee" is a nickname) and his brother Wayne have been abandoned by their father and turned over to a foster mother while his natural mother tries to find work and earn enough to reclaim her children.

When Caverly is six, his mother returns, but the reunion is bittersweet.

Caverly and Wayne are happy with their foster mother, and their real mother takes them away from their small town to a New York City suburb where, as African-American children, they are minorities and outcasts. Trouble is inevitable.

As the children get older, school becomes more of a battlefield, and Caverly discovers in himself an anger he can neither articulate nor control. Tensions escalate, and he hits a teacher who has been kind and patient with him. This act brings him to Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School, the sleepaway school of the title, a place for "children at risk."

At first this doesn't seem so bad: The food is good, the rules manageable. But Hawthorne is a school that has only recently admitted students sent by social services as Caverly has been; most of the others are privately admitted and privately funded. Labeled as "state," Caverly is marked again as a minority and an outsider; even his new clothes, handed to him on his arrival, give him away as a welfare case.

The largest part of Sleepaway School is set at Hawthorne. Stringer tells his story in a straightforward, unsentimental way. His style is natural with few frills and ruffles. At one point, Caverly is sent for observation to a psychiatric institution more than a little reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. When he returns to Hawthorne, he's asked if it was a scary experience; he nods in vague assent.

But he thinks to himself: "There's no way to explain to him. That being locked down on a ward full of madmen wasn't really the scary thing. Coming to realize that Grasslands Hospital psychiatric department had no miracle in store for me - that I was to be shipped back to sleepaway school at the end of my stay unchanged - was harder to take. The scariest thing of all though, was discovering the sublime satisfaction I got out of life in a bathrobe. How willingly my desire for anything more than that had surrendered to the allure of blissful nothingness."

Caverly's story is about the struggle to find words for the way he's feeling. The most surprising thing about Sleepaway School is that it is not grim. In fact, much of it is lighthearted and free from bitterness. Caverly's voice is appealing, and his innocence and helplessness are convincingly conveyed.

Hawthorne is not some grim terrible place cut out of a Dickens novel (or a contemporary newspaper). Many of the adults he meets there are good people, not sadists, and some of the boys offer a version of friendship. In a foreword to the memoir, Kurt Vonnegut praises the universality of its themes and stresses the details it contains that are common to all children growing up.

This seems well said. In spite of the setting and the occasional violent outbursts, the reader doesn't feel distanced but engaged, and this is a real strength of the book.

It is also, obviously, Stringer's intention. In his preface, he comments about the term "child at risk" and applies it to every child: "Every mother's son of us. Even those of us with overflowing larders and soft, warm beds. Our young hearts like leaves in the wind, we all had to face down the inner turmoil of being, simply, children. We were all on shaky ground."

Mary J. Elkins is a faculty member in the Honors College at Colorado State University.