Through the Eyes of Children

By Melissa Ludtke

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER WAIT on a New Orleans park bench for their respective buses to arrive. Every working day, the child takes one bus to school, and the mother rides another to work. When the vehicles pull up, mother and daughter part company, as usual. But the girl realizes she has left her school books on the bench, and she runs back to retrieve them. By now the mother has boarded her own bus. With a maternal premonition of danger, the woman tries to get off.

"I could see two men jump out of a car and grab her," says the mother. "I yelled at the bus driver to let me off. When he turned toward me, he was wearing a hood, and his eyes were big flames of fire like he was the devil. He was laughing and wouldn't open the door. I couldn't get out of the bus, but I could hear my daughter yelling." The bus drives away.

At that instant, Sherri Belonga wakes up screaming. She sits upright in bed. Leonard Howard, her fiance, is also awake. "Leonard says to me, 'It's only a dream,' " Sherri reports. She is a 25-year-old single mother. Bianca, 9, the girl in the dream, is her only child. That night Sherri can not fall back asleep. Months later, the dream still haunts her.

Themes of danger and escape, often through fantasy, are woven into the textures of Bianca's life. "Sometimes I have problems sleeping," says Bianca, a shy, sensitive and self-centered child. "Like I sweated one time. All you could see is wetness." Was she sick? "No. But then it reminds me of when that girl got bitten on Fright Night. She started turning ugly, and then it was like she was sweating. But the only movie that scared me was The Exorcist. That scared me. Her head turned all the way around, and something green just jumped out of her mouth and killed the priest. You see the devil was inside of her. Some people say it was like a true story that really happened."

Does she believe it? "I don't know," says Bianca shyly. Her mind is stocked with what she has learned from television and movies. Bianca says she wants to go to college because if she does not, she will "end up like that lady in a cartoon" who sings because she didn't finish school. But she will not take science, for fear of burning her hand in a lab, "like that woman on The Young and the Restless." She talks about the bad effects of cocaine and reveals that she learned about the subject from a TV movie called Desperate Lives.

Bianca feels safe when she is at home in front of the television. When Jem, a shapely, superstar rock singer who is the title character of her favorite cartoon show, shakes her radiant pink hair and makes her magical red earrings sparkle, Bianca is transported into another world. Jem embodies what Bianca would like to be as an adult: sexy, a singer and a success. "I don't want to be a maid at hotels when I grow up," says Bianca. "That's what my auntie is. She works for a hotel in the French Quarter. I want to be a singer like Jem. I'm going to have some red star earrings like Jem's, but they don't have to be magic or powerful."

For Bianca, Jem is something of an obsession. When Bianca was seven, she watched the show once a week on Sundays. Now, two years later, she watches it at 7:30 each weekday morning and again at 4:30 every afternoon. The escape into television extends beyond Jem. With cable, Bianca has more than 40 channels to choose from at any moment. Seated on a small wood-rimmed couch, usually by herself, Bianca uses the remote control to click her way through the channels.

When Jem is on television, Bianca's face is set in a blank, enameled look. Her brown eyes are wide, unmoving, unblinking, transfixed by the 19-inch color screen. With her right foot, she taps out the beat of the program's frequent songs. She knows the lyrics by heart and sings them loudly to herself.

One morning Sherri calls to Bianca from the kitchen. "Your blue sweater is over here. Come get it." No response. Jem is fending off her evil enemies, the Misfits. Sherri repeats the message. Again, nothing. She brings the sweater to Bianca, shoves her daughter's right arm through, wraps it around her and guides the left arm in. "This is every morning," Sherri sighs. Says Bianca later: "I know I couldn't hear what my mom said this morning about wearing my sweater. I didn't hear it because I was too busy in the television, but when I heard it the second time, I remembered the first time."

Bianca re-creates Jem episodes at home. Her doll collection includes several Jems, each with a switch in the back of the neck to turn on flashing red earrings; a few versions of Rio, Jem's boyfriend, with elaborate outfits; some villainous Misfits; green- and purple-haired members of the Holograms, Jem's backup singers; a miniature pink waterbed, which doubles as a piano; a stage for the Holograms; a pink wardrobe to store the outfits; and a pink roadster. Bianca knows that her Jem habit is hard on her mother, who works part time answering telephones. "If I get a Jem doll, then my mom don't have any money for the next day."

Two low-lying, dilapidated brick housing projects border the neighborhood. Just around the corner from Bianca's house is Joseph Kohn Middle School, where teenagers hang out, selling drugs, causing trouble. They spill into the neighborhood, sending out ripples of fear, especially for parents with younger children.

On a sunny afternoon, Bianca rides her bike up and down Pauline Street. She does not stray far from home. A few blocks away, another child, about Bianca's age, is hit on the head and knocked off his new bicycle by an older boy, who rides away on the bike. There is no outrage in Bianca's voice as she recounts the event. She seems to expect and accept what happens. "That is why I never ride it much," Bianca says of her pink ten-speed. "My mom paid lots of money for it. I may not ride it that much, but I still like it." Usually, it rests on its kickstand, hidden behind the house where no one can steal it. In a way, Bianca is like the bicycle, safe but immobile.

Until last year, Sherri and Bianca lived in another predominantly black area of New Orleans with Sherri's mother, Maurine Belonga, who raised five children by herself after she and her husband were divorced. Sherri is the youngest. Six weeks after she met Leonard, 29, a soft-spoken, neatly dressed mail clerk, on a blind date, Sherri and her daughter moved in. She wears an engagement ring, though no wedding date has been set.

Leonard's parents live in the other half of the one-story, pale blue home, which they bought when Leonard was eight. The house stands in a neat row of similar dwellings, each with a small square-columned portico and patch of front yard. After a 1960 federal order desegregated William Frantz Public School, which Bianca now attends, the neighborhood changed from all white to nearly all black. Today only 26 of New Orleans' 126 public schools are racially integrated. Bianca's school is virtually all black. When told about the bitter struggles to integrate Frantz, Bianca says, "That's history." She brushes away further discussion.

"Bianca has a lot of her father's features," Sherri says. No photographs of the man are around the house. Sherri never lived with him. Bianca saw him only occasionally before he became ill and died when she was not yet four years old. "You don't miss what you don't know," says Sherri, dismissing any relevance to Bianca's life. Recently, Bianca was asked for her father's name in a school workbook. She wrote in Leonard's name.

On weekends Bianca often visits her grandmother, with whom she was especially close in the pre-Leonard days. Since Bianca and Sherri moved, Bianca's affections have shifted in the direction of her mother. Last November Bianca wrote in her school journal, "I would like to say something nice to a special person, Mom. My mom always stand by my side when I needed her. My mom always love me, took very good care of me. And always teached me wrong to right. I always love my mother." Mother and daughter grew up together. In some respects, they were raised more as sisters than as mother and daughter. "We talk a lot, alone," says Sherri. "We are extremely close. I tell her things I tell no one else. And what I tell her not to tell, she don't."

Bianca's classmates say they want to be engineers, teachers, scientists, nurses, football players, policemen. A fourth-grader named Erica writes in her journal, "When I grow up I will get married and be an engineer because I have to study some science and math and be a doctor or a teacher and for my children to have school and clothes and food and strong and healthy."

Other journal entries are less encouraging. Cynthia, a former foster child who sits in front of Bianca in class, once wrote, "I would like a magic ring that do anything I said and I would want my baby doll to be a real baby." The teacher wrote back, asking her, "How would you take care of a real baby and still go to school?" She answered, "I have a mom, you know." To this, the teacher replied in her red ink, "This isn't your mom's baby. Why should she take care of it?" No reply.

What is to become of the third-grade girl who wrote in her journal, "I'll have my own children someday, I'll be sure to do this and that. Then I'll kill myself."? Another entry: "The best thing about a pet is that it dies." And "I would not like to have the mother I have now. She don't love me."

Students in nearly three-quarters of the New Orleans elementary schools, including Frantz, rank below the 50th percentile on national reading tests. Without mastering the ability to read, kids like Bianca will find it impossible to realize their dreams. Bianca, who reads a bit above her grade ; level, keeps what she calls a "literature book" at Leonard's house. Her grandmother gave it to her. She reads it by herself. "I keep it in the back room," she says. "It has lots of stories in it by different authors."

Talking recently with a friend about what lies ahead for Bianca -- menstruation and other bodily changes, dating -- Sherri suddenly realized that when her daughter is 15 she will be only 31. "I told my friend, I don't know if I'll be ready for it," says Sherri. "I'm young myself. And my friend says, 'You'd better be ready for it.' "

Sherri worries about what is ahead for Bianca. "Young men today have garbage on their minds." She says. "If they take you to Burger King, they think they can sleep with you. I tell Bianca, 'Don't wrestle with these little boys. They want to touch you in the wrong areas. You don't want them up close, period.' "

"It's sad you have to talk to them about it at this age, but times are so different," says Sherri. She speaks as if it has been decades since she was a child. "Under the influence of drugs, 14-year-old boys might decide to go off and grab Bianca. Every time she leaves out the door, it is scary." For both mother and daughter, the nightmares have already begun.