PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Once the Candy Earnings Went for Extras

Pandemonium in the Hobart school office.

A troop of 5-year-olds hands in a found dime. A bruiser waits, leaden, menacing, with black whiskers and clenched fists. He is shy, it turns out; a secretary helps him gently with a form for his daughter and a sweet, bashful smile creeps across his rough face. Phones ring, women laugh, teachers bounce in for mail, the principal rushes through, children and mothers come and go easily; the school’s heart is large and warm.

And everywhere are small brown envelopes filled with candy-drive money. All morning, children come in with dollars--crushed into brown envelopes, into plastic bags, five times folded to the size of a nickel--each class competing, each child proud with the sense of making a difference: 2,200 children and, there, so far, 29,782 bars of Hobart Boulevard School chocolate: big brown boxes of 36 bars, sticky remains stuffed into book bags.

Once, the money raised was for extras: stockings at Christmas time for children who expect nothing, skinny saplings planted in the schoolyard, Popsicles for “Cool Fridays” in the burning summer. There are so few luxuries on this corner near Olympic and Western: just the ghastly, grinding dust of the streets, the clanging of locked gates, bars everywhere, the smell of fear and threat, endless graffiti. And in the midst of it all, decent lives and children who find a dime, a dollar or more in a playground and hand it in.

During the candy drive, the office is full of money, and not one dollar is stolen, not one candy bar goes missing. Every morning, each child’s contribution is entered painstakingly in a handwritten ledger, full of wiggly lines, rushed scrawl, triumphant checks--the smudges of life. Every night, Letty Sakai sits for four, five hours putting the ledger together--counting, marking, making sure that not one dollar goes uncredited to the child who raised it.

Letitia Sakai, born Riley, with her soft, tired face and quiet, steady voice--she knows the children by name, has raised four of her own, who all came to Hobart. She has worked here as mother, volunteer and secretary for 20 years and more. In her face are her ancestors: hardy Scots and Irish, shabby smallholders pushed from the soil by landowners’ greed, the harsh farm in the north of England that gave no living, the father who left it to work in a garage in London. The blunt, British common sense is gentled by these small children, many speaking hardly a word of English. They come to her desk with hope and trust in dark eyes that have seen unspeakable cruelty.

Letty went to schools where the lash stung reddened hands and bit against the legs of those who dared to whisper or to dream. It was another time. But men did not beat one another senseless, shoot and destroy their own as they do on these streets. Times have their own vile curses.

Against this harrowing background, children find warmth and constancy and pride. They hand in their candy money and hope for a miracle.

A miracle that will stave off yet another round of threatened cuts. The school orchestra that brings to a raucous area the purity of Mozart and Haydn? Silenced, as the music teacher’s notice arrives by certified mail. The psychologist in her small office where children who are thrashed, neglected, troubled, tempted, come to talk. Children of alcoholics, sisters of addicts, brothers of gang thugs: lives that want still to run true, needing to know that it is not their fault, nor their bitter fate. The psychologist, too, has had her letter in the certified mail.

The huge hole left in the playground because there was no money to fill it in. The teachers’ aides threatened. Cuts into the bone. Every softness, every small thing of color in peril of one savage cut after another, as if this were wartime, and as if selling candy bars could spare the deprivation.

And the school’s whole budget is but one new missile.

We shall be haunted by the children who turn away from us; dark, violent shadows are all around them.