‘What the Use in Dreamin?’ : A novelist finds hope in an urban world that beats the childhood out of kids while they’re still toddlers, and where the few adults in sight are smoked-out husks. : SIX OUT SEVEN, <i> By Jess Mowry (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22; 501 pp.) </i>

The Reverend Jesse Jackson and novelist Jess Mowry have both confronted a perplexing modern truth.

“More black men die each year from guns than the total who died from lynching,” Jackson has said, calling upon young African Americans to break the unwritten code of silence that prevents “snitching” on the bullies who plague inner cities.

Few characters in Mowry’s powerful third novel, “Six Out Seven,” are likely to heed Jackson’s call. But Mowry does grapple angrily and honestly with the forces killing young black men; with individual and societal responsibility; with the complexities of modern racism, including drive-by shooters who, Mowry says, roam inner cities “like the KKK’s Afro-American auxiliary.”

In its early chapters, “Six Out Seven” skillfully juxtaposes two parallel worlds that are destined to intersect. It opens with 13-year-old Corbitt Wainwright sitting in a tree, watching a “nothing colored bus” haul his father--a Gulf War veteran--off to prison for beating a white child molester.

Corbitt lives along a rural Mississippi river, in a village of old motor court cabins everyone calls Bridge-End. Every day, Corbitt hikes two miles across steamy fields to Mr. Rudd’s truck stop, where he washes the windshields of big rigs and busses. When he’s not working, he and his “best brothers” Lamar Sampson and Toby Barlow--the only white boy in town--live like modern Mark Twain kids, fishing, skateboarding and maybe smoking and drinking a bit as they talk out the confusing details of life.

These “jungle cats,” as they call themselves, are wonderful characters--children working their way up through the dreamy mist of innocence, searching for a meaningful next thing, to cheat the nihilist nightmare that by all indications is their destiny.

Preternaturally wise at 13, Corbitt has never tried to get a real job, “because most anything he could do was already being done by grown men to feed their families.” But he’s also impatient with folks who only “do what’s expected.” He’s been saving money, and now plans to offer Rudd a proposal: He’ll set up a full-fledged truck-wash, and they’ll split the profits 50-50.

Alas, Mowry masterfully kicks a reader’s naive hope for a Horatio Alger tale out from under him, when Rudd--one of the area’s kindest white men--lets Corbitt in on the philosophical underpinnings of his benevolence:

“You people are children, an only a fool would hate children,” Rudd says, gently. “See, that’s why you people always have such a miserable time in our cities. You just wasn’t designed to understand complicated matters. . . . When the going gets rough, y’all up and blow your tops like frustrated children, an break things. Your own things, likely as not, the way y’all done years past up there in Harlem, or Watts, or after that Rodney King trial.”

Wounded, Corbitt brims with hatred for everyone white, including Toby. He angrily tries to squirm out of his own childhood, like a snake molting repellent skin.

Mowry’s portrait of this rural southern town is so vivid that when Corbitt finally catches a Greyhound west to pursue a vague spiritual quest, the reader longs to return to Bridge-End, with its hypnotic river and warm, tight-knit community.

That’s no wonder, since Corbitt’s flight lands him in the scene Mowry’s been painting in alternating chapters--the ghetto of West Oakland. Here life tends to beat the childhood out of kids while they’re still toddlers, the few adults in sight are smoked-out husks, and the enemy is as likely defined by the color of his bandanna as his skin color.

It’s unlikely that an L.A. gangbanger will see much similarity to his Crip or Blood set in the skateboarding “Collectors” and “Leopards,” the gangs Corbitt falls in with. But Mowry’s Oakland cast is as compelling as his Mississippi crew, and anyone who’s been an adolescent will glimpse themselves in these young men.

Mowry called his characters in his earlier book, “Way Past Cool,” “Little Rascals With Uzis.” That book gave him a reputation as a tough-guy writer. He does seem to have learned good lessons from Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim and similarly hard-edged “ghetto realist” novelists published by Los Angeles’ Holloway House--which also printed Mowry’s first book, “Children of the Night.” But Mowry’s real strength comes from his soft side. Unfortunately, it’s also the source of his weakness, and his prose sometimes trips on the fine line between sensitive and sentimental, occasionally lapsing into cornball. While Mowry deserves credit for giving heart to the sort of hotels characters most writers kiss off as vapid scum, his gangbangers’ boundless nobility sometimes cloys. Where is that nasty, hormone-drunk creepiness that poet La Loca so astutely discerns from her hate/love relations with white teeny-bop skateboard brats:

“You’re Huns / Huns marauding megalopolis . . . / I know the putsch of libido in the smashing glass of a beer bottle . . . / don’t tell me it’s rage.”

When Mowry’s story shows what’s behind his characters’ amorphous fury, the book throbs with awesome power. When his characters spout preachy cliches, it sags. Similarly, the book’s allusions to Africa add a mythic backbone when rooted in history; it’s fuzzy Afro-centric mysticism--apparently gleaned from hip hop magazines and rap videos-- annoys.

In the world of “Six Out Seven,” it is assumed that few outsiders know or care that economic injustice and racism’s legacy have turned parts of America into storm drains brimming with pariah children. The kids know they’re unwanted. One child’s crayon drawing in a perfectly described shelter reads: “Whitey Hates Your Black Ass and Will Kill You With Crack.” Meanwhile, Mowry’s cops--fleeting caricatures, sadly--dismiss the ghetto as “a self-cleaning oven,” in which African Americans kill each other so efficiently that the white man is spared considerable effort.

Mowry knows the pervasiveness of such thinking among the dispossessed--he may even buy the prevailing conspiracy theories. But he doesn’t back away from underlying complexities. His character Beamer, for instance, is a crack baby who now slings the stuff for an older black dealer. “Kids not wanted. Kids not happy. Kids do crack . . . “ Beamer says, cluing in a young friend to the hows and whys of the business. “Some kids gots somethin missin out their eyes. I see that, know I gots me a sucka.”

So it is that Corbitt’s rite of passage makes him a warrior in a war more baffling than any intertribal or anti-colonial battle fought in the jungle or on the veldt. He winds up fighting on two fronts. The violent climax is pure B-movie. The only real victory comes when Corbitt embraces a one-eyed, dreadlocked, 8-year-old urchin who’s been selling sex in the bus station. Corbitt helps him recover a bit of his childhood, thereby giving him a shot at someday becoming a man.

Before Corbitt left for Oakland, Bridge-End’s wisest woman visited him in a vision:

“Gettin your dreams stepped on an your trust betrayed gotta be the most hurtinest thing in this life, son,” she says. “But you can’t never stop dreamin nor givin your trust where you believe. Stop dreamin and tryin to trust, and you start hatin. First it the whites ‘cause you figure you can’t never trust none of ‘em. But, pretty soon, you start hatin your own color folks cause you figure they lettin you down somehow . . . not tryin hard enough, an makin you look no-account right along with ‘em. An then come the time when you begin hatin your ownself, cause you only born a nigger so what the use in dreamin.”

On a grim inner-city street, a young gangster tells Corbitt he and a friend are thinking about sharing responsibility for a baby: “Ain’t that a sort of African thing, man?” he asks. “Like the kids really belong to everybody?”

“If it ain’t it oughta be,” says Corbitt.

With luck, Mowry’s heartfelt, beautifully written book will make readers see that the kids he portrays are everyone’s kids, and to let their dreams wither unnurtured is everyone’s shame.