She had always tried to protect him, but now he was heading for trouble. Big trouble. That’s when she decided that . . .To Hold On, She’d Send Him Away

The room is dark and the clock on the wall says 3 a.m. But the clock is wrong: It is not 3 a.m., not here, in this quiet West Baltimore row house.

The quiet is wrong, too. No sneakers pounding up and down the stairs. No cartoons blaring from the television. No “Ma, I’m hungry” or “Ma, can I go outside?”

The only sound is the video sliding into the VCR. The mother pushes a button and settles back in her chair. She is alone tonight--her husband at work, her mother at home--though their chiding voices still echo in her head.

“Kaye, let the boy go around the corner. Kaye, let the boy grow up. Kaye, you can’t watch over your child forever.”

“Yes, I can,” she would think. “For as long as I’m breathing, I can. He is my son and my job is to protect him.”

The videotape begins and the screen flickers and fills with color. Grassy fields, crooked trees, the low mud-colored buildings of a school. And the schoolboys, in khaki shirts and blue shorts, squinting in the sun as they wave and grin at the camera. A woman calls out their names. “Terrell. Sherlock. Derrick. Donte.”

And finally, “Jerrell.”

The mother springs from her chair. “Hi, baby!” she waves at the television. “Hi, my son!”

It is a little after 7 p.m. here in Baltimore when Kaye Yarrell, for the first time in months, sees the face of her only child--his round, smooth cheeks, his wide, bright smile. He raises his hand to answer a question in class and she leans forward and shrieks. “Go, my son! Go, baby!” She points at the teacher, a tall man in a baseball cap: “Call on my son . . . He know the answer!”

But the teacher can’t hear. He is thousands of miles away, in Africa, in Kenya, at a place near the equator called Baraka, where her son and 35 other Baltimore seventh- and eighth-grade boys go to school.

Yarrell turns and looks at the wall.

3:15 a.m.

As long as he is gone, she will keep her clock on his time.

*

This story is about a mother who did something no mother should have to do: put her son on a plane and send him to the other side of the world. She felt it was his only shot at having a future. It’s also a story about something every mother must learn: when it’s time to let go.

During the tearful months before she heard of the Baraka School, Yarrell would stand beside her son’s bed and watch him sleep. He looked so innocent, snoring under his X-Men comforter, that it almost seemed as though nothing had changed--that he was still the toddler who followed her everywhere, the little boy who crawled into her bed because he saw ghosts in his room.

But something had, in fact, changed, and she knew it.

As she stood there in the dark, her head pounded with questions. “Who are you? What is happening to you? What kind of child are you becoming?” Her 11-year-old boy was a stranger to her now, and she was scared. Scared by the fights and failing grades. Scared by the rough friends, the lies. Scared by the condoms under the bed, the suspension slips in the book bag, the call from the officer: “Do you know your son hasn’t been in school, ma’am?”

Scared because she didn’t know what more she could do. She’d spoiled him and coddled him; she’d punished him and hollered at him. Again and again, she’d visited his school. And for what? The boy who’d missed only five days of school through five grades had missed 48 days of sixth grade. The boy who’d been on the honor roll was bringing home 55s and 60s. If something didn’t change, she knew, he’d end up on the streets.

All Yarrell had to do was look around the city--at the dealers and addicts and drugs and guns--to know what the streets could do to her child. She had only to think of her big brother James, shot in the head, dead at 34.

Back in the days when ghosts were imaginary and solutions to problems oh-so-simple, Jerrell had saved his lunch money to buy her a gold bracelet inscribed, “#l Mom.” Back then, Yarrell had written a poem to ward off evil spirits and, at night, she’d hear her son chanting it in his room:

I’m not scared.

I can fight.

I’ll take my fist.

And knock you out.

But that was a long time ago. Now, when night came, it was the boy who slept soundly and the mother, full of fear, who wanted to raise her fists and fight. She blamed the school system, Jerrell’s teachers, his peers; she blamed a city that didn’t seem safe for children. And she blamed herself. Maybe, if she hadn’t been so overprotective, if she’d been more willing to let go, Jerrell wouldn’t be slipping away from her, rebelling against everything she believed in.

His father was out of the picture. Yarrell’s jobs--as a bartender, and then as a bank teller--supported them. She believed she could raise a son on her own, that if she was attentive and involved and watched over him constantly, she could keep him safe and make his life successful.

So while other mothers dropped their children off at preschool, she stayed on as a classroom volunteer. Later, she took him on bike rides and to the movies; she bought him every toy, every electronic gadget a boy could want. At his football games, she’d yell at the other players: “Why’d you knock down my son?” “Why’d you tackle my boy?”

When she met Tony Yarrell, the man she would marry, she told him that no matter how much she loved him, her son would always come first.

Jerrell was happy and healthy and did fine in school. Still, the older he got, the more she wanted to protect him. When she wasn’t at home, he wasn’t allowed outside. When she was, her voice would carry down the block on warm summer evenings: “Jerrell, where are you? Jerrell, come back home!” She once ducked behind a car to watch her happy-go-lucky 12-year-old walk to the corner store. He’d protested, “You can’t be with me all the time!” “As long as I live,” she’d told him, “I’ll be behind you wherever you go.” And she meant it. When she began getting phone calls from the assistant principal at his middle school, Yarrell knew it was she who had to get her son back on track.

She even thought about giving up her day job, taking a night job, so she could sit beside Jerrell in his classes, follow him in the halls, keep him out of trouble. If he didn’t like it, too bad. She would do what it took to save him.

What she didn’t know was that he wanted to save himself.

*

When he first heard about the Baraka School, early in 1997, it was a one-year-old experiment funded by the Abell Foundation, which recruited boys from sixth-grade classes in the Baltimore schools. As Jerrell tells it, he saw a few kids at school with brochures that read:: “Where the blessings of Africa change boys into men.” There was the promise of rigorous, disciplined school days broken up by sports, mountain climbing and camel safaris.

Jerrell read on: “Your past grades do not matter. Your ability to pay does not matter.”

When he asked the middle school’s parent liaison for a brochure, she gave him one, with this caveat: “There’s no way your mother’s going to let you go.” But Jerrell was determined. “Ma,” he told her, “I’m going to Africa.” She said, “Boy, get outta my face. You ain’t going anywhere.”

As it turned out, Jerrell was an ideal candidate for the Laikipia Baraka School, which targets boys in danger of becoming dropouts or criminals, boys who need a different environment, a new start. Most in Jerrell’s class at Baraka had tested below grade level and behavioral and truancy problems; a few had been in trouble with the law. All had the ability to do better.

And all had someone willing to let them go, for two nine-month school years, broken by a summer vacation back in Baltimore. What had made Yarrell change her mind?

Her answers on his application give some insight. She acknowledged that she was too protective, that he needed to meet new people, good people. She said she wanted him to grow up to be someone special and important, able to take care of himself when she was no longer around. She said she feared for his safety. She said he desperately wanted to do well in school, to get out of Baltimore, to stop getting in trouble. When he was with good children, she wrote, he shines.

Mother and son said goodbye on a warm September evening at Dulles Airport. When the voice on the loudspeaker said it was time to board, Yarrell wrapped her arms around her son and tried to imagine nine months without him. When he came back, would he be taller than she is? Might he not need her as much as he used to?

She clung to him, her arms around his neck, her chin resting on his head. “You have to do this,” she kept telling herself. “You have to let him go.” What if she didn’t? What if he dropped out of school and ended up on the streets? What if he said, “Ma, if you had let me go to Africa like I wanted, this wouldn’t be happening”?

She wiped her tears from Jerrell’s face. “Be good, hear,” she said. But he was already walking away, bag slung over his shoulder. Just that morning he’d told her, “I’m fearless.” But she could see that he, too, was crying. “You’ll be all right, you hear?” she shouted. “Don’t lose that passport!” she hollered, pushing through the crush of sobbing mothers. “You be a good boy, you hear? . . . I love you!”

*

In January, she got her first phone call from Kenya. “Talk to me,” Yarrell said. “What’s going on? How you been? You having fun there?” Yes, he said, he was having fun. She wanted to know everything about his life, as she always had, but got mostly frustrating yes and no answers.

Her news of Jerrell comes from videos, letters, photographs, report cards, notes from teachers. There have been three phone calls from Jerrell; she tape-recorded them. The news is mostly good. He has earned 70s and 80s in nearly all his classes and is considered a good, creative student with the potential to do better. Like many of the Baraka seventh-graders, he has gotten in trouble for fighting.

He has ridden a camel, petted a cheetah, dissected a snake, picked guavas. He adopted a baby bird, and on one video can be seen trying to teach it to fly. He has muscular arms, bigger feet, less baby fat. He has a girlfriend he writes to in Baltimore.

Jerrell shares a room with three other boys on a compound surrounded by fields on which they play football and basketball. He has started a rap group. When told by a visitor that he looked like his mother, he replied, “No . . . I look like myself.”

While Jerrell has been in there, Kenya has experienced its worst flooding in 20 years, an outbreak of a deadly virus--and tribal violence, some of it near the school. But Yarrell, usually so prone to worry, has taken all this in stride.

Sometimes she hears gunfire at night in her Baltimore neighborhood, or sees young boys hanging out with drug dealers. She thinks her son is better off in Kenya; she trusts the people who run the school to keep him safe.

On March 3, Jerrell turned 13. She’d always promised him a special party, at the neighborhood rec center, with all his friends and a DJ. Instead, she’s planning a homecoming party in June, when he comes for summer vacation.

She writes him long letters, full of love and encouragement--and also reminders to work on his handwriting, to stop playing in class. And, she tells him firmly, no son of hers is going to sing rap songs with lyrics about guns or whores, as on the tape he sent her.

Yarrell has cleared out Jerrell’s room, save for his encyclopedias and the framed pictures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. When he comes home, he’ll find a new oak bedroom set and a VCR for his television.

“He’s growing up, and I want him to see that I’m growing with him,” Yarrell said.

In September, Jerrell will start his second and final year of school in Kenya. The plan is for him to attend City College, one of Baltimore’s best high schools, the following year. City College is on the other side of town from the neighborhood where Yarrell has lived her whole life; she plans to move closer.

“As long as I live, I’ll be behind you wherever you go.”

When she last spoke to Jerrell, two months ago, he sounded happy, healthy and excited:

Jerrell: “We’re going to climb a mountain today. Mount Kenya.”

His mom: “All of y’all?”

Jerrell: “Most of us. People who don’t got asthma.”

His mom: “Don’t have asthma.”