The picture on the book’s cover is chilling. The boy to the left appears to be about ten; his hair cut to form a kind of crown, with a shaggy forelock hanging down the center. His eyes are downcast, and there is a smile on his face, though not a child’s smile, a forced smile, as though he had willed himself to another planet, far from his eight -year old brother holding a shot-gun to the side of his head, grinning. Both boys’ smiles are in an almost fiendish manner.

In Chapter Two, we find a hint of its contents in the chapter: Rejected and Neglected, Ashamed and Depressed.

Then, Garbarino goes on to explain the powerful first meeting of Alexander Graham Bell with Helen Keller, then eight years old, a blind and mute child who nevertheless learned to communicate with eloquence. Bell wrote, “I feel that in this child I have seen more of the Divine than has been manifest in anyone I ever met before.”

Garbarino explained that he started with the spiritual basis when it came to understanding boys, and discovered the spiritual in the child’s eyes.

(When I was visiting Mundelein College in Chicago, Helen was giving a lecture, which we could understand, but because she had never heard anyone speak, it wasn’t too clear. However, considering her blindness, coupled with her deafness, she appeared like a walking miracle to us, and, indeed she was just that.)

Garbarino goes on to ask: “How do I know what to say to people? I recall a meeting I had once in Africa when I was the lone African-American on the panel. During the coffee beak, they began chatting among themselves and discovered all had teen-age sons. Garbarino began to feel a certain apprehension.

Psychiatrist Leonard Shengold called his book on the effects of severe child abuse, Soul Murder. Garbarino said we begin our journey to understanding these boys by studying the quality of their early relationships, the psychological condition of their inner life, the development of their spirit.

“Every infant contains a divine spark. This is one reason why I shamelessly ‘flirt’ with babies everywhere I see them–in airports, in shopping malls, in the waiting rooms of prisons. I seek out their eyes to make contact with their souls, hoping to elicit a smile and to experience once again the delight that comes from contact with the divine spark within them.”

(To be continued)

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