Hello, I'm David Jamison, Ph.D.
I'm an Activist and Public Educator
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“A Children’s Story” is Anything but a Good-Time BBQ Joint. It Is Instead a Tragic Tale of Urban Decay, State Repression, and Gun Violence.
And Slick Rick Knew Exactly What He Was Doing
“A Children’s Story” is probably the most context-inappropriate song in all of black culture. And trust me, "A Children’s Story" is an integral part of Black American culture. If you don’t know, just Google “Children’s Story” cookout. You will see several links to music mixes based on a cookout or BBQ theme, all of which include “A Children’s Story.” There is a legendary reel that circulated on Facebook a while back where that song comes on at a cookout and virtually everyone at the party knew all the lyrics. It was literally insane. In high school, I bought the 12-inch and knew all the lyrics within the month. “A Children’s Story” is most definitely the jam and Slick Rick finesses the fuck out of it. But it only takes a cursory look at the lyrics to realize that this jam is less a party anthem and more of an urban nightmare.
Uncle Ricky
Would you read us a bedtime story?
Please, huh? Please?
Alright, you kids get to bed
I'll get the story book
Y'all tucked in? (yeah)
Here we go
The song starts off with an evening of dystopian babysitting, in which one of Rick’s siblings has left him in charge of their kids. I say "dystopian babysitting" because I cannot imagine a world where any sibling of Uncle Ricky would let him babysit their kids. The nonchalance with which he delivers the lyrics suggests that Rick thinks “A Children’s Story” is a perfectly appropriate bedtime story. In this urban dystopia, the only kind of babysitters you can get are street babysitters. There is no way in hell a real babysitter would unfold the tale Slick Rick is about to unfold. But in this dystopia, it is the only kind of children’s story that this street bard has any access to.
from Jacob Lawrence's series The Great Migration (1940)
Once upon a time not long ago
When people wore pajamas and lived life slow
When laws were stern and justice stood
And people were behaving like they ought to good
There lived a little boy who was misled
By another little boy and this is what he said:
"Me and you, kid, we gonna make some cash
Robbing old folks and making the dash"
So the story starts off with a kind-hearted protagonist. All kids are their mama’s baby. But the inner city dystopia is host to a number of individuals that prey. They do not prey because they are evil, they prey because they too were raised in this dystopia in which you either prey or get preyed upon. There are always predators in the inner city because, first off, most of the boys live in fatherless homes. This is because the Great Migration destroyed the sanctity of the black family.
During the period in which millions of blacks moved out of the post-Civil War south and into Northern and Midwestern cities, people were being “pushed” out of the South by a rise in racial terror violence and an increase in voting restrictions and segregation once Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South in 1877. There was now no one to protect black voters or black rights. As such, many blacks left the South. But unlike the slave era, women were more valued in urban settings. During the slave era, men were valued for their strength and speed, which had benefits in a purely capitalistic system. But black men as free laborers presented a problem – namely, their testosterone. If there’s one lesson slaveowners learned, it was that female slaves were easier to control. Since they are maternal they do not want to do anything that is going to endanger their children, and they are much less restricted by pride when it came to doing humiliating acts. That’s why all the brave men on any plantation were either broken by slave breakers, sold away, or had short life spans. This remained true after slavery. In the urban context men’s strength and speed is not needed because there are far more mechanized factories and far fewer fields. And when women get fired unjustly, they are less likely to complain or even plan some sort of insurgency. As a result women’s labor was much more highly valued in the city than men’s labor. This led to the degradation of a lot of black homes. Black men could not feel fatherly or even manly when their wives were consistently bringing home more money than they were. Male pride and anti-black male discrimination on the part of urban employers led to so many fatherless families.
This is likely the environment in which Another Little Boy was raised. Another Little Boy is what we call a “bad influence.” He is the one who gives our protagonist, Little Boy, the idea to engage in a life of crime, a choice that extends his life only until the end of this song
They did the job, money came with ease
But one couldn't stop, it's like he had a disease
He robbed another and another and a sister and her brother
Some people should never get a taste of being a predator. For some, it is a drug too addictive to break free from. The thrill, the adrenaline . . . even though a life of crime is highly stressful, someone with a dysfunctional psyche feeds off of that stress, and fools themselves into normalizing it. Little Boy’s compulsion with robbing people is most likely a latent reaction to the trauma of his surroundings. Living in a place with the disturbing imagery of the inner city (drug addicts, prostitution, people with mental health challenges) can only have a traumatic effect on a child’s mind. Even though we like to imagine that our children’s visual world is full of wonder and magic, we must not act as if children raised in the city do not grow with an entirely different mental architecture of our society.
But kids adapt, so you never see it. They play; they joke; they quickly leave uncomfortable situations. But they see it all. And to think that none of it affects their mental health is a convenient delusion. Every kid raised in the ‘hood was traumatized at least once a month. Sometimes a young person can put it in context and file it away. Others, however, cannot. They feel such empathy for street criminals that they begin to identity with them, and then even emulate them. Some children live and breathe the short-life ethos of the street. And they dive into criminality with the zeal of a monk who has finally found his purpose.
Tried to rob a man who was a D.T. undercover
The cop grabbed his arm, he started acting erratic
He said "Keep still, boy, no need for static"
Punched him in his belly and he gave him a slap
But little did he know the lil' boy was strapped
And there it is. The primary conflict. Gustav Freytag’s critical moment at which the rising action of the plot of any story begins its ascent. Before this moment, it is possible that the boy could have been arrested, served time, and maybe had the chance to turn his life around. But the D.T.'s one-line barrage of police brutality set Little Boy on a path from which he would never return. Instances like this are not rare in the saga of Africans in America. Almost from the time that police forces were formed, many municipalities saw it as their duty to control the burgeoning black population that had been moving into the city since the beginning of the Great Migration. Many patrolmen saw it as their duty not to investigate and arrest criminals, but rather to police the border between the black and white communities, and make sure no “bad elements” crossed over to the “right side of the tracks.”
But the police functions as any paramilitary force does. Most of the people who join join because they want to help society. But there are always your small number of psychopaths. And paramilitary groups are based on the idea that they should be ready for combat at any time, so constant and mandatory training is essential. But as many military generals have discovered, troops get restless when you train and train them and don’t give them anything to hit. And that is how one must think about America’s early police forces. They were trained to protect the white community, and the black community was okay to “hit.” Sure there were consequences and indictments, but nine times out of ten they would get off. That is why George Floyd’s murderer being convicted was so spectacular – black people were used to police being exonerated for their abuse. It is encouraging to think we may have turned a corner
The kid pulled out a gun, he said, "Why’d you hit me?"
The barrel was set straight for the cop's kidney
The cop got scared, the kid, he starts to figure
"I'll do years if I pull this trigger"
So he cold dashed and ran around the block
Here Rick introduces a concept that law enforcement may not be happy to share – the increasing armaments of private citizens. For most of the 20th Century law-enforcement authors could be fairly certain that they were better armed than the common street hood. But they can longer say this. Anytime a police officer decides to escalate a situation today, it is very possible that the gun the bad guy pulls out will be bigger than theirs. Or in this case, the cop thinks that a fistfight will do, while the Little Boy brought a gun. It is the inevitable result of America being one of the world largest arms suppliers, and having the right to bear one in its Constitution. How do we expect cops to maintain the upper hand?
This verse also introduces the idea of “street smarts.” America typically tells its young men that if they turn themselves in, they will get a fair shot in the criminal justice system. But most black American men know that the calculus is different for us. If we get caught, we might get a fair trial, but there is just as good a chance that we will never even make it to the jailhouse. The number of extralegal killings by police will forever remain unknown simply due to the sheer number of people who have committed these crimes wearing either plain clothes or white robes.
So no, Little Boy did not think it wise to turn himself in and then explain to the judge how he shot the police officer in self-defense after being punched and slapped. But that is the story Rick is telling us. No, Little Boy reasoned, I would have just as good a shot cold dashing around the black and betting that cop's fat ass cannot catch me. That is street smarts. It is not being less intelligent than college professors, it is having the street-given sense of being able to discern de jure reality from de facto reality. The facts were that, despite the law, black men have been murdered by police for turning themselves in. The hustle was to anticipate the de facto and even get paid off it, if possible.
Cop radios in to another lady cop
He ran by a tree, there he saw the sister
Shot for the head, he shot back but he missed her
Um . . . did you catch that? The cop shot for the kid’s head first! Why am I still dancing to this song?!
Rick never uses the pronoun she, but he uses the pronoun he for sure and there is only a male and a female in this exchange. It was the female cop who shot first. But this is also not uncommon for boys raised in the hood. Just because another cop is black does not mean you will receive special treatment. The first generation of black cops got their positions through grit and hard work, but the second wave was a little entitled. And amongst that second wave came black officers who knew they could establish lucrative careers in law enforcement. And so some of them became more concerned with impressing their superiors than protecting little boys like Little Boy.
Looked around good and from expectations
He decided he'd head for the subway stations
But she was coming and he made a left
He was runnin' top speed 'til he was out of breath
Knocked an old man down and swore he killed him (sorry)
Yes, he said "sorry." Because it’s a little boy. He’s 17 years old. No matter how much mess they talk or how much trouble they get into, nothing really dislodges a black man’s respect for his elders, especially mama. Even the most hardened black criminals don’t cross that line. They are all people, not supervillains, and so the “sorry” comes out, unconsciously, unapologetically, part of the DNA-and-heritage-given right of black men to redefine the western rules and establish their own parameters of behavior.
This was one distinction between the Civil Rights Movement and New Negro Movement. New negros were concerned – obsessed some may say -- with proving to Victorian Americans that they could aspire to any cultural or intellectual heights that white people could. They were every day making a sociological statement to white society and the statement read thus: For the past 250 years you have been telling us that we are inferior. But we come en masse to tell you that we know you are wrong We know that is a fiction, And we are very bit as good as you. That was the raison d’etre of the New Negro Movement – it was a cultural movement focused on black people emulating in every way the highest standards of Victorian culture. In his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that not all blacks were ready to aspire to those heights (neither were all whites, though). Du Bois distinguished a Talented Tenth that would be able to be the black emissaries of white culture. But the Civil Rights Movement was not bothering with that pantomime. The Civil Rights Movement was far more concerned with reanalysis and reappreciation of African heritage and culture. Afros and Daishikis were the uniform, at least among the young and hip. There was no precedent for this in white America. And it was important for black people, and especially black men, to establish a cultural parameter that was unapologetically unconcerned with sneers by the paragons of white discernment.
Then he made his move to an abandoned building
Ran up the stairs up to the top floor
Opened up the door there, guess who he saw? (who?)
Dave the dope fiend shootin’ dope
Who don't know the meaning of water nor soap
He said "I need bullets, hurry up, run!"
The dope fiend brought back a spanking shotgun
So, so many things.
Why does Little Boy know a dope fiend drug dealer? Why does Little Boy know that if he went to the top floor of this particular abandoned building, that a dope-fiend gun-dealer named Dave would be able to get him armaments? Why does a 17-year-old have this knowledge? Because it is undeniable form Rick's narrative that Dave is well known to Little Boy and has probably gotten him strapped before. The “guess who he saw" was ironic, just Little Boy’s inner snark coming out. Dave is always there. And like most dope fiends, Dave is pliant, desperate, forgettable. As long as he gets his cash.
He went outside but there was cops all over
Then he dipped into a car, a stolen Nova
Raced up the block doing 83
Crashed into a tree near university
Escaped alive though the car was battered
Rat-a-tat-tatted and all the cops scattered
Ran out of bullets and he still had static
Grabbed a pregnant lady and out the automatic
Pointed at her head and he said the gun was full o' lead
He told the cops, "Back off or honey here's dead"
Deep in his heart he knew he was wrong
So he let the lady go and he starts to run on
This is why I knew Little Boy said “sorry” because he was a kid. This is not a story of hardened criminals. The rat-ta-tat-tatting and scattering of cops are desperate pleas for help. I am a little boy, these actions are saying, I could be your little boy! The pregnant lady was never in any danger. and I would not be surprised if she knew it. I would not be surprised if she looked at Little Boy with pity, and would have liked to have helped him once he put the gun down. Mothers can tell when children are in distress.
Sirens sounded, he seemed astounded
Before long the little boy got surrounded
He dropped the gun, so went the glory
And this is the way I have end this story
He was only seventeen, in a madman's dream
The cops shot the kid, I still hear him scream
Wait – Did you get that? Did you get that? The Little Boy dropped the gun. Slick Rick stopped telling his story. And then the cops shot this unarmed 17-year-old, eliciting an unforgettable scream. This was not a scream of pain, but the scream of injustice. Why am I still dancing to this song? Why are we still dancing to this song?
And it is not like we do not know that this happens. After a chase like that, cops are mad. They want to punish someone. And they care little whether that person is still technically a threat. Ask Rodney King. Ask Miami insurance salesman Arthur McDuffie. “A Children Story” is a dystopian nightmare of urban decay, police brutality, and our society’s complete abandonment of sympathy for young black men.
It’s got a banging beat, though.
I’m just sayin’.
Oh boy, that Uncle Ricky he's really weird
I know, right? What did he by mean "Straight and narrow?"
I don't know
I don’t know either
Well, good night
Good night
“Honey, did you let Rick babysit again?”
“Why do you ask? How are the kids?”
“They’re sitting up in their beds in a cold sweat, staring into the gaping maw of their destiny.”
“I’m gonna talk to him.”
“I really think we should go with that service.”
“That bitch ignored my call twice and then asked for references. From me?”
“Honey.”
“Rick just needs to feel like he’s helping. He doesn’t really know how to talk to them. He doesn’t really know how to talk to anybody. But he has lessons he has to share. You just have let him do it in his way. He’s a good guy, honey.”
“Alright . . . I mean, his flow is ill as fuck.”
"Ain't it, though?"
This ain't funny so don't you dare laugh
Just another case about the wrong path
Straight and narrow or your soul gets cast
Good night!