Rats In The Trees

Rats In The Trees was Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories of many street kids, though mostly about Robby, a 13-year-old African-American boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone in the city, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. The stories were originally "told stories" in what some might call an oral tradition, to entertain and offer positive messages to kids at a West Oakland youth center where Mowry worked at the time; and when he began to write them down he tried keep that flavor. Although never intended as a documentary, Rats portrays the conditions for inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods, as if designed for that, and especially to destroy kids. The times of happy black music of the late 1970s were ending. So was the social-awareness and the kinship of Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained black people during the '60s and early 70s. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal and desperate years of gangstuh rap, of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" were beginning as if in retaliation for that brief interlude of relative peace. Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the happier days when black people seemed united in a common cause of freedom and justice; and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something even if they might not have been able to give it a name. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true, the ever-increasing and senseless black-on-black crime, the "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" in U.S. innercities, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. It was also predicted in Rats that guns, gangs, drugs and violence would move into white suburbia -- as Chuck (an older white teenager in Rats) said: "Coming soon to a neighborhood near YOU!" Of course, much of the language and many of the expressions, as well as some attitudes toward certain types of people, have changed since 1989 -- or are at least masked by political-correctness these days -- but the reader must judge for him- or herself if the U.S. has gotten kinder, gentler or any more enlightened since then despite all the political-correctness and Pollyanna lip-service given to equality. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S.