Giving—and Getting—Shelter in Jersey City
by JACKIE HARRIS

This summer, courtesy of a Juilliard summer grant, I drove a beat-up brown van through the potholed streets of Jersey City. My mission: to pick up 11 urban teenagers who were leaders in a program called New City Kids, take them to a newly refinished basement room—a room crammed with six keyboards and one overhead projector—and teach them notation, composition, and keyboard skills. At the end of a six-week program, the student with the most points would win one of the keyboards, and all of the students who hung on through the intensive course of study would participate in the recording of a CD. I was excited, nervous, and full of questions. Would the course that I planned capture their interest? How would discipline be? Would we get along with each other? The one thing I did know is that what I had planned would have to be frequently adjusted. Already, just picking the kids up for their first day, I had seen how things became more complicated than planned.

(Clockwise from left) Jessica, Linda Rubingh, Michael Rubingh, Trevor Rubingh, Jackie Harris, Stacey, Tiana, and Coco.

To begin with, there was the schedule. For a variety of reasons, the neat six-week block I’d originally planned had morphed into a motley assortment of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays somewhat unevenly spread over our time. (I expected the irregularity of this would cause attendance problems.) Then there was the space. All the places we’d believed would house us fell through. At the last second, Trevor Rubingh, the director of New City Kids—a vibrant man full of vision for the kids of Jersey City—decided that he wanted to remodel his basement anyway. He cordoned off a space, raised a small army of volunteers, and turned a dusty corner into a brightly lit music room.

While this room was being constructed, I met with Pastor Trevor to transcribe familiar songs that the kids knew. “I would love to see the kids falling in love with music,” I told him during one of our final meetings. “You might just find yourself falling in love with the kids,” he replied. Though I knew he was right, I didn’t then have any inkling how prophetic his words would be.

So that the kids could get to class, I drove the dilapidated brown van into the depths of Jersey City through crime-ridden streets to their apartments, picked them up, and shuttled them to the basement school. Though I live in Jersey City, I see very little of it in my daily commute to Juilliard, and the van rides were an eye-opener into the true workings of the city. I found a tight-knit, loyal community, but one rife with problems. Almost every day, during our shuttle runs, the kids would see a cousin or aunt, and as they talked to each other about their relatives’ lives and their own, I discovered just how sheltered I had been. One of the high schools that my kids attended had the highest AIDS rate in the country. According to my kids, 50 percent of high school seniors tested positive for H.I.V. Drugs and knives were common sights. One day we passed a wake. “Who died?” asked William.

“A little girl,” said Coco. “She got hit by a car. I know three kids who were killed on that corner. My cousin died there. Cars just drive too fast, and there’s no traffic light.”

“And no one will put one up?” I exclaimed. My kids just shrugged. The streets were dangerous, and they knew it. It would take a lot more than a few deaths to get the corruption-riddled government to start looking out for their safety.

Despite these obstacles in their daily lives, or maybe because of them, the kids’ dedication to their lessons could put many of us Juilliard students to shame. No one ever forgot a lesson. Though two students didn’t meet the attendance policy and had to drop out, of the remaining nine, seven had perfect attendance, and there was only one tardy in the entire 12 sessions.

(Left to right) Coco, Jackie Harris, William, Darren, and Ron during the final recording session.

We progressed from learning which finger was which to two-handed scales, from one-handed tunes to two-handed chordal compositions. We started off with simple free-style improvisations of two or three notes, and ended up with stunningly complex compositions.

The kids soon placed their individual stamps on the classes. My morning class worked very well independently. They tended to be intensely competitive, over matters ranging from who had learned the pieces the fastest to who could shoot the most baskets during break. One teen, Ron, worked his way through a three-part theory course as homework, which ended up being a deciding factor in his winning the keyboard.

For the final CD recording project, most of the class chose to do both a personal composition and a written-out piece. The breadth of originality was amazing. Gian Carlo made a collection of wild freestyle improvisations, but his brother George created a highly structured rondo form of amazing complexity. Coco wrote a poignant original poem about life’s hardness, and layered five-finger patterns and nature sounds underneath. Ron took advantage of the keyboards’ capacity to add glisses and various voices to his pre-existing music, and his brother Darren used the structure of a song as a framework for his own rock composition. William doggedly worked on a version of “I’ve Got Peace Like a River” that challenged him by using chord patterns in both hands, and mastered it.

My afternoon class learned best as a group. They were enchanted with the interactive possibilities of music, and loved to play things as a class to produce something greater than they could alone. Tiana, Jessica, and Stacey formed a “band” that was able to play the bass line, chordal background, and improvised melodies to chord charts. The three of them worked out a satirical composition about waking up in Jersey City, using the sounds of the keyboard, including gunshots and helicopters, an Aebersold Play-A-Long CD, and their voices (which to my regret, they decided not to include on the final CD project).

Some of the best rewards, though, came outside of class. I heard from a neighbor of mine that Darren was drawing notes with chalk on the sidewalk, which delighted me as evidence that the material had caught his fire. Soon after, Tiana asked if she could pray for me after class, and along with Jessica offered up a beautiful, touching prayer of thanksgiving and empowerment for me and the class, asking that God “whisper sweet words of wisdom into Miss Jackie’s ear, as she don’t know the streets like we do.”

As Pastor Trevor predicted, I fell in love. From just names on a piece of paper and a handful of faces, we became two distinct classes, then 12 unique people in a complex web of relationship with each other and with music. As in all great teaching situations, I began to think of my classes in shorthand as “my kids.”

I’d promised an ice-cream party for all who finished the class with a significant amount of points. Everyone qualified. We held the party on the Sunday after the World Trade Center attacks. Though we started talking about our feelings about the bombings, we soon moved on to talking about movies and music, books, and girl-fights versus boy-fights. That party was the biggest therapy I could have had at that point—to realize what my resilient teens already knew: that the world goes on. My summer? It began with me trying to provide a safe place for Jersey City teens to relate and explore, away from the mean streets. It ended up with me being given “shelter,” getting back more than I gave by “my kids.”

Jacqueline Harris is a master’s student in bass trombone.