A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich :: Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich Essays

Webster has outlined nostalgia as a wistful or excessively sentimental, sometimes abnormal yearning for a return to or of some past completion or irrecoverable soma. Nostalgia is a psychological time machine that transplants adults to the nice old days of a nonher era. Once there, they will find that it is a state of mind, oblivious to actual or imagined barriers. For some it is a pleasing stroll through yesterday, a simple, less turbulent past. Benjie Johnson is thirteen, Black, and well on his way to being hooked on heroine for good. Benjies wry predilection and courage, his hard surface and vulnerability beneath make it impossible not to care about him. This book confronts a difficult subject and offers no easy solutions. The inner city students I presently teach spate relate to much of what Benjie talks about. The Black English used is a variation solely a continuation of school boy mutual which we saw in the previously mentioned novels. Now I am thirteen, but when I w as a chile, it was hard to be a chile because my evade is a tough block and my school is a tough school. Im not trying to cop out on what I do or dont do cause while is man and chile is chile, but I aint a chile no more. Dont nobody want to be no chile cause, for some reason, it just hold you back in a lotta ways unless you be a rich chile the like in some movie picture or like on T.V.where everybody is livin it up and their room is perfect-lookin and their swimmin pool and their block and their house and they also ridin plump in one rollin Cads with a tape-deck playin cool music and with air condition goin.21 The block where Benjie lives is no peaceful place. People are hold back mugged and robbed regularly. After age three when the relatives hold your hand you are on your own in the poorly lighted hallways of the tenement. Walkin through dark, stinky hallways throw out be hard on anybody, man or chile, but a chile can get snatch in the dark and get his behind parts messed up by some weirdo Im talkie bout them sexuals. Soons you get up to leven, twelve and sothey might cool it cause they scared you go through where to land a good up punch, dig?