Christopher Paul Curtis by Bucking the Sarge

gonna keep going on and on and on….
    She said, “How's that supposed to be anything but an incentive to fail? What human being, I don't care how old you are, can't see that there's no way you can win that race? What human being, I don't care how old, can't see that that is a race you have no business even running? That is something you've lost even before you began. That, my boy, is the path set aside for the sucker.”
    I wanted to argue with her but what was the point?
    She said, “I see either a look of disbelief or befuddlement in your eyes, so let me explain it to you again for the hundredth time.”
    I knew what was coming, the sad and touching story of a young girl trying to find herself in the big city.
    The Sarge said, “Before you were born, right after I got my degree in teaching, I got a job in New York City at this chichi all-girls' school right in Manhattan. The people were paying twenty-five thousand dollars a year to send their kids to this school, not for room and board, mind you, twenty-five Gs for the tuition alone. Way more than my salary. Mostly the little brats were the kids of
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500 execs, actors, politicians.
    “So I'm interning under a teacher and she's doing an art appreciation class and starts to talk about Pablo Picasso and it turns out that two of the little girls in the class have genuine Picassos hanging on the walls at home. One had two Rembrandts. Not copies. Originals. The real deal.
    “I went home that day to my fifth-floor cold-water walk-up, looked at what I had hanging on my wall, a blackvelvet painting of Martin Luther King and John Fitzgerald Kennedy walking hand in hand with Jesus, and I asked myself, ‘What's wrong with this picture?’ And I wasn't referring to the rather obvious deficiencies in my taste at the time.
    “I asked myself how many generations down the line it would be before any relative of mine would have anything anywhere near fine, original art hanging from the walls of their home. I asked myself how many years it would take me to amass enough wealth so that a school I could afford to send my future kids to would have Jessye Norman sing at their eighth-grade graduation. On a teacher's salary I knew it would take me five or six lifetimes to get enough cash to afford a school where we could get James Brown to come in and scream ‘I Feel Good’ one time.”
    She kept going and I kept pretending I was listening.
    “I asked myself what these little
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500 kids had done to deserve so much when my future kids were obviously going to be starting with so little.
    “Were they unusually talented or intelligent?
    “If so, it was only because any modicum of talent or intelligence they'd shown at an early age had been nurtured and cultivated with the best tutoring and training that money could buy.
    “I asked myself if they'd been blessed or preordained to be where they were.
    “I realized the only reason it seemed as though they were was because they'd been taught to fervently believe that that was the case. And like I've told you many times before, believing in yourself is half the battle. And like I'vetold you even more times than that, the other half of the battle is money.
    “So during my year at that school my dreams of changing the world through teaching began falling apart just as inexorably and just as irreversibly as the paint on JFK's face began flaking away off that black velvet painting.
    “I asked myself what I'd have to do to be able to send my child, or make it possible for my child to send his child, to a school like that one. I knew none of those kids' parents had started right out of school teaching, or working at Wal-Mart, or working in the Buick. Most of them had their money left to them or they'd lucked up and had hit it big with their own businesses where someone had greased the skids for them. They knew that daily nine-to-five action is purely for the sucker.
    “And since I knew no one was going to give me anything, the best way