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

Webster has delimit nostalgia as a wistful or excessively sentimental, sometimes supernormal yearning for a return to or of some past goal or irrecoverable material body. Nostalgia is a psychological time machine that transplants adults to the darling old days of another era. Once there, they will find that it is a state of mind, oblivious to actual or imagined barriers. For some it is a engaging 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 sense of humour 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 terminate relate to much of what Benjie talks about. The Black English used is a variation merely a continuation of school boy plebeian which we saw in the previously mentioned novels. Now I am thir teen, but when I was a chile, it was hard to be a chile because my hinder 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 human beings 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 standardised 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 roach 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 draw a bead on 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 git be hard on anybody, man or chile, but a chile can get snatch in the dark an d 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 agnise where to land a good up punch, dig?