By Bob Kerr
There were people in the room who had done 18 years in prison. And there were people in the room who, as Sal Monterio pointed out, had probably never driven by a prison.
The mix made for an interesting, sometimes edgy, sometimes goofy afternoon. It included an exercise called “Crossing the River.” The river was a space marked by tape on the floor and the stepping-stones were wooden blocks which were pulled away if they were left untouched by hand or foot. People ended up in positions they had never been in before.
It was part of nonviolence training. It was part of reaching out and reaching back to reach the other side. It was the third weekend session for the people who gathered at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence. They were coming from a lot of different places to try to consider what works and what doesn’t, what can be embraced and what needs to be tossed aside in the effort to take nonviolence training to the places it needs to be.
There were people in the room who really disliked each other. They came from rival gangs. They brought their differences and their losses with them.
“At first, it was tense as hell,” says Fausto Clase. “There were two of them, two of us. The first week, the street workers were watching our every move.”
But, eventually, they talked — about gangs and why they come together and why they break apart.
“It was a memorable moment,” says Clase. “For us to be in the same room and be able to talk and not be fighting.”
He is 22 and a guy you want to talk to. He has spoken at Brown and a bunch of Rhode Island schools. He says three members of his gang are dead and three are in prison. So he is at the Institute on Oxford Street where gang violence is given a face and made personal. He learns and he teaches. He brings invaluable experience to the conversation.
Clase says the first time he was approached by street workers from the Institute, he thought they were cops. He found out they weren’t, that they came from the same place he did. And he found the Institute a place where he could talk.
His gang, he says, the one named after its Pine Street neighborhood, was formed more from circumstance than any deliberate plan.
It started with a cousin who got slapped.
“That’s the most embarrassing thing, to get slapped in the face,” he says.
The response was going to be old-fashioned. The two guys would fight, one on one, right there on Broad Street.
“Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that,” says Clase.
Settling a dispute with fists just isn’t the way it’s done anymore. And going anywhere alone is asking for trouble. So friends gather to protect friends.
“And this is one of those cities where cops see a group of kids and call us a gang,” says Clase.
He and his friends did little to avoid the label.
“There were little incidents that weren’t supposed to happen,” says Clase. “They made us confirm what the cops assumed. Stupidly, we started promoting ourselves.”
He offers little detail, but clearly he has grown from his mid-teens to early adulthood with gang obligations weighing heavily. There were about 15 core members.
“But a lot of groupies came through.”
He became the leader, he says, because he’s the guy who others looked to to sort things out.
“I’ve always been the mind guy.”
As we talk, others taking part in the training work in groups to come up with projects to take nonviolence all over the state. Monteiro, the nonviolence training coordinator, keeps it moving — challenging, questioning, cutting to the heart of the matter. A proposal to talk with kids at a Woonsocket Middle School is brought up and discussed and it is agreed that the best approach is to work with small groups rather than pack hundreds into the school auditorium.
And so it goes. Some hard-earned wisdom works its way in. It’s a tough room for the wishy-washy.
Victor St. Hill is there, and his parole officer knows it.
“They know where I am at all times,” he says, referring to the tracking device he wears.
He has worn the device since his parole from the ACI in November after serving 12½ years of a life sentence for felony murder.
He works as a Spanish interpreter in a law firm, and he tries to put a life back together in the same places where he sold his drugs and got into big time trouble. He can’t have a cocktail, which he says he doesn’t really want anyway. He has to report in once a week. And he looks forward to seeing his son graduate from Hope High School in June.
“From being young to where I am now, I’ve got a story to tell,” says St. Hill.
So he brings his story to the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, where a friend works. And he adds it to the ever growing store of things learned the hard way that the Institute turns to life-saving lessons.
And last Sunday afternoon, St. Hill was there trying to make his way along those wooden blocks and across the river — a big man trying to keep his balance with the help of strangers.
St. Hill likes his chances. He’s got family. He’s got a plan. In five years, he’d like to be out of Rhode Island.
There is always uncertainty at the Institute. It is in the nature of what it does. Sometimes, the streets win one and somebody with good intentions and high hopes falls back. But there is no other place like it. There is no other place where the reality of what people in certain parts of the city deal with every day is so clearly understood.
It’s definitely the only place where I could sit on a couch and hear Fausto Clase tell me about the day his cousin, Angelo Camarene, was killed.
It was three years ago. Fausto was working for a bus company that made regular runs to New York. He was driving home with a full bus when he got a call.
“A friend called from a party. He told me ‘Jay (Angelo) is dead.’ ”
He floored it the rest of the way to Providence.
“When that happened, I just lost it. We shared so many moments together. Losing him, and me not being there, that was a big hit on me. I was angry at myself.”
He talked to people who had been at the party.
“They told me the scene. I put two and two together and broke down the puzzle.”
He has a very good idea of who shot his cousin. There has been no arrest. He says the person he believes did it has disappeared and he has no idea where he is.
Now, he works with a street worker at the Institute and thinks it is the place for him to be. He would like to own a bus company someday.
“Gangs are just not the best solution,” he says. “There was no positive benefit for me.”
bkerr@providencejournal.com
