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"What a Man Do": Coe Booth and the Genesis of Tyrell
ALAN Review, Winter 2007 by Blasingame, James Jr
Tyrell Green is facing a man's share of problems. His father is in prison, his mother is on probation for welfare fraud, and the New York Emergency Assistance Unit can't find his family a decent place to live. Until more suitable housing is available, they have been deposited, along with other families, at the Bennett Motel, a dirty, roach and rat-infested, garbage littered, bloodstained dump. Over the course of one week, iyrell needs to earn more money than a regular job can pay, secure his family a safer place to live, put food on the table, find a new high school and enroll, keep his seven-year-old brother, Troy, alive and safe and out of the custody of New York's Administration for Children's Services, steer clear of drug war gun battles, figure out who he can trust and who he can't, and try to make sense of his love life. All at age fifteen.
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Tyrell (Scholastic, 2006) is the creation of BRIO Award winning author, Coe Booth, whose honest and accurate portrayal of families caught in "the system," as Tyrell puts it, comes from years of experience as a social worker in the New York City Emergency Children's Service. Ironically, as Coe began her MFA in creative writing at New York's revered The New School, she had not intended to write about the experiences of the typical teenage boys she encountered as a social worker. She had other stories in mind.
Tyrell Green, her book's protagonist, took her by surprise. As the words flowed out onto the page, Coe had no idea where this teenaged boy's voice was coming from or where it would take her. She hadn't outlined the plot, didn't know where the story was going, and had no idea how it would end.
What she did know was that the manuscript she had been anguishing over for her creative writing class wasn't working for her, and she wanted to turn in a different set of pages for the teacher and the class to critique, something new, something real. The basic idea for Tyrell had been tugging at the corners of her mind for a while, but she imagined him as middle school age, and when the very first line of the narrative flowed onto paper, she was surprised to find the voice of a fifteen-year-old teen, curses and all.
The spirit, as well as the details, of Tyrell Green's story could not be more accurate. Coe's career as a social worker in New York City provided her with plenty of background to draw from as she followed Tyrell through a few crucial days of his fifteenth year. Coe's record as a social worker is commendable. The immense workload and high level of emotional intensity that accompany a field worker's job in the New York City Emergency Children's Service (ECS) are not for the weak of heart or anyone who is less than devoted to the job. In a profession in which 82% of public agencies blame "caseloads [that are] too high and too demanding" for one of the highest turnover rates for professions requiring a college degree (O'Neill 1), Coe Booth saw a lot of human tragedy. During the first three years with ECS, she worked out of the Bronx field office, working exclusively on sex abuse cases, handling a huge caseload, interacting with families and following them through court and legal proceedings to completion.
Coe's BA and MA in psychology gave her special preparation for dealing with the clients she encountered with ECS. Her training also gave her a different perspective on these clients from the one held by most of her coworkers, who were more likely to come from criminal justice backgrounds. Coe did not look at her clients as people in need of punishment, but rather as people in need of help, people with deep-seated emotional problems they could not solve themselves. "Obviously, criminal offenders had to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," she explains, but her goal was to mend dysfunctional families, figure out what had gone wrong in a parent or child's life, try to repair the damage to a "broken spirit" and guide the family to a healthy functioning.
After an injury suffered on the job put her on the sidelines for seven months, Coe chose to switch to an even more stressful ECS position and she became a Crisis Worker. This change in responsibilities put her on the night shift, beginning each evening at midnight and dealing with middle-of-the-night emergencies in which children's lives, safety and well-being were at risk, such as police raids or hospital emergency room patients whose injuries suggested child abuse. Rather than working solely in the Bronx, with the new position, Coe was required to cover all of New York City (the entire Five Boroughs area). As she describes that experience, she recounts how the sheer physical exhaustion of 70-hour work weeks, constantly on the run all over New York City, would often take precedence over the emotional toll of seeing families in nearly impossible situations while she was on-call 24 hours a day.
Coe's job meant a lot to her, but she came to realize that it was totally consuming her life, leaving no time for her lifetime passion for writing.
