I realize how lucky I am that this is one of the most emotional memories from my childhood. Some go through unspeakable trauma, and here I am, lamenting the trade-in of a used car. Because the early years of my life were so gosh darn normal and uneventful, it can be difficult to relate to some of my more troubled students. My student teaching placement is in an economically depressed area, and many of the students come from difficult or dangerous home lives. Some of the situations from home that students talk to me about make my jaw drop. I have no idea how to deal with most of them.
It makes me think back to a class that I took when I was about fifteen. My high school offered a series of classes called Child Development which were the first peek that I got into the world of teaching. We got a taste of teaching’s unique difficulties – ranges of intelligence and emotions in children, proper handling of negative situations, and the ever-present question of what happens to the child when they leave your care. Within these courses, we had a small unit on Child Abuse. We learned that it would be our responsibility as teachers, parents, etc, to watch not only our children but also those around us. As a class, we read David Peltzer’s celebrated book A Child Called It. At the time, I remember being bothered, perhaps even disgusted, by the book. But when I finished a chapter and set the book down, the story didn’t follow me. I was learning to drive and breaking my curfew, there was no time to worry about starving children or conniving mothers.
More than 8 years have passed since I first signed up to take those Child Development courses, but the questions and subjects that we covered in Child Development are more relevant than ever. Emotional or physical abuse is no longer a hypothetical, a chapter in the casebook assigned by my Classroom Methods instructor. Instead, emotional or physical abuse is a first grade girl who curls into the fetal position and cries if you give her negative feedback, or a third grader whose only means of communication is violence because that’s all he’s ever learned. In the case studies, the neglected and abused children were easy to tell from the others; they had black eyes and torn clothes, they wept in your arms about their daddy’s temper or their mommy’s drinking. They never hid their wounds or defended the villains. In the real world, we’re not so lucky. It was this realization that inspired me to revisit David Peltzer’s story.
A Child Called It is Peltzer’s first-person account of a horribly abusive childhood, his battle for survival, and how he eventually escaped. Peltzer is tortured by his mother, a mentally ill woman who abuses alcohol and shows many symptoms of bipolar disorder. Peltzer begins by describing a happy early childhood where he plays with his two brothers, vacations with his family, and basks in his parents’ affection. He is well fed, clean, and loved. A place for everything, and everything in its place. But as time goes on, Peltzer and his brothers start to make mischief. It seems to be a requirement for all young boys to run and break and ruin, and the Peltzer boys are no exception. But for some reason, only David Peltzer is punished for their collective misadventures. The other boys are sent outside to play while David stands with his face smashed against the mirror for hours on end, repeating phrases like ‘I am a bad boy’ or ‘I hate you’ at his own reflection. And the beatings begin.
At first, the other members of the family are concerned for Peltzer’s safety. His father, so weak and worthless against his mother’s rage that he is never even named, makes a few feeble attempts to defend his son. The brothers initially treat him as one of them, a simply unlucky one of them. But soon the mother’s brainwashing does away with those luxuries. David is no longer a member of the family. He is now ‘the Boy’, or ‘It’, a creature lower than the dog. He is beaten and burned, forced to work like a slave, to sleep under the kitchen table on a pile of newspapers and eventually in the garage. All the while the emotional abuse intensifies, the mother constantly sneering and jeering and convincing David that his life is worthless. As a child, you automatically think that your parents are the smartest people in the world. So when your mother says she wishes you were dead, who are you to argue?
Peltzer’s mother, or ‘The Bitch’, as he begins to call her, continually searches for new ways to assert her power. Eventually, she stops allowing David to eat. Do not confuse this with stops feeding David, as it is not that simple. She sorts through the garbage to make sure that there are no edible scraps. She forces him to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet every afternoon so that she can inspect it, to make sure that he hasn’t found a way to satisfy his hunger. Most of the time it is two or three days between the reward of getting to eat the leftover cereal that his brothers leave in the bottom of their bowls, but there are stretches of up to ten days without a single scrap of food to eat. Peltzer gets thinner and thinner, angrier and angrier. He starts to lash out at school, stops believing in God, and stops feeling any kind of pain.
These limitations don’t stop his mother from torturing him. After her actions become enough of a pattern that Peltzer can attempt to work around them, his mother realizes she is being outsmarted. Because he has stopped responding to physical beatings, she locks him in the bathroom with a mixture of Clorox bleach and ammonia for up to an hour at a time, in a game she calls ‘gas chamber’. Having just given birth to David’s third brother (he will eventually have a fourth, and both of these boys will be raised to hate him), she forces him to eat the contents of a used diaper. She makes him swallow teaspoons of ammonia, tears his arm from its shoulder socket, stabs him in the stomach with a carving knife.
All the while, his family, neighbors, and teachers do nothing.
The first time I read A Child Called It, I was bothered by the abuse. The acts themselves, the calculation, and the severity of it. But this time, what truly upset me was the inaction of other members of Peltzer’s life. Clearly, Mrs. Peltzer is mentally ill. How else do you hold your child’s arm down against a lit burner on the kitchen stove? She is the obvious villain, and quite a terrifying one, but she at least has insanity to blame for her actions. What about David’s brothers? Or his father? The staff of his elementary school that dismissed him as a problem child, never bothering to connect the dots between stolen food, uncontrollable anger, and an increasingly emaciated child with obvious physical wounds? Maybe what really changed is the knowledge that I now hold the responsibility that those same community members shirked. When I read the book at fifteen, I automatically saw myself in the place of the child, which was impossible to imagine. But now, I am in the place of the adult that turned away and pretended not to see a child so desperate to be rescued. It was a completely different way to experience the book.
Peltzer’s writing is simple. The book is written with the point of view, tone, and vocabulary of a child. You won’t find long, beautiful phrases between the covers of A Child Called It. Instead you will find a story that has been stripped to a skeleton. There is no need for setting description; Peltzer’s childhood consisted only of pain, hunger, and the inside of a cold garage. No time is spent on character development, because no other sides of his makind were ever revealed to him. But this simplicity is chilling. Vivid descriptions and witty turns of phrase would only distract from the book’s message: this unbelievable story has happened to a child. He never had the opportunity to fully develop his writing abilities into something flowery or jaw-dropping. We get the simple facts in short, stoic sentences of a child never allowed to bloom. If it weren’t for that, the book wouldn’t have the power that it does.
There is a downside to Peltzer’s simplicity. The book is heavy with cliché, and with repeated phrases. The book is meant for discussion groups and school lessons, so the message is far more important than the diction – but the generic language was still bothersome at times. The childlike qualities of the narrator are a double edged sword. As I said, it further twists the knife of the book’s purpose. But it also makes the book less interesting for me to read.
This brings a question to my mind. When a writer chooses to tackle a morally difficult subject, should they make the writing pretty? Should the diction be approached in the same way as a novel meant to pass the time in a beach chair? Or should these writers be excused from the ‘rules of literacy’, free to create their own voice, one that worries more about truth and weight than readability? I am equal parts literature-lover and tree-hugging human rights activist, so I have no idea how to answer this question.
I suppose this is why books are divided into genres, so that the reader can begin with expectations set in place. One should not necessarily pick up a discussion text on child abuse expecting Sylvia Plath’s poetic tragedy or Roald Dahl’s whimsy. Instead, it is important that the reader take the book for what it is – a tale of warning, both for children and for parents. If we are not careful, we can slip so easily into the pernicious roles of either David or his mother.
Since it was published in 1995, A Child Called It has been used across the country as a discussion text in classrooms, discussion and focus groups, and book clubs. In becoming a New York Times bestseller, it has accomplished what very few other ‘textbooks’ have. Through the eyes of a child, Peltzer effectively communicates to the world some of the most terrifying truths about child abuse. Although the book will be difficult for those with a weak stomach, its message is crucial. I wish that I could give this book to specific parents as assigned reading. The world can be a difficult place, and the pressures of daily life can be a struggle to handle. But stories like Peltzer’s help us to understand the importance of not taking our pain out on each other. And the importance of caring for those around us, even if they do not belong to us – every child, no matter their situation, deserves protection and care. What seems like a lifetime after learning it in Child Development, this is clearer to me than ever.
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