Allan Appel Photo
Henry Green escaped the gang life, but still got shot in the stomach.
Henry Green asked young survivors of the city’s meaner streets to write their dream vision of New Haven. They came up mainly with nightmares.
It was only the first draft.
Henry Green is a 2008 graduate of Co-Op High School, where the techniques he learned as a chorus and theater major are helping him lead young people through music and self expression to avoid identifying with gangs, the streets, and the violence that inevitably ensues.
He learned how to do that firsthand. As a kid he was “influenced by gangs,” he said. He later got arrested on a weapons charge. Most recently he was shot in the stomach; he’s waiting for a stomach transplant.
Meanwhile, he has made helping other kids avoid that fate the centerpiece of his life.
William Torres and Solomon Green.
With a genial smile at his apartment in the Annex, he led a group of 10 high school-aged kids, including William Torres of New Haven Academy, in an exercise Saturday afternoon to prepare them for a spoken-word concert at the Church on the Rock on Dec. 17.
The group is called “Worldwide.” It has given performances before at open microphone settings around town. The Church on the Rock concert will be their first performance for middle-school age kids, many of whom are at risk and deeply impressionable, Green explained.
There was an air of fun in the room Saturday, but also of responsibility, as the kids wrote and revised their eight-couplet, 16-line raps on the “prompt” (or theme) of “I dreamed New Haven was …”
Green sat in the circle with the kids. A stand with several I.V. drips was visible in the corner. Another tube was draped over Green’s left leg.
Those are part of Green’s story, too.
“The main reason violence happens is we don’t understand what’s happening to each other. We use the hip-hop arts” to express and to communicate, he said.
He knows whereof he speaks.
Although he was never officially a gang member himself, Green said, between the ages of 13 and 16 “I was heavily influenced by gangs. All my friends were [gang members]. A lot of Crips. I was surrounded by bad people.”
That led to a felony conviction when Green was 17 for possession of a deadly weapon, a large knife he was picked up carrying when he lived in Newhallville. He’s now 20 years old. He’s on conditional probation because of his age; if he violates that probation he can do three years or more of time, he said.
He left that life. But a year ago, as Green was walking down Shelton Avenue in his former neighborhood, a 15-year old shot him in the stomach at point-blank range.
He didn’t know any of the people, Green said. The shooting was a gang initiation.
The serious stomach wound landed him in a hospital for five months. “I had to learn how to walk and how to smile again,” he said.
When he came back to the community, “People asked: ‘Is this kid an enemy because he tried to murder you?’ I put a lot of thought into it. I said, ‘I wished that kid [had been] in Worldwide.’”
Once he recovered, Green said, he put his heart into his program, which involves kids “stamping their own identity” through the arts so they aren’t vulnerable to the lure of gang identity.
Because of his health and the pending operation, he took a hiatus from his third semester at Gateway, where he is studying to be a social worker.
With a deft touch, Green Saturday called on the Worldwide group members, a floating cast that has been meeting for at least a year, to read their lines.
Although Green did not ask them to put their poetry into biographical context, most of the kids volunteered personal background before reading.
For example, William Torres, who goes to the New Haven Academy, said he was born in Puerto Rico, came from the island straight to live with his grandmother in the “Jungle.” That’s the name used to describe the tough, heavy-on-the-concrete Church Street South housing complex across from Union Station.
He said plenty of drug dealing goes on there. He has been robbed at least twice. Once he was playing ball and a kid who was high came up and punched him in the face. Torres struggled not to retaliate and has succeeded. So far. He said his school to him is everything, the refuge he goes to every day.
Cynthia Green and Baby Leila.
Here are the opening lines of his dream: “I looked up at the night and I didn’t see any stars. I dreamed New Haven a place you could pass through. Without someone tryin’ to blast you.”
A 15-minute discussion ensued on what it means for a city not to have a firmament of stars above it.
Cynthia Green is Henry’s sister. She and another brother, Solomon, helped Henry establish Worldwide. Her 6‑month-old niece Leila put a smile on the writers’ faces. But the lines they churned out continued to be, well, grim.
Even Cynthia’s. There was a discussion, especially among Cynthia and two other girls in the group, on how when you leave your house in Newhallville, you have to wipe away the love or joy you might have felt in your home. You have pressure, Cynthia said, to put on a street face.
Here’s the way it was expressed in two of her couplets: “We are suffering and the oxygen is thin here. There’s a fee attached to every breath.”
Henry Green paused here and took a quick census. Everyone agreed that in the inner city there is anger and despair, almost like an atmosphere in the air. In lingo rich in metaphor and simile, he said, “It’s like stepping into a shower after someone has used it, and heat comes up.”
His brother Solomon added a corollary: that when you meet up with friends, that’s where the anger is permitted to come out, as in, Let’s do something bad.
“When I walked out on Shelton, I had to muffle my joy,” Cynthia said.
As she took Baby Leila in her arms for a dandle, another girl added, “When we walked out the door, I felt my heart drop to my feet.”
Adam Walker, a friend of Green from Church on the Rock, came to help facilitate the workshop, Walker told the group: You were asked to compose lines of a dream of New Haven. “Yours [Cynthia’s] was closest to a dream. The others, nightmares.”
Worldwide members Allen Thomas, Jr. and James Pierson.
The room fell silent. Then there was an audible recognition. Fingers snapped.
“We’re listening to the pain and anger. I need to hear hope,” Walker said.
Green said that the kids for whom the group will perform are well-acquainted with the bad stuff that occurs all around them. They need to hear hope. “I feel Worldwide is to uplift these kids.”
The challenge Green and now Walker offered the kids in the room: How to be positive yet authentic not only in their music but also the conduct of their lives.
“You’re all talented. What can you do with your music? Don’t do a corny positive ‘Don’t do drugs song,’” Henry Green said.
The young lyricists set to work again. Torres and James Pierson took out their cell phones to do the composing. Another group chose the old fashioned way to write rap, with pens and pencils in notebooks.
Henry Green set to composing anew himself. Baby Leila made amusing noises. Cynthia Green took the baby out to change a diaper. The atmosphere was oddly relaxed but tense at the same time.
“God Took The Guns Right Out Of Our Pants”
Ten, 15 minutes elapsed. If it took some nerve to be the first person to read the rapping couplets of a nightmare, it took even more to avoid the corniness of performing lines of a positive dream.
Henry Green read his lines first: “I dreamed there were basketball courts with hoops from Dixwell to Whalley Avenue. I dreamed God took the guns right out of our pants. And the only thing we took a shot at was another chance.”
Jordan Young tipped back the brim of the bright red baseball cap he was wearing as he listened to others’ contributions. Then he cautioned against removing the nightmares. “I feel you should write some of that bad stuff. My little cousin got killed,” he said, referring to Quelly Banks, the 13-year-old shot to death in West River on Oct. 23. He said he never got a chance to know his cousin.
The rap will have to include themes like this, Young said. “New Haven is a nightmare.” He added that he also wants to stop the stereotypes.
The consensus was to include both aspects of life. Walker advised to lead with the negative and show with creativity how the positive emerges and can become a force for change.
In short, keep it real.
Green said he is religiously motivated to be upbeat and to be positive and forgiving.
He said he was going down the negative road before he got shot. He has recommitted to it since.
As to the mix of nightmare and dream, Green paused and nodded to Jordan Young. “The positive has to outweigh the negative. But we’ll not be fluffy clouds.”
Green said he couldn’t stand clouds.
The concert at Church on the Rock takes place on Dec. 17 at 2 p.m. at 95 Hamilton St. Green said it will be the holiday concert for the kids.