BENEATH THE SKYLINE

SOME THOUGHTS ON HELPING

Deborah Good

On a Saturday in October, I was scheduled for an afternoon phone appointment with a psychologist in Indianapolis. I had already completed a questionnaire and a battery of tests about my personality, skills, and interests. Now he was going to tell me what I should do with my life. To someone feeling like a child lost in a fluorescent-lit maze of grocery store aisles, this was good news—like Mom had finally turned up in the dairy section, or I had at least found a clear sign to the exit.

But I had lost track of time at a friend’s house, did not have Doctor Fadely’s number with me, and was still in the car rushing home five minutes after I was supposed to call him, when my cell phone rang.

"Hello? This is Deborah."

"What are you doing?"

"Uhh—"

"This is Doctor Fadely," said the voice on the other line with a chuckle. He was calling me to see I why I hadn’t called him at our scheduled appointment time.

"Actually I’m rushing home to call you!" Some mixture of embarrassment and relief breathed through my nose. I pulled my car to the side and apologized; I had completely lost track of time.

"Well, that makes sense," said the doctor. "Because you can be kind of spacey sometimes . . . but we’ll get to that later."

Gee thanks. Tell me something I don’t know. For the rest of our half-hour appointment (shortened to 25 minutes by my delinquency), Doctor Fadely told me about myself. I’m intellectual, creative, independent, and relatively useless without more education. I have a lot in common with people in the arts, with geographers, with psychologists. I like to study people, he said. I am also a writer.

"You could be an artist very easily," he told me. "You’re a creative arts person. You could go off into the mountains and write the first great novel of some sort and probably be pretty happy. You could work in any number of editing and journalistic fields—and it would work—but you shouldn’t do that. Why not?"

Well, tell me.

"You have a high need—fortunately or unfortunately—to help people. You would really like to make some kind of difference with people."

I need to help people. Yes, I suppose it’s true: I am another compassionate do-gooder, just another city-church-raised liberal who wants to make an impact, maybe another white girl trying to make peace with my privilege by alleviating the pain of those oppressed and dejected for centuries. It’s one way to live, but I’m not sure it is the way to a better world.

My appointment with Doctor Fadely went on and got more specific, giving me something like direction for my future—a fascinating experience. And I was left with words spinning in my head, words I likely inherited from a family tree of teachers, preachers, counselors, and missionaries: help, serve, change lives.

To help. The entry in the dictionary is as long as my hand, from top to bottom. What does it mean?

Is it an older sister leaning over a child and his homework book, using apples to explain arithmetic? Or maybe helping is a volunteer in Kosovo, handing out blankets and listening to stories so awful the words themselves are crying?

There are the retired Mennonite men I worked with for a week in Louisiana, hanging drywall in a hurricane-wrecked house and replacing a tin roof. There’s me on my way to the subway, pulling a quarter from my pocket for a beggar. And there’s Rosa Parks, sitting when she was supposed to stand, inciting a movement, changing the law of the land for hundreds of thousands of black Americans. Or my grandparents, who moved their young family to Ethiopia and started a Bible school.

Helping is big and small, personal and structural. It can be arrogant; it can be kind. Sometimes it is both at once. It brings some good, some harm—usually one more than the other, usually in more ways than we can predict at the time. It can cause dependency. It can perpetuate inequality. It can be power over instead of power with. It can insult, incite, prove officious. These are not new ideas.

One thing I do know about helping: I should never pretend I know what is best for another person. "One is extremely lucky if one knows this for oneself. . . ," said social worker Alan Keith; "however much you can feel and think with and for another, it is [their] problem and not yours. You don’t have to face what [they are] facing. You may think that you have, or are, but you don’t know." Like I said, these are not new ideas: His talk, titled "The Art and Science of Helping," was given in 1963.

Five years later, in 1968, my parents moved to W Street in northwest Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from where Martin Luther King’s assassination had brought riots and fires to the city streets four months earlier. They would spend their next two years living at Friendship Flat, a youth community center begun by the Mennonite Church and staffed by six volunteers who lived above it.

In a conversation I had with my dad years later, he reflected that Friendship Flat did much good for the neighborhood youth. It provided stability, trusting relationships, activities that kept them out of trouble. But it also perpetuated racist stereotypes and an unhealthy dependency on the volunteers, who were foreigners—most of them white and from the country—on an all-black city block.

"It was hard for me to clearly legitimize our being there," he said. "I imagined the larger neighborhood looking in on us. Why were these six young people coming in here? What was their purpose? Unlike an institution providing a clear service—like a school or a clinic— Friendship Flat was very informal. Yes, we provided nice activities, but who said the neighborhood wanted those activities in the first place?"

I share some of Dad’s skepticism about our efforts to help and serve others. Often to help other people is to have power over them. I’ll say that again. Helping places me in a position of power. This, of course, becomes especially tricky cross-culturally and cross-racially.

Several years ago, I did some substitute teaching at a small high school in the neighborhood of Columbia Heights, near my childhood home in Washington, D.C. One day, we read a segment from Richard Wright’s Black Boy, in which a white man from the North offers young Richard a dollar for food, but Richard refuses to take it. After reading, we discussed the story.

"Was it wrong for the man to offer him a dollar?" I asked.

"No," thought the students.

"Then why did Richard refuse to take it?" Because it hurt his pride, said some. Because the white man was arrogant. Because the white man didn’t know him. Because it’s hard to accept help.

"Generally, do you like it better when you help others or when other people help you?" We went around the circle, and most of us agreed it felt far better to help than to be helped.

"In your lives, are you more often the ‘helper,’ or are you always receiving help?" With the exception of the young mothers in the circle, I was the only one who felt I spent more time helping others. I rarely must bend my pride to accept help, yet this class of mostly Latinos did so regularly. I observed how these very dynamics were playing themselves out, poignantly, as we spoke. I, only a few years older than some of those in the class, was the teacher, and they were the taught. I was white. They were not.

As Doctor Fadely suggested, I will likely spend much of my life "helping people." I know this will always be an imperfect art, but I hope to do it sensitively, creatively, and in the context of well-balanced relationships—while always keeping an eye on the larger structures in which real change happens. I hope I learn to accept help as often as I give it.

Last year, while my dad was dying of cancer, he and I (along with our whole family) relied on others’ help more than we ever had before. Some friends worried that they didn’t know the right thing to do or say. But again and again, I was grateful when they let me know they were there anyway—even when I rarely returned their letters, calls, and e-mails.

Perhaps more than anything, helping is when we remind one another that none of us is alone in this big world, and that whatever happens today—whatever changes or does not change in a difficult situation—we will be there tomorrow, too.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a writer, editor, and middle school classroom assistant. If you have thoughts on helping, if you ever feel like a child lost in a grocery store, or if you want more information about her experience with a career psychologist, she can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.