Little Brother
It's hard to imagine what it must be like to grow up as a black child with seven siblings and a mother in jail, surrounded by the influences of poverty, drugs, and gun violence on the streets of St. Louis – unless you have lived it yourself or become close to somebody who has.
I haven't.
That's why my attention peaked when a college friend of mine shared that he was writing a book about just this, called “Little Brother.”
Ben Westhoff and I had been classmates at Washington University in St. Louis. Like many students at the school, we were smart white kids from relatively privileged families. We focused on college life and paid no attention to what was going on in the "bad" parts of town.
When Ben was 28 years old, he was again living in St. Louis and joined the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. The program focused on providing mentorship to kids who had an incarcerated parent, and Ben was paired with 8-year-old Jorell Cleveland.
Jorell and Ben formed an instant and lasting bond, sharing weekends together to go to movies, listen to music, or just have fun. When Ben moved to New York City for a couple of years, he flew Jorell to spend a summer with him and attend a YMCA camp. When Ben got married and had kids of his own, Jorell continued to spend time with them like family back in St. Louis.
Eleven years after they met, when Jorell was 19 years old, Ben got a call from an unknown number. He answered. It was the mother of Jorell's girlfriend who asked him to sit down. "Jorell has been shot," she said. "He's dead."
What follows in “Little Brother” is Ben's search for the truth. Starting from a place of wanting to find the killer to bring peace to Jorell's family, Ben put on his professional hat as an investigative journalist. What unraveled was a tortuous discovery into the depths of Jorell's life that Ben had never known when Jorell was alive.
“Little Brother” is a personal story of love and heartbreak. It is also a window into a world shaped by the intricate web of racism, guns, drugs, poverty, and violence.
I will never experience life as Jorell did. I may never even become close to somebody who has. But through “Little Brother,” I got a glimpse of what that life is actually like. The way it shapes a person's world – a person's outlook – a person's actions. There are stories inside the pages of “Little Brother” that will replay in my mind forever.
If you care even the tiniest bit about understanding the world outside of your own privileged box, read “Little Brother.” You'll be glad you did.
Little Brother is available on Amazon for $27.99