A Chance in the World

Steve describes studying his features in a mirror, from his childhood into his teenage years. He is most interested in his afro, nose, forehead, blue eyes, and skin tone. He is “very fair—not white, but close” (5). He has scars on his rib cage, on one of his fingers, and on one foot. He does not know where they came from. He studies himself in the mirror because he is trying to answer certain questions. He wants to know who his parents were, and how he got the last name, Klakowicz. 

Steve relates a memory of the Andrade family. They cared for him briefly after his separation from his mother. In the memory, they are trying to get him to go somewhere in a car, but he is afraid. He associates cars with being taken away from family. When he resists for too long, they leave him. He cries and pleads with them to come back while he sits alone on the porch, even though they are gone. When they return hours later, he hasn’t moved, which amuses them.

In August of 1972, a social worker comes to get Steve when Mrs. Andrade says she can no longer care for him. He believes that the social worker doubted the story, and that Mrs. Andrade was interested in adopting a different boy that she was already housing. Steve’s nose is broken, he is malnourished and underweight, and he has impetigo. When his social worker reports Steve’s physical condition, the social work agency takes Steve and the other boy out of the home and the Andrades are no longer allowed to take in children.

When Steve is five, he remembers riding in a car with a social worker named Patti Southworth to visit the Robinson family. Steve “yearned for a new home, a place where the family actually wanted to keep me” (10). He meets two nice people, Willie and Betty. Willie shows Steve how to dribble a basketball, and Betty gives him a cookie. As he leaves with Patty, Steve thinks: “This was the place. I had found a home” (12). 

Steve summarizes some of the critical political events from August, 1972. The Watergate scandal was linked to the Nixon administration, and Henry Kissinger’s meeting with a North Vietnamese became a national controversy. 

When Steve officially comes to live with the Robinsons, Betty welcomes him (in front of Patti) and gives him a Big Wheel motorcycle to ride. After Patti leaves, Betty stops smiling. She takes Steve inside and tells him that he is going to have to do chores. She also reveals that she has a 16-year-old son named Reggie, who smiles at Steve in a way that makes Steve think something is wrong. Reggie pushes Steve and hits him when Steve does the dishes wrong. When Steve tells Betty, she ignores him and tells him to keep working. For the next 30 minutes, Reggie watches Steve work, and through “a brutal process of trial and error, I learned how to wash dishes. I also learned how to be afraid” (17).

Although there are more than nine rules presented over the course of Part 1, Steve presents nine “Robinson Rules” that give them permission to beat him, state that he is ugly and worthless, and that “You are here to wait on us hand and foot” (18).

The Robinsons are a violent, dysfunctional family. Over the years, Willie and Betty taken stewardship of nearly 40 foster children. In addition to Reggie, they have a son named Eddie. He doesn’t live with them, but when he visits, they treat him almost as badly as they treat Steve. They also have an adopted daughter, Lisa, who is four years younger than Steve. Willie frequently beats the children. He whips Steve with a belt, even after he brings home a report card with straight As. He will use any excuse for a beating, often claiming that he just feels that Steve has done something wrong, even if he can’t prove it. Willie is illiterate and insecure about his inability to read. He resents any signs of curiosity in Steve. No one is safe from Willie’s anger. During a road rage incident, Steve watches him get out of the car in traffic and threaten a taxi driver with a machete after the man uses a racial slur. 

Steve begins stealing as a way of coping with his miserable situation at the Robinson house. He steals food because he weighs only 40 pounds at seven years old. He smuggles whatever he can find into the basement so he can eat it later, unobserved. He also begins reading, taking solace in books that he sneaks books home from the library, but the Robinsons beat him when they catch him reading. He makes a space for himself under the stairs in the basement, which allows him to hear when someone is coming.

When he can, he prefers to read at the house of Mrs. Blake, a nearby neighbor. One day he is reading on the porch when another neighbor, a Jewish woman named Mrs. Levin, asks what he is reading. Steve is reading an Encyclopedia Brown book. He gravitates towards stories of resourceful children and animals that have to find their way out of tricky, dangerous situations. That night, Mrs. Levin brings a full box of books to the Robinsons, and Steve stores them in the cellar.

When Steve was one and a half, a babysitter wrote, “Dropped Steve off at the latest family his mother is boarding him out to…he cried his heart out…this little boy doesn’t have a chance in the world” (31). The stories in the books help him escape the prison of the Robinson house. The book Watership Down gives him what he calls “a model for dealing with the Robinsons” (32). He empathizes with the rabbits, who have a hard time adjusting to the dangers of their new home.

On July 14, 1973, Steve gets a washcloth for Betty. She sees a yellow stain on the rag and accuses him of urinating on it. She hits him in the head with a brush and he starts bleeding. She holds his head underwater in the sink to try to stop the bleeding and shouts at him. She calls a part-time nurse named Edith to take Steve to the hospital. Betty orders Steve to claim that he fell out of a shopping cart and hit his head. Steve receives many stitches and tells the story about the shopping cart to everyone who treats him. A woman named Nurse Nancy stares at him. She calls two doctors who come and examine him again. They notice that he is tender in the spot where Betty kicked him. Then she takes him upstairs in a wheelchair to a place where “hurt children come to get better” (41).

Steve admits that Betty hurt him. Years later he learns that everyone who treated him at St. Luke’s suspected that Betty was lying. To buy time, the doctors keep him at the hospital for a few more days. They call a doctor named William Downey, who has cared for the Robinsons as their primary pediatrician. They don’t know that Betty has already called Downey, who has agreed to support her story. When the Robinsons take Steve home, Betty makes him clean up his own blood on the floor. After a month, Patti Southworth—who knows the story about the hospital—files a report stating that the Robinsons are a loving family and that they are providing a foundation that she hopes will make Steve suitable for someone to adopt. 

In the summer, the Robinsons reshingle their house. Steve offers to help one of the workers—a man named George—by gathering the old shingles that fall off the roof and putting them in the dumpster. The crew gives him a hard hat, and he works with them for several days. He learns how to use a hammer and screwdriver, and the crew’s dedication to detail impresses him. George understands that something is wrong in the Robinson house. He tells Steve never to stop reading and reassures him that he will find a way out of his situation. Steve cries when the job ends. 

Steve believes that his actual family will arrive at any time and save him from the Robinsons. When Steve is 11, he searches for his father. Betty tells him that after his father died, they burned his body and placed a rock on top of his grave. When Steve asks Eddie, he says that there was a boxer named Kenny Pemberton who died like that, but he doesn’t believe that he was Steve’s father.

On a field trip to the library, Steve hunts for newspaper articles about a boxer named Kenny Pemberton, but he doesn’t know when he lived, or when he died. He goes to City Hall and requests a death certificate for Kenny. A clerk named Charlie tells him that Kenny was a good man, no matter what Steve might read or hear about him. He finds that August 2, 1972 was the date of Kenny’s death. At the New Bedford Library, he searches the microfiche archives for the day of Kenny’s death, but there is nothing about him. A librarian sees Steve crying in frustration and tells him that Kenny’s obituary wouldn’t have come out until the August 3 newspaper. The article says “Boxer Kenny Pemberton Is Slain in Fall River” (60).

Steve does not believe that Kenny is his father, but the story of his death—as it is reported, the result of a bar fight—intrigues him. He reads another story about someone breaking into the funeral home and setting Kenny’s body on fire. Steve cannot imagine what Kenny might have done to enrage someone so badly. Outside the library, he sees a bronze statue of a man carrying a harpoon—The Whaleman’s Memorial. He feels a kinship with the whaler, knowing that the whalers could not afford to stop hunting whales, no matter the risk, and he vows to keep searching for his father. 

Steve wants to go to Boston College, so he becomes an excellent student in the hopes that it will help him. On his first day of high school, he walks to school with a friend named Duane Nelson. After school, he tries to meet Duane to walk home but takes a wrong turn and gets lost for two hours. When he gets home late, Willie beats him and demands to know where he was. Steve, for once, refuses to answer. Willie holds Steve’s hands over the flames of the stove, burning him badly. When Steve still refuses to answer his question, Willie puts him in the car, then joins him. He has two hunting rifles and an orange hunting jacket. Steve understands that if he doesn’t tell Willie why he was late, Willie will shoot him and claim it was a hunting accident. When Willie suggests that Steve might have been at a girl’s house, he agrees. He is ashamed that he gives in and lies but is too frightened to defy Willie any more that night. 

Steve joins a college-preparation program called Upward Bound, part of Southeastern Massachusetts University. The program director is a woman named Ruby Dottin. Ruby believes that her Christian mission is to help children. To apply to college, Steve needs Betty’s signature. She refuses to help him with the paperwork and tells him that he is never going to college. Steve gets a new social work case manager named Jose Botelho. With college in mind, Steve tells him that he wants to leave the Robinson home because they discourage his academic successes. Jose tries to make Steve’s case to Betty, but she resists and complains to Jose’s supervisor. Three weeks later, he is no longer Steve’s caseworker and Steve is no closer to college.

When Steve is a sophomore, a woman named Heather Pope becomes his caseworker. Steve has grown desperate enough to escape the Robinsons that he tells Heather and her supervisor, Tom Amisson, everything they have done to him. Heather and Tom are horrified at Steve’s abuse, but they cannot remove Steve from the home unless the Robinsons come to the office for a review, which has not happened in years. This time they are successful. At the meeting, they tell the Robinsons that they will no longer pay them to care for Steve, knowing that they may free Steve by removing the Robinsons’ financial incentives for keeping him. When Steve gets home, Willie has laid a rope, a leather strap, and a box of salt on the table. He tells Steve to go to the cellar to wait for him. 

Two days later, Steve shows Heather how badly Willie beat him. She tells him that he has to file a “51A” (79) form, which will start an official investigation into his mistreatment. The 51A will mean he gets to leave, but he will also have to return to the Robinson home after filing it, and they will know what he has done while the investigation begins.

The Robinsons then begin making threatening phone calls to Heather. Their harassment is so extreme that she asks to be removed from the case. Her replacement is a man named Mike Silvia. Knowing that they are under scrutiny, the Robinsons no longer beat Steve, but they are emotionally and mentally tortuous. They refuse to feed him, and they tear up the books from Mrs. Levin. Betty tells him constantly that she knows where his real parents are, but that she’ll never reveal it. They also make him sleep outside.

On December 15, Steve has a psychological evaluation whose results are grounds to remove him from the home on December 30, 1983. On the morning of the 28th, Reggie beats him badly. Steve leaves the house and makes it to Mike Silvia. Mike takes him back to the Robinsons, where Steve defies them by going to the basement to get his books. Before he leaves, he tells Betty: “God is going to take care of you” (90).