Writing Homework Help

After reading both the “Jimmy’s World” article and the article about its author, Janet Cooke, please write a 2- page summary/reaction/opinion to the article including the situation surrounding the author and her story. 

Janet Cooke, Washington Post Staff Writer 

September 28, 1980; Page A1 Jimmy is 8 years old and a third-generation heroin addict, a precocious

little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the

baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms. 

He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his

comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic

expression on his small, round face as he talks about life — clothes, money,

the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5. His

hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet, and a

striped Izod T-shirt hangs over his thin frame. “Bad, ain’t it,” he

boasts to a reporter visiting recently. “I got me six of these.” 

Jimmy’s is a world of hard drugs, fast money and the good life he believes both

can bring. Every day, junkies casually buy heroin from Ron, his mother’s

live-in-lover, in the dining room of Jimmy’s home. They “cook” it in

the kitchen and “fire up” in the bedrooms. And every day, Ron or

someone else fires up Jimmy, plunging a needle into his bony arm, sending the

fourth grader into a hypnotic nod. 

Jimmy prefers this atmosphere to school, where only one subject seems relevant

to fulfilling his dreams. “I want to have me a bad car and dress good and

also have me a good place to live,” he says. “So, I pretty much pay

attention to math because I know I got to keep up when I finally get me

something to sell.” 

Jimmy wants to sell drugs, maybe even on the District’s meanest street, Condon

Terrace SE, and some day deal heroin, he says, “just like my man

Ron.” 

Ron, 27, and recently up from the South, was the one who first turned Jimmy

on.”He’d be buggin’ me all the time about what the shots were and what

people was doin’ and one day he said, ‘When can I get off?'” Ron says,

leaning against a wall in a narcotic haze, his eyes half closed, yet piercing.

“I said, ‘Well, s . . ., you can have some now.’ I let him snort a little

and, damn, the little dude really did get off.” 

Six months later, Jimmy was hooked. “I felt like I was part of what was

goin’ down,” he says. “I can’t really tell you how it feel. You never

done any? Sort of like them rides at King’s Dominion . . . like if you was to

go on all of them in one day. 

“It be real different from herb (marijuana). That’s baby s—. Don’t

nobody here hardly ever smoke no herb. You can’t hardly get none right now

anyway.” 

Jimmy’s mother Andrea accepts her son’s habit as a fact of life, although she

will not inject the child herself and does not like to see others do it. 

“I don’t really like to see him fire up,” she says. “But, you

know, I think he would have got into it one day, anyway. Everybody does. When

you live in the ghetto, it’s all a matter of survival. If he wants to get away

from it when he’s older, then that’s his thing. But right now, things are better

for us than they’ve ever been. . . . Drugs and black folk been together for a

very long time.” 

Heroin has become a part of life in many of Washington’s neighborhoods,

affecting thousands of teen-agers and adults who feel cut off from the world

around them, and filtering down to untold numbers of children like Jimmy who

are bored with school and battered by life. 

On street corners and playgrounds across the city, youngsters often no older

than 10 relate with uncanny accuracy the names of important dealers in their

neighborhoods, and the going rate for their wares. For the uninitiated they can

recite the color, taste, and smell of things such as heroin, cocaine, and

marijuana, and rattle off the colors in a rainbow made of pills. 

The heroin problem in the District has grown to what some call epidemic

proportions, with the daily influx of so-called “Golden Crescent”

heroin from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, making the city fourth among six

listed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency as major points of entry for heroin

in the United States. The “Golden Crescent” heroin is stronger and

cheaper than the Southeast Asian and Mexican varieties previously available on

the street, and its easy accessibility has added to what has long been a

serious problem in the nation’s capital. 

David G. Canaday, special agent in charge of the DEA’s office here, says the

agency “can’t do anything about it [Golden Crescent heroin] because we

have virtually no diplomatic ties in that part of the world.” While

judiciously avoiding the use of the term epidemic, Canaday does say that the

city’s heroin problem is “sizable.” 

Medical experts, such as Dr. Alyce Gullatte, director of the Howard University

Drug Abuse Institute, say that heroin is destroying the city. And D.C.’s

medical examiner, James Luke, has recorded a substantial increase in the number

of deaths from heroin overdose, from seven in 1978 to 43 so far this year. 

Death has not yet been a visitor to the house where Jimmy lives. 

The kitchen and upstairs bedrooms are a human collage. People of all shapes and

sizes drift into the dwelling and its various rooms, some jittery, uptight and

anxious for a fix, others calm and serene after they finally “get

off.” 

A fat woman wearing a white uniform and blond wig with a needle jabbed in it

like a hatpin, totters down the staircase announcing that she is “feeling

fine.” A teen-age couple drift through the front door, the girl proudly

pulling a syringe of the type used by diabetics from the hip pocket of her

Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. “Got me a new one,” she says to no one in

particular as she and her boyfriend wander off into the kitchen to cook their

snack and shoot each other up. 

These are normal occurrences in Jimmy’s world. Unlike most children his age, he

doesn’t usually go to school, preferring instead to hang with older boys

between the ages of 11 and 16 who spend their day getting high on herb or PCP

and doing a little dealing to collect spare change. 

When Jimmy does find his way into the classroom, it is to learn more about his

favorite subject — math. 

“You got to know how to do some figuring if you want to go into

business,” he says pragmatically. Using his mathematical skills in any

other line of work is a completely foreign notion. 

“They don’t BE no jobs,” Jimmy says. “You got to have some money

to do anything, got to make some cash. Got to be selling something people

always want to buy. Ron say people always want to buy some horse. My mama say

it, too. She be using it and her mama be using it. It’s always gonna be

somebody who can use it. . . . 

“The rest of them dudes on the street is sharp. You got to know how many

of them are out there, how much they charge for all the different s—, who

gonna buy from them and where their spots be . . . they bad, you know, cause

they in business for themselves. Ain’t nobody really telling them how they got

to act.” 

In a city overflowing with what many consider positive role models for a black

child with almost any ambition — doctors, lawyers, politicians, bank

presidents — Jimmy wants most to be a good dope dealer. He says that when he

is older, “maybe about 11,” he would like to “go over to Condon

Terrace (notorious for its open selling of drugs and violent way of life) or

somewhere else and sell.” With the money he says he would buy a German

Shepherd dog and a bicycle, maybe a basketball, and save the rest “so I

could buy some real s— and sell it.” 

His mother doesn’t view Jimmy’s ambitions with alarm, perhaps because drugs are

as much a part of Andrea’s world as they are of her son’s. 

She never knew her father. Like her son, Andrea spent her childhood with her

mother and the man with whom she lived for 15 years. She recalls that her

mother’s boyfriend routinely forced her and her younger sister to have sex with

him, and Jimmy is the product of one of those rapes. 

Depressed and discouraged after his birth (“I didn’t even name him, you

know? My sister liked the name Jimmy and I said ‘OK, call him that, who gives a

fu–? I guess we got to call him something, don’t we?'”) she quickly accepted

the offer of heroin from a woman who used to shoot up with her mother. 

“It was like nothing I ever knew about before; you be in another world,

you know? No more baby, no more mama . . . I could quit thinking about it.

After I got off, I didn’t have to be thinking about nothing.” 

Three years later, the family moved after police discovered the shooting

gallery in their home, and many of Andrea’s sources of heroin dried up. She

turned to prostitution and shoplifting to support a $60-a-day habit. Soon after,

she met Ron, who had just arrived in Washington and was selling a variety of

pills, angel dust and some heroin. She saw him as a way to get off the street

and readily agreed when he asked her to move in with him. 

“I was tired of sleeping with all those different dudes and boosting

(shoplifting) at Woodies. And I didn’t think it would be bad for Jimmy to have

some kind of man around,” she says. 

Indeed, social workers in the Southeast Washington community say that so many

young black children become involved with drugs because there is no male

authority figure present in the home. 

“A lot of these parents (of children involved with drugs) are the unwed

mothers of the ’60s, and they are bringing up their children by trial and

error,” says Linda Gilbert, a social worker at Southeast Neighborhood

House. 

“The family structure is not there so they [the children] establish a

relationship with their peers. If the peers are into drugs, it won’t be very

long before the kids are, too. . . . They don’t view drugs as illegal, and if

they are making money, too, then it’s going to be OK in the eyes of an

economically deprived community.” 

Addicts who have been feeding their habits for 35 years or more are not

uncommon in Jimmy’s world, and although medical experts say that there is an

extremely high risk of his death from an overdose, it is not inconceivable that

he will live to reach adulthood. 

“He might already be close to getting a lethal dose,” Dr. Dorynne

Czechowisz of the National Institute on Drug Abuse says.”Much of this

depends on the amount he’s getting and the frequency with which he’s getting

it. But I would hate to say that his early death is inevitable. If he were to

get treatment, it probably isn’t too late to help him. And assuming he doesn’t

OD before then, he could certainly grow into an addicted adult.” 

At the end of the evening of strange questions about his life, Jimmy slowly

changes into a different child. The calm and self-assured little man recedes.

The jittery and ill-behaved boy takes over as he begins going into withdrawal.

He is twisting uncomfortably in his chair one minute, irritatingly raising and

lowering a vinyl window blind the next. 

“Be cool,” Ron admonishes him, walking out of the room. 

Jimmy picks up a green “Star Wars” force beam toy and begins flicking

the light on and off. 

Ron comes back into the living room, syringe in hand, and calls the little boy

over to his chair: “Let me see your arm.” 

He grabs Jimmy’s left arm just above the elbow, his massive hand tightly

encircling the child’s small limb. The needle slides into the boy’s soft skin

like a straw pushed into the center of a freshly baked cake. Liquid ebbs out of

the syringe, replaced by bright red blood. The blood is then reinjected into

the child. 

Jimmy has closed his eyes during the whole procedure, but now he opens them,

looking quickly around the room. He climbs into a rocking chair and sits, his

head dipping and snapping upright again, in what addicts call “the

nod.” 

“Pretty soon, man,” Ron says, “you got to learn how to do this

for yourself.”