Ben Westhoff - Little Brother

Jorell Cleveland in 2015

I hadnt seen Jorell in a couple months. It was August 2016, and hed stopped returning my texts. This was a bit frustrating, but I didnt take it personally. After all, hed turned nineteen that year, and I figured this was typical teenager stuff.

Jorell Cleveland was my little brother. The Big Brothers Big Sisters program had paired us eleven years earlier, and I had watched him grow from a shy kid with a big afro who barely stood as high as my chest to a confident, muscled young man people looked up to. We didnt share blood, but as far as I was concerned he was my family.

Our backgrounds could have hardly been more different. I grew up in a tree-canopied St. Paul neighborhood near the University of Minnesota. My mother was an entomologist and my father a doctor. Jorell lived his early years in a poor Arkansas town, and when we first met, his single-parent father was a roofer raising eight children in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother was in prison, back in Arkansas.

I first moved to St. Louis to attend Washington University. I developed an affinity for the city, and moved back there at age twenty-six for my new job at a weekly paper. Before long I felt a need to get involved in a public service program, one where I could actually make a difference. I read a news story about a Big Brothers Big Sisters program focused on children of incarcerated parents. For many children, a parents incarceration often marks the beginning of a generational cycle of crime, the article said. Having a mother in prison often disrupts a childs environment more than having a father in prison.

The article touched me, and at Big Brothers Big Sisters, they had an immediate, pressing need, particularly for male volunteers. And so after going through a background check I was assigned a match. In the early evening of June 30, 2005, I went to the Big Brothers Big Sisters offices and met my Little, a tiny eight-year-old who possessed a gigawatt smile.

Whats your name? I asked.

Jorell Marsay Cleveland, he said.

Its great to meet you, I said, extending my hand.

Nice to meet you too, he said, shaking it without making eye contact. I thought: There must be some mistake. This kid is so charming and adorable that he couldnt possibly need mentorship. People must fall at his feet. I was also introduced to his father, Joe, who seemed gregarious and appreciative of my efforts.

For our first outing together, Jorell and I ate dinner at an old-fashioned Italian restaurant called Rossinos, where the wait staff melted for him, refilling his 7UP glass continually. He couldnt have been more than fifty pounds.

Where do you go to school? I asked.

Adams, he said.

Do you like your teacher?

Yes.

What grade are you in?

Second.

It continued like this. He politely answered my questions with one-word answers, an upward inflection on the last syllable. When we said goodbye he asked when Id pick him up again and suggested, Monday? which was that same day.

Jorell craved undivided adult attention. He lived in a crowded household, in a dodgy St. Louis neighborhood called Forest Park Southeast. When I drove through the area at night, guys standing on the side of the street tried to flag me down to sell drugs. One time, when Jorells dog got off its leash, police shot and killed it.

Despite our biographical differences, we found plenty in common as we explored St. Louis together, trying new burger stands and bowling alleys, and seeing bad movies. I took him to his first Cardinals game at Busch Stadium, and got him swimming lessons at the YMCA.

Jorell could be cripplingly shy, his answers to my questions often barely audible. But he had bright eyes, an insatiable curiosity, and relentless positivity. He liked to feel the stubble on my face with both of his hands. He was game to do anything, even if it was just hanging out by the pool, listening to rap albums, or watching TV in my apartment with my tuxedo cat, Nora.

Not long after we met I went to pick him up at his home, and upon being invited inside was shocked by what I saw. He sleeps on a bare mattress, I wrote in my journal. The bedroom door is a frayed blue tarp, and his windows have been broken but never replaced. But Jorell almost never complained. One time he found a Books-A-Million gift card in his backyard, and I took him to the mall to redeem it, but the card had no value. Later, his bike was stolen. Still he didnt get angry or rant about unfairness. He just accepted life as it was. He never wanted to discuss his mother in prison, or any other hardships. I didnt press him.

A year into our pairing, Jorell told me that his family was moving to a new house in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. This was a chance for them to get away from the violence and poverty of their city neighborhood. I visited when they moved in, and I was surprised by the size of their six-bedroom home. The backyard was as big as a football field. This was late 2006, the go-go era for real estate, and Jorells dad also invested in another house in the area, which he rented out.

This seemed to be a step up for the Cleveland family. Though I didnt know much about Ferguson, a municipality of twenty-one thousand people, I had middle-class friends whod been raised in that part of the metro area, known as North County. It was the suburbs, so it had to be safer than the city, right? As I looked around, I saw an area in flux. Some houses on the block were run down, others well maintained. A cute downtown business district was just a short walk away.