Chapter 62
Joseph Leroy Campbell at seven was everything his name suggested: solid, loyal, physically adventurous, and possessed of a quality of stubborn kindness that was entirely his own and entirely his godfather Leroy's.
He could not be talked out of caring about people. It was simply not available to him as an option. If a child was hurt in the schoolyard, Joseph was there. If something was unfair, Joseph said so. He did not have his sister's analytical precision but he had something else: a moral instinct so clear and early that it sometimes stopped Marcus in his tracks.
'Papa,' Joseph said one evening, looking at Marcus with the full seriousness he brought to important matters. 'Why do some children have things and some children don't have things?'
Marcus set down what he was reading.
He thought about how to answer this not simplistically, but with the honesty a seven-year-old who asked real questions deserved.
'Because some people were born into situations with more,' he said. 'And some were born into situations with less. And the world hasn't yet figured out how to share fairly.'
Joseph thought about this.
'That's wrong,' he said.
'Yes,' Marcus said. 'It is.'
'What do we do about it?'
Marcus looked at his son.
'We try to change it,' he said. 'With the work we do. With how we treat people. With how we build things. The Kingston Voices programme that's part of trying to change it. Mama's design work is part of trying to change it. Grandma's whole life was part of trying to change it. Everyone does what they can from where they are.'
Joseph sat with this for a moment.
'I'm going to do something about it too,' he said. Not as a vow. As information.
'I know,' Marcus said.
He wrote in his journal: 'Joseph already knows what he's for. He doesn't have the vocabulary yet, but the direction is completely clear. I wonder if this is how it looked to my mother watching me at seven in the mango tree, already organizing everything into what mattered. I think it was. I think she saw exactly this.