Andre Woodberry worked this summer at Camp Harbor View. (Wendy Maeda/ Globe Staff)
Young Boston man gets a village of support
By Linda Matchan, Globe Staff | August 19, 2007
It's been a sweet summer for 19-year-old Andre Woodberry of Dorchester. He won the "Best Youth Filmmaker" award at the Roxbury Film Festival. He found a summer job doing what he loves most, working with children. He was accepted into Hampshire College in Amherst on a full scholarship.
"My spirits are, like, the highest high," beamed Woodberry, a poet and artist who has worked as a teen docent at the Museum of Fine Arts. "Things started, like, dropping into my lap."
Though his accomplishments are impressive, they wouldn't be exceptional in Boston's more affluent suburbs, where high achievers are as common as overbooked SAT prep courses. But Woodberry was, to put it mildly, disadvantaged. He grew up in a tough part of Boston. His father died when he was 9, and he has had little contact with his mother. The grandmother who raised him died two years ago. He was homeless for three months last winter.
What sets Woodberry apart from so many of his peers in rough Boston neighborhoods has been the presence of a loving grandparent and a strong support system -- teachers, mentors, the Boys & Girls Club, among others -- who never let him flag. This is a real-life story about that proverbi al village that raised a child, and about that child -- now 6-foot-4, with dreadlocks and tattoos -- who chose to welcome strangers into his life as family and accept their good will.
"I'm agnostic and all, but I can say I'm blessed for being able to do the networking that I do," Woodberry said. "I don't like to seem like the sort of person who always needs it, but when the hand is out, I always grab for it."
Woodberry is modest and surprisingly shy considering his imposing size and athlete's build. He is working this summer at Camp Harbor View, a day camp for disadvantaged urban children on Boston Harbor's Long Island, and seems more at ease high-fiving his campers and playing Rock Paper Scissors than talking about himself. He loves the camp, he says, because he thinks he can be a role model to the children.
"I know where they're coming from," he said. "Gandhi once said, 'Be the change you want to see in the world.' I'm doing it one step at a time."
He has taken a lot of knocks in his life. His mother has been on the margins of his life, and he won't say much about her other than this: "You can say I'm pretty independent." Asked how many siblings he has, he has to stop and think. "There are about six of us," he said, after counting. "Three of them are half-siblings."
When he was 3 he went to live with his grandmother, Pearlean Woodberry. "She meant the world to me," he said. A woman with high standards, she took him to church, showed him how to cook Southern dishes, and imparted her principles of how to get along in the world. "She said, 'It's one thing to be yourself, another to be bilingual,' " he recalled. "She meant you have to speak different ways with different people -- one way with friends, another with elders."
She also encouraged him to join the Boys & Girls Club, where he quickly caught the eye of staff members, said Daphne Griffin, executive director of the Blue Hill club. He loved to draw, especially cartoon characters, which she describes as "phenomenal." He wrote poetry. He played basketball. Griffin says he had an easy way of interacting with other children. Soon he was getting leadership awards and making speeches on behalf of the club.
Linda Whitlock says she still gets goose bumps thinking about a speech he made two years ago at a club fund-raising event before an audience of 500 corporate and philanthropic leaders.
"When most people see me, they see an athlete, or sometimes just a tall African-American man," he said, introducing himself. "When you first saw me today I bet you didn't expect that I was an artist and a poet, did you?"
"There really was a collective gasp from the audience," she said. "We all realized he was holding a mirror up to our faces."
An indifferent student at Jeremiah E. Burke High School, Woodberry flourished in other ways. His poetry evolved into spoken-word performance art, and he used that forum to lament the street violence around him. He did airbrush art on T-shirts and sold them.
The Boys & Girls Club connected him to other organizations, including the Boston Center for Community and Justice, where he participated in youth leadership programs. They introduced him to Jonathan Davis, the CEO of a real estate development firm, who first met Woodberry at a club event and got a call from him a few weeks later, asking him to have lunch.
"John is one of the best people I've ever encountered," Woodberry said. "He tells me what to do, what not to do. He's a cool guy -- a cool guy in a business suit."
"Andre is a really wonderful kid, someone who is a real leader," said Davis. "And he's had a really brutal personal story."
A few days after Woodberry gave that speech, his grandmother died unexpectedly. "It was awful," he said quietly. "It was like, 'What am I going to do now?' "
He turned to his surrogate family, the Boys & Girls Club. Staff gave him money for food, clothes, even art supplies. "When your caregiver passes, you can either be resilient and continue moving, or fall into disarray," Griffin said. "He went through his mourning and his pain, but at the same time he was really looking ahead. He said, 'My grandmother would want it that way.' "
Deciding that Jeremiah E. Burke School wasn't a good fit, he transferred to the evening school of Boston Day and Evening Academy in Roxbury and began to turn his grades around, says Margie Samp, the school's senior and alumni coordinator. Reluctantly he moved in with his mother, but after about a year, he said, "things didn't work out; there was some friction."
He stayed briefly with an older brother who lost the apartment two months later for reasons Woodberry won't discuss.
"He left with the clothes on his back," Griffin said. "He was bouncing around with this little duffel bag." For three months last winter he was homeless, sleeping a few nights at a friend's house, a few nights at an uncle's.
Still, he was president of the student government and worked mornings as a janitor at Wentworth Institute of Technology. "He'd go to work at 7 a.m. . . . then come to school and stay there till the building got locked," Samp said.
Dreams of college were quickly fading; he couldn't see how he'd pay for food, let alone tuition. He talked to an Air Force recruiter, though Samp and Griffin kept him focused on college, helping him with applications and taking him on college visits.
A turning point came with his senior class project -- an assignment to spend a semester learning about a topic that was personally important to him. Homelessness was now on his radar screen.
"I had my experience, and I thought it was time to give homeless people their voice, to get them to step up," he says. His 11-minute video, "What It's Like to Be Homeless in Massachusetts," is a series of conversations with homeless men and women in the Boston area and Springfield -- people he says who are about as much a part of most citizens' daily consciousness as "a pole on the street." Samp encouraged him to enter it in the Roxbury Film Festival.
In the meantime, he is living for the summer in a rented room in a Dudley Square apartment secured by his mentor Davis, with the help of an "anonymous funding source," Davis said. The room holds pretty much everything Woodberry owns, which isn't much: his paints, his clothes, some paper plates, a framed photo of his father, the bedroom furniture his grandmother gave him.
What he sees, though, is a lot of possibilities. He'll start Hampshire College at the end of the month on a James Baldwin scholarship, one of nine full scholarships the school offers to talented, underprivileged students. He might study forensics or learn more about film.
"And my heart is definitely in music," he says, beaming. "But I'll follow whatever blows my way."