All God's Children (Fox Butterfield) Book Report - Essay Example

10th May 2006 All God's Children - Book Report Willie Bosket is considered by many to be New York's most dangerous inmate. With his life a never-ending rage, Willie is kept in near-solitary confinement within three cells, incarcerated for five years for a casual double murder on the New York City Subway at age 15. But essentially he is serving the remainder of his life in prison, for a number of violent attacks on guards and staff. The story is documented in All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence by award winning writer Fox Butterfield. All God's Children is an exceptionally well written and finely researched book, detailing how violence in the African American community and primarily in the Bosket family, saw roots from the violence that was the norm in South Carolina, where the Boskets came from. It is the sobering story of Willie Bosket's family, from his ancestors down to his parents and siblings, explaining how families can be doomed when they remain outside mainstream society and who have no access to opportunity or given any hope. Butterfield does a fine job describing the criminal justice system as it relates to children and how we have come to treat 12 and 13 year old children like adults. In July 1962, while Willie was still in the womb, his father, Butch, stabbed two men in the heart in a Milwaukee pawnshop. Willie's mother, Laura gave birth to him in Harlem, three months before Butch was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders. Willie did not learn his father's history or whereabouts until he was seven years old. By then, Willie had stolen groceries and assaulted an old woman. By age 8, Willie was described as a human nuclear chain reaction, someone very unpredictably violent and aggressive. When he threw a typewriter out of a school window, just missing a pregnant teacher, he was expelled from school and sent to Bellevue for observation. His institutional life had begun. He was diagnosed as depressed. By the time he was 15, Willie claimed he had committed 2,000 crimes, including 200 armed robberies and 25 stabbings. They culminated in seven violent weeks in 1978, when he kicked another boy off a roof to his death, and then murdered two men during subway robberies. Six factors existed in the Bosket family that fuelled this level of violence - alcoholism, physical abuse, sexual abuse, incest, rejection, and neglect. Since the victims of this abuse found it difficult to transfer their anger back at their family, they turned their rage outwards on society. It seemed as though the only way they had learned to fight back was with either weapons or with their bare hands. One of the saddest situations included Butch and the fact that he had raped his girlfriend's 6 year-old daughter, Kristin. The girlfriend's name was Donna, a weak-willed woman, who had actually ignored her daughter's cries during the rape. In the end, because she allowed it to continue, she had lost custody of both Kristin and her twin brother, Matthew. She was so taken by Butch that she seemed to care more about him than her own children. Butterfield shows the weaknesses that existed within the family. This book seamlessly ties two issues together. On the one hand, it is a fascinating and detailed true crime study of Willie Bosket and on the other hand it's a study of the origins of violence in America. With a surprisingly detailed research, the author was able to trace Willie Bosket's ancestry back to his slave ancestors, and follow the escalating evolution of violence and criminality in each succeeding generation of the Bosket family. The book begins in pre-revolutionary era with a study of white violence in the region of North Carolina where Willie's ancestors were enslaved. The author persuasively argues that the primary origin of black violence is the tradition of white violence that was transferred to them from their former slave owners. Butterfield contends that the white Southern mentality of easily aggrieved honor has made its way through time and the descendants of slaves, transformed into the similar hair-trigger culture of inner-city streets in modern America. He traces the Bosket family to Edgefield, South Carolina, the home of Rep. Preston Brooks, who nearly beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate. Butterfield shows that Southern society considered "manhood" by the willingness to use violence in defense of one's honor. "Honor" is defined as reputation, especially the reputation of being someone who cannot be insulted with impunity. Butterfield argues that even "field hands" or blacks of the lowest class appeared to imitate the white man's penchant with avenging "disrespect." In the era of slavery the blacks could only avenge "disrespect" among their own kind. Northern ghettos are filled with black youths who murdered people for simply looking at them the wrong way or showing disrespect. Blacks in the South also learned the low value of black life. Butterfield writes that very rarely was a black punished with any severity for killing another black. Quite often a plantation owner could go to the jail and request the sheriff to release a murderer so he could work in the field. The South has been known as the land of hot tempers since the days before the war. To this day, Southerners are far more easily insulted than Northerners. Butterfield says that Willie is not an aberration within the Bosket family, but rather the latest in a long line of brutal, exceptionally intelligent malefactors who were driven by circumstances, racism, and a distinctly American craving for respect by any means necessary. All God's Children is a true story about human failure. Fox Butterfield detailed both the external forces and the internal forces and gave insight into the perpetuating violence among the Bosket men. He included psychological, race, and institutionalization. The impacts of their experiences due to these forces are both interesting and heartbreaking. Although the book's focus is on how Willie, the youngest Bosket, came to be the violent person he is today, great detail is given to his father Butch. These two men share strikingly similar beginnings and life circumstances. These seemingly parallel lives of both Willie and Butch create a sense of uneasiness with the reader, especially because the two men never met! In 1979, Willie Bosket became known due to the passing of the first law in the United States which allows for teenagers who commit murder to be tried and punished as adults. New York has nicknamed this law the Willie Bosket Law. Willie, who has been incarcerated in New York since 1978, is considered to be the most dangerous man in America. Butterfield does an excellent job of tracing the family's history back to the antebellum South, and in identifying the precipitating factors of criminal behavior. References Butterfield, Fox (1996). All God's Children. The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence. Harper Perennial. Read More