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The following story was published in The New York Times, January 18, 1998
He had marvelous hands, magical hands. DeWitt White grew up poor in a Bronx neighborhood where piano lessons, not to mention pianos, were in short supply. But at 12, he discovered classical music and a prodigious talent for playing it.
By 15, he had played in student performances at Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, the New York Botanical Garden, performed so beautifully that he silenced and shamed those who judged him by his baggy jeans, his wild hair, his dark skin. He was raw, but his playing had a power, a passion, that portended greatness.
In school, he lacked discipline; at the piano, he could sit for seven hours straight. Through music he escaped troubles at home, troubles at school; he made sense of a world that seemed profoundly unfair. He had been born into a hard life, and in his teens, when his mother sickened and died, it only got harder.
He had a spark that prompted teachers, friends and counselors to reach out to him. One teacher said he made her believe in God: how else to explain a wellspring of beauty from such barren terrain? His talent, they thought, would be enough to save him from the drugs, violence and hopelessness that suck young black males in like a black hole. He believed it too. Music, he said, would be his way out of the ghetto.
At some point, he stopped believing. Most of the plagues of New York City-AIDS, homelessness, drugs, violence-came to roost, like crows, in DeWitt's life. In the last year, he became an itinerant, bouncing from borough to borough like a pinball, like nobody's business, which is just what he was.
The Monday before Thanksgiving found DeWitt, at 17, selling drugs on a desolate Staten Island street. Before midnight, he was dead of a gunshot wound in the back, one of the city's 767 homicides last year, one of 15 in the 120th Precinct.
DeWitt White fell through the cracks. For a parentless child, being loved by everyone could not compensate for belonging to no one. The system could not substitute for family. From one perspective, if anyone should have made it, it was DeWitt. He...