It’s not stuff just of juvenile fiction or sociological and theological theory.
First, though, the juvy notes:
The Black Book of Secrets tells of a young boy who meets up and then works for a pawnbroker of the most unusual sort: he pays money for secrets. As they enter a small village and establish their shop, they find that central in all of the sellers’ secrets is the evil land owner, lender, and otherwise filthy man who monopolizes the townspeople.
However, in spite of his insistence that all he promised to do was buy their secrets, the townspeople come to see the pawnbroker as a messiah who they’d hoped would end their troubles for them. As their frustration at his inaction mounts, he explains, “However bad the situation, I can’t change the course of things. Just be patient.”
And in fact, the evil man’s evilness does eventually come back on his head, and the townspeople rise up against him even as he is killed.
This would be “retributive justice,” writes Howard Zehr in his Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice. “We assume that offenders must receive their ‘just desserts.’ Offenders must get what is coming to them.” And if that means we can get rid of the offender, good. It is “just” that the evil monopolizer winds up dead.
The Black Book of Secrets is a bit more complex than that, however. Towards the end of the story, when the evil man himself comes to pawn away a secret, the broker welcomes him in and lends him his ear. Even he has a right to request and receive the same relief I offer anyone else, the broker explains to the wary young boy.
Zehr would call this a hopeful glance towards restorative justice, a first step in a long process of involving “the victim, the offender, and the community in a search for solutions which promote repair, reconciliation, and reassurance.” In other words, the evil monopolizer, in his seeking relief from the pain of his own story, could be turning towards right relationship with the townspeople, in a Zacchaeus sort of moment.
However, the evil man then violently steals the book in which all of the secrets are recorded and, against the urgent pleadings of the pawnbroker, picks up the broker’s pet frog, which fatally poisons him.
Is this justice? Sweet revenge? An alluring execution of the “myth of redemptive violence”? Walter Wink writes in The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millenium that according to the myth, “we need a messiah, an armed [with a frog?] redeemer, someone who has the strength of character and conviction to transcend the legal restraints of democratic institutions and save us from our enemies…. So great a threat requires … an avenger, a man on a white horse [with a frog?].”
Whatever it is, The Black Book of Secrets seems to be a reassurance that what goes around, comes around. It’s a common perspective.
Take last week, for instance. The one day that school wasn’t canceled was a parent conference day, and my one scheduled parent meeting revealed to me that I don’t enjoy being bullied.
The parents, upset by the possibility that I might limit their son’s (in my mind excessive) bathroom pass use, exercised a variety of thinly disguised threats (I was one of my principal’s “employees”; earlier in the year they nearly hired a lawyer for another situation with their son and the school–over a “petty” issue, the dad said; and “kids text and email each other to gang up on specific teachers or students,” said the dad) to convince me that they were supportive of their son’s good behavior in school and that their son can use the bathroom whenever he wants.
I must say, besides the fact that I knew they were difficult parents of a troubling student yet decided not to request their son’s other teachers or an administrator to attend the meeting, I handled the situation extremely well. A bit of pleasantry and polite listening and responding as if the threats were just friendly comments seemed to me to be the best immediate option even if it did probably give the parents the impression that I was a naive airhead.
(That’s not to say no one else ever thinks I’m an airhead or naive in any of my other environs. At the lumber store earlier on the same day of the parent conference, for example, I tried following the worker who was taking my sixteen-feet-long boards to cut in half. He had left a few of them for a second trip, and so to be helpful I finagled them onto my shoulder, didn’t see where he disappeared to, floundered around off balance and afraid of falling on the ice, and finally jumpled the boards onto a nearby pile of two-by-fours to wait until he came back to find me.)
After I thanked the parents for coming in to talk with me and they left, I desperately needed affirmation–which came to me from some other parents who dropped in, from another teacher who affirmed my team leadership, from one of my administrators who asked how the meeting went.
“I didn’t want to come in while they were here,” he said, “because that can give the parents the feeling that they’re in control and the teacher has no power or is in trouble. But I knew it was two against one up here.”
“It felt like it,” I said.
“They’re raising a monster,” he said. “Their son is going to be the high school student who is totally drunk at every party. They think he is untouchable, but he isn’t. I hate to say it, but he’s going to get what’s coming to him, and they don’t want to hear anything about it from us.”
Unfortunately, it seems, “what goes around, comes around” is inheritable.