A chess match he can’t lose

His Next Move
For a Young Washingtonian, Life Is A Chess Match He Can’t Afford to Lose

By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 7, 2008; Page C01

He is already one move behind. He’s overslept on the morning of his big chess tournament. So Marte Garner slips on his bluejeans and a white T-shirt and races through his Barry Farms apartment. He passes his rook, his little brother, and his bishop, his older one. His mother, the king, is rushing, too, on her way to work. The pawn whispers goodbye and pushes out the red door, racing for another chance to play the game of his life: survive and be among the last pieces standing.

“I’m a pawn,” he says happily a few days earlier. “A pawn has power. You can never tell what a pawn will do next. A pawn can take anybody on the board.”

“I would — what do you call that word? — sacrifice myself for my family,” says the 15-year-old. “If my mother was in danger, I would put myself in front of her so she doesn’t get hurt. I would sacrifice myself for my mother.” And he is adamant that his mother is the king, the most important piece on the board, not the queen. Without the king, the game is over.

His life has become a chess game, and he has become a piece on its board. Chess has helped him frame his world. Chess is like life, the teachers at the rec center keep telling him. Chess, they tell him, is a mental game of transformation and survival. A game in which the weak could become strong and the strong could end up alone. All pieces on the board and in life, no matter how small, are significant, have their own power. Just because you may think you are a pawn, they tell him, doesn’t mean you can’t one day be king.

The words are as valuable as gold. Repeated every day in the Benning Park rec center’s after-school program until he and the other students begin to believe them. A pawn could rise, despite his lot in life, despite his background, despite weak schools and dangerous neighborhoods where other pieces lurk, places where you could be minding your own business, moving across the board, then bam! — just like that — another piece tries to take you down.

Marte knows. He has burdens no young pawn should have to bear. In real life, pieces have fallen around him.

“My father was shot and killed when I was 1.” He continues, without emotion: “My cousin got shot in the leg and arm. My uncle was killed when I was 10. Two boys, my role models who kept me out of trouble, died two years ago.”

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