Better Angels
After his brother’s murder, Jacobi Wheeler finds restoration at his job at DreamBikes.
Jacobi Wheeler turned 16 last month.
He’s a tall kid. Broad-shouldered. Plays middle linebacker at Wauwatosa West, where he’s a rising junior.
Jacobi is entering adulthood with the wind in his face.
More than one in four people who share his neighborhood on the north side of Milwaukee are impoverished.
Violence is much too common. If you ask him how many siblings he has, he pauses. Thirteen, more or less. They don’t all live together.
Jacobi was close to his older brother, Ramsey. But around this time last year, Ramsey was murdered— shot in the head during what police describe as a drug deal gone bad. Ramsey was 19.
“That day was a messed-up day,” Jacobi says quietly.
Poverty. Violence. Family instability. Jacobi never asked for any of it. How do you keep those things from shaping you? He says some of his friends have already begun to despair.
They wonder what’s the point of working hard. There are people all around them who are working hard and going nowhere. They wonder what’s the point trying to do the right thing. You do the right thing and people still treat you like a threat.
“They’re asking, ‘What’s the point of even being here?’ ” Jacobi says.
“I tell them: ‘You are here for a specific reason. You have a whole life ahead of you. There’s a reason why you are here.’ ” Jacobi says he really believes this.
He wants to finish high school, go to college, play professional football and buy a home for his mother where she’ll be safe.
So how does a kid like Jacobi persevere? He’s determined. He’s hopeful. He’s willing. But how are those traits to be nurtured? What can be done to support them?
That’s the mission of DreamBikes, where Jacobi has been working for two years.
DreamBikes is a nonprofit bike shop on King Drive with an ingenious business plan: It hires young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods and trains them to refurbish donated bikes, which the shop then sells at affordable prices.
“The goal is for the teen to leave here and become a successful adult,” says Russell Jobs, who is the store’s general manager.
“To me, success is if they go on to become effective members of their community.”
This has been a banner year for the shop. Three of its former employees graduated from college, one of them
Three days after his brother’s homicide, Jacobi was back at work.
The people he works with, he says, have become some of his closest friends. They listened to him and comforted him. And work, he’s found, helps to focus the mind.
“I feel safe here,” Jacobi says.
To refurbish a bike properly requires that attention is paid to the seemingly smallest things, and this, Jacobi says, has been one of the big life lessons that he’s gained at DreamBikes.
Fixing what’s broken, restoring scrap to usefulness, takes mindfulness.
“The smallest details matter,” he says. “The smallest thing can be the most important.
“Little things matter.”