Lullabies for Little Criminals

One of the primary themes is the idea of innocence being lost. In the beginning of the novel, Baby is twelve and very aware that her childhood innocence is a valuable thing. Despite the iniquitous and often violent environment that surrounds her, she clings to her innocence like a life raft. This is what allows her to not let the knowledge of Jules’s heroin use drown her. In the first section, he refers to heroin as “chocolate milk” (10) in an attempt to shield Baby from the reality of what he’s doing. Although Baby knows what he’s referring to, her innocence allows her to accept him how he is and love him unconditionally. Concerning this idea, she says, “When you’re young enough, you don’t know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair” (184).

In the beginning, Baby distances herself from people and situations that try to take her innocence. This can be seen when Marika, an older neighborhood girl that Baby used to look up to, tells Baby that she’s been prostituting. Baby is aware that sex and prostitution are adult things, and that once she dips her foot into those pools, she can no longer be a child. Instead of listening to Marika’s stories, she leaves to avoid becoming complicit to them.

Baby manages to hold onto her innocence, despite a few close calls, until she meets Alphonse. She pinpoints Alphonse’s kiss as the defining moment when her innocence starts to slip away. After this moment, she feels dirty and begins to equate adulthood with feeling nasty and guilty. Innocence and childhood are now mirages that she can only conjure when she’s around Xavier.

Most of the kids that Baby is used to hanging out with try to act older than they are; they are street kids and have had to grow old before their time in order to survive or cope with the violent world around them. However, Xavier is different. He comes from a two-parent, stable household, and Baby likes that he “was different from my friends. I liked that he was immature and that he seemed naïve, as if he was actually acting his age. He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder” (232). When Baby is with Alphonse, she’s prostituting and eventually doing heroin, but being with Xavier reminds her of what it’s like to be a carefree child. While with him, she’s reminded of her age, and she pretends that she’s from a nice home, too. This created identity gets her through the worst times, but it also reminds her that she can never truly go back to who she was before.

Although Baby has been catapulted into nefarious adult activity, she doesn’t want to be an adult. Because of the men she’s forced to have sex with, she doesn’t “have a very high opinion of adults. I didn’t think there was any point in going to school or having a career. The adult world was filled with perverts, so it hardly seemed like something worth preparing for” (292). Not wanting to be an adult, but also realizing that she can’t once again be a child, leaves her in a formless and indefinable space somewhere in between. This is why she acts like a child around Alphonse and simultaneously realizes that she’s seen too much to be a child around Xavier.

It’s only when she reunites with Jules at the end of the novel that she reclaims the hopefulness that comes with being a child. By giving control back to her father and accepting his decision to move her to Janine’s, she realizes that the essence of being an adult is making decisions. When she was trying to be an adult with Alphonse, she was making decisions without an understanding of the consequences. When Jules takes over as her father once more, she feels the safety of being a carefree child once more, despite what she’s gone through. Even though she can’t undo the adult things she’s been through, this reclaiming of her childhood role ends the novel with a feeling of hope.