Indeed, physical punishment is so commonly administered by the adults in the family that the children hold animated discussions over which adult is the strictest. One night at dinner time, the children are seated at the table and Ms. McAllister is walking around the living room. A discussion that begins focused on a picture of an aunt dressed in bell bottoms and clogs evolves into a comparison of strategies of physical punishment:
Jane says she don’t like clogs because Mom-mom used to “beam” her on the forehead and it would leave a mark. Guion asks who is [harsher], Mom-mom or Pop-pop. This leads to an animated discussion of the grandparents’ various strategies for beating kids. Guion and Runako and Harold and Alexis all compare notes and argue back and forth. Jane mostly listens. (She never disagrees with children or defends adults.) The kids talk about marks being left on the forehead and other parts of the body.
As this discussion of discipline across generations suggests, physical punishment is a common feature of the children’s lives. Ms. McAllister also uses physical confrontation, and threats of physical confrontation, as a mechanism for resolving serious conflicts in her own life. One evening—the night before Harold is to leave for camp—she reaches her limit of tolerance with her twin sister, Jill. Her sister, she discovers, has taken packages of T-shirts that Hank bought for Harold and sold them. Jill also cut the cord to the air conditioner, so the unit no longer functions. Ms. McAllister, who is extremely angry, denounces her sister. Lori, Harold, Alexis, and a field-worker observe the fight from the beginning; Lenny shows up part of the way through it. The field notes capture the mounting tension and barely restrained violence:
(Jane and Jill do some serious yelling downstairs for about ten minutes.):
JANE: You fucking bitch! You steal Harold’s clothes, huh?
JILL: Shut up, Jane.
JANE: Nobody but you around here go stealin’ from my kids! I’m about to get you upside the fuckin’ head!
JILL: I ain’t fuckin’ stealin’ from you! Don’t fuckin’ accuse me!
JANE: . . . I’m sick of your stupid fuckin’ games. I’m gonna get me a stick and you’re gonna get out before I fuck you up!
JILL: Nobody puttin’ me the fuck out!
In the middle of this, Alexis is hollering from the bathroom that she needs toilet paper. Ms. McAllister leaves, goes to a neighbor’s house and borrows a roll. She returns with a large wooden stick.
JANE: I got me a stick now! You fuckin’ hear?!
(Jill doesn’t answer.)
JANE (yelling): You gettin’ the fuck out! . . .
There’s a lull as Jane searches [for Harold’s missing shirts]. Lori turns to me (I’ve slowly come downstairs as I heard the yelling from Lori’s room; now I stand against the banister wall of the living room). Lori (to me): “Her’s no excuse for it.” She says this with her head down; she looks so sad, like she might cry. Alexis is standing on the second step of the stairs, saying to me: “They always do this. The only thing is, it makes me scared.”18 She looks sad.
The density of the housing project also permits neighbors to hear the conflict and a small group gathers outside. The conflict escalates when Keith arrives home. He and Jill have a loud (physical) entanglement, but by this time the children and the field-worker have left the apartment and gone to the basketball court. They return a little later and sweep up the glass and move the broken furniture to the street as per an order issued by Ms. McAllister.19
This series of events was painful for all involved. Ms. McAllister was embarrassed that the field-worker witnessed the fight. She knew that it had been a frightening experience and wished it could have been avoided.20 But, as she explains to me a few days later, she felt she had little choice. If she is to provide her children with a “home” and not just a “house,” she could not allow her sister to stay.
I ask her, “Is she going to be moving?” She says firmly, “She is going to go.” I say, “It is hard on your nerves.” She says, “This is a house but it got to be a home.”
I say, “Where will she go?” She shakes her head (to indicate she doesn’t know). She says, “The kids won’t come in here when she is here.” She asks me, “Did you ever notice that?” I nod slowly. She says, “I got to make this a home not a house.”
EMERGING SIGNS OF CONSTRAINT
The McAllisters, like other poor and working-class families, display caution and at times distrust toward individuals in positions of authority in dominant institutions. This approach contributes to very different interactions between family members and institutional representatives as compared to those experienced by middle-class families.
At a parent-teacher conference, for example, Ms. McAllister (who is a high school graduate) seems subdued. The gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting. She sits hunched over in the chair and she keeps her jacket zipped up. She is very quiet. When the teacher reports that Harold has not been turning in his homework, Ms. McAllister clearly is flabbergasted, but all she says is, “He did it at home.” She does not follow up with the teacher or attempt to intervene on Harold’s behalf. In her view, it is up to the teachers to manage her son’s education. That is their job, not hers. Thus, when the children complain about a teacher, she does not ask for details. Harold’s description of his new (fifth-grade) teacher as “mean” prompts his mother to recall another, more likable, teacher—nothing more.
Similarly, when the McAllisters visit a local clinic so that Harold can get a physical for Bible camp, their experiences contrast sharply with the Williamses’. Here, too, the normally boisterous Ms. McAllister is quiet, sometimes to the point of being inaudible. She has trouble answering the doctor’s questions. In some cases, she does not know what he means (e.g., she asks, “What’s a tetanus shot?”); in others, she is vague:
DOCTOR: Does he eat something each day—either fish, meat, or egg?
JANE (her response low and muffled): Yes.
DOCTOR (attempting to make eye contact but failing as mom stares intently at paper): A yellow vegetable?
JANE (still no eye contact, looking down): Yeah.
DOCTOR: A green vegetable?
JANE (looking at the doctor): Not all the time.21
DOCTOR: No. Fruit or juice?
JANE (low voice, little or no eye contact, looks at the doctor’s scribbles on the paper he is filling out): Ummh humn.
DOCTOR: Does he drink milk every day?
JANE(ABRUPTLY and in a considerably louder voice): Yeah.
DOCTOR: Cereal, bread, rice, potato, anything like that?
JANE (shakes her head, looks at doctor): Yes, definitely.
Harold, too, is reserved. When the doctor asks, “What grade are you in at school?” he replies in a quiet, low voice, “Fourth.” But, when the topic shifts to sports, his voice grows louder. He becomes confident and enthusiastic. When the doctor reacts with surprised disbelief to Harold’s announcement that he plays all positions in football, Harold is insistent. “All of them,” he reiterates, interrupting when the doctor seeks to clarify things by listing positions (“tailback? lineman?”).
Nor is Ms. McAllister always passive or subdued during the visit. For example, when the doctor comes into the waiting room and calls their name, she beckons Runako to come along and, only as an afterthought, asks if her nephew may come too. Ms. McAllister also asks that Harold’s hearing and weight be checked. Not content to trust the doctor, she sends Runako down the hall to watch Harold being weighed and report the results back to her.
Nevertheless, there was an important difference in the character of the interaction between the McAllisters and their doctor and the Williamses and their doctor. Neither Harold nor his mother seems as comfortable as Alexander, who was used to extensive verbal conversation at home. Unlike either McAllister, Alexander is equally at ease initiating questions as answering them. Harold, who was used to responding to directives at home, answered questions from the doctor but posed none of his own. Unlike Ms. Williams, Ms. McAllister did not train her son to be assertive with authority figures, nor did she prepare him for his encounter with the doctor. Finally, the two families approached the visit with their doctor with different levels of trust. This unequal level of trust, as well as differences in the amount and quality of information divulged, can yield unequal profits to the individuals involved during a historical moment when professionals define appropriate parenting as involving assertiveness and reject passivity as inappropriate.22