Chapter II Violence Absorbed: Lives of Children in an American City

Linda McDonald

Children live primarily in the context of home and school. As learners and participants in both arenas, they knowingly and unknowingly take in an array of values, mores, standards, and specific information from those settings, and develop skills to operate within them, cul­tivating what Vico referred to as the capacity to “read between the lines” (Burke 1985).

Discussion pertaining to the effects of violence centers primarily on violent adolescent or adult behaviors that might be attributed to previous conditions (Maxfield and Widom 1996; McCloskey, Figueredo, and Koss 1995; Schwab-Stone, Ayers, Kasprow, Voyce, Barone, Shriver, and Weissberg 1995). While valuable, these studies cannot detail the cul­tural context of the child and subsequent shaping in the child's lived experience. Violent acts of shooting and stabbing are obvious and effect the child's psychological development; however, mundane violence emanating from home and school, and understood by children in this study, amplifies insidious daily occurrences of violence to create a developmental map evident through their language (Bruner 1990; Vygotsky 1962).

The children in this study are students (K-5) at Hoover School, a neighborhood public school located in the inner city of a large Midwestern metropolitan area. Neighborhoods surrounding the school reveal boarded up storefronts with signs on others announcing that merchants sell money orders and lottery tickets, cash welfare checks, and accept food stamps. Multiple family dwellings display peeling paint, torn screens, bottles, paper, and a number of vehicles in yards.

The one hundred-year-old school mirrors the neighborhood, situated next to a forty­eight-acre blighted area of deserted factories recently identified as a former toxic waste dump, now earmarked as a “priority development site” for the city (The Plain Dealer, Janu­ary 14, 1996). Entrance is through the “yellow door” once the buzzer is pressed and the visi­tor identified. A walk through the school reveals ceilings where water leaks caused plaster to become so saturated that it crumbled and fell, exposing structural boards between the floors. Paint on the walls is chipped and peeling, and two large windows on stairway land­ings are broken and boarded up. Several classroom doors display “value” words such as sharing, courtesy, friendship, and honesty. Bells mark the end of academic periods; students walk single file, by gender, through the halls when changing classes. Talkers receive deten­tions.

Approximately 90 percent of the 540 Hoover children are poor, based on the percent­age of those who receive free or reduced-price lunches. All but four students are African- American. Basement lunchrooms have seven-foot ceilings and stone walls, each supervised by one parent volunteer. Lunch in Styrofoam boxes and containers of milk are served on a tray with plastic ware. Children’s voices reverberate amid shouts of “Don't talk!” from the frustrated lunch volunteer who dispenses detentions and/or loss of playground time. The school slogan is posted on the lunchroom wall: “Do our best, obey each rule, and make Hoover a model school.” Absent is any evidence of support, concern or strategies for the children meeting these goals.

Safety and behavior are intricately related for children. “My mother said if I act up she going to whoop me. She say if my name be up on the board and I’m bad, that mean I’m get­ting a whoopen.” Children not in required uniform get their names on the board.

By fifth grade, children possess a sophisticated understanding of classroom and inter­personal dynamics, and unfortunately the barrier created by this teacher prevents Regina from sharing her insights. “Sometimes one person do something. The teacher blames the whole class if someone misbehaves. Like we have to write 600 times.” She explains that she can’t tell the teacher this punishment is unfair because more punishment would be meted out; school and home reality are in direct conflict as parental instructions are to “tell the teacher” if she has a problem. Regina reflects that writing doesn’t keep the bad kids from being bad. By not being accessible to the “good” kids, the teacher drives them to join forces with the “bad” ones, and reinforces the “Why bother?” attitude ever present among the children, and narrows the range of school behaviors available to children.

The state of family is fluid and site specific. Joan understands family as, “It’s like some people don’t have a mother, or some people don’t have a daddy. Some people don’t have neither one of the parents. A family is a mother, a father, or just a mother or just a father, and you put all your relatives together.” Other children respond, “people that live in your house with you and you have a nice relationship,” or “when somebody has a baby, and then you’re a family,” to “blood and love.” Although extended and inclusive, support relation­ships are fragile and often transient.

Little if any distinction exists between girls’ and boys’ narratives from kindergarten through second grade. All examine what they know about their world and the mediators used to move through the various institutions in their lives. The typical child for these grades is Ken, a kindergartener, who informs me, “Rotweillers save you from bad people. Get one right now. Y’all feel better, y’all got some dogs” [to gain protection from people with guns]. He lives with his mother, who is separated from his stepfather, who is in jail for beating Ken and his mother, and he discusses living in a number of homes with mom before the current arrangement with his grandmother and his brother. Ken explains his mom’s in­struction “not to be bad, and don’t fight in school; get good grades and do homework more neatly to get in first grade.” He adds he got in trouble for walking fast and having the teacher classify the behavior as running. The teacher wouldn’t believe him and put him in the corner. Ken takes care of his brother and says if he had lots of money he would buy clothes and shoes for himself, his brother, and mom. He often plays “exterminator” at home to pick up the bugs in the house. The stage is set as Ken tries to retain taught values, “My uncles be smoking not cigarettes, the other stuff, and they be drinking beer and wine, and so do my daddy, and one of my grandma's drink too, but two don't. Bad people do drugs, and when they have a friend that's involved in guns and uh... that other stuff, if he tell you to come on, just say no.” By age five, Ken already knows adults cannot be relied on and feels the impact of violence and dissonance of values in his world.

Friends are to share, and this includes endorsing fights. “Best friends take each other back if we fight, we stay together.” If somebody fights a friend, “We all go fight the person who did it, because my grandfather say if somebody fight somebody, you try to stop it, and if they hit you, you hit them back. He said I could fight anytime I want to if somebody get in my face, I just fight them.” A moral dilemma exists between church values and world real­ity, “God don't like evil, if a person be mean, you should still be nice.” According to this logic, if she follows God, she will be beaten up.

Early understandings of gender differences emanate from observed adult relationships, “My step-dad don't whoop me no more because, I don't want his hands on me. He only whip his kids now. Sometimes he tap her [his daughter] with the belt. If I get in trouble like after school, my mom she is hitting me. Sometimes when I be screaming, she be punching me, then she get back the belt and then hit me.” Third graders know, “In the old days, boys did nice things to girls, now it's just boys hurt girls, like they bend their wrists and stuff.” “James, he want to hit girls, and he always want to have a girlfriend. She shouldn't have no boyfriend like I don't have one because you too young. You don't know what he might do, he might smack you and all that, but he treat her right; he give her money, but that's still wrong.”

Third-graders' experiences and worries sound more adult than child-like. Death is not an abstract concept confined to bad dreams from scary movies, but rather an omnipresent reality. A boy tells about his mom's undefined illness, “Sometimes my mother she...she starts getting a little weird and stuff and gets sick. Mom gets sick 'cause last time almost, she couldn't breathe that day when we got home. The ambulance came, and she had fell down and then my brother's dad had turned on the fan so she could get a little air, and then the ambulance had to come pick her up.” He matter-of-factly tells that his sister nearly died when her heart stopped.

Evidence of a concern for personal safety begins to generalize to an upset condition, sometimes approaching outrage, as third-graders tell personal experiences about danger re­lated to drugs, guns, shootings, and police. “Here we have a lot of violence and people sell­ing drugs.” The boy hears gunshots four times a week, and has constant fear, “I think I'm going to die, gettin' shot on my way to school.” “At night times when people be walking around in gangs, I be seeing police; I hearing policemen, and I be hearing firecrackers. Sometimes I think that they be guns; I be scared.” Children know how gangs evade the po­lice. Once a gang was “shooting dice and stuff, and then he [Mr. Y] called the police, and they all ran. And Little Wayne [age thirteen], he was on his go-cart and went in this back­yard and parked it, and then hid in the backyard, and the police couldn't find them. Once, the police was called and someone ran in my backyard and got on my garage and hid and ducked down, and then the police tried to look up there, but they couldn't climb the gate cause they were two old guys.” He describes another incident, “The police pulled out a gun because they thought it was a grown-up running from them, but it was a little kid, and they shot up in the air, and he still kept running.” The message is clear; police cannot be de­pended on to provide safety.

Traditional values of goodness, loyalty, and responsibility exist simultaneously in the interviews, but their significance to Hoover children is very different from suburban chil­dren (Tillman and McDonald 1994). The standard admonition to “do good [in school], don't fight, and don't get your name on the board,” contradicts “grandma told me never fight in classroom, but if they want to fight me outside, fight them outside. Don't be scared, fight them back or pick up a stick or something and knock them out.” A boy explains he was taught to recycle and pick up litter, and about the role of a friend. “A friend ‘lie up' for you. Sometimes I get in trouble, and the other person lies for the other, like you like one person, like the O.J. Simpson thing...like...but I think it's that like well one person gonna lie up for his friend. But he don't have to suffer the consequences. And my friend didn't lie up for me, cause I didn't start it, and he lied, just lied for his friend, and I felt it was really un­fair. Then I was like, I didn't say anything, and then I got back at him. When he got in trou­ble again, I was like one of his friend's witnesses, when his friend's friend, and I was like yea, he did start it with this other boy, because he start hitting him, and the way I got back on him was when he went outside, he like (facial expressions and sounds), and he had hit me, and then I hit him across his face, and that's what made it even!”

Jamae, a typical fourth grader, says her family “be moving because these drug dealers, they being by the house, they be in the hallway.” She explains the drug culture, “They be gambling and stuff, and they be smoking their joints, and they be across the street and writ­ing stuff, it begin with a ‘W,' I forget, and then they be giving white stuff. They be like ‘hey you want some of these?' Me and my sister be going over there and sometimes, they be walking across the street and me and my sister go over here.” Her mother taught her to cross the street to escape the dealers, but she “would like to go to Washington, D.C., to meet the President and ask, ‘Could we get the drug dealers off the streets, and get rid of the guns and stuff, and make them use more useful things, make them use cars, tools, useful things.' Col­lect all the guns, knives and stuff.” Jamae reaches to find someone who can establish some safety for her life and chooses the highest, most powerful symbol in the United States, the president. She optimistically believes surely someone must care about children's safety.

Isolation from teachers and parents is sometimes self-imposed as a means of physical and emotional survival. The history of Don, age ten, typifies the frustration of a child who has experienced violence in every area of his life from everyone with whom he has contact. After his suspension, Don watched a citizenship movie and reconstructed the event to rede­fine himself, “the only people that go is the citizens, and so that's why I think I'm good. If you do good things, you get rewarded.” He tells, “My mother keep hittin' me and it feels just like I want to hit her back, but I'm not gonna hit her cause she my mother and I just feel I want to get out of there. She be hittin' me with, in the face with her rings and stuff.” His mother drinks and smokes; her fiance lies and tells her Don's selling drugs, and his sister hits him with broomsticks and burned him with an iron. Don's personal struggle not to hurt his mother whom he loves is as real as the anger and contempt he feels. Personal safety is a chronic worry, but few avenues of escape or support are available for a ten-year-old.

Will tells about visiting his older sister and seeing police involved in a case of “mis­taken identity.” A “friend's friend” had reportedly been playing football in the street and ran to use his aunt's bathroom at the same time the police were following another man. “He looked just like him, so they were driving and he looked behind him and he heard the siren, so he just kept on running faster and faster and then he ran into his auntie's house and just stayed there and hid, cause he didn't know why they were running after him. The police found him and they beat him with the night stick and arrested him because after they beat him, they sprayed mace into his eyes, and they arrested him.” After the police left with the man, a third policeperson, a woman was beaten by the residents of the housing project as they “started throwing bottles at the car and took a night stick away from her and started beating her.” The boy asks the interviewer if she's heard about “the thing about Rodney King.” Regardless of the degree of accuracy of the boy's report, the perception of victimiza­tion remains and in fact is seen to exist beyond his immediate neighborhood and generalizes to the national level. Police as symbol of protection has changed to one of aggression.

Multiple moves and schools are the norm rather than the exception. Friends, and often parents, become transient too. The tentative nature of childhood becomes even more vul­nerable and carries with it a threat to the achievement of success in school, college, or workplace. Michelle has been to five schools; they move when “my mother gets tired of the house, or something broke and the landlord won't come fix it. Then we'll move till she get a better house, but it's hard because she got all them kids [eight children] and people don't want to take kids in an old house.”

Contradictions abound and coexist as an embedded element of childhood. A more powerful description of this paradoxical life is evident in the following vignette of a boy and his black Labrador retriever: “I let her jump up on the bed with me when nobody's looking. I feed her when nobody's looking. I'm not supposed to do that, and I close the door and I beat her up.” The nature of friendships being “someone who's there for you, and accepts you,” takes on a different significance at fifth grade. Someone fun and willing to help you with your problems may or may not include “school goodness,” thus raising new issues in the friendship dynamic. When the single available option for conflict resolution and the primary criterion for a friend both consist of fighting, the choice is clear, and rather than seen as a bully (Byrne 1994), the most successful fighter feels empowered in a culture that recognizes the importance of survival. A powerful account of the fragility of association is told by Binjamin Wilkomirski (1996), about his childhood in the concentration camps of Poland where the need to survive created distrust of anyone new.

Descriptions generated by the children and the symbols they recognize as effective in navigating the dynamics of family, school, and friends depicts world knowledge observed and experienced. It is within that world that they define themselves, a process identified by Blumer (1969) as symbolic interaction. The children's narrative texts represent experiences that imply a complex interaction of cognitive, affective, and connotative dimensions (Bruner 1986; Linde 1993; Tappan and Brown 1989). In authoring or telling a story, chil­dren claim responsibility for the experience, thus taking cognitive ownership. For Hoover children, that ownership means absorbing violence from every corner of their lives, and the Bakhtinian (1986) dialectic of the “I for myself’ and the “I for others” becomes a necessary coping structure.

By fifth grade, attitudes and values from the personal, lived culture are embedded and become the central organizing structure for children. Abandonment by parents and teachers has forced the boys and girls to rely on each other or become totally isolated, a greater threat to safety. There is no choice; survival means becoming like those around you. Missing in the lives of children in this study is any attitude of playfulness or realistic vision of a future different from the present. Imagination is a luxury absent when basic needs are not met; and without the capacity to see into the future, it becomes difficult to have the motivation to self­improve (Dorris 1989), suggesting that the children in this study have a limited range of adult experiences.

The adult family members who share their lives with Hoover children also attempt to survive: they work, care for children, offer their understanding of “do good in school,” and strive to provide a physically safe home; however, they too were once children in the same neighborhood. Vygotsky viewed each culture as providing children the necessary tools, technical and psychological, whereby they could become full participants in their culture (Wertsch 1985: 78). When the world is filled with contradictions, determining which tool better serves children becomes critical to survival, and when the measure of daily violence is taken, one can hear the assimilated scripts which allow children to simultaneously care for a friend or dog, while at the same time beating the dog or friend who doesn't “lie up” for you. Childhood is indeed a process of guided participation (Rogoff 1990).

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