Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity

Field Note: Mothering

‹eld note mothering Donte lives with his mother, Mariana, and his brother in an apartment over a local fast-food restaurant on a busy street not far from a major intersection. The stairway up to the apartment is dark as night and gets darker the closer I get to the top of the stairs. There are two apartments on either side of the narrow landing; the doorways are about six feet apart. I have no idea which is Donte’s apartment because it is so dark that I cannot even see the number on the door, so I knock on one door and wait. No one comes to the door, so I knock on the other door and this time Mariana appears. She invites me to come inside. All the lights are on in the small room that I enter, but the room is still dim and depressing. I sit next to her on a couch that has a huge gaping hole in the middle. We sit on either side of the hole. In one corner of the room is a kitchen table and two chairs. To the right of the couch is a large TV with some framed photographs on top. Framed colored photographs also line the wall behind our heads on the couch. Family members have been captured in moments of success, triumph, passages into new life stages. I found these family photographs clustered on walls, TV sets, mantelpieces in almost every house that I visited as family members sat in graduation regalia, con‹rmation dresses, family portraits. Happiness shows on every face, hair perfectly combed, expressions purposeful, clothes neat and conventional. No clowning, candid, or spontaneous snapshots here. These portraits mark off the passage of the time and landmarks attained. There is a photograph of Donte with his mother, smiling and poised. Several of the photographs are of Donte’s sister, who is now going to a university in the South on a scholarship. Donte’s mother is extremely proud of her daughter’s accomplishments. They have been like two sisters, she tells me. There are pictures of the girl in her high school graduation cap and gown. There is one of Mariana wearing graduation cap and gown, her two sons and daughter on either side of her. She has worked hard to get her GED. She begins to tell her story. I turn the tape recorder on. The following is a partial transcription of my interview with Mariana, who almost immediately after we begin starts telling me about the time she was arrested by the Arcadia police for beating Donte, or Tay as she calls him, with his belt one evening after the boy had been gone from home for several hours on his bicycle without telling his sister, who was babysitting, where he was going. Mariana had found him in another part of town and right there on the street had pulled off his belt and begun whipping him. Someone had called the police. (This was spoken to me. You must read what Mariana had to say aloud. You cannot understand it unless you hear the words.) i. this is my child They pulled the guns out what did I do? This is my child! Don’t tell me how to raise my child. I was so upset at that time. The lady cop she was checking his elbows and his knees. He was scratched up but I didn’t do that. [Her voice is thick with tears.] And they write down he has a hairline scratch on his back so many inches long. I was like, I didn’t do that his sister did that they was ‹ghting one day and she did that. They read me my rights, put my hands behind my back, put handcuffs on me. and I was like— Why? What did I do? MOTHERING 135 I cried I actually cried they told my boyfriend to leave he said, she didn’t do anything that’s her baby son. who slipped off from home. She was worried. And they told him they said leave. So he drove off And he was looking back at me as he drove off. I mean I was hysterical I had never been in trouble with the law never been to jail Never even dream of going to jail. How could they tell me how to raise him? This is my child. These...