Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence

Chapter 2: “It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live”: When Good Girls Fight

46 Chapter 2 “It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live” WHEN GOOD GIRLS FIGHT ON A WARM SUMMER DAY, I sit on the stoop outside a South Philadelphia row house with Takeya, a thirteen-year-old girl, who is slim and light-skinned.1 I ask her if she has been in any recent fights with other girls. “I’m not in no fights. I’m a good girl,” she earnestly replies. “You’re a good girl?” I ask. “Yeah, I’m a good girl, and I’m-a be a pretty girl at eighteen,” she adds confidently. Takeya’s straightened, shoulder-length hair is pulled back carefully into a ponytail and she is neatly dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Takeya’s aura of youthful simplicity and her reserved demeanor are hard to reconcile with what I know about recent events in her life. A neighborhood girl attacked her cousin, also a teenaged girl, in the neck with a knife. The wound required emergency care at the local hospital. The young woman who cut her cousin is “going to jail for attempted murder,” Takeya tells me. Shortly after the knifing, some of Takeya’s cousins and family friends stopped by her row home to recruit her to take part in a retaliatory battle, but she resisted their efforts. “I don’t fight,” she insisted. This is how she recounts the recent episode for me: “They [her cousins and some friends] do, but I don’t fight. Like my cousins and them came in here . . . saying give “It’s Not Where You Live, It’s How You Live” 47 me this and give me that [a reference to an unspecified weapon]. I said, ‘No! No. I’m not doing it ’cause y’all are gonna go to jail yourselves.’ I said [in response to a detailed recitation of the plans for payback], ‘Well, that’s you, that ain’t me.’” Near the end of our interview, however, Takeya goes out of her way to make sure that I do not leave with a mistaken impression of her street skills. She flatly dismisses the notion that good girls never fight: “I don’t want you to think I don’t know how to fight,” she tells me, “I mean everybody always come get me [for fights]. [I’m] the number one [person they come to get].” In this conversation, Takeya, like many of the adolescent girls I spoke to about their experiences with interpersonal violence , reveals her commitment to seemingly competing and contradictory goals. She wants to be a good and a pretty girl, yet she also wants to be known as an able fighter—specifically, as “the number one person” people come to for backup. For girls like Takeya, a commitment to an idealized gender identity, such as a good girl, does not necessarily exclude a commitment to being known as an able fighter. The distinct gender dichotomy that orders much of social relations in mainstream society is confusingly contradictory for many adolescent girls who come of age in distressed urban areas. Takeya’s desire to be a pretty girl, for example, reflects both stereotypically feminine concerns rooted in mainstream expectations of appropriate femininity and Black respectability. In Takeya’s world, beauty is assessed using an intersecting set of expectations that include skin color, hair texture, and body shape. A light-brown complexion, a good perm (professionally, or at least competently, straightened hair, or naturally curly hair, is a positive attribute, as opposed to “kinky” or “nappy” hair, which is generally considered a drawback),2 and a slim figure help make a teenaged girl pretty. In this context, as Takeya’s story makes clear, pretty is often conflated with good, B e t w e e n G o o d a n d G h e t t o 48 as girls who fight regularly are often physically marked during their battles (Banks 2000; Collins 2004). Still, being a good girl or a pretty girl is not simply something that one is—it is not a static state. Instead, pretty is an ongoing gendered project that is accomplished during everyday interactions with others on the street and in the home (West and Zimmerman 1987; West and Fenstermaker 1995). Girls’ gendered survival projects have as much to do with how girls work the code of the street as they do with any ascribed...