Families at Work: Expanding the Bounds

9: Black Picket Fences: Growing Up in Groveland

203© 1999 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted from Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, chapter 5, pp. 91-116 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 9 Black Picket Fences Growing Up in Groveland Mary Pattillo-McCoy Editorial Note: Mary Pattillo-McCoy decided to study a middle-class black community because of her experiences growing up in a community much like “Groveland”—“Of my group of neighborhood and school friends, some had children young, were sporadically employed, or were lured into the drug trade, while others had gone to college, or worked steady jobs and earned enough to start a family. We started pretty much at the same place, but we ended up running the full gamut of outcomes. Some now make six figures—and others are 6 feet under. I wanted to understand these divergences.” Studies indicate that although middle-class white children are themselves highly likely to become successful members of the middle class, the same assumption cannot be made about black children. Pattillo-McCoy helps us understand why this is the case, that the reasons do not necessarily have to do with black families themselves, but rather with the neighborhoods and circumstances in which they are forced to live. Her work is unusual in helping us look at work and family issues from the perspective of teenagers as much as from that of parents. A note about the language used in this selection: Many white Americans rarely hear Black English. Black English is not identical to Standard English; whites, however, make a big mistake if they interpret “different” to mean “inferior.” Pattillo-McCoy emphasizes her conscious decision, as an ethnographer, to accurately reproduce the speech of the people she studied. In doing so she emphasizes that many middle-class black Americans are in effect bilingual: “Even though the African American bank receptionist may answer the phone in perfect Standard English, he or she may have a much different linguistic style when in the company of other African Americans.” This “code switching” is only one of the many challenges that middle-class African Americans confront. Growing Up in Groveland The kin-based branches of the Gibbs family tree spread far and wide in Groveland. The family’s trunk—Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs—moved into Groveland in 1961. They raised their six daughters there. Anna Gibbs Morris is one of the three daughters who have chosen to raise their own families in the neighborhood. Last year, Anna Morris’s 19year -old daughter, Neisha, had the family’s first great-grandson, Tim Jr. The Morris family represents over 35 years in the neighborhood, with four generations, in one square block. Much has changed since the Gibbs family moved into Groveland. One such change 204 Mary Pattillo-McCoy has been an increase in gang activity. Little Tim’s father, Tim Ward Sr., is in a gang, as were many of Neisha Morris’s boyfriends before Tim. Drug dealing often goes along with being in gangs. Neisha’s mother, Anna, feels both anger and sadness as she watches Neisha’s boyfriends fall prey to the fast life. I’m so sick of all this shit. ’Cause, you know, Neisha done lost too many friends to all that shit. You know, Neisha just can’t take it no more. She lost two boyfriends. And she really took this last one hard. I just hate to see her go through alla that. The first one was like her first boyfriend. You know, he was a nice boy. I liked him. But they just be out there doin’ they thang. And they shot him. This last one, Sugar, we just buried. You know she had waited about a year after her first boyfriend and she started seeing this boy Sugar. They shot him in the head. He was in a coma for six months. For the past six months we been goin’ to visit that boy in the hospital. We all thought he was gon’ pull through. And I really took this second one hard. They done lost ten friends already. Close friends, too. But still, they still choosin’ these little boys who [are] out there like that. I mean, they ain’t bad people, but they get caught up in all that stuff sellin’ drugs. The Gibbs family vignette illustrates the permanence of many Groveland families through changing surroundings. . . . I elaborate on the local context by focusing on the cohort of adolescents and older youth to which...