Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [166]
The move that Katie, her mother, and her toddler brother, Melmel, made to Florida when Katie was nine lasted less than a year. The family returned to Lower Richmond, and Katie went to middle school there. She did well academically, but she began experimenting with drugs and started fighting with other students. Still, her middle-school teacher helped her fill out applications for high school, and she was accepted at three high schools: a highly desirable, publicly funded school about a 20-minute bus ride from home; a nearby vocationally focused high school; and a local comprehensive high school. Her mother narrowed the pool to two (she did not want Katie traveling across town). Katie chose the vocational school but, she explains, she quickly found it oppressive. “I’d start fights with people, I’d rip stuff from the walls,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to be there, so they kicked me out.” The local comprehensive public high school did not work out either. Throughout ninth and tenth grades, she cut classes, drank, “smok[ed] weed,” and got into fights. She also got pregnant the summer after sophomore year.
Being pregnant seemed to stabilize Katie. She reduced her drug use, cut back on “partying,” and made two efforts to return to high school (but ultimately dropped out). Motherhood has proved difficult, though. Katie describes herself as “not a good mother.” “I love [Nirani], but I’m not good with kids.” She thinks Jenna is a very good mother who “has more patience than me. . . . She prays to God and all that.” Katie explains that “Things irk me so bad—like to the point where it’ll make me want to hurt her [Nirani].” She says that an incident in which her anger spun dangerously out of control prompted her to ask Jenna to “take care of [Nirani] for a little bit.” This decision makes Katie feel “horrible,” but she reasons, “growing up with me right now is going to be a lot worse than how she could feel.” Katie’s goals are to earn a GED, get a good job, and have her own apartment: “I want everything to be right before I take [Nirani].”
Harold McAllister (African American, poor) and I meet in the apartment he shares with his brother, his brother’s girlfriend, and their three kids. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and jeans, Harold looks older than the others, perhaps because of his closely trimmed beard. He works the 4 P.M. to-midnight shift at a suburban chain restaurant (taking four buses, and two hours, to get there). Harold knows how to drive, but he does not have a driver’s license. “I got to get [around] to that real soon,” he says. He started at the restaurant five years ago, as a busboy. Now he is a waiter.
Harold began high school in a “school within a school” college prep program. He liked it but was removed after one year and reassigned to his school’s general education program. He is not sure why. He guesses it was because he had been late a few times and had gotten a D in English. Harold recalls his grades as “B’s and C’s” in the general education track. On the athletic front, high school was disastrous. Although during middle school Harold’s basketball prowess had earned him a ranking of seventh citywide, he was not selected for his high school team. He insists this was because the basketball coach (who also coached football) wanted him to play football. (Harold is built like a football player—he is broad shouldered, stands 5 feet 11 inches, and weighs 240 pounds.) He was devastated by the coach’s decision. He explains that he took the busboy job “to get [his] mind off basketball.” By his junior year, he was working full-time. Harold got home late, but because his mother always woke him in time for school, he always went. But when he began staying with his father (in order, Harold says, to avoid having to “deal with all those females”—his mother, his sisters, and their kids), who did not wake him up, he got to school less and less often. He dropped out six weeks before graduation. He hopes to go back to school someday.
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