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By Root 1366 0

Around her peers, however, especially her cousin, Amy, who is about the same age, Katie seems more like the nine-year-old child she really is. Much like other children we observed, outside of the home—away from her mother—she is more energetic, louder, and bossier than she is at home. Every weekend, she and Amy play together for hours on end at their grandmother’s house. Katie has a flair for the dramatic and seems to be a “natural” actress. She and Amy have great fun putting on skits of their own devising. Compared to Tyrec Taylor and other boys in the study, gender clearly influences aspects of her play. She is more restricted in movements. Katie plays with neighborhood children in the large parking lot of the Brindles’ apartment building. There she rides her bike, plays tag, and visits with other children, but she does not wander several blocks from home in a group of boys as Tyrec and other boys we observed do. Much of her play is more sedentary than the active movements of boys, with a stress on femininity. In the house, she enjoys her Barbies (she has fifteen). With a neighborhood girl, she will have long periods of practicing the development of herself as a beauty object (something that was never observed with the boys in the study). Katie and her friend will practice dressing up the Barbies and playing with each other’s hair. Katie also watches television and plays Nintendo. As a result of her own initiative, not her mother’s, Katie participates in two organized activities: she sings in a choir that meets after school for an hour, once a week. On some Friday evenings, she takes a van with neighborhood children to a Christian youth program where they sing Christian songs, learn Bible stories, and play games.

Katie has had more than her share of problems, though, and she sometimes volunteers stories of feeling lonely and abandoned. Her mother confided (during the in-depth interview) that Katie had been sexually molested when she was in first grade.3 Last year, when she was a third-grader, Katie missed quite a bit of school. She was hospitalized in a program in part due to her displays of self-destructive behavior.

Ms. Brindle’s family—her mother, Tammy; and adult brothers, John and Ryan; and Amy—live nearby.4 Ryan and Amy’s mother are divorced; Amy lives with her mother during the week and stays with her father and grandmother on weekends. Katie can take the bus by herself to her “Grandmom’s” house; it is a ten-minute ride up one street. She visits almost every weekend. Amy is usually there as well because weekends are when she sees her father (Ms. Brindle’s brother Ryan). Although Ms. Brindle unabashedly describes her relatives as “dysfunctional,” it is her extended family that provides the structure around which she and her children organize their lives. Grandmom baby-sits for Katie on weekends, and both she and Ryan sometimes provide Ms. Brindle and the children with transportation (the Brindles have no car). Katie’s best friend is her cousin, Amy, and Ms. Brindle’s best friend is her former sister-in-law Mary (once married to John, Ms. Brindle’s schizophrenic older brother). Ms. Brindle and Mary talk daily and see each other often during the week. Mary’s daughters, who are in their late teens, also come by the Brindles’ apartment regularly.

The level of racial integration in Katie’s world varies. The stores close to the apartment are staffed and used by whites, almost exclusively. Although there are a few African American families in the apartment building, the neighborhood is overwhelmingly white. The Brindle family benefits from the racial segregation that exists in city housing.5 Rather than live in a public housing project, where all of the families are poor, owing to segregation, they have access to neighborhoods where nearly all the families are of the same racial group (in this case, white) but occupy different economic positions. Still, key aspects of Katie’s life are racially integrated. For example, her classrooms are about one-half Black and one-half white. At recess, she occasionally plays with Black