Chapters fifteen, sixteen and seventeen

Chapter fifteen finds the author shocked over his best friend, Jerome, being shot in the neck while walking down Avenue D. In some ways the author is thrilled that Jerome’s family called him first to give him the grim details so he can pass the story on to others becoming popular with every group of kids at school. In other ways, the author feels loss and guilt for being the best friend of a kid who was shot “…this time I had a tale to tell, something no other kid—no matter how cool, how rich, how popular—could match. At the same time I felt horribly guilt about this pleasure” (Conley, 2000, p. 162).

Conley visits Jerome in the hospital and finds he is the only white person in the room. Jerome’s mother, grief stricken, continues to repeat over and over “my baby’s paralyzed” and Conley asks out loud “Is it from the neck down or the waist down?” which horrifies everyone in the room and only causes the crevasse between the author’s world and his friends in the projects to open more deeply. Because of this question, he no longer belongs with the people he lives with and is once again, rejected by the group he most wants to belong to.

Conley develops a type of obsessive behavior in order to protect his loved ones and his home whereby he kisses everyone two times on each cheek before leaving them. This behavior progresses to where he’s kissing the furniture, the carpets and even clothing in order to protect his family and home “I must have been trying to recover a sense of psychic control over my body while Jerome was going through real physical therapy” (Conley, 2000, p. 171). His mom sends him to therapy, which does not help, and he eventually learns to control his need to protect others by focusing on an object his mom gives him.

Chapter sixteen

In this chapter Conley makes friends with a Hispanic boy that is large in stature but soft in voice. His name is Raphael and unlike most of the Hispanic kids Conley knows, his family had made solid financial choices and lived in a loft apart just north of school.
While playing at Raphael’s house, the boys played a game with matches and accidentally set Raphael’s room on fire. The firefighters came and put out the fire but more is damaged by the smoke and water than by the fire itself. Conley’s mom was more relieved he was okay and also that Raphael’s parents were not going to press them for money to fix the damaged rooms. Conley believes the reason his parents were not asked for money was because the family was white and enjoyed the option of working out the damages matter privately without the intervention of the law “The fire taught me one of the most subtle but powerful privileges of middle-class status: the chance to work problems out informally, without the interference of the authorities. Poor minorities get no such allowances. But we were lucky—for Raphael’s family represented the right class and I the right race” (Conley, 2000, p. 181).

Chapter seventeen-final chapter

The final chapter in the book has the family moving to a loft apartment in a better part of town. Conley and his dad protest vehemently but ultimately Conley’s mom, Ellen wins out and the family moves. Conley has difficulties making friends in this new area of town and when he encounters kids he knows from his previous school, he’s labeled “socially awkward” and retreats back inside. The residents at his new building were mostly, if not all, white and he was unable to integrate into his new environment. Towards the end of the chapter Jerome comes for a visit in a motorized wheelchair that he controls with hand motions. He and Conley chat about Jerome’s desire to move to Los Angeles and become a movie star, while Jerome asks about Conley’s new home. The final paragraph has Jerome asking why Conley moved away from the projects and before anyone could answer, Conley’s mom says “we moved here because of you” and everyone goes silent. In essence, it took Jerome getting shot to jolt Ellen into the reality that where they live is unsafe and next time, it could be her son getting hurt and not his best friend.

This book is based on the author’s real life experiences growing up in the projects in Manhattan. It is Dalton Conley’s reflections on how his formative years were spent trying to conform to a group he never really fit into and longing to find a safe place to be himself. The author graduates from high school and attends college at the University of California at Berkley. Here he attempts to integrate to mostly white campus life and finds he can blend in without being harassed. He now lives a couple miles from where he grew up in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. He works at Yale University and commutes two-hours each way.

As I reflect on this book I keep wondering about the twists and turns of Conley’s life and how, in the end, he would up living and working in mostly white areas. He desperately wanted to belong to the people in the projects growing up, but because of his skin color he never really quite fit in. When he started high school, his family moved to a mostly white neighborhood but because of where he came from he didn’t fit in there either. So this is a child continuously searching for a place to be himself and eventually finding it at college.

This book, while interesting, made me angry from time to time because the author’s parents couldn’t see beyond their own selfish needs and put their children first. In my view because both his parents were artists, they felt the need to experience life at the poverty level. His father never worked full time, and based on the book, his mom never worked at all except to write a book. I understand Conley became the person he is today because of the adversity he experienced, but I’m wondering if his formative years might have been better spent in a safer environment.

My connection with this book to adult learning is that I should never assume where someone comes from based on what they look like. I need to be culturally aware how I present curricula and also be sensitive to how my learners process information.

Chapters thirteen and fourteen

Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen

Chapter 13 finds the author in middle school during an assembly in which the school votes for the music selections for an end-of-year party. He sits with his Black friend Jerome, and as he scans the students in their seats he notices the races are separated by the type of music they plan to vote for much like the neighborhoods these same kids came from “When word got around that the selection of music was the purpose of the assemble, the student body segregated into camps that were scaled-down versions of the neighborhoods from which we came” (Conley, 2000, p. 142). Conley also notices how each group is dressed and that the students within each group all dress very similar. For example, the students that are in favor of rock music at the party are white wearing concert T-shirts, jeans and sneakers. The students into punk rock have ripped T-shirts, skinny jeans and boots and are white. The students in favor of disco are Black or Hispanic and dress similarly to the white kids in favor of rock except their T-shirts aren’t from concerts but the local Dollar Store.

Conley then goes on to discuss his obsession with designer labels, specifically the Lacoste alligator label, and how he would search through his Grandparents clothes for old shirts that would have that logo and then rip them off and sew them on his own shirts. He’s desperate to fit into some group, any group, but really doesn’t belong to any. He can’t hang out with the white kids because he doesn’t live where they live. Conversely he can’t hang out with the Black or Hispanic kids because he’s a “honky”.

Chapter Fourteen

Conley starts skipping school in chapter fourteen in favor of hanging out at the local Twin Donut shop playing video games. He becomes obsessed with stealing money to feed his video game habit and has taken to stealing money from his father’s bureau and his mother’s purse. Conley’s grades start to slip and he’s eventually removed from the math and sciences track he was on and reassigned to the vocational curriculum. When Conley starts to notice who his classmates are in his new curriculum, he figures out the focus in these classes are honing life skills and not critical thinking “These classes were populated predominantly by minority students, a fact to which I failed to ascribe any importance at the time. Journalism has been replaced by sewing, history by typing, and science by wood shop” (Conley, 2000, p. 153). When Ellen, Conley’s mom, finds out he’s skipping school and letting his grades slip she intervenes by embarrassing him at the Twin Donut and dragging him out by his ear. That ends his school skipping days for good.

Chapters eleven and twelve

Chapter 11 finds the author in a highly integrated middle school where he hopes to attach the two sides of his world together. Little does he realize that with a highly multicultural school comes a good degree of racism. Conley talks about his desire to be called "nigger" by his friends at school and at home in the projects. He hears his Black and Puerto Rican friends call each other by this name and wants to use it himself but decides, for whatever reason, he can't. He does, however, have one friend named Marcus that does call him "nigga" and this is the author's response "Every time he applied the word to me I relished the sound of it, as I might savor an exotic delicacy. This word, more than any other cultural term or practice, continued to separate me from my neighbors back home. They all referred to each other by this term, whereas I substituted the word man,as in, "Yo, what's up man?" Several times the n-word perched on the edge of my tongue like a diver, ready to leap off. I so desperately wanted to say it" (Conley, 2000, p. 123)

Conley also realizes that because he's white, he's spared physical punishments that his black friends endure. There was a cafeteria incident where both Conley and his friend Marcus were flinging food. They were caught by a teacher and Marcus was hit on the head by a microphone leaving him with welts and bumps on his head. Conley received no physical punishment and figured out it was because of his skin color.

This chapter shows the two worlds Conley inhabits. On one side he wants to be black so he can fit in with everyone from the projects and on the other side he's accepting the gift of being white to avoid physical punishment at his school. He can't have it both ways but it seems that's how he's living.

Chapter 12

Chapter 12 brings a small amount of economic prosperity to the family as Ellen, Conley's mom, sells her book Soho Madonna. His mom splurges and purchases leather coats for herself and Conley's dad, and then takes the family on a trip to Columbia. Conley talks about having to eat powdered soup and canned beans in the hotel room with his sister while his parents partake in all you can eat buffets. His mom and dad would return to the hotel room with some food for Conley and his sister, but the children's primary source of food was what they brought from home in the way of canned goods and powdered food.

Two things made a big impression on young Conley; the level of poverty in Columbia and the frequency with which guns were brandished and used daily. Conley was accustomed to seeing beggers in New York City but the children starving on the streets, people sleeping and dying on the curbs, and the homeless oozing with open soars in Columbia really upset him. Suddenly he didn't think his life was so bad in NYC and maybe he was lucky to have what he had. The gun issue, however, was something not so easy to justify away because in Conley's mind the villagers seemed very docile, as compared to the semi automatic weapons the government officials wore on their shoulders day after day.

Once the family returned from Columbia his father accepted a part time job that morphed into two full days a week. Conley's dad deeply resented doing this type of work as his "true" calling was that of an artist and a gambler. He still managed to squeeze one full day a week at the race track, but never got over the assault on his integrity because true artists starved or sold their creations; they didn't work.

In this chapter the author comes away with the feeling that the family's economic situation has improved and they no longer had to scrounge for half-used pencils or half sheets of paper for homework. Unfortunately this new found economic prosperity only helped to deepen the divide between himself and his peers in the projects. Upward mobility in the projects…comments?

Chapters Nine and Ten

Chapter nine finds the author enjoying a game of pick-up baseball in the lot behind the projects when, at the end of the game, a boy who had borrowed his glove suddenly decides he’s keeping it. The boy, named James, is Black and is much taller than Conley and it occurs to him his chances of winning a fight against James are not so good given his adversary is so much larger “In this case, however, my choice became clear: I could avoid a fight but forfeit my glove, or I could attack James and hope to win. I had no idea what chance I stood in such a confrontation” (Conley, 2000, p. 106). As the fight gets going another boy, Sean, pulls a switchblade on Conley and asks the group of kids watching if he “Should slice the honky”? The bully, Sean, decides to further humiliate Conley by making him dance like a puppet for everyone while the blade continues to push against his throat. The incident came to an end when Sean heard police sirens several blocks over “Though never any real threat, the squad car had given Sean his out, a socially acceptable reason to let me go, an excuse for having drawn his weapon but not having drawn blood” (Conley, 2000, p.109).

At the end of this chapter he reflects that it’s a right of the middle class to be able to fabricate the reasons for the events in our lives as opposed to allowing the social order to do so for us. For example, if a person living in poverty gets robbed, one assumption might be the robbery is a result of where the person is living. Conversely, if a middle-class person is robbed it’s because the robber took days to stalk them, learned their schedules and then without warning swooped down and stole prize possessions “This is the privilege of the middle and upper classes in America—the right to make up the reasons things turn out the way they do, to construct our own narratives rather than having the media and society do it for us” (Conley, 2000, p.110).

Chapter Ten

Each summer the author and his family traveled to Pennsylvania, where Conley’s mom (Ellen) was from, to visit with family and have a vacation. Conley states this vacation, while interrupting his Little League career, allows him to be himself and not feel torn between the world at school and the world where he lives.

He and his sister have a variety of adventures that range from playing with the neighborhood kids to attending summer school and Boy Scout Camp. Both Conley and his sister get the feeling this is the “real” America where white families grow up, go to school and live, as opposed to his life in New York City. While he’s in Pennsylvania, he tries to assimilate into the local culture and finds it confusing and difficult, as does his sister. For example, when Alexandra attends a birthday party/sleepover, the girls start to tell spooky stories before bed. One such story in particular tells of a monster-like “nigger” that tries to eat a little girl after chewing on a squirrel. Alexandra is shocked at the overt racism but is also confused because that same term is used by Blacks themselves to refer to each other at home “At any rate, the word never seemed dirty until we heard it used in the white Pennsylvania suburbs. Here, racism was expressed but apparently not thought much about; by contrast, I often reflected, on Avenue D it was often thought about but never spoken of—at least not directly to us” (Conley, 2000, p.117).

During their stay in Pennsylvania, Conley and his sister Alexandra had attended BBQ’s, church services, sleepovers, summer school and Conley himself had spent time with the Boy Scouts. The author, in particular, felt angry with his parents for not exposing him to religion, and when he pressed his dad as to why, his father admitted harboring resentment for organized religion. Here both children were surrounded by people that looked like them, but did not act, or speak, or think like them. Even though the children felt “comfortable” being surrounded by white people, their isolation weighed on them because their upbringing and daily lives were nothing like Ellen’s relatives in Pennsylvania.

Chapters seven and eight

Chapter seven

In chapter seven the author talks about the food he sees and eats at his friend’s houses and how it compares to the food he eats at home.  He then goes on to discuss his Tuesday afternoon walks with his friends after school, on the way to a sleepover, and the types of foods he sees in gourmet stores along the way.  The vivid colors of the oranges, grapes and pineapples are tantalizing to his third grade pallet and he remembers thinking he’d only seen fruit colors like that in cartoons or on TV.

Conley then goes on to talk about an assignment from school that asks him to go to the supermarket and decide which food groups the family’s purchases go in.  For example rice belonged in the starches column.  It was then he decided the fruits and vegetables did not resemble the ones his friends ate at all “The little bodegas that dotted most corners in my neighborhood seemed to display fresh offerings, but their papayas, plantains, yuccas. And taro roots were not listed on the nutritional posters that lined our classroom” (Conley, 2000, p. 78).  At the age of eight Conley is starting to notice a lot of things are different between his world and his friends’ worlds and he’s starting to feel ashamed and embarrassed about the types of food his family eats.  In fact it’s during this chapter that he starts to equate poverty with the minority Black population and feels conflicted because even though he’s not Black, he’s experiencing poverty unlike his white friends from school.

Chapter eight

In chapter eight Conley steals a comic book and two Reggie Bars from the local luncheonette.  He eats his candy on the playground at the projects while reading his comic books and then goes up to his apartment where his mother is resting with a headache.  For whatever reason she starts to question him asking if he’s had candy and he replied he has.   Then he develops a headache and starts to confess his crime convinced the pain in his head is directly related to the guilt in his heart.  His mom, Ellen, took him down to the luncheonette and made him confess to the couple that owned it.  As a punishment for his behavior, Conley was made to do household chores to pay off the stolen purchases.  Because of this episode he learns the value of money and after he pays off his debts, he negotiates with his parents a set amount of money for chores he can do around the house every week.  The chores he performs gives him about $3.50 a week which satisfies his need for pocket money.

He then takes a job at a local candy shop during his lunch break at school.  He loves the job, makes more money than the household chores and is able to bring his mother home chocolates which she loves.  He is eventually caught and the principal of P.S. 41 calls Ellen letting her know child labor laws prohibit her son from working during school and this behavior must stop immediately.  This sends mixed message to Conley because he thought if you worked, and didn’t steal, he’d be permitted to take that money and purchase what he wanted to.  But in this instance, he’s being told he can’t work to make money so perhaps stealing is the better option “Having been taught not to steal by my mother and the luncheonette woman, I was now being told it was not okay to work for money, either (Conley, 2000, p. 101).

Morrisville, North Carolina Pool

Hi All,
My family and I have been traveling the last two weeks on holiday.  We've been to North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Virgina and now we're back in NC for one more week with my mother before we leave.  So yesterday I took all my girls to the Morrisville Aquatic Center which is about 12 miles outside of Raleigh, NC.  Myself and my daughters were five of seven white people in the entire outdoor complex.  Multiculturalism is not new to myself or my three oldest girls, but my youngest, who's 12, was a bit off balance.  Nearly all of the children in the pool (about 50) were Black or Asian.  Then my 12 year old discovered another child that had the same bathing suit as she did and the child, who was Black, walked up to her and said she liked her suit, which made my daughter laugh.  I asked Ashtonn what she thought of the pool and she said the water was great but she felt "alone" with so many faces that didn't look like her.

I drew a connection to Honky because he grew up white in a mostly black community and had no difficulties being with people that didn't look like him and yet my daughter felt alone because her upbringing is completely opposite of the authors.  Then later in the car Ashtonn told us there was one black child in her grade and she reflected on how she must have felt moving from Georgia to Colorado in the middle of the school year where there is little or no multiculturalism.  This was a great thing to expose Ashtonn to, and the rest of the girls, because it teaches them what it feels like when the shoe is on the other foot.  I want my girls to see the person beyond the skin color if they are going to truly benefit from the rich diversity of cultures our world has to offer.