Because I Said So (9 page)

For a while, friends and family hung up the phone when they heard Joe’s super-cool new voice and talk on our answering machine, thinking they had gotten the wrong number. When Joe did pick up the phone, they were bemused by the throaty voice that greeted them. “Yo’ mama’s on the phone,” he said one day as he handed me the receiver. My mama? Wasn’t she still
his
grandma? His man voice was moving him away from us and from his childhood.

We had always congratulated ourselves that Joe had built a rainbow coalition of friends at school. But overnight he stopped chillin’ with his white buddies. His sudden need, and to a lesser extent Nat’s, to be black (or more correctly, to be “ghetto,” the popular teen definition of being “authentically” black) took us by surprise. Of course, Joe denied it and laughed at other white kids who tried to act “black.”

“But you’re trying to be black,” I said one day in the car.

“I’m just trying to be a cool white guy.”

Nat threw up his hands. “I admit it. I’m a
wigga
.”

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It’s true, Nat was a “wannabe
nigga
.” Although he still fell asleep clutching a furry little bunny, he had also taken to wearing a do-rag and oversize white T-shirt to bed, which made him look more like an angel than a thug. At his birthday party, he was the token white kid. Actually, Nat had been conferred the status of
nigga
by one of his friends, a term that still burned my ears though I knew it was considered a form of endearment among some African Americans. “And Natty,” his friend had added, “I mean it in the nicest possible way.”

Nat’s foray into ghetto was mild and fanciful, but Joe’s, like everything Joe, was with great heart and a vengeance. “Our school is so white,” he complained one day. “There are only three black kids in my class.” I started to count off all the African American and biracial kids, but it was all he could do to be patient with me. “Oh her—she’s so white,” he huffed. “Him—

you call him black?” By his definition, there were really only three “authentic” blacks, and he was one of them.

To a city boy like Joe, urban street-corner society was simply more interesting. The sidewalks were livelier, the styles hipper, the banter wittier, the music better, and the extended families of cousins and aunties and siblings more fun. White kids at school snickered at his transformation. “Didn’t that used to be Joey Talbot?” one mother giggled to a teacher. Although black kids are routinely expected to fit into white culture, the idea of a white kid becoming “black” seemed laughable to everyone but Joe’s African American friends.

We knew Joe’s need to define himself separately from us was a natural part of adolescence. “I’m trying to figure out who I am,”

he reflected one day. “I think this is who I am.” But all attempts to convince him that he could not erase his white middle-class roots were to no avail.

When he was thirteen, we took him to see
The Godfather,
to expose him to an American classic and revive his interest in his Italian American roots—but that backfired. Soon after, describing how he averted fights between neighborhood kids, he explained to me, “I’m kind of like the Godfather. People come to me with their problems, and I help them work them out.” I looked at
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him—the thin arms that were lifting weights to get buff, the ethnic nose he was trying to grow into—and I immediately regretted that choice of films.

I realized then, with some awe, that he was still young enough to believe he could reinvent himself as anyone he wanted to be. I knew that, someday soon, his ghetto persona would probably not be accepted by either blacks or whites. But I marveled that, for now, by his definition, skin color was superfluous.

Maybe, after all we had been through, Joe’s need to reinvent himself as someone else was simply stronger than most adolescents’. Maybe he needed to go to a world where his parents and his old friends couldn’t go. Maybe my cancer had accelerated his hardening himself to be a man. But it was something else too.

Once, a writer told me that after her divorce her son dropped out of the school band to become a loner skateboarder. When she asked him why, he said, “Mom, kids whose parents are divorced don’t play in the school band.” I think that, for Joe, the world of shiny soccer trophies and smiling two-parent families busying themselves for school bake sales just didn’t seem important anymore. Inside, he needed to connect with people whose lives seemed as hard and scary as his must have suddenly felt. And in his inner-city friends, he found that connection.

In bookstores,
the titles on helping kids cope with cancer in the family are shelved with those on raising children who are biracial or disabled. But none of the books tells you what to do when your cancer crashes up against your son’s becoming ghetto. I came out of a year of treatments with a childlike appreciation for life’s humble things. The pale clouds of winter, a glittery spider web could bring tears to my eyes. But I had also lost my son’s last year of boyhood, and I wasn’t ready. I’d get hurt by his sulking street self. While his eyes darted around to make sure he was not being seen with us at movies and on other family outings, I still wanted every second of our time together to count. I had no right to ask that of him, I knew.

Give him time to find himself,
I thought. But I also wondered sometimes how much time I had to give.

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David and I were concerned with Joe’s transformation for other, more rational reasons. His lapses into bad grammar were to us like a jarring car alarm on a deserted street at night. All his interests—school, piano, film, soccer—seemed to shrivel against the pounding rhythms coming from behind his door. Sometimes I’d hear him working out a beautiful refrain on the keyboard, but then there would be the familiar grunts and shouts, and I knew it was just background for the main event: rap.

After all our family talks about the civil rights movement and African American history, we were actually appalled. Didn’t Joe know that most people were trying to get out of the ghetto, not into it? Joe and his pals weren’t thugs, but they all wanted to look like it. They studied the short lives and violent deaths of rap stars as if they were Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X. We worried about what serious risks could lay ahead if Joe pursued the gangsta persona into the more dangerous years of high school.

But Joe’s new identity challenged our own assumptions and awareness as well. With Joe’s new friends in the picture, neighborhoods that we usually drove through only on our way somewhere else now became our destinations. I remember walking through double-locked gates into a labyrinth of concrete halls to drop off one of Joe’s friends at a unit that had only a TV and a PlayStation—no chairs, no kitchen table, no beds. Dropping off another child meant driving through acres of public housing staggering down to the shipyards in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point.

Years ago I often went into these projects when I worked with teenagers in juvenile court, and later wrote about kids who were struggling to get out of them. But when had they built so many more of them? Why didn’t I know how the projects had multi-plied? They might have been communities of Amish or Hasidic Jews for all my life intersected with them now.

The insidious face of inner-city poverty seemed to raise the stakes on everything—even the simplest get-together. Should we let Joe sleep overnight at the home of his new best friend, who lived in public housing? Would Joe be a target in a tough inner-city neighborhood, or just an unlucky victim of a stray bullet?

Should I be honest about my fears with his friends’ mothers or
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make excuses? A longtime African American friend of ours told us we were being too cautious, but when a man was shot down after a high-speed chase with the police on the street where Joe’s friend lived, it settled the question.

What I hadn’t expected was to find myself worrying about the safety of Joe’s friends in
our
neighborhood. We live in what middle-income San Franciscans consider one of the last affordable areas, a topsy-turvy mix of mostly aging bohemians, Latins, gays, lesbians, and white starter-house families. It is separated from one of the poorest, most gang-dominated neighborhoods in the city by one traffic-clogged boulevard that leads to the freeway. Like a Pied Piper, Precita Park sits on the dividing line, drawing together kids from both sides to play. Parents sit on the benches, watching their kids mingle but rarely mingling with one another. At dusk they retreat to their own side of the invisible line. At night we are connected by sirens: the people on our side of the line often awakened by wailing from the streets on the other side.

Our neighborhood is by no means sheltered or privileged. But when Joe started bringing new friends from the other side up to the house or even hanging outside with his black friends from school, I noticed the neighbors tense up. People on our block paused a while at their doorways before going inside, watching them. Someone always seemed to notice if one of the boys hopped the back fence to get a stray ball in a neighbor’s yard. When the boys rang the doorbell of a female classmate a few blocks away, her neighbor called the police. The girl’s white mother had a black boyfriend whom the neighbors were used to seeing around, but the sight of those boys climbing the stairs to her door on a Saturday afternoon alarmed them.

I doubt they even noticed Joe—they just saw a gang of kids who shouldn’t be there. They saw the scariest people in America—black teenage boys. I realized that everywhere these kids went—up the street, downtown—they were being watched.

A few summers ago, as budding filmmakers, Joe and his white friends had rung doorbells in the neighborhood and run off, catching people’s reactions in a video series they called
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“Pranking and the Human Response,” a kind of precursor to Ashton Kutcher’s
Punk’d.
I knew that Joe and his new gang could never get away with something like that.

As I got to know the mothers of Joe’s new friends, I saw that they had their own apprehensions about sending their kids into our neighborhood, new turf that might hold unfamiliar dangers on the street. And they worried about their kids hanging out with some white boy whose idea of fun might be their sons’ trouble. “I was so relieved to find out that Joey was a nice boy,” one mother, Charmaine,* admitted to me one day. “You know, these white kids are bringing drugs and sex into the schools.”

Slowly, awkwardly (much more awkwardly than our sons, who by now called themselves “brothers”), we moved from polite to friendly, from talking through a rolled-down car window to coming in to chat. My new friends were mothers raising their kids alone, with little or no child support. Unlike me and my other friends—mostly atheists and agnostics—they spent long hours in church and believed strongly in the power of prayer. Two kids’

fathers were doing hard time. One boy’s father refused to pay child support to his mother, but said that if his son needed something, “he knows he can call me.” Another boy’s stepfather had just died of cancer, and his birth father lived across the country.

“Sometimes I wonder, why is God doing this to me?” said his mom, a Latin American woman who was raising three children alone. “Then I realize, God is doing this to show me I have the strength to handle it.”

Fall and winter of eighth grade
in San Francisco are dominated by the hysteria of the high school application process. The stakes are high. Good public high schools are few, so many middle-income parents also apply to private schools they cannot afford, praying for scholarships or, like us, resigning themselves to taking

*The names of some people in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.

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out loans to pay tuitions of up to $25,000 a year. In fact, many private school scholarships go to families with incomes of $100,000 or more.

The crumbling, leaky halls of even San Francisco’s elite public high school, Lowell, can’t compare with the calm, safe havens the private schools offer. We visited pricey schools that supplied each student with a brand-new laptop, plush libraries that rivaled those of my college, campus “communities” that promised small classes and study support. Though the schools talked a lot about diversity and had elaborate, ultra-sensitive ethnic pride clubs, they seemed to have just a sprinkling of light-skinned black students in the mix. One school had enough clout to have drawn an elderly Rosa Parks to campus for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday to sing “We Shall Overcome” with the overwhelmingly white student body.

For thirteen-year-old kids, the application process is need-lessly brutal—essays, interviews, tests, shadow visits, open houses, all while having to keep up their grades. For parents, it is obsessive. “This
is
my job,” is the familiar refrain from stay-at-home mothers. One working mother I knew took a leave from her job to keep up with the rigid schedules and paperwork required.

I went through the process like a stand-in in a life that was no longer mine. Up until a year or two before, Joe would have had a good shot at one of the top schools. But now his grade-point average was wobbly and his extracurricular activities weak. He had mustered the energy to make an impressive film in which he asks a wide variety of people to define what it is that makes them who they are. But he closes it with a tribute to Tupac—a big point of contention in our house that can be explained only by the insanity that had overtaken us. My husband—newly enlightened after seeing the film
Tupac: Resurrection
—argued that it was Joe’s artistic right to do so; I said that most admissions people know Tupac as just a thug who got himself killed, and it wasn’t worth the risk.