High Price

Through this parenting style, middle-class children were being trained to lead, whether intentionally or not.
    Meanwhile, the poor and working class were being trained for life on the bottom. Middle-class children were constantly being taught explicitly to advocate for themselves with authorities, while the lower classes were taught to submit without question. Or, if they were going to resist, the poor learned by experience to do so covertly, not openly.
    Indeed, covert resistance permeated my early life so thoroughly that it was as natural as breathing. Even today, I feel uneasy and disconnected when I have to do something like pay an outrageously overpriced bill for cable TV or parking. Part of me still thinks that paying full price is for those who don’t have a friend who can cut them a special deal. It has taken me several years to begrudgingly accept the fact that I am indeed out of touch with the part of life that was once defined by getting the inside deals.
    The idea behind the “accomplishment of natural growth” strategy clarifies a great deal for me about how my family saw its children and what my mother thought her role should be. While MH was obviously troubled and stressed by the overwhelming task before her, she saw her job as mainly keeping us safe, fed, clothed, housed, and out of trouble. Beyond that, she would teach the discipline of hard work and forcefully, often intrusively impose morals and manners. Life was hard and she didn’t think it would make it any easier for us children if she coddled us.
    Above all, she wanted us to be scrupulously clean, polite, and well behaved. That would make us respectable—we’d be even better than the ill-mannered white children we often saw when she worked as a house cleaner—no matter how much or how little we had.
    But as a child, I was infuriated by this emphasis on manners, appearances, and respect for adults. I didn’t understand why adults were supposed to be automatically accorded respect, while children could be arbitrarily dismissed and belittled. It didn’t seem fair that a child couldn’t speak up and be heard if something was wrong, while any pronouncement or action of an adult, no matter how cruel or foolish, had to be accepted unquestioningly. I didn’t understand the way the desire for respectability and some semblance of power and control amid poverty shaped the behavior of adults.
    Moreover, the emphasis on obedience until you’d reached adulthood didn’t always enhance parenting skills. At least for some members of my family, becoming an adult just seemed to mean a shift from having to take often-irrational orders to being able to give them. While my own kids challenge me far more than I did my parents, I value that because I know damn well that adults aren’t always right. Of course, I also want them to question and interrogate the world, not to take things on faith without thinking.
    And so, while there are many ways in which my parents were certainly neglectful, there are others in which our upbringing provided significant advantages. For one, I learned to be independent and to take care of myself very early in life. Second, I learned to take responsibility—both for myself and for my younger brother, whom I often essentially parented. Finally, my close ties to my cousins and siblings were another important result, though this was another influence that would have both positive and negative effects on my ability to enter the mainstream.
    Nonetheless, in my earliest childhood, there was no pleasure I could see in many of the mainstream words—and no power or clout associated with doing well in school. The drive for status was part of what put me at great risk in my neighborhood, while simultaneously playing an even larger role in helping me to escape it.
    M y mom liked to listen to Al Green on Sunday mornings, his rapturous voice with its sacred yet really erotically charged falsetto high notes filling the house, the record spinning at 33 rpm on our giant console. With bright gospel harmonies and swirling organ lines, mellow songs of love and heartbreak like “Love and Happiness” and “Let’s Stay Together” flooded the house: “ . . . we oughta stay together. Loving you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad . . .” It was our music, the kind that didn’t get played on FM radio, so it was especially esteemed and comforting.
    One Sunday when I was seven, however, Mom picked up an extension phone and