Page 136 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees . 121
mother, who was in her early twenties, had not come home all night and
he'd had to take care of his younger siblings, the youngest still in dia-
pers. Money was tight for his family, and though a simple uniform of
white shirt and blue pants was required at the school, Davy did not have
the proper outfit. A couple of months after Davy joined the class, the
classroom aide took him downtown and bought him a basic set of
school clothes and a sweater. He came to class the next day wearing his
new uniform and beaming broadly. Davy's pleasure in being able to
dress both according to the school code and like his classmates was
openly visible and reflected his new ability to fit in with everyone else.
Davy was painfully eager to communicate with teachers and other
children but seemed not quite to know how, and his end of any conver-
sation was usually monosyllabic. My pictures from the field seemed al-
ways to catch him on the edge of things, hands in pockets, tall for his
age, leaning in longingly toward a group of kids who were doing some-
thing that he was not quite part of. Davy was not at the edges of things
because the rest of the class was leaving him out; the other kids really
seemed to like him, and several students made special efforts to help him
with his math or his reading, both subjects he liked but was struggling
with. It just seemed that Davy did not know how to make contact with
people or that he was afraid.
On his shopping trip, Davy spent his twenty dollars at Toys-R-Us, a
store that he had never visited before. He did not even know the store's
name and at the beginning of our trip had asked if we could go shopping
"where Ronnie and Kareem went." These two boys were classmates of
Davy's and had been talking with him about their trip, which we had
done the day before. Once we were in Toys-R-Us, Davy's trip did not
take long. He seemed to take little notice of the abundant merchandise
and, though he was unfamiliar with the store's layout, he found and
quickly settled on his choice: a walkie-talkie set. Together with the bat-
teries the walkie-talkies required, the total cost came to just over twenty
dollars (I routinely paid small sums over the twenty dollars if they re-
sulted from sales tax, which many children could not calculate or did
not anticipate). The problem was, as we moved along another aisle
Davy also found Wolverine, an X-Men action figure, which he had told
me before we began shopping he had planned to buy. These action fig-
ures were tremendously popular among the boys in the classroom, and
most of them had two or three of the most coveted ones. The boys would
often congregate together in front of Ronnie's house to play X-Men after
school. Though the boys freely lent figures back and forth during these