Page 141 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

126 . Anthropologist on Shopping Sprees

Table 5.2. Shaquita's Purchases

Item Price Store
1 pair gold-colored slip-ons $9.99 Payless Shoes
1 pair denim mules $6.99 Payless Shoes
1 package foam rollers $2.09 Rite-Aid Drugs
1 bag bubblegum $ .99 Rite-Aid Drugs

when she needed them. Shaquita's godmother was a member of the
church the family attended, and the church played a big part in the fami-
ly's life.
The first purchase Shaquita made was two pairs of shoes at Payless
(see table 5.2). She had originally gone into the shoe store to find herself
sneakers for camp but couldn't find any sneakers she liked. She did find a
pair of $6.99 denim mules that she liked very much, though, and bought
those for herself. As a birthday gift, Shaquita bought her mother a pair of
golden slip-ons for $9.99. With the remainder of her twenty dollars she
bought a 99-cent bag of bubblegum that she planned to share with her
older sister and some hair-rollers made of pink foam for her grandmother
for $2.09. Shaquita spent more than half her money on gifts, all for fe-
male kin who play central roles in her life.
In her explanation about why she and her siblings continued to live
with their grandparents even after their mother had returned from the
Army, Shaquita emphasized she was wanted, that their mother had asked
to have her children back, but their grandmother wanted to keep them.
Shaquita never said much about what she herself preferred to do, but she
seemed happy and secure in her grandparents' home, even as she longed
for and missed being with her mother. Looking at these gifts in more de-
tail sheds light on the nature of the different relationships that Shaquita
had or hoped to have with her mother and grandmother. Shaquita told
me before we began our trip that her mother wanted some gold sandals
and that she wanted to buy her these for a birthday gift. There is a fan-
tasy aspect to these shoes, with their golden color, and their special-event
feel. These qualities dovetail with aspects of Shaquita's actual relation-
ship with her mother, where visits were special events. At $9.99, the
shoes cost Shaquita about half of her money, and to some degree this is
an indication of the degree to which Shaquita wanted to impress her