Page 35 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

20 . Consumption in Context

knew and also gave me a chance to talk with caretakers about their per-
spectives on their children and their children's activities, wants, and
problems.
Three girls—Tionna, Natalia, and Asia—are at the core of what
follows in the succeeding chapters. Over the course of my time in
Newhallville I came to know these girls and their families best. Tionna's
great-grandmother, Ella, had been her primary caretaker since birth.
Tionna's grandmother, Celia, was also living in the same household.
The family was neither especially well off nor especially poor in com-
parison to other Newhallville residents: Ella owned the family's home,
paying for the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, heat, and utilities
on her retirement income. After working for more than forty years in
the cafeteria of the local hospital, Ella retired at age seventy due to knee
trouble. Celia, Ella's daughter, was in her early fifties and received state
aid for her own and Tionna's support.
Tionna was nine years old when I met her. She was tall for her age,
with a sweet, intelligent face that she could transform into a mask of
baleful reproach in an instant. Her gait was shambling and slightly off-
balance, as if she were being pulled to the side by some sort of weight or
absence. And there was a large absence in her life: the year before we
met Tionna's mother had been shot and killed in an incident that was
rumored to have been drug related. One afternoon early in my field-
work, I walked Tionna home after school and she told me of her mother's
death in a matter-of-fact, almost distant manner, saying, "My mother
said she'd be there for my birthday but things didn't work out like that."
She was the only child in the study to have lost a parent to a violent
death, yet her situation was not unique: many of the others had lost
brothers, uncles, or other close relatives in a similar manner, or to AIDS
or the penal system.
Natalia was one of Tionna's close friends. Whereas Tionna still had her
baby fat, Natalia had the stick-thin figure of a girl who has just shot into
puberty. She lived around the corner from Tionna with her older brother
and her maternal grandparents. Natalia's mother lived only a few blocks
away, with her boyfriend, and Natalia moved back and forth between
these two homes. She had a particular talent for managing to be away
from her grandparents' home when it was time to go to church—where
her grandmother was pastor and her grandfather a deacon—on Sunday
mornings and Thursday evenings. Natalia's well-timed absences con-
tributed to her reputation for being a little wild and unmanageable. She
was never someone to walk when she could run, and the small frame