Odd Girl Out (34 page)

Her mother's inability to make her own decisions frustrated her, especially when there seemed to be so many to make right at the time. Perhaps because of this, Jasmine told me that "my mother doesn't know me as much as my friends do."

In one sense, Jasmine's complaints have the texture of typical adolescent angst—my mother doesn't get me; she makes me do too much. Jasmine's frustration, however, ran deeper, and her anger pointed to a gulf between herself and her mother that paralleled the two worlds she was living in. Her mother didn't speak English, and her mind, Jasmine said gingerly, "is kind of set back to the culture in DR (Dominican Republic). She doesn't understand the way things are now." The values Jasmine was learning at school—of competition, ambition, and individual success—conflicted with her mother's attempts to socialize her into interdependence. To survive the confusion, Jasmine turned to herself, holding fast to her own voice.

From the first days at the new private school, Jasmine told me she steeled herself to remember certain things. "I came in with a certain attitude. That this is me. You like me, that's it; you don't like me, that's it, too. I'm not going to try and change myself because some-one doesn't like me." She was surprised to attract more friends than she could handle, but some girls viewed her with animosity. "I'm not going to be trying to impress people because I want them to like me. I think that kind of intimidates people that I'm sort of more assertive and more aggressive in what I do. In my thinking I'm not weak-minded. I consider myself a very strong person. That scares them because they're not like that."

Jasmine described public school as a place where "you can't show weakness," and private school as a hotbed for emotions. Yet she was confused and insecure about the duplicity she noticed in some of her new peers. "A lot of people are hypocritical," she told me. "They pretend to be your good friend. They pretend nothing's changed. That's just worse." When she tried to tell people how she felt, they often thought she was being "mean." They were offended by her directness. "Can't you just take what I'm saying as coming to you?" Jasmine remarked. "Don't try and change it. I'm just saying, this is it."

Jasmine struggled with the unexplained abandonment and silences from the girls she loved most, and the friction in her group of friends had Jasmine questioning herself. Bewildered and sad, having tried fiercely to keep her relationships intact, she remembered thinking, "What is it that I do that pushes people away? Why is it that so many of my friendships are failures? What do I keep on doing wrong? When you see a pattern in your life, you look to yourself for the problem." Eventually, however, she realized that trying and hoping and wanting would not be enough. "There's only so much you can do in a friendship," she said simply. "You can't give 110 percent and another person gives 5 percent." Eventually, she told me, some of the friends who had stopped speaking to her confessed they had been jealous.

Jasmine resented it. "I have had to work really hard for everything I have in my life. Nothing's been handed to me. A lot of girls in this school have. It's a really expensive school. I'm on scholarship. I'm not paying for anything for this school. And it's like they don't grasp the fact that you have to work for things. You're not always going to be given things in your hand." She later told me, "I've been through a lot in my life and I've learned that in certain situations you have to be more aggressive because, if not, people are going to take advantage of you."

Jasmine's marked self-reliance complicated her relationships with her friends. She found competition with other girls so jarring that she preferred friendships with boys. She balked at the disdain she felt emanating from girls who seemed to resent her academic success. "I have to keep my grades up!" she said in protest. "It's a must or I won't be attending [the school] or any school like that. They just don't understand that."

Jasmine was perplexed by the need of her girlfriends to rely on each other so much, especially their endless barrage of questions about how they looked and what they should do. "It's not like, 'Oh, my God, I hang on the opinions of my friends all the time.' I do depend on opinions. I always ask, What do you think? But it's not like I'm going to change something about myself because someone doesn't like it. If I really feel I should do it, I'm going to do it."

Whether at her old public school or Arden, Jasmine had always been a minority, and she found particular comfort in her identity at her mostly white school. Yet she found that "people kind of forget who they are and they start acting a certain way." At school, minorities rarely attended gatherings for students of color. "Like you know?" she asked. "They're forgetting their heritage. They kind of get lost in all that. My friend Ray is a Dominican. It's so sad. He doesn't speak Spanish." She told me she was ashamed that she could write only a little Spanish. "What are you trying to be?" she asked no one in particular. "Don't forget who you are."

She noticed her white peers trying on "ghetto" fashions like bandannas, imitating Jasmine's Spanish slang and Dominican inflection. One classmate shared her address with the caveat that she "lives in the ghetto," and Jasmine silently imagined her coming to visit her neighborhood sometime. There, Jasmine said, she can't wear a bandanna because it signals gang affiliations.

When I asked Jasmine who she turns to for help, she echoed many urban girls observed by researchers. "Mostly I don't talk to anyone. Sometimes I'll talk about stuff. Most of the stuff I deal with on my own."

As a working-class Latina, Jasmine's transition into white, middle-class culture had left her a stranger in both worlds. She was caught in the space between, and to adapt, to avoid the overload and confusion of mixed messages, Jasmine was digging in her heels and holding fast to the memory of her grandmother. Where the messages of her world collided, she chose to rely on herself and her own voice, the only sound she could hear clearly.

 

Parents' attempts to empower their children were evident in my discussions with urban girls. I was struck by the extent to which many of them were socialized to defend themselves physically. In some instances, girls reported being struck by their parents for returning home beaten. One urban African American girl who lost a fistfight was given some credit by her mother. "My mother says at least you tried. My mother doesn't want me to be no sucker, nobody's fool." It is important to emphasize that these girls are not expected to be aggressive generally, but to defend themselves when they have been provoked. Their comments confirm the observations of researchers who found parents training their children to expect affronts on their dignity.
⁷⁸

Martin Luther King Elementary's students are predominantly African American, Puerto Rican, and Dominican. Twice a week, when I arrived for our group discussions, the open expanse of the first floor hovered over a cliff of afterschool chaos, thick-skinned maroon balls crashing out of the gym and into lockers, children's voices raised in laughter and shouts as they moved toward their activities.

Ntozake, the head of the afterschool program, had chosen a mix of known bullies and targets to speak with me. These fifth and sixth-grade girls were assembled around a conference table used by teachers. In the dim, smoky light flowing through crisp Venetian blinds, the girls fidgeted in too-large chairs, looking apprehensively at Ntozake.

At this school, Ntozake said, shaking her head in wonder, the girls fight as often as and sometimes more than the boys. Standing at the front of the room on our first day together, she asked a simple question. She said she wanted to know the answer as much as I did, and I was grateful for the comforting effect her presence clearly had on the girls. "Why," she asked pointedly, eyes narrowing, "is there so much fighting?"

"The reason why we fight so much is because when they spread rumors, and you tell them to come to your face, they change it around and talk about your mother and dead family members," Rosa said.

"We have fights because sometimes we say to say it to our face to show that if you want to talk, talk to my face!" Marisol added. "My sister told me, 'If someone calls you a word, you say it back. If they say something, don't take it because it's not true.'"

"My mother says to bust 'em up if someone hits you," Tiffany volunteered.

"You can't stay hit," Latoya explained. "If you don't hit, they gon' say, 'Oh, why don't you hit, you a punk?'"

Rosa gestured at Ntozake. "Even though you tell us not to fight, our parents tell us not to stay hit."

"In third grade," Jessica began, "I used to be a punk. There was a boy. He hit me and I wouldn't do nothing. I'd go home crying. My mother would be like, 'What happened?' One time he punched me in the mouth. My mother said, 'If you don't hurt him, I'm gonna hit you.'" The girls erupted in cheers and shared similar rules from their homes.

Later, after the discussion had ended and only a few students lingered, Rosa approached. "I don't want to be in fights," she said, "but I feel like I have to. My dad says, 'Beat their behind up.' But I don't want to. I'd come home with bruises and my father would yell at me. So I had to fight."

Some physical fights between girls bear a powerful likeness to nonviolent alliance building, explored in chapter three. Tiffany, an African American ninth grader in Mississippi, explained that fistfights between girls are often prolonged by the need to get other girls involved in a supportive backup, not unlike the way girls build alliances.

"They gotta go get their clique," she explained. "They gotta take all their time. The girls have to get their clique because ... they're likely to jump in and just have your back, just like that." Notably, although girls in the Northeast and Mississippi described girls standing behind a friend to back her up, they said it was extremely rare for witnesses to enter the fracas themselves.

Nevertheless, Tiffany explained, their presence "tells you who your real friends are," adding that "you feel much stronger" with them by your side. Tiffany alluded to R & B singer Jill Scott's video "Gettin' in the Way," in which Scott decides she must resort to physical violence to convince her boyfriend's ex to stop trying to sabotage his new relationship. Scott charges up the scorned woman's front steps, trailed by her closest friends (and most of the neighborhood), and tears off the woman's wig, to the delight of the crowd.

Jacqueline explained, "If you have your friends there, it's kind of a threat. If you're just talking to the girl, she probably won't be as nervous to say what she has to say. Or she probably won't get as loud. But if you have another friend there, you're dominating her because it's two of you." Like the middle-class girls who use emotional alliances, these girls make pacts to defend each other physically.

Fourteen-year-old Amanda shared intriguing insights when I asked her about her observations of boys fighting in her Puerto Rican neighborhood. Amanda had watched boys move up the social ladder when they won a fight one-on-one. "If he would win, he's stronger than that boy.... They're like, 'Oh, I beat him up. He knows the next time not to say nothing.'" The rules of masculinity demand displays of individual strength. Girlfights, she tells me, have different goals. Girls "continue arguing. Usually when girls do that ... she's beat up, she'll be scared of her, or she'll bring more people into the fight. Boys, they'll fight, they won, and leave it alone. If girls fight, it's just constant." Girls who lose fights often wait for the next moment they will be able to fight again. "It's like back and forth."

As with Jenny in chapter one who waited years to retaliate against her bully, feuds can last for years between girls as they seek opportunities to avenge their loss. Tiffany explained, "After a fistfight, girls feel like they need to get that girl back. Whoever beat that other girl up is going to have to watch her back all the time."

Similar to alliance building, in which middlegirls may have a stake in causing a fight, girls who fight physically also describe those who instigate. "Somebody'll pump it up. They're gonna say, 'Oh, she said this about you.' They're gonna come back in your face, and then, you know, they don't want to hear what you got to say."

Keisha explained, "They get stuff started. That's how it all happens."

 

unbidden resistance

Inner strength reveals itself at unlikely moments, often when we are at the end of our rope. For some girls, rock bottom points the way up and out. A fusillade of bullying can batter someone into hopelessness, and yet the same extreme situation can lay the groundwork for extraordinary acts of personal strength, like when a stunned father hoists a car off a trapped child.

The girls who decide to fight back seem to confront moments like these. Like girls living under economic and social stress, the girls who resist find themselves with few other choices. These girls, however, are not usually prepared for it the way their counterparts are. Rather, they come into an instinct to defend themselves and preserve their integrity, one that is only semiconscious, born more of desperation than desire.

Where they may have once drawn self-esteem and strength from their friends, solitude augurs new perspective and self-awareness. As my friend Astrid recalled, "Having it happen stripped me of all external sources of confidence, and I had only what I had internally to draw on. I realized I had a lot of strength and integrity." Shelley McCullough learned about her own limits, and especially the things she needs in her relationships with others. That insight has been critical to her friendships today. "I know how I react to things. I know more about myself. I learned more how to deal with stuff."

Alizah moved from California to live with her father in New Jersey when it was clear that the cruel campaign of the popular girls would not let up. The last straw came when one of the girls stole her sneaker and refused to return it. Alizah confronted her, the girl still refused, and when Alizah pushed her up against the lockers, the girl claimed Alizah had pulled a knife. When she was suspended, Alizah was furious, ready to go anywhere, even three thousand miles away.