7
BILLY’S NARRATIVE
Clashing in Parkmont
When asked about their old neighborhoods, many of Parkmont’s black residents described the things they didn’t like: “There was a lot of crime and drugs, and I didn’t like that.” “The schools that were there and different places around the neighborhood.” “Two people were killed on my block.” “I was mugged over there three times. That’s why I carry teargas everywhere I go, and that’s why I don’t trust anybody.” “Down that way? The violence and everything. The drugs, everything that’s going on down there, and especially because I have a baby now.”
Most black residents moved to Parkmont to live in a place where people were less burdened by segregation, crime, disorder, poor schools, and neighborhood problems. In their view, bad neighborhoods are the common and normal urban residential experience rather than the exception. From this perspective, Parkmont, a recently integrated community with a good reputation, seemed like an oasis that was free from the entrenched problems associated with city life. With its semisuburban feel, affordable homes, neat lawns, and highly regarded school, incoming black residents viewed the neighborhood as a retreat from their own residential histories in the inner city. However, Billy Gordon, a nineteen-year-old who moved to Parkmont as part of the second wave, schooled me on the realities of life in the neighborhood and why his experiences and those of many second wave residents differ from those of the pioneers.
My day with Billy started out at his father’s modest barbershop, a black-owned business on the strip, and a place where casual conversations revealed a great deal about the lives of younger residents. On a hot July afternoon, I sat waiting for Billy in the shop. His father, Ray, is a forty-year-old U.S. Army veteran and second wave resident. Ray wore a neat haircut, a crisply new and stylish athletic jersey, and extra long denim shorts. As he cut a man’s hair with an electric razor, we were joined by several customers who seemed impatient to have their turns.
In the background a soccer match was on television, though Ray had muted the volume and the sounds of a popular hip-hop song filled the small room. The shop was stocked with artifacts of Afrocentric symbolism and black pride. Several framed posters hung on the walls to remind customers of the African origins of humankind, including depictions of human migration patterns across the globe and a timeline of black religious history. A stereo with a pile of rap and R&B CDs, posters displaying black men’s hair styles and one offering special prices for senior citizen cuts on Wednesdays, and a large poster advertising “Urban Talent Showcase: Street Mafia” all gave the space a cluttered feel. Leaning against one of the walls was a telling symbol of community life in Parkmont: a door with a steel security gate waiting to be installed.
One man, tired of the delay, asked about making an appointment. Ray let him know that he does not get enough business to take appointments: “I ain’t that big. I’m a little dude.” Ray is a proud entrepreneur, but he seemed to be struggling to make ends meet. A few days earlier, he had aggressively tried to sell a baseball hat to me. Athletic gear is apparently a side business for him. He and his wife, Neala, had just opened a women’s beauty salon next door where I had my hair done once, but it would go out of business after less than a year.
As customers talked, I heard about the troubles in the lives of Parkmont’s newest black families—school problems, criminal involvement, family breakups, and the need for money to pay bills and debts. At one point, a teenager named “Beats” entered. Below his long, baggy shorts, he wore an electronic ankle bracelet used to track criminal offenders after their release. Everyone in the shop greeted Beats and some men commented on his long absence from the neighborhood. “I heard that you was giving away lyrics now,” said Ray, commenting on Beats’s reputation as a rapper. Beats downplayed the quality of the recording of his music that had been circulating around the neighborhood, but Ray and others in the shop objected to his modesty and urged him to be more consumer-oriented and in the capitalist spirit: “It don’t matter if you like it, as long as people buying it.” After the entrepreneurial pep talk, Ray lowered his voice and said, “Beats, you stay focused, and don’t get into no more trouble. You be in the [recording] booth and school as much as possible.”
A few minutes later, a young teen ran into the shop and loudly asked everyone, “Who got shot last night?” According to the television news and gossip around Parkmont, a gunman fatally shot a pizza deliveryman just a few blocks from the shop; many young people who hang out on the strip had been talking about it. With no sign of shock about the shooting, the customers exchanged stories about what they had already heard about it. A few moments later, Billy entered and greeted everyone. Then, we left the shop and walked to the patio of the nearby public library to talk in a more private place.
Billy, along with his father, stepmother, and siblings, lives in a rented home in Parkmont. Like many second wave children in Parkmont, he has siblings from his mother and father’s relationship as well as from their relationships with other people. Though on the surface his appears to be a stable, nuclear family—with Billy in college, living in a married, two-parent household, and having a father who owns his own business—this family has dealt with considerable volatility and hardship. It does not take long to recognize that they, like many second wave residents in Parkmont, are struggling. Parkmont’s streets are far better than other parts of the city, but this façade masks the troubles of a community where new residents are having difficulty staying afloat, and most are fairly alienated from community life and their neighbors.
This life history chapter moves us from Billy’s original neighborhood to Parkmont, the site of his troubled teen years, and then to his current life as a cautious college student who lives four hours away and only returns to Parkmont during breaks. Because of his young age, recent graduation from Lombard, and the abundant time he has spent hanging out at his father’s shop, Billy considers himself quite knowledgeable about Parkmont, and especially about the experiences of neighborhood youths. This chapter considers the similarities and differences between pioneer and second wave families, with special attention to stated differences in cultural values and consequential behaviors.
Escaping “Typical” GhettoLife
A key goal shared by most of Parkmont’s black residents, pioneers and second wave residents alike, was to escape the serious crime and poorly performing schools that were ubiquitous in their old neighborhoods. This desire to flee reflects the fact that the city’s many black communities tend to be deeply troubled by poverty, crime, and unemployment. Such neighborhood-level problems are caused, in part, by city-level problems with segregation, suburbanization of jobs, gains in immigrant Asian, Latino, and black populations, and selective population decentralization, all of which have resulted in the loss of middle-class and white residents.
Parkmont’s second wave residents seemed especially aware of these problems because they were the ones who had most recently left neighborhoods where blight and danger were the norm. Billy explained the sad state of his old neighborhood: “It just was bad. Still is. Typical stuff—drug selling, shootings. I know I would’ve been involved in all that stuff if I had stayed down there.” While Billy conveyed a negative evaluation of his old neighborhood, he was simultaneously nonchalant about the tragedy of his experiences there. Having lived in a segregated, poor, and crime-ridden community for so long and so recently, Billy has developed a more general sense of normalcy about the existence of violence and crime in urban neighborhoods. His use of the word “typical” demonstrates that he, like many second wave residents, found it unremarkable that his former neighborhood was riddled with so many serious problems.
This is not to say that Billy approved of the state of affairs before; nor did he live fearlessly in his day-to-day life in his old neighborhood. In fact, part of the reason that Billy seemed both disapproving of and desensitized to the harsh realities of his old neighborhood was that the problems there closely mirrored those of his own family: “I was used to the shootings, but I didn’t like that stuff. I didn’t like to see the drug addicts walking around. I knew my mom was one.” Unlike the typical pioneer in Parkmont, Billy viewed members of his own family as epitomizing the set of problems that plague so many urban neighborhoods.
Parents “Doing Their Own Thing”
Everything changed when Billy moved to Parkmont. The drive-by shootings, the constant threat of being robbed, and the daily sidewalk traffic of crack addicts that characterized his old block were no more. But these were not the only changes; the circumstances of his move were such that he also had to contend with the personal trials of establishing a life with a whole new family.
Billy’s mother is addicted to drugs and has been largely absent from his life. His father only became involved in his upbringing after the death of Billy’s grandmother, who served as his legal guardian. His grandparents raised him in their home, located in Westside, a very poor black neighborhood: “I didn’t live with my parents. I lived with my grandparents at the time, and they felt comfortable there because they lived there for a while. So they weren’t gonna go nowhere.” When I asked about his parents, Billy described his strained relationship with each of them:
They wasn’t doin’ all right when I was down there. My mom, in and out of jail. My dad, he was just doin’ his own thing, but he came through. My dad, he did more than my mom. He came through around birthdays, maybe Christmas or stuff like that. My mom, she came through once in a blue. I’m in touch with her. I just seen her when my sister graduated from high school the other day. She comes during stuff like that, and I still talk to her and stuff. I lived with my grandmother ’til I was like twelve, and then she passed. My grandfather passed when I was in fifth grade, so we really didn’t have nowhere to go because my parents, they were doing their own thing. So my dad—I’m not saying he had —but he kind of had to step up to the plate. That’s the way I look at it. Unless we were just going to be in foster care or something like that. So I feel like he had to step up to the plate.
I surmised that Billy felt like his father was forced to take him in. Billy said, “I don’t know what would have happened. I think about that a lot. See, I don’t really know. I’ll never know because it’s already happened now. We here.”
Married family households are relatively uncommon among Parkmont’s second wave families. Instead, the newest Parkmont residents have more varied arrangements that are either intended to help pay bills on time and provide childcare or else are the unfortunate result of life events that have split families apart: single women living with young nieces and grandchildren, sometimes along with their own children; divorced or never married single mothers living with their own children but also renting out a room to a sibling or even a parent; single women, both young and middle aged, cohabiting with and caring for aging parents; single women of various ages living alone; and unmarried couples living with shared children as well as children from past relationships.
Unmet Expectations and a Segregated School
Like many successful inner-city black students, Billy did not attend his old neighborhood’s poorly rated school. Both of the schools located in his old neighborhood are counted among the most persistently dangerous ones statewide. Billy’s grandparents were outraged by the conditions there, so they sent him to an integrated school located about an hour away by public transportation. Billy explained: “I went to school at Northside. I used to take the bus because of the neighborhood. Well, the school, and then, the neighborhood. Period.”
Though Billy loved his school and did not want to transfer to Lombard, his father promised that moving to Parkmont would offer an even better life than he had with his grandmother because he would have access to both a safe neighborhood and a reputable school. However, the reality was far different. Both Lombard and its surrounding neighborhood had resegregated by the time of Billy’s arrival. In addition, Lombard was failing academically and residents said that it was notorious for frequent disciplinary problems, which occurred not only among students but also between students and teachers. Billy complained of overcrowding at Lombard. Because it was originally built as an elementary school and later expanded to include children from kindergarten and up, Lombard’s high school students are confined to one floor, while the rest of the school building is for children in lower grades.
I asked Billy whether he had heard of Parkmont before he moved here: “Yeah, but only from what I was hearing about Lombard.” The only time Billy had even heard about Parkmont was in reference to its school, which people said had a good reputation. I asked Billy to talk about some of his expectations about Parkmont and how they matched up to reality: “Didn’t nothin’ really match. Not really. Because there was a lot of black people here when I came here, and the school wasn’t really good. I didn’t look at the teachers and all that stuff as being really good. It was better when I was at my other school, so I was like, ’What the heck did I really change for?’”
Billy told me about how different his former school on the Northside was from Lombard: “My friends were there. That was a good school. It was bigger, had better opportunity. They have more sports: football, basketball, others I can’t even name. More activities, more people.” I asked if his friends at Northside had lived around that neighborhood, and he said, “A lot of them did. A few of them didn’t. They were like me, kinda like commuting.” Billy said that he did not realize that leaving the ghetto for Parkmont would mean trading an integrated school experience for a segregated one and missed the diversity of his friends at his old school: “White, black, Puerto Rican, Chinese. There was like a mix. That’s what I’m used to.”
High expectations for Lombard and Parkmont were aspects of Billy’s case that contradicted my interviews with many second wave residents. As with many pioneers, his views were based on information from older blacks he knew who were bused into the neighborhood years ago. In the following excerpt, Billy described his image of what going to school in Parkmont was going to be like:
It ain’t how they said it was going to be. Down my old way, I knew a girl that went to Lombard, and she was saying that it’s a good school. I can only remember one white person in every class that I probably had. It was probably the same way for my sister [laughs]. At the time, I thought it was more because I kept hearing that it was a good school. I thought it was more white people. Then my cousin graduated from there in ’94 or ’91 or something like that, a while back, and she was telling me when she was there, it was like a ton of white people.
Thus, Billy once lived in a neighborhood far more dangerous and disorderly than Parkmont, but his grandparents made a special effort to send him to more reputable and integrated school way across town. His father insisted that he switch schools to attend Lombard, and Billy, like many Parkmont youth, was saddened to leave his old school and friends. However, he was also excited, having heard about Lombard’s well-regarded reputation from family, friends, and neighbors. He assumed that like his other school, Lombard’s student body would have a sizable population of white students. This anticipation of a racially mixed school was integrally tied to his perception that the school would be of high quality, but in a strange turn of events it was not until he moved to Parkmont that he began to attend a segregated, black school.
Billy’s expressions of disappointment with both Parkmont and Lombard sounded similar to complaints made by pioneers. Although pioneers had already figured out that Lombard is no place to send their children to school, the second wave parents and children were just beginning to learn this. Billy’s tendency to link racial integration to his anticipation of school and neighborhood quality was also characteristic of residents who were relying on older information about Parkmont from the generation of blacks who were bused in. Residents who learned about Parkmont from the “bused generation” often conveyed the feeling that they had been duped—victims of a residential “bait and switch” caused by white flight. The local school, Lombard, was often the strongest source of disappointment to parents, children, and teens. Like so many black residents in Parkmont, Billy was fully aware of the neighborhood’s recent white flight, and race was a topic that he did not want to skirt.
Neighborhood Identity and ClashingYouth
Parkmont residents who are in the know think that too many of Lombard’s students commute in from outside neighborhoods. The younger people who attend Lombard were better able than their parents to provide details about how this affects students. The account below represents Billy’s view of the composition of the student body at Lombard and how it has created a special set of problems there:
It’s weird because everybody in Lombard is not really from this neighborhood. Everybody comes from so many different neighborhoods. It kinda clashes. It’s starting to clash now. People gotta prove points. Stuff here, stuff there. Even if they live in the neighborhood, they not usually originally from this neighborhood. Like, even me. It’s just getting like that now. Clashing and people wanting to prove themselves—that they can do this or where they’re from is like this. If they all came from one place, it would be a lot more peace. Especially, being moved here. Like, if me and you both moved from Northside, just because we both moved out of Northside together, I could probably talk to you. I’m from Northside and you from Northside, and we would probably become friends or something like that.
Billy’s discussion of his experiences at Lombard returned to the topic of race. He insisted that once Lombard resegregated, students from other neighborhoods began to flow in, even though Lombard no longer needed integration busing. Billy suggested that even after the school became completely black, many students continued to commute from other neighborhoods, which led to violence when students from different communities conflicted with one another. I asked Billy how many students come from other neighborhoods, and in his answer he said that the intraracial conflict at Lombard consisted of fights between bused in students and second wave students, neither of whom wanted to be associated with Parkmont’s reputation as a “soft” neighborhood:
Billy: I’d say more than half were from other places. Even if some people are in this neighborhood now. It’s recent. Real recent.
R. W.: So, they’re still attached to their old neighborhood?
Billy: Yeah, I would say that.
R. W.: And they want to show that they are not from this neighborhood?
Billy: Basically. Exactly.
R. W.: Because this neighborhood isn’t really tough or….
Billy: Not at all. I’m not saying that, but that’s the way they look atit.
R. W.: Is that what you mean when you say they are trying to prove that they are not from here?
Billy: Definitely. They’re not from Parkmont, even though they live here now.
R. W.: And so why are other kids coming to Lombard? Why don’t they go to a school near them?
Billy: Because they’re moving here. Like me, they could be living in their neighborhood, and maybe they thought that Lombard was this good school or something. They might think that they’re getting into a good school like I did, but it was getting crazy kinda. Is this like snitching or something if I give you details? There were like, riots in that joint. There were fights every day, and then it was crazy because it was so many young people, like ninth graders and stuff, trying to fight everybody. The hallways are so tight because they put lockers in there. It was really tight and a lot of bumping going on. A lot of beef got said, and a lot of fights broke out just in the hallway. Big riots, people getting trampled over, people who ain’t even in it getting hit. It got crazy after a while.
Many of Lombard’s second wave students resemble their parents in that they feel conflicted about their neighborhood identity and allegiances. On one hand, they know that Parkmont is safer, more attractive, and more economically stable than many black city neighborhoods. However, on the other hand, the community leaves much to be desired, and to many young people, it is nothing special or worth fighting for. Like many of Parkmont’s second wave youths, Billy remains attached to his old neighborhood. As new residents attending a school with so many children from other neighborhoods, second wave young people are reluctant to show weakness. Being from Parkmont, a neighborhood that lacks notoriety on the street, has made teens quick to demonstrate their affiliations with the lower-income, tougher neighborhoods where they once lived and with which they still identify.
Billy elaborated further on the ways in which the racial homogeneity in Parkmont is misleading for those trying to understand the culture of the community. He explained that the diversity of neighborhood loyalties and peer conflicts are not just found at school but can also be observed on the streets of Parkmont:
People might just look at the color, like it’s just the black people moving in. But it’s people coming in from so many different places and so many different ways of living and so many different mind-sets of how they go about things. It’s from where they are actually from. It’s just clashing and colliding. It’s just crazy. People, when they move here, want to come up and think it’s really sweet and just take over or something like that. Like, “I’m in charge up here” or “I’m the toughest guy up here.” It is safe. It’s definitely safer than other neighborhoods. I can tell you that. Stuff you hear about other neighborhoods don’t really happen here, but I’ll tell you that there’s a lot of people up here now that just not from the neighborhood. It’s like they’re bringing their own ’hood and what they know here. It’s so difficult when you come into contact with somebody, and you never know what they might do. I keep myself small. I know almost everybody up here, but it’s the difference between knowing them and being able to speak to them and really being cool with somebody. I’m cool with only, like, four people.
In Billy’s view, Parkmont is a “sweet” place to live to outsiders because it is uncharted territory. Anyone can move to the community and have a chance to be the “top dog.” As he sees it, Parkmont’s dubious status as a new and “soft” black neighborhood has resulted in conflicts over respect and territory. The neighborhood problems cannot be simply categorized or traced solely to racial change, drugs, or gangs. And even though Parkmont is relatively safe, Billy believes that residents can only successfully navigate the culture clashes by becoming guarded in public places.
The conflicts over culture and identity have divided Parkmont’s black population. Because many second wave parents have not embraced the preexisting cultural codes in their new neighborhood, second wave children have also struggled to shift their cultural orientations, friendships, and loyalties. The second wave children are far more likely to attend Lombard than the pioneers’ children, who attend Catholic schools, private schools, charter schools, or magnet schools. Thus, the newest Parkmont children are far more enmeshed in the social life of the neighborhood than their pioneer counterparts. According to Billy, Parkmont feels unsafe because it is filled with unfamiliar people who are originally from outside neighborhoods. Whether it is an authentic way of life or just posturing, second wave teens are perceived to be living according to a more threatening set of codes, similar to those that were the norm in their former neighborhoods. Youth feel pressured to adhere to the cultural codes from their old neighborhoods, which in part, persist in Parkmont because of the steady influx of new residents from similarly poor, high-crime areas. Second wave children often try to prove themselves in an effort to “represent” their street credibility and identification with their previous neighborhoods. As Billy explained, Parkmont’s intraracial cultural clashes are magnified for youth, making for a volatile community atmosphere.
Drugs
Having come from worse communities, many of Parkmont’s adults, teens, and children have had direct experience with dealing drugs or have had close friends and family involved in dealing drugs. I learned about Billy’s time selling drugs when he told me why his grades in high school were not as good as they could have been: “I had a job for most of high school and other stuff. I was workin’, playing ball. Girls were in there, too. A little bit of drugs; not major, just marijuana. I don’t use. I’m talkin’ ’bout sell-wise.” When I asked what he bought with the drug money, Billy told me, “Oh, gear! [Clothing]. I ain’t into that stuff no more, though. I stopped. I just looked at it as, like, extra. It was so easy to do. I just looked at it like extra cheese or extra money.” As might be expected in a community mostly populated by working people with stable jobs, Billy did not sell drugs out of economic need. In fact, he worked as a security guard in an upscale mall located downtown. Like many neighborhood youths, the opportunities and desire to deal drugs were closely tied to Billy’s family problems and his move to Parkmont.
Billy emphasized that selling drugs was not the center of his life, saying that he also attended school, played on the basketball team, had a job, and was very interested in girls. However, he also reported how important it was at Lombard to conform to the materialism that characterizes popular teen culture. The money from his job and family was not enough to keep up with his peers, so he said that he had to resort to drug dealing to buy the extra clothing and items required for his friends to consider him “in style.” Initially, Billy felt unconcerned about the consequences of drug dealing and dismissed the crime as an obvious, easy way to obtain money. He told me that, at that time, he was focused on the lucrative nature of drug dealing and not the possibility of getting caught at a young age and entering the criminal justice system.
The absence of Billy’s father and his father’s practice of routinely taking back the material things that he once provided as a punishment for Billy’s bad behavior further fueled his receptiveness toward drug dealing. It was obvious that Billy holds a deep resentment toward his father and is guarded around him. Billy told me that he prefers to be independent, which in high school meant buying sneakers and clothing with his own money from work and drug dealing, although he admitted that Ray would buy him something if he asked:
My dad would say, “Yeah.” But I’m the type that never really asks for stuff. I get that stuff on my own. I wouldn’t take the money, even though it’s my pop. I don’t like making people feel like I owe them anything. I didn’t live with him. Stuff just went down. Like, if I was to do bad or something, he’ll take stuff back from me. That was just when I was younger, like if my grandma would say I was acting up or whatever. He wouldn’t step in. He’d be like, “Give me the clothes. Give me the stuff I bought you back.” I’d be mad, because how can you buy somebody somethin’ and then take it back?
Like Billy, many second wave residents revealed that the damaging personal struggles from their old neighborhoods followed them to Parkmont. Billy moved to Parkmont because his grandmother died, his mother was in and out of jail and drug rehabilitation centers, and his father felt obligated to take him. His interview shows that the material demands of teen popularity, his negative experiences with his father’s parenting, and Parkmont’s opportunities for teens to deal drugs all combined to lead him down a risky path.
The fact that moving to Parkmont did not insulate Billy from the opportunity to sell drugs and that he engaged in risky behavior does not mean that Parkmont has not been an improvement over his old neighborhood. Despite the general recognition that the neighborhood is not what many residents had hoped for, many children and teens there seemed to believe that they were part of a special group who had escaped far more dangerous places. Most young people I met aspired to success by following predictable pathways, since being conventionally successful and out of the drug world are shared values among most Parkmont residents. Yet it is no wonder that Billy became involved with drug dealing, given his assertion that the drug trade has become so prevalent in his community:
I was probably fifteen the first time [I sold drugs]. When I came across the opportunity to get something bigger [amount of marijuana] in twelfth grade, I did that. And then I stopped. Everybody is going to know someone who’s selling drugs. Just being here, like fifty to one hundred people sell. I wasn’t selling for nobody. You can just find who’s carrying what, and you buy. I would just buy the stuff for myself, and get all the work myself. I bought what I wanted and sold it. But I was just tired of it, because I’m not trying to go to jail and all that crazy crap. I wasn’t afraid. I think a lot, so I’m not trying to be in jail and all that. That’s not the path that I’m trying to go.
Closely aligned with Billy’s insistence that he was not a big-time dealer was his assertion that he never found drug dealing to be fulfilling as a life pursuit. However, the main reason that Billy seemed willing to discuss the drug-dealing life that he left behind was that he did not believe that it was grossly immoral or troubling. As he saw it, he only sold marijuana, and he bought the drugs and sold them himself, rather than being part of a crew or gang. In a worse neighborhood where people might have known that Billy was selling on his own and making good money doing it, he might have become a target for muggers or more established drug dealers. The relatively safe nature of Parkmont, instead of protecting Billy, actually eased him into the drug trade by allowing him to feel comfortable selling alone.
Since Ray runs a barbershop located only a block from the school, I wondered if he knew about Billy’s drug dealing. Billy said he was able to conceal his behavior from his street-smart father, partially by having a regular job on the side. However, Billy alluded to the fact that his father had once been involved in drug dealing, and he said that Ray has a suspicious nature, so he seemed to know what was going on:
My dad will confront me about something even if he got the slightest idea about anything. When you’re a barber, you know a lot of people involved in many different things. Friends that do that, friends that do this, friends that sell that. One of his friends that I’ve been around since we moved here, he’s into a little of this and that. I was just talking to him one day. I’ve known him for like six years now, so we just walked out the side of the barbershop together, and that’s it. This is when I was in college, too. And my dad thinks that I’m doing something. Like, I’m selling drugs up at college or somethin’ like that. And he asked my cousin, “What’s up with Billy? What’s up with him and Mark walking out the barbershop?” Like, dang, man. “You can’t say somethin’ to me or ask me?” He didn’t even ask me. He just asked my cousin, “What’s up? Is he selling drugs?” He’ll say anything if he thinks it at all. Now, I’m older. I’m in college now, and I’ve got too many other plans.
Though many second wave families consider their values to be superior to the people from their old neighborhoods, they are aware that Parkmont’s pioneers have even more middle-class or conventional cultural ideals. Billy’s downplaying of his involvement in the drug-dealing subculture reveals the way that the second wave Parkmont youths use different levels and distinctions of drug dealing to demonstrate their more respectable cultural orientations. For instance, having a crew seemed more deviant to Billy than dealing drugs alone. Additionally, he seemed proud that that he had quit selling at age eighteen and has since embraced his new social status as a college student.
Ties to the Old ’Hood and Getting Involved in the NewOne
Billy had very few positive things to say about his old neighborhood, and the few pleasant memories that he did share were brief. His last neighborhood was a dangerous place populated with drug addicts. It was a community where teens—even those with street savvy—lived every day with the fear that there was a possibility of getting shot. So, what aspects of life there does Billy miss? The people. The intimate ties with the good people he knew are all that he really misses. He said that he knew everyone in his old community and had close, trusting bonds with many neighbors on his block. Like so many second wave residents, Billy seemed unable to let go of the community of which he was once a part.
Billy explained that the people from his old neighborhood were much closer than the neighbors in Parkmont. Before moving, he and his grandparents had strong ties to neighbors, but this type of neighborly closeness was not present in Parkmont at the time that Billy arrived. In rapidly changing neighborhoods like Parkmont, where Billy lived out his teen years, close neighbor relationships can be difficult to nurture. In more established and stable black neighborhoods and in communities where fewer people work the long hours that people in Parkmont do, neighbor relationships are easier to find and are often more intimate.
Thus, even after six years away from his old neighborhood (a lifetime for a teen), Billy has continued to keep in touch with his friends from the old neighborhood: “I got a couple of friends down there that were really like my brother’s friends. They were three years older than me, but I’m still cool with them. Two went to college and everything, one of them just graduated from college, and I still keep in touch with them.” And Billy is not alone. Many second wave residents reported that they often go back to their old neighborhoods to visit with former neighbors, family, and friends; sometimes, their friends even make the journey to Parkmont. Like most second wave residents, Billy realizes his old neighborhood was a far from ideal living situation, but he still feels attached to it. He insisted that the people he stays in touch with are the good ones—those who have succeeded through conventional means. Unlike others who visit their old neighborhoods for excitement or “to mix it up,” Billy goes to see his friends who, like him, are college students. As he said, “I’m not trying to hang with old buddies who’re getting into trouble.”
Yet Billy explained that he and his family are like most second wave residents, uninvolved in community life and rather isolated. He said that second wave residents have a set of norms and values that run counter to pioneers’ ideals of participation and involvement in community affairs. As an example, Billy elaborated on his own father’s unwillingness to attend neighborhood civic association meetings despite the fact such meetings could be beneficial to the future of his home, family, and business. According to Billy, Ray’s customer base includes many people involved in crime, and he enjoys being in the middle of the action and “in the know.” Billy thinks that his father attaches more importance to maintaining these customers’ business than to improving Parkmont’s quality of life:
We ain’t used to no meetings and stuff like that. We probably not paying attention to it. We probably just doing what we got to do for our life, going to work or whatever we’re doing, and going to sleep. Before, people here were probably really into where they live at and their neighborhood and stuff like that. Now, it’s probably a lot of “this is where I live” type people. The only difficult part for my dad—I don’t know how to put it—is we got so much clientele that’s into stuff [crime]. Most of our clientele are working people, but then we got a lot of clientele that is into stuff like that. It’s hard, especially for a barbershop. It’s hard for businesses like that. You got so many different types of people, you just got to stay humble, man. You won’t believe what people talk about. My dad likes to know what’s going on.
At times, Billy seemed pessimistic about Parkmont’s future, and like many residents he stated that the neighborhood is getting worse. When he specifically mentioned emerging problems with violent crime, I asked what incidents made him think that serious crime was becoming an issue, and he said, “How about last night somebody got shot?” Repeating the news that the men in the barbershop had gossiped about before Billy’s arrival there, Billy explained that someone in Parkmont had just been murdered, providing very clear evidence that deadly violence has reached this relatively sheltered community.
Although Parkmont is safer than residents’ old neighborhoods, it shows signs of decline. Some of the problem is compositional; Parkmont needs residents who have economic and family stability. However, in terms of culture, residents must identify with Parkmont, have a shared value system, and stay involved in neighborhood and school life. Many disadvantages, complicated family problems, and unexpected school and community conflicts have set the stage for unfortunate residential experiences and teen outcomes in Parkmont.
Despite having better odds at success than many urban youths, Billy came to Parkmont during a decade that saw the loss of throngs of white residents and black pioneers, as well as a collapse in the real estate market. It is still too early in the history of this newly black neighborhood to say how far or fast the school and neighborhood will deteriorate. The pioneers struggled at first with the rapid loss of the white population, but were determined to do their part to maintain a clean, safe community. However, the small coalition of active neighbors is only loosely organized, and many remaining pioneers plan to leave the neighborhood in the coming years. With fewer and fewer pioneers remaining to take the lead in community efforts to deal with disorder, crime, and school problems, the fate of Parkmont lies with the secondwave.
Unfortunately, the second wave’s economic and family instability, timing of arrival, and cultural value systems and identities work to further inhibit the growth of networks and investments in Parkmont. With the presence of school children from all over the city, and with the most stable residents and their children absent from the neighborhood all day, second wave residents struggle. Like Billy, many lack a sense of their place in the social order of Parkmont because the community is characterized by population change and intraracial cultural conflict. Whatever the similarities between the pioneers and the second wave, the differences are real.
Parkmont’s newest parents and children are not making the needed social investments in Parkmont, and, for youth in particular, neighborhood attachment is undermined by situations at school and on the street where they often feel the need to publicly demonstrate that they do not identify with the neighborhood. The problematic presence of outsiders at Lombard has been exacerbated by white flight and the pioneers’ decisions to send their children elsewhere for school. Unaware of other options and less capable of negotiating the bureaucracy of the city’s school system, well-intended second wave parents send their children to Lombard and hope for the best.
The question of good schools is essential to any study of residential mobility and neighborhood change, and this case is no different. Chapter 8 takes a closer look at Lombard, once “the gem” of the neighborhood, highlighting its crucial role in white flight and black flight from Parkmont. It suggests that, just as it always has, Lombard will continue to play a pivotal role in Parkmont’s demographic changes for years to come.