Читать книгу Everyday Courage - Niobe Way - Страница 34

Because of scheduling difficulties, I am Malcolm’s interviewer in his junior year. Malcolm does not seem bothered by the switch. He is much as I expect him to be from Mike’s descriptions—a tall, lanky, handsome African American young man. He wears the latest “hip hop” fashions, a brightly colored sweatshirt and baggy pants riding low enough on his hips to reveal the waist band of his boxer shorts. I interview him in the “piano” room where he was interviewed in the previous years. The small, claustrophobic, soundproof closet seems to get smaller with each passing year. When I go to Malcolm’s classroom to ask him if he is willing to be interviewed again this year, he and a friend (who is also a participant in the study) enthusiastically agree. They tell me that they like getting out of their class for one period, and I suspect, judging from their enthusiasm, that they also enjoy speaking to someone who wants to listen to their stories.

Malcolm and I begin the interview by going over the past year and discussing the changes that occurred in his life. His fifteen-year-old sister has been diagnosed with malignant cancer and has been given six months to live. Also, he has recently become a father to a child born three months premature (a few weeks before the interview). Malcolm has had an eventful and difficult year.

Malcolm tells me that he and his mother do not have time to be close with each other this year because most of their time is spent trying to care for his sister. His mother stays home because they cannot afford a home nurse, and his sister is too ill to be by herself. He or his mother is constantly with his sister “because it’s really scary like, you know, how she [his sister] can go to sleep and not wake up or something.” Because his mother’s attention is directed toward his sister, he says he has been mostly by himself this year: “I don’t feel that my mother’s neglecting me because I understand the situation. But it’s just that it’s not like she’s around all the time or anything” (she goes to the hospital frequently with his sister). Malcolm sounds and looks depressed and scared. He tells me that his sister is undergoing chemotherapy and spends most of the time in the hospital. When she is home, she hardly eats: “It’s real hard ’cause, you get her a plate like—a regular meal from McDonald’s or something, she won’t even finish a whole Happy Meal. Sometimes she’ll just throw it up.” Malcolm is clearly struggling with his sister’s illness.

When I ask him directly how he is doing, Malcolm replies: “I really take it from what my sister tells me. If she’s having a real bad day, then that’s when I start feeling bad. If she’s feeling good, then I feel good. I don’t feel bad when she’s feeling good to make her feel bad, you know. You know, I just go with how she reacts.” As Malcolm explains how he carefully monitors his own feelings to make sure they are consonant with his sister’s, his concern for her is unmistakable. Briefly looking away from me, Malcolm says that he and his mother are “just barely keeping things together,” and that he and his mother try not to show their feelings too much “so that way it won’t affect us in our ability to do what we have to get done.”

Growing increasingly concerned about Malcolm’s well-being, I ask him:

Are you able to really talk with somebody about your fears with your sister?

I don’t really talk about it with anybody. … People thought I needed to have somebody to talk to and they tried to like—well, when I did speak to them, they said that I’m handling it pretty well on my own ’cause like I’m on the honor roll in school and I’m still working and all.

While “people” have told Malcolm that he is doing well (based on his behavior), it is not clear from his response whether he himself thinks he is okay. When I ask him again if there is anybody with whom he could share his feelings, he says “there ain’t nobody there” and he is “tired” of people telling him that he should talk to somebody. Malcolm sounds defensive, predicting, perhaps, that I too will recommend speaking with somebody. His willingness to be interviewed, however, suggests that while he is not interested in counseling per se, he is interested in telling his story to someone.

Malcolm does not really have time, he states, to think about what is happening at the moment because he is so busy with schoolwork, going to the hospital, or going to work: “There’s so much going on, it’s really hard to let myself get down. You know, I know it’s good at times to, like, feel sympathy, which I do. It’s just that I don’t want it to affect me real bad, then it affects my schoolwork and I have to work at my job.” His school and work responsibilities may be important for Malcolm because they provide him with some sense of control over the events in his life. Although in the previous year he also spoke about “maintaining order” and “keeping things decent” and “neat,” this year these themes return with a new kind of urgency.

How are you able to be so strong? It’s not like you’re surrounded by people that are supportive.

Well it’s not people supporting me, but people showing the same strength.

And so they inspired you?

Yeah. Not in school, but people that I’ve seen as I grew up. You know, like my mother, she has some real hard times. But she is always doing her best. She always tried, you know. She never gave up. To keep myself from the same struggle that she went through and to keep my girlfriend and my child now, I’m doing what I can. I wanna make something of myself. I don’t think it’s just that I got this way like it just happened to be. It’s just that from what I’ve seen … my own sight, you know, what I hear and stuff. How people act.

Notably, Malcolm refuses to believe that his resilience is an inborn trait (“I don’t think it’s just that I got this way”) or the outcome of overt support. He perceives it as a product of watching and being in relationship with others, especially with his mother. Observing and listening to his mother has given him clues of how to persist and thrive in the midst of ongoing adversity.

This year, Malcolm is not only dealing with a sister who has been given a limited time to live, but he has also recently become a father to a child born three months early. He says he is very happy to be a father, but he is unsure what it is going to be like since his child is still in the hospital. When I ask him if it was scary to have his child born prematurely, he says with a pained expression on his face, that while it was difficult, he was happy that his sister got to see his child before she died. His daughter, he says, is giving him the courage to carry on during this difficult period.

Over the past year Malcolm and his girlfriend have grown closer and, in a shift from the previous year, he “thinks” he loves her. He still wants to take things slowly with her, however, because he does not want anything to go wrong in their relationship, especially now that they have a child together. Although his girlfriend’s jealousy and possessiveness irritate him, he seems committed to her in his discussion of “loving her” and hopes their relationship will last a long time. Yet, he does not feel ready to marry her: “I wanna make sure that’s what we want because we’re going through so many stages now. Before we like move into the same house and stuff, I wanna make sure that we can happen.” Malcolm’s hesitation about marriage may be connected to his feeling that he was not cautious enough when he and his girlfriend had a child.

Although Malcolm’s thoughts and feelings about his girlfriend have changed from the previous year, they have not changed regarding his male peers. When I encourage him to tell me why he doesn’t discuss his troubles with his male peers, Malcolm says:

Like ’cause I feel that what I got to say, everybody can’t handle it or really wouldn’t understand it, you know. They’ll sit there—they’ll take it as if I’m talking about the sports game or something. Like, if I were to talk about my sister, and they’ll just change it up. Like, “Yeah, how are the Bulls doing?” You know?

Malcolm’s thoughts about communicating with his peers this year are more complicated than he had indicated to me earlier in his interview. He wants to talk to others about what is happening in his life, but only to those people who will listen and understand him. While he seems to believe that I, as his interviewer, can “handle it,” he doesn’t hold such faith in his male peers.

Malcolm states, as he did in previous interviews, that he doesn’t have a best or close friend this year:

I had a couple [of friends] like once when I was real young, around ten, and then when I lived out—and then me and this dude got real close, we was cool. But right now, nobody really ’cause it seems that as I’ve grown, you know, everybody just talk behind your back and stuff, you know. So I just let it go because it seems like no people that can hold—well, not no people, but the people that I’ve been meeting can hold up to their actions. Like you know … something might’ve happened like between me and a person where other people felt that we shouldn’t even be friends no more. So they sit there and talk about me to that person while I’m not around or something. And then that person will just talk about me too, you know, whatever, ’cause you know all throughout my neighborhood, I always hear, “He talks about you, he says this or he says that.” … So I just don’t really bother with it, you know, trying to make best friends.

Although he had a close friend when he was young, Malcolm currently believes, like most of the other boys in the study, that his male peers will betray his trust. He, consequently, does not have a close or best friend and has given up on trying to find one (chapter 5 is focused on this theme in the boys’ interviews).

Malcolm explicitly tells me that he does not tell his male peers when he is angry:

Why don’t you confront your friends when you are angry with them?

I don’t know. … I guess it’s sometimes like it could be just their family or something like they’re nice or something. You know, I don’t really wanna cause no conflict. I just leave it at that and just avoid them.