Editor's Note: The following was composed on St. Croix on September 25, 1994 by G.A. Sprauve, relying on his best recollection of an informal family discussion concerning child-raising that took place an hour earlier between an aunt and grandmother, her great-nephew and her niece. All names of persons in what follows, except the interviewer, have been changed.

E = Auntie Eldra T = Terrence (great-nephew)

C = Clarice

T.: I know what you're talking about. For three years, three whole years, Granny never talk to me--won't say a word to me--over something that she say I say to her one time when she tried to correct me.

C.: What did you say to Aunt Leona that upset her like that?

T. She didn't like how I was wearing my cap and she criticized me for it. All I said was: "You take me for somebody just off the street and, like, forget who I am." She went and told my mother I call her "Just somebody from off the street!"

G.: If that's what she understood, I could understand her feelings.

Auntie E.: Terrence isn't giving it to you right! Terrence said to Cammie: "Nobody just off the street can't tell me how to dress!" Something like that.

G.: Which was it, Terrence. The way you tell it or what we're hearing now?

T.: Something like that.

G.: Well, is a big difference between one and the other, you know!

T.: Anyway, she wouldn't say nothing to me for three full years!!! My mother tell me, unless I apologize to her, I could forget it!

C.: Well, did you make up to her?

T.: Umpteen times I tried. She wouldn't breathe on me.

C.: Did you say to her you were sorry?

T.: That I was sorry? Not exactly. But I tried to talk to her, to make up to her.

C.: It's how you do it. Now, with my son,Yancey. He comes over, to me, he hugs me, he says he is sorry he hurt me. He don't hold back anything. And he don't expect me to hold back anything. If I am going someplace, and he wants to know, I must tell him. Because if I ask him where he is going he tells me. He gets upset if he comes in the bathroom and I hide from him. Because if I go in the bathroom and he's in there he don't hide from me.

E.: There, I can't go along with you. A bathroom is the one place a person should have complete privacy.

G.: How old is the boy?

C.: Twenty-one.

E.: Oh no! By then he doesn't need to be getting into your private business. Nor you into his.

[There follows an explanation by G. on how situations like the above, where there is so much contact between children and parents, sometimes yield problematic results. He hastens to state that he admires the openness in parent-to-child contact just described, notes that as a general rule, St. Croix families seemed closer than St. Thomas in matters of this nature. Physical closeness in his own family was withheld very early in the growing up process.]

C.: I used to scrub my boys' back and neck up to when they were fifteen and sixteen.

E.: Again, that's carrying it kind of far. Why couldn't those two big boys scrub each other's back and neck?

C.: You know, boys don't like to get in the tub with each other. Besides when the one was in the hospital with his operation that time, it was I that bathed him. He found it more natural. And you never know when you might have to do everything for one of your own. They feel better knowing it's you than a nurse or somebody they don't know.

E.: There I can agree with you.

C.: But what G was saying just now about closeness, maybe it runs more in our family, Auntie. Take your niece F. and her son, S. Of course, S. isn't too good in his head to begin. Maybe some of the B. blood there. But, he would get in serious trouble for his mother. One day up at the beach something happened between her and some fellow. Somebody came back to Fredriksted and made the mistake of telling S. about it. He came over to my house in a huff, telling me he is looking for that man. He only wants to find him, and he will kill him. I tried to calm him down. I was only wasting my breath. He decided if he found the man he would kill him. "That man upset my mother!"

But, again, that's the type of temper S. has. As a li'l boy, from up in the States his uncle noticed he wasn't learning to tie his shoelace correctly. So, when his uncle came down, one Carnival night he went with him and his mother to the Village. I don't know what got into the man to pick trouble with S. Because, it wasn't like it was broad daylight where anybody could see. His uncle said to him, "S, it looks like you still can't tie your shoe string properly. Look at your one shoelace dragging in the dirt!" S. got angry right off the bat and went scouring the grounds of the Village, looking for stones to pelt the man with. And, from the time he found them, he started pelting him. No matter how much he says he was sorry, only joking, the boy won't stop. It was a sight to see this big man running and taking cover from this four year old pelting stones!!!

E.: I guess that too must run in the blood. That was my first boy's favorite sport when I had to beat him as a child, to find stones and throw at me.

C.: This boy loved so much to pelt stones, one time Miss A. met him and some friends playing and making noise in her schoolyard. She told them to find some other place to play and make noise but not in her schoolyard. S. got so mad, he went and find all the stones he could and rained stones on her schoolhouse roof till she had to stop class, since nobody could hear anything inside till he stopped.

Yancey's strongerheaded-ness one day made me have to go to court . . .

E.: I am not too surprised at that news. Because, when they don't want to listen, that's where it usually ends up--in Court. Then the same parent who let the child control them will ask the court to kindly punish. Which is a thing I can't stand. One of the most ridiculous things to do.

C.: Make me have to go to court. What happen? I sent the boy to his grandmother in Christiansted one day. Instead of doing what I told him, he meets a group of his paddies who just stole a car and all of them go joyriding. Till the police stops them. They hold all of them, and a neighbor comes to tell me that the Police is holding one of my sons. I rush to the station, and find Yancey with a group of young men that officer Thomas has doing jumping jacks. So, I get him out. The next thing I know, now is that he's on probation. Anyway, because this boy won't do what I told him to do in the first place, I go through all this. Then comes the day in Court. One of the other boy's case is called ahead of Yancey. the boy's mother goes up and ask to make a statement to the Court. What does she say? "Judge, I want you to know that when my son comes in after hours, I lock him out and he has to sleep outside!"

E.: "Sleep outside!!" That woman is crazy!

C.: That's exactly what I'm saying to myself. And Yancey's case is coming up soon. The Court has assigned him a lawyer. I say to the lawyer, "I want a chance to say something to the Judge!" He tells me OK. But he is doing all the talking. We break for a recess. I haven't had a chance to talk. We go back in Court. He's doing all the talking. When I had enough, and before the Judge closed the case, I stood up and asked the lawyer: "Didn't I tell you I wanted to address the Court? OK! Your honorable, I want you to know I have been doing everything to keep this boy in line and doing it without a father to help me. I have had to be his mother and father at the same time!" And with that, as soon as the judge turned him over to me, I grabbed Yancey up, and on my way out of the courtroom with him I put two good cuff on him, and remind him that when I send him on a mission in the future, he is to do as told! And that was that!

[The discussion then turned to Abu, the eighteen year old grandson of E. whose first overt manifestations of defiant behavior towards the grandmother started when he insisted on his rights in the matter of allowing his locks to grow. There followed a series of petty encounters with authority at school, at home and on the streets, then truancy, intervention by his other grandparents in St. Lucia, bringing him back to the father's homeland (despite the fact that his father, himself a school teacher, remained thriving--mostly indifferent to the boy's incipient delinquency--on this island of his mother's origins.) At the beginning of Summer "before he got into any more trouble" Abu was sent for by a brother of his father who lives in Alabama. This uncle of Abu's was on the phone with E just yesterday complaining that the young man's shiftlessness up here [in the States] was already becoming a matter of concern for him.

E.: The day that that boy let me to know that who his school teachers were was none of my business was the day that I told him to find his way back to the house of his wor'tless father, who only knows how . . .

C.: Auntie, Abu tell you to stay out of his business???

G.: It wasn't in so many words, the way she told me it.

E.: You judge for yourself, C. When--after all the nonsense I went through with that boy over his so-called rights to his dreadlocks--the day came that I say to him that I want him to bring home a list of the names of his teachers, he turns around and tells me he knows who all his teachers are. What is he saying to me if not that I must stay out of his business?

C.: So where is Abu now, and what is he doing?

E.: With his uncle in Alabama. Says he's going to finish school up there, get his high school diploma. But his uncle says he's not even doing the things he has to do, didn't get his transcripts to the school in time. It's always somebody else's fault. this time, "the school didn't send them along." Do you know how many times I say to Abu, "You're going to be eighteen in a few months. You'll be . . . ."

C.: "...in charge of your own life!!! "When my son was under age and I lay down the rule, the first thing he used to like to say is: "I cyan't wait till I make eighteen!!!" Like the time when I notice the Rasta company he was keeping and then he come home one day with his hair in locks. I tell him he cyan't live in my house with he hair that way, to get rid of the locks. When he come back the next day with the same locks on his head, I say: "Yo know what? I think you better see 'bout packing up your t'ings; I don't plan to get in trouble for you!" That's when he start seeing I was serious. He trips out of the house, went out in the yard by the big tree. He stand under that tree glaring at the house all morning like somet'ing out of the wild what ain't show how close he go permit you to get to him. Like he studying to see whether I serious or not. When he made up his mind, he turned off down the road. When he come back his head was trimmed.

But, back to Abu. It could be that he is trying to tell you something, Aunt E. Because, I know Abu loves you.

E.: Loves me? That's the way people does tell people they love them? Causin' you all kinds of headache? I already raise my children, and none of them ain' cause me no headache like that. When J. gave up teaching after a few months and started hanging with the Rasta set and growing his hair in locks, I took him aside and had a serious talk about whether he wanted to be treated as an outcast in this society or like a member of a decent family. He was by then an adult. Nothing I could do to change his behavior. He went back to Michigan to College. (Getting in College was never a problem for him, since he was always a straight A student.) And I'll tell you what. Six months later when I was in Michigan for his brother's graduation and I saw him coming to greet me I couldn't believe my eyes: Hair thoroughly groomed and decked down to a "t". I say to him, "What happened to the locks?" "The locks??? I'm moving with the movers, Mom!"

"So, back to Mr. Abu! I received a letter from him yesterday, telling me that he's going to get his life together. About his hair, that he trimmed half of it off. He is begging me to accept him on his own merits instead of based on how he wears his hair. One day he's going to be as successful as his Uncle J.

C. wants to know where Abu's mother (her own first cousin and C's daughter) is during all this. When told that she's somewhere in Africa, C. replies: "If she were my daughter, wherever she is where she would have to stay. She couldn't come stay in my house. I would tell her plain to her face. "You cannot stay in my house if that's the best you could do for your son and my grandson."

DISCUSSION:

Various aspects of our culture come to light when one reads a segment like the above. The student must identify at least three of them and be prepared to discuss at least one of them for five minutes or write a two page discussion of his or her views on the subject as they relate to those of the principal participants in the segment.

1. Let us suppose that Terrence said to his grandmother "You forget who I am!" what do you suppose he really meant, and she really understood that started the contention between them?

2. What is it that might have broken the ice between the boy and his grandmother that he seemed unable to do? Would you consider this a case of poor communications, stubborn pride or both? Who is/are being inflexible?

3. Would you say that C's remedy to the stalemate between Terrence and his granny would be to just take the needed action instead of talking?

4. What does "it" refer to when E says "that's carrying it too far?"

5. C. argues that the openness she practices with her children can also have its positive aspect when the unexpected happens. Explain and indicate your agreement or disagreement!

6. What do you understand by "isn't too good in his head anyway?" In the West Indian Creole context, is the speaker declaring this person crazy or preparing the listener for the unexpected?

7, 8. How seriously would you take S's tantrum over someone upsetting his mother? How would you compare the intensity of his feelings with the concern Terrence expresses that his grandmother refused to talk to him?

9. What does the factor "broad daylight" have to do with whether or not S's uncle was "picking trouble" with him?

10. Stone "pelting" seems to develop as a form of aggression or defense at an early age among boys in this society. Give two examples besides the first incident cited above!

11. You may have at one time or another heard someone claiming that someone else--usually younger--was "getting out of hand." How do you suppose such an expression might be used with respect to the Courts having to step in to discipline or punish a young person who had shown signs of rebelliousness during childhood?

12. Is peer group pressure a likely culprit in the series of incidents that led to this mother having to go to Court one day?

13. Why do you think E. characterizes the first woman's plea to the judge as "crazy"?

14. Do Yancey's mother's actions in Court demonstrate as much confidence on her part in the judge as in her lawyer?

15. Does the reader experience a sense of deja vu as he/she reads the exchange between E. and C. concerning Abu's evasive response about his teachers? Does the reader feel that he/she understands better the conflict between Terrence and his grandmother at the beginning of this section?

16. Based on the way Abu evades when it comes to revealing who his teachers are, according to his grandmother, are you able to imagine just how he might have declared his rights to his dreadlocks?

17, 18. Can you cite an example in the exchange between the two women of somebody "picking the words right out of the mouth" of somebody else? What conditions must be present for this phenomenon to take place?

19. What kind of trouble is the mother threatening to get into if her son continues to grow his locks and stay at home?

20. Can you think of "somet'ing out of the wild" that would act the way the boy with the locks did the day he stood under the tamarind tree glaring at his mother's house?

21 Could you cite a couple of factors that might explain the two different ways these two women from the same family deal with children who decide to identify with Rastafarianism?

22. Based on the contents of the letter E. has just received from Abu would you say C. might be right when she tells E. "the boy love" her?

23. C's remark concerning Abu's natural mother would indicate she doesn't hesitate to show people the door. Is she as justified in this case as when she threatened her son with expulsion?

ACTION QUESTION:

1. How are the stereotypes of Rasta dress and hair style that we hear from these two women consistent with what Dr. Akil Petersen says about earlier treatment of Rastas in the Virgin Islands.

2. What would Abu have to do to change these older women's views to tolerance and admiration for his Rasta lifestyle?

3. What do you make of the ban in the British Virgin Islands next door to persons entering the islands with dreadlocks? Are Human Rights an issue in this case?