Her name was ...

Becky Magnano is a soft-spoken and petite 17-year-old junior at a high school in Woodbridge, a small city in Massachusetts. Although she was born in a local hospital barely three miles from her high school, much of Becky’s adolescent life was spent traveling between Texas, where her Italian American father is from, North Carolina, where her mother (who is African American) used to live, and Woodbridge, where Becky’s mother, and her maternal grandmother, and her 10 great aunts and uncles, also were born and raised. “I consider myself African American,” Becky said. “And Italian sometimes.”
Her parents have been divorced almost 12 years, “but they’re still just really good friends,” Becky said. They met almost 18 years ago, at a mutual friend’s birthday party in Woodbridge, and after living together in Massachusetts for about six years, her father returned to Texas. “Every few months he comes up and stays with us,” she said. Becky has one “full” brother, Tyler, who is 15, and attends the same high school. Becky and Tyler have eight half brothers and sisters.
The siblings live with their mother in a three bedroom apartment about one mile from school, in one of the city’s older, and more socioeconomically depressed, neighborhoods. Becky’s mother is studying to be a nurse, and she works as a supervisor at a time share resort in a nearby town. Becky works 20 hours a week in the kitchen at an assisted living facility across the street from the high school.
Of the approximately 1,000 students in Becky’s high school, about 9.8 percent are listed as African American, and about 85.1 percent are listed as White, according to 2007 statistics. The numbers of students at the high school who were listed as African American has been increasing in recent years; in 2002, the percentage of African American students at the high school was 6.4 percent (City Data, 2007). Although Becky identified herself as African American, she felt like she was, in her own words, “between two worlds,” and with her Black friends and family, she acted one way, and when she was with White friends or Italian American family members, she was someone else. “Our conversations have to be different,” she said.
At Becky’s school, issues about race, and racism, largely go unspoken, she said. Her experience of racism is more covert; if she walked down the hall with a White girl “who’s really smart” and neither of them had a hall pass, certain teachers would just ask Becky if she had a pass. Becky said it was this way because of her skin color.
She also noted that she did not grow up with racism in the same way that her parents, or her grandparents – who came of age in Florida in the 1960s, during the battle for civil rights – grew up with racism. “I didn’t actually feel what it was like to be called a nigger, like my grandpa did,” she said.
I was introduced to Becky by an English teacher who mentored me when I was a preservice teacher at Becky’s high school. The first interview took place in the morning, during Becky’s free period, in the high school’s empty English department lounge. The second interview took place about a week later, at the same time in the morning, in the hallway outside of the department lounge. We spoke in whispers, and Becky’s soft voice was even softer. There was a male teacher using the room, and neither Becky, nor I, felt comfortable talking while he was there.
Although Becky was a candid and thoughtful interview subject, the process of getting her to commit to an interview time was a frustrating experience. After a successful first interview, she readily agreed to meet again, at the same time the next day, and when I arrived at the appointed time, Becky wasn’t there. The guidance office told me that she was absent. After we rescheduled for the next day, in a volley of text messages, the same thing happened again. No Becky. That’s when a department head told me that Becky often didn’t make it to school on time, and usually didn’t make it at all. In an elliptical and aggrieved tone, she added, “and then there’s the baby she’s about to have... ”
When Becky and I got together again, she told me that she was four months pregnant. When I asked her about her plans, in what would be our final interview, Becky said she had no intention of dropping out of school, and her dreams about becoming an architect, like her father, would be put on hold, but they would not be forgotten. She added that her mother gave birth to her when she was 17.
In 2007, 67 females aged 15 to 19 gave birth in Woodbridge, placing its birth rate at 52.7 per 1,000 females, more than double the state average of 22 per 1,000 females. Although Woodbridge is a relatively small city, with about 43,000 residents, its birth rate ranks very close behind much larger Massachusetts communities with a high teen birth rate, like Holyoke, Springfield, and Lawrence (Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Preganancy, 2009).
The baby’s father is Becky’s long time boyfriend, an 18-year-old fellow student at the high school. He was black, she said, and he was currently enrolled in a specialized program, run by the county sheriff’s department, for truants and dropouts. After her child was born, Becky planned on attending the city’s teen parenting program, where mothers could attend high school classes while their children were cared for in a nursery located in the same building.
Becky seemed like she was disappointed when she learned that the classes offered by the teen parenting program were going to be too easy. Becky welcomed a challenge, especially in her math classes. Still, she was adamant about staying in school.

Between Two Worlds
When we’re with our [Italian] family in Texas they like, like me and Tyler both, but there’s always a couple of them that don’t like ... I feel they don’t like me. They like Tyler a lot more than they like me because I’m darker than him. He looks more Italian, like he has a tan. It’s hard, but ... I still respect them, because they’re my family.
I look more black. Two of my [half] sisters, they’re the same color as me, but the rest of them, they’re light skinned, they look more white, their features are more white, their hair and stuff. They just look like they have a tan. When we go out places, they all think we’re friends. Because they ask us, and we tell them we’re sisters. They look at us surprised. Questions like that make me feel a little bit weird. But I guess they’re just wondering.
I think it was really hard for my parents to be together at first. My grandma, my dad’s mom, was kind of funny at first, but then she got to know my mom before I was born, I guess. She liked her and stuff like that. But my dad’s brother, he doesn’t like me and Tyler, because we look more black. Most of my dad’s side of the family loves us.
My other cousins, they’re full white, from my dad’s brothers and sisters, and my [dad’s sister and brother] aunt Jennifer and uncle Steve don’t like me. They like pretend I’m not there when I’m there. Like they’ll talk around me. My dad’s gotten into arguments with them because of it. He doesn’t like it at all. I rarely see them except for like at Christmas.
Racism definitely opened my eyes a lot, especially coming from my family and stuff. But it doesn’t bother me because – it does bother me, but I just learned how to deal with it. Because my other family, they love me, like on my dad’s side, but it’s just like a couple of them, and I don’t understand why, you know?
My mom says not to use “mulatto” because sometimes it’s derogatory. So she says to tell that I’m white and black. Some people just take offense to saying mulatto.
[Friends] will ask me, why do you act like that? They’ll bring up that I’m Italian, and we’ll be listening to black music. How come you’re listening to this? They’ll play around with me. I don’t really mind, because they accept me.
I have friends who are good kids, so to speak, and the bad kids ... I’m the kind of person who anyone can get along with. I like anybody. Anybody that’s friendly, I talk to. I try to not just go towards one kind of group of kids. I wouldn’t be myself if I just hung out with like a group of black kids and a group of white kids. Just me being multiracial I just kinda like ... I go toward everybody.
Around my friends, I don’t have to change so much. But around my family, I do. I dress different when I’m around them. I dress up. I feel ... they’re Italian, and the way they dress is formal, kinda, nice, so when I go to see them I dress really nice.

On The Move
The thing is my mom and dad really liked to travel. They always wanted us to see something. They wanted to show us that there was more to life than staying in one place, in that this is the school you have to go to. They just wanted to show us different stuff. In a way it’s kinda bad, but then in a way it’s good because they wanted to show us different stuff.
I went to school in North Carolina and Texas up until my freshman year. It’s different here than in North Carolina because there it’s a majority of blacks, it’s way more blacks. You’d find a handful of white or Hispanics there. Just the whole makeup of the school is different. I kinda liked it better there. I liked the way the school was. Because it’s not ... it’s more strict, so to speak. They wouldn’t let me wear this shirt because it’s all blue, because the gangs. They’d make me go home and put a different shirt on or they’d write something like South East [the name of the school] on the back. You’re not supposed to be in the hallway. You have to walk a certain way. Like if the bathrooms are here you have to walk all the way around. There’s so many students, there’s one way you have to walk. And they don’t like you wearing all one color. All purple, or blue, or red. I like the way that’s made up.
And the teachers there, there’s white and black. And you can’t answer them “yes,” you have to say “yes ma’am,” and stuff like that. I just like it. There’s more black teachers there. When I was in school in Texas it was more white kids.
I would like to stay in the area but it all depends. Right now we live in an apartment in a two-family house. My mom’s buying a house, but we have to wait, they’re fixing it, and the appraiser has to go in. We lived in a house before this but something went wrong with the pipe during the winter and the basement got flooded, and stuff started messing up, the guy said he fixed it and he had an appraiser in to look at it and he said it was fine, but it wasn’t. We lived in that house for a while. I’ve moved, ooh... I can’t even guess how many times.
There’s a lot of kids, like my friends I talk to, they’ve been in Woodbridge their whole life and they’ve never seen anything else, and they wish they would have moved, like, a lot, just so they could have seen stuff. I got to meet a lot of different people from a lot of different schools, I got to meet this British girl, from Britain, and a girl from Ecuador, I kinda liked it.

What Is Unspoken
Certain teachers I feel like ... they only look at the kids that are good, you know, and they look at ... say if I was to walk down the hallway without a pass and like a white girl who’s really smart would be walking down the hall without a pass, I feel they would call me out before her. Or that girl who just walked by, and she didn’t have a pass, but I had one, and he’s asking me to see it. You know what I mean? It’s all the same but we’re a different color. So that’s what makes me think.
I have had that happen a couple times by the meaner teachers. Other teachers, like [my current English teacher] Mr. Green, he would do, like anything to help students. Black, white, Italian. Mrs. Stephens [my English teacher last year] would give up her time after school to help kids like us. Only a certain amount of teachers here do that.
I’ve never really been mistreated, no. But there’s all this stuff because of race. Teachers here wouldn’t say it, but if you’re not supposed to be doing something, and you get punished, teachers make up a different excuse for why.
We’re gonna have this after school program about race. Teachers are kinda scared about talking about race and they think kids are gonna get offended if they talk about it. And so it’s not really brought up that much in school. So what they’re gonna do after school is bring it up and a group of kids will sit down and actually talk about how they feel and what they think of it and how they can change it and stuff like that and get their outlook on it.
Some teachers say they don’t want to talk about it because they don’t want to offend anyone, but it’s not really offending them. It’s not like you’re saying “this is what you are,” it’s just pointing out what was seen a long time ago.
We do have an immature group of students, some black kids saying the nigger word, and yet they feel weird if a white teacher says it or something like that, and that’s where the teachers feel like they shouldn’t say it, because of the immature kids. So the mature ones will sit there and listen to teachers and won’t take offense to it.
[Nigger] is a bad word. But in the same case the same kids who don’t want a person to say it walk around the school and call their friends that.
I didn’t grow up around [the word] as much as my grandfather and my great grandfather have. So it’s not like ... I just know it from the textbooks and what I’m taught in school and what my grandparents told me, and what I saw on the History Channel and stuff like that. And movies and books. I only know that so I didn’t actually feel what it was like to be called a nigger, like my grandpa did. And then so I always got taught that if someone said it, to walk away from that person because they’re racist. It was like [my grandpa] walking into a store with a group of friends and have them say it to them. I walk into a store now and it’s fine. I didn’t grow up with feeling how hurtful the word actually was.
I feel like I am [represented well at school]. The time we really hear about [African Americans] is February Black History Month, but to change that, and actually hear more of it. They should do it like, we can pick elective classes, because, like I said, mature and immature kids. Immature kids don’t have to do it. They don’t have to hear about it or whatever, but that would be better for the kids who want to talk about it.

“School’s not always gonna be there.”
I’m pretty good on [standardized tests]. On my MCAS, on the math, I was like one point below proficient. So I need improvement, it’s not really bad, my teacher says it’s fine. I have a plan, but I kind of messed up freshman year a little bit. I was really sick, and so I didn’t come to school. Me and my guidance teachers talked about me going to [the local community college] to fix it, and they would overlook my freshman year. And then I can go in to a higher college ‘cause I want to do architecture. The dream is engineering school.
I’m really good in math. I like when the teacher teaches me and I get to do it on my own. When it comes to math, I don’t like to stop. Everything that has to do with math, I like. I’m in Geometry right now. I might be moved to trig and stats because of my math scores. I just like how there’s a method and you can do it, and like it’s figured out.
In my class right now there’s a whole bunch of girls. There are only two boys in my math class. And my teacher is a woman. It’s kinda weird.
Some of my friends, they’re not really into school. They don’t care about it. For me to like, want to do something in school, they kinda look at me like, what are you doing? Why do you do good in school? And it’s just like, because. I’ll always have time to hang out, but school’s not always gonna be there. My mom and my dad, they pushed us our whole life to like school a lot. My dad has a good job. He’s like an architect too, and he likes to build. My grandpa does that stuff too, and I would watch him build when I was little and handle the tools and stuff, so I really liked that, and they told us that the only way we would do that was to go to school. I just don’t want to like get out of school and have to work like four jobs just to get by, you know?
I feel like my friends want to drag me down sometimes. Like I have friends outside of school. The thing about it is, around my age, the kids aren’t really, like, mature. I understand that sometimes you can have fun, sometimes you can’t, and I notice that my school friends are into drugs and stuff like that and so I like the older, like, 18 year olds. They’re mature. We have fun. Lots of fun without doing messed up things. We listen to music and go for walks. Just simple stuff. I hang out with people from work, too. I just don’t want to do [drugs], so I go toward everybody else, not trying to say that they try to like peer pressure me, I just don’t want to be around it.
The majority of kids in my classes are white kids. It’s just like I’m the only person there so I feel like I’m getting ... I might not be, you see what I’m saying? It just feels like I’m the only one there. I feel like I have to show more, like I have to push myself more.

“That won’t be me.”
We didn’t plan [the pregnancy]. But we’ve been together for like five years, and it will be six on January 18th. [My boyfriend] is really big into sports and stuff, and he’s always in the paper for sports. He plays every sport.
We’re still gonna go to school and stuff. I’m gonna stay in school. There’s a teen parent program, and I’m gonna go there and finish the rest of school, and there’s day care there. I guess I can get my high school diploma, Mrs. Stephens was telling me. I guess the classes are really easy. There’s a nursery downstairs. If [the baby] is having a tough time, like they’re crying a lot, they’ll call you out of class. There’s a couple schools I was looking at with my guidance teacher, they’re schools I can travel to from here to there, or they have nurseries at the school, not on campus but nearby, and you can get vouchers as long as you’re going to college.
Some girls I know are like, before this happened they told me they were planning [to get pregnant] and stuff, and I didn’t get it that they honestly did. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to do that, and they’re having a tough time now because they don’t have any support, they just wanted to have the baby and that’s what they wanted. They’re doing all right, it’s hard, you know what I mean, they didn’t have a game plan, they just wanted a baby because there’s nothing else to do, that’s what they said.
I have a lot of support from my family. My dad doesn’t know yet. He’s really strict, and he’s gonna be mad.
I know two other girls who got pregnant. They dropped out of school. I won’t be a dropout. That won’t be me.

Commentary
When Becky sat across from me in the department lounge, we often found ourselves touching our bare forearms together, comparing – well, contrasting – our skin colors. Her brother Tyler was medium colored, like me, she noted, and added that she looked “more black” than the other members of her family. Her darker skin often meant that she was treated coolly, or ignored, by members of her father’s Italian American family.
These exchanges were reminiscent of a simple, but telling, comment made by a young Sudanese man in the documentary Lost Boys of Sudan: “I am so black.” He said it in a weary, knowing tone. I am so black, and separate even from those with whom I belong. It never occurred to me, until relatively recently, that there could be, within a family, a hierarchy of belonging that aligned itself on a spectrum of light to dark skin.
As a former news reporter, and someone who often relies on clean, finished explanations to complex things, I often looked for linear logic, and linear chronology, where it doesn’t necessarily exist – namely, in family structures. I am used to the time line of mother, father, me, brother, one school district, separation, divorce, the end. I found myself asking an amused Becky, to explain (and re-explain) how she was related to her skein of brothers, half sisters, and dozens of aunts and uncles. I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. Her passage, from state to state, and school to school, and adolescence to burgeoning motherhood, hasn’t been exactly linear.
I got the sense that Becky was fabricating parts of her story -- for my benefit, perhaps, or for hers.
After our last session in the high school hallway, Becky stopped responding to text messages or phone calls to set up another interview session. About two weeks later, Mrs. Stephens told me that Becky had left the high school and enrolled early in the teen parent program.

Names of all individuals and identifying places have been changed.


Sources
City-Data.com (2007). Retrieved from www.city-data.com

Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. (2009). Trends in Teen Birth Rates for Selected Communities, 2006-2007. Retrieved from
http://www.massteenpregnancy.org/research/teen-pregnancy-and-birth-rates