Interlude II

Listen In

Once the interview was over, the elementary schoolers filed out of the classroom just as the high schoolers’ passing time was starting. The older students moved through the hallway, largely ignoring our presence, caught up in their own conversations. Lined up against a wall on one side of the hallway and awaiting instructions from their teachers, the P.S. 432 students commented on what they saw. “Ooh they were kissing,” observed Catalina, as Ms. Daniela asked that she and her peers “stand up against the wall and stand up straight.” Nellie replied, “Hellooo it’s high school you gonna be doing that too.” “Middle school,” Catalina quickly corrected, clarifying that they were on their way to middle school, not high school, the next year. Maybe she was eager to emphasize they had plenty of time before they were expected to behave like the high schoolers they were witnessing. Meanwhile, Nellie relished the social capital she accrued by claiming to be acquainted with some of the high school students who passed us: “That was so-and-so, I told you I know them.”

As we exited the building, the humidity reasserted itself. The fifth graders sang their graduation song—“Brave” by Sara Bareilles—spontaneously practicing for their upcoming graduation just a few weeks away. The graduation would bring them back to Vista High School because the ceremony was scheduled to take place in that school’s auditorium. Because it was much bigger than P.S. 432, the high school could accommodate all the students, teachers, family members, and friends expected to be in attendance for the event.

From the outside, it may have seemed like they were just belting out the latest pop song. In fact, the children were rehearsing for what they and their families considered a major educational milestone.

Look Around

As we exited the school onto the sidewalk, some of the children noticed that I was recording our walk. My camcorder was just one of the many devices recording people’s actions along the city streets that afternoon; other cameras were in apartment building vestibules, in the doorways of local businesses, on lampposts, in passing cars, and in smartphones. The images below illustrate the various ways that students responded to the many modes of surveillance that surrounded them. After these fleeting moments, the students’ attention shifted back to the streets we were now walking through, and they began to narrate what they saw.

The camera picked up two synchronous audio tracks: talk in Spanish about behavior and continued singing in English. Seeing someone a few years older than them and smelling smoke from the lighted cigarette in his hand, Catalina commented on his smoking while a friend told her not to climb along the ramp leading down to the street. Ignoring that warning, Catalina sang back—her words timed to a merengue beat—tempting her friend to tell on her.

The sound of a passing police siren entered into one boy’s stream of consciousness. He stopped chatting, and I overheard him saying, in a singsong manner matching his light hopping movements, “If you wanna run away from the cops, why don’t you play with me.” His friend—another male student—looked over and put his arm around his shoulder, as if to pull him to safety.

The police presence intensified as we rounded the corner from the high school to the main commercial strip leading back to the elementary school. Just as Aurora had immediately noticed the presence of the school safety officer (Interlude I), Catalina commented on the police officers patrolling the streets on which we were now walking. Both school safety officers and police officers are employed by the New York City Police Department. The differences between them are registered in the subtle variations of their uniform’s shade of blue and the far less subtle difference that only the latter carry guns. These differences were not lost on these children. Sara and Nellie—whom we met in chapter 3 as they worked alongside Aurora to complete the diversity word web activity—also joined in here.

Notice everyone’s hands. The girl waving—Sara—extended her hand as she said hello to the police officer while another hand—Nellie’s—reached out to hold her back. Male friends in the class placed their arms around each other’s shoulders and walked closely together. The police officer rested his right hand on his gun. Without stopping, and in a whisper, as if she had been dared, Catalina asked the police officer his name; he did not respond.

The girls’ voices bubbled up in a release of nervous energy as they processed their fleeting interaction with the officer.

Ms. Daniela raised her voice in order to restore order to the lines. The officer stood quietly alongside the buildings, but his presence was loud. The children responded to passing him in a variety of ways: with silent yet anxious gestures, and with words unlikely to be audible to the police officer but registered by my audio recorder. Catalina asked his name. Perhaps she thought she could humanize him by transforming the abstract representative of police power into an actual individual. Or maybe she was playing with reversing the usual interrogation routine, so that if he did speak, it would be on her terms. The girls’ exclamations indicated how significant the brief interaction was. They played and they teased, sarcastically claiming, “I made a new friend,” then countering with, “He was ugly, yo.” They expressed disbelief at Catalina’s daring (“I can’t believe you said that”) and a sense of danger and transgression (“Shit, stay here”). As the class continued walking, the police remained on the children’s mind—not just because of the individual officer but because of the siren sounds and flashing lights as cop cars passed us.

While Catalina, Sara, and Nellie played with the idea of being noticed by a police officer, Hazel demonstrated profound anxiety about that prospect. Hazel, who boisterously sang “Brave” in the streets, did not tolerate Jenni’s taking risks in the public space. Although she was often bossy with her friends, Hazel rarely tattled to her teachers, preferring instead to assert her own authority. But when she worried that Jenni was scribbling graffiti on a lamppost, she began yelling, threatening her friend with the risk of being stopped by police for defacing public property, and turned to Ms. Daniela to recount what she had witnessed. For these girls, peer interactions were infused with a sense of the risks involving state authority.

Hazel wanted to take the words—and the instrument of writing—out of Jenni’s mouth, to make sure that she didn’t say or write something that would put her at the risk of attracting the attention of the police. So she returned to singing “Brave.” But what does it mean to be brave on these streets, in a childhood inflected with both song and surveillance, where schools are mistaken for factories, in which decisions about speech and silence take place against a backdrop of sirens?