Familial conflict... (Clara B. Jones)

Familial Conflict in the Panopticon Network

The Panopticon Network is a system of behavioral surveillance and policing of which the family is a key component. Optimally, in the nuclear arrangement, mother and father shape their own and their children’s responses to conform to the expectations and norms of those of the broader system, using persuasion, coercion, and force (if required). Conformity has the added benefit of repressing competition, both within the family group as well as the family’s connections to other nodes in broader and more distant networks of policing (e.g., educational, political, and economic nodes). When I was fifteen, my mother gave birth to a third child who displaced my position as my mother’s rival in the home. The new baby, pink and blonde, became an instant reservoir of reinvented dreams and future expectations for both of my parents. The baby, a girl*, was tethered to her mother’s ideas of who she would become, a burden which my sister proved, over the long term, unable to endure. My mother never differentiated love from parasitism, but, unlike some parasites, she succeeded in damaging, sometimes, destroying, her hosts**.

My baroque relationship to my mother and her mate yielded certain benefits. Among them were a fierce capacity for concentration and work resulting from many hours of solitary play and an unmitigated need to escape parental manipulation and control. I imagined only three options. My first choice was to pursue an academic life. I imagined myself translating documents from the original Latin at the 42^nd Street Library in Manhattan. On numerous, furtive occasions I had visited the library, riding alone on a bus to “the city,” lying about my hours absent from home, giddy with feelings of flight from a toxic atmosphere. Those escapades from unpleasant stimuli (negative reinforcement in technical terms) conditioned my construction of reality to favor spaces associated with dispersion, necessity, and resolution.

My dream made it necessary for me to contemplate college, a course of action favored by my parents. I was enthusiastic about this option because it provided the greatest proximate benefits—avoidance of parental disfavor, and pressure, as well as, their consequent stress, continued financial dependence with a significant measure of autonomy (I had received a full scholarship to an exclusive women’s college in Connecticut, Connecticut College for Women), and minimal dissonance about my role in life. To become an academic was to achieve a status which I had been taught to value. My family’s economic and social success had been purchased with the advantages of education for generations, and I internalized this ethic. I had been bred to fear the fates*** of most non-immigrant African-American in the US and to view education as the antidote.

Marriage was, however, another option. While it seemed inconsistent with a centered and independent life of scholarship, the disadvantages decreased rapidly with an increased likelihood of flunking out of college by my sophomore year. But, a fortuitous set of circumstances put a hostage in my path who I seduced at 17 and married the following year. No amount of strategic planning could have insured the receipt t of an unexpected phone call one evening in my dormitory. “Do you want to get married?” I hesitated only briefly. “Yes.” My future was determined by that one communication. I was almost certain that this option would resolve my conflicts by redefining my perception of myself as wife and, eventually, mother. Dialectics intervened, however. The ideal solution to my problems was less than ideal from the perspective of romance. I was not in love.

Even as plans for the wedding were underway, I was frantically testing a third option that I hoped would be approved by my mother. Desperate for parental approval even as I schemed to abandon them, up until hours before my wedding (i.e., the same day of my wedding), I implored my mother to permit me to quit college, move to New York city, and work. A friend of mine had earned $250 per week one summer as a secretary; I was certain I could live on that. This possibility made my mother hysterical, and, in her habitual manner, I was accused of insolence, ingratitude, and corruption. This response successfully aroused shame and remorse in me, and I submitted to her influence. Thus, it was determined that I marry at 18 years of age on the 23^rd of December, nineteen sixty-one.

Many young women of my generation married as teenagers with conventional expectations about family and their role in it. I did not have customary expectations, but I was certain that I could live as my maternal grandmother, Clara, had…devoted to husband, children, and hearth. I had not yet read Francoise Giroud, had not yet tested my ability to live an independent life. Indeed, that choice seemed remote because I had successfully repressed it and, in particular, had no experience with the skill sets required for life on my own. The alternatives to marriage seemed, ultimately, more unsettling than the lack of emotion I felt for my new husband. I imagined a promising and tolerable future, and, besides, our children would be physically appealing.

Appearances were very important to me. From my family’s perspective, my ideal mate would be Caucasian, and my selection did not meet this criterion. In addition, my husband’s family did not have the same social and educational influence as my own even though my father-in-law was a prominent businessman in Manhattan earning much more than my educator-parents. The “match” was authorized by my family only because of my husband’s plans to become a physician and, when he decided, soon before the wedding ceremony, not to attend medical school, my parents were irate. Their vision required conformity to the historical choices of the black middle class for which medicine or teaching were the most desirable career goals.

*My sister, Alice-Joye Brown (Dunford), was a prize-winning equestrienne (dressage) who ravaged her body with cocaine and died in FL at 45...a long, sad story.

**My brother, Marshall Carson Brown, Jr., was a schizophrenic who died young (50?), a few years before my sister, in an adult group home in NJ.

***At this time (1960-61), there were limited career options for non-immigrant African-Americans, especially, females...entertainer? athlete? teacher?, and so on. It took me decades to clear a different path for myself.