Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence

“My mother told us to stick together. That we couldn’t let people think we were afraid. That what she had done in making Dan go and get the jacket was to let us know that she would not tolerate our becoming victims.”

This is the first time that Canada hears this sentiment, but it will not be the last. The importance of not being a victim, and also of sticking together, will be emphasized to him over and over, by his peer group of neighborhood boys. The boys must present a united and tough front so that they are intimidating to boys in other neighborhoods.

“Dan’s description of the confrontation left me with more questions. I was trying to understand why Dan was able to get the jacket. If he could get it later, why didn’t he take it back the first time?”

Canada still does not understand how much feelings of fear and pressure–in this case, the pressure that Dan feels from their mother to retrieve John’s jacket–can be a motive for fighting, and can even make one a fiercer fighter. Since the code of machismo that the neighborhood boys live by prevents them from talking about these feelings, Dan cannot explain this to him. The only way that Canada can solve the mystery is to become a fighter himself.

“I tell people that we were the poorest welfare cheats that there ever was.”

Since Canada’s family is struggling to get by, between welfare and his mother’s minimum-wage job, there is a sense of humor and irony in this line, one that appears often in this book. The family is of course not cheating at all but doing its best with the unfair odds that they have been given. There is also an awareness in the line of how the family might be viewed by an unsympathetic outsider, perhaps a more-privileged person who sees all poor people as being “welfare cheats.”

“So I was completely surprised when she gave me another dollar to go back to the store to get some rice. She could tell how much my self-confidence had been shaken after being robbed.”

This is an imaginative and generous act on the part of Canada’s mother, and it shows her thoughtfulness as a parent. It also shows how important her son’s autonomy and independence is to her, and the fine line that she must walk in bringing up her children in a neighborhood like the Bronx. She has decided that she would rather have a confident son and risk being robbed again than have a frightened and defeated son who has less risk of being robbed. Letting her son go to the store again so soon after being robbed can be seen as a kind of investment that she is making in Canada’s future.

“He didn’t recognize me. He looked me in the eye and said…Hi.”

The boy who robbed Canada earlier in the summer, and whom Canada has built up in his mind as a literal monster, turns out to be a different a kind of personality entirely when he is in his apartment with his mother. He has seemingly no memory of Canada, or the robbery. This is one of many episodes in the book that shows the gulf between street life and home life for the boys in this neighborhood. When they are on the street among themselves, they are autonomous and independent, attempting to imitate–and occasionally face down–the violent adults in their neighborhood. When they are at home with their parents, they revert to being the children that they actually are.

“I thought that I had worked out all of the violence and fear issues in my life.”

This chapter shows Canada vacillating between fearfulness and bravado in the exaggerated way of a small child. He goes from thinking that the boy who robbed him is a monster to thinking that he will never have any problem with violence ever again. The line shows his vulnerability and susceptibility, and also shows the long way he still has to go in learning the codes of his neighborhood. It also ironically foreshadows a feeling that he will have a few times, as he grows up: one of having finally figured out how to act, only to learn that he still has much to learn.

“The lesson was straightforward and clear. The police didn’t care. This lesson would be reinforced again and again as I grew older.”

The indifferent white cops who come to Canada’s apartment to investigate a robbery teach Canada what are really two, related lessons. They teach him about the impotence of authority figures in his world, and they also make him aware of racism. As he encounters more and more serious violence in his neighborhood, and also becomes more and more aware of the complex stories behind violence, the police will seem less and less effectual to him. He will grow up to be an adult who believes in peaceful, on-the-ground solutions to violence and crime, such as the community organization that he himself runs, rather than in excessive policing.

“On Union Avenue, failure to fight would mean that you would be set upon over and over again, sometimes for years.”

There is no escaping fighting and violence for Canada and his peers in the Bronx. It is because of the omnipresence of violence in the Bronx that Canada and his peers are made to fight so frequently, and are instructed to do so by the older boys in his neighborhood. The older boys have a role that is something in between bullies and drill sergeants, and they are trying to toughen the younger boys up so that they are better able to face their tough surroundings.

“The moment I went outside I began to learn about the structure of the block and its codes of conduct.”

Though Canada’s neighborhood street life might look chaotic and wild to an outsider, who might see nothing but a lot of unsupervised, fighting children, it is in fact highly structured. This is a surprise to Canada himself, to whom the fighting had looked simply terrifying when he was watching it out of the window of his apartment. It remains frightening to him but is also more of a stable community than he had realized, and is in some ways as organized a unit as his family life. 

“During the time I was sizing up my situation I made a serious error. I showed on my face what was going on in my head.”

Learning how to hide his emotions is one skill that Canada must learn in his neighborhood, not only during or immediately preceding a fight but after a fight as well. This is a skill that is required not only to appear tough and inscrutable to potential adversaries, but also to manage one’s own feelings in a chaotic and unpredictable environment. In an environment where Canada and his peers do not have control over very much, they learn to have total control over themselves. 

“It was at P.S. 99 that I began to appreciate what the older boys had done for me that summer.”

While Canada’s street life is frightening to him, his school is even more so, and allows him to see his street life in context. He realizes that his block is just one block among many violent blocks in the Bronx, and that the older boys on his block have been aware of this all along, which is why they have trained him to be as tough as possible. His school will, in turn, be a preparation for junior high, when he will be at the bottom of the pecking order all over again. 

“They felt that Butchie was giving the block a bad rep. Everyone had to be taught that we didn’t tolerate cowards.”

The older boys on the block beat up Butchie not only to teach Butchie himself a lesson–not to be gentle or “soft” when he is out on the street—but as an example to the younger boys. They want to show the younger boys what will happen to them if they don’t learn how to be fighters. There is no evidence that Butchie is actually a coward; one could argue that, in his obliviousness to the codes of his neighborhood, he is actually brave. But the boys are afraid that he might seem like a coward, and therefore make their whole neighborhood look like cowards. The whole episode shows the fierce conformity that operates in Canada’s world.  

“The big issue among the boys was whether or not you had ‘heart.’ Having heart meant that you were unafraid, that you would fight, even if you couldn’t beat the other boy.”

Learning how to be brave and defiant against extreme odds is another important skill for these boys. The irony of this quote is that these boys still do not know how unmatched they will be in their later lives, when they will have to face down not only stronger fighters but irrational men with guns. This is what happens with Kevin, a minor character in the book, when, in Chapter 9, he fights bravely against an adult who turns out to have a gun in his car. 

“I had worked so hard to get my reputation at P.S. 99, and now I was being told I would have to start all over again at the bottom once I got to junior high.”

Canada is poised between the innocence of his earlier years and the disillusionment that will come with his adolescence. He has worked hard to master the codes of his neighborhood and to become a fierce fighter, and he is devastated to realize that he still has more to learn and overcome. He is still innocent enough, however, to believe in rules and hierarchies, even if he is disillusioned about being at the bottom of a hierarchy. He is not yet aware that he will encounter some situations–those involving guns–in which rules and hierarchies are made irrelevant. 

“If I have accomplished anything in my life, Mike is directly responsible.”

Mike is an important figure for Canada for a number of reasons. He is older, and street smart enough to be Canada’s protector in the neighborhood, yet also young enough to share in his enthusiasms. He teaches Canada how to fight and how to conduct himself in the neighborhood, but also accepts Canada’s bookishness and earnestness, qualities that Canada is not able to share with the other boys in his neighborhood. He shows Canada by example that there is a way to be himself while still fitting in with his surroundings—to be both accepted and independent. 

“The thing about the South Bronx was that you could never relax. Anything might happen at any given time.”

Because the South Bronx is a dangerous and unpredictable environment, Canada and his peers must walk a fine line between defending themselves and not provoking fights. They must appear tough, polite and calm. Canada is fortunate in having Mike to model this behavior for him.

“Because of the unpredictability of life in the South Bronx, you had to learn how to dominate your emotions.”

Canada learns from Mike not only how to act in his neighborhood, but also how to view his neighborhood. He learns how to shrug off the upsetting and violent encounters that he has as being nothing out of the ordinary (as indeed they are not). This is an important survival skill for him to learn, but it is one that will come at a price to his equilibrium.

“We all knew that a gun was the ultimate weapon. Little did we know that one day guns would forever change the codes of conduct that we worked so hard to learn and live up to.”

Guns are a presence in Canada’s neighborhood, but not as much as they will be later on. He is growing up in the Bronx at a time when it is still mostly adults who are armed. As he tells us in the book’s Epilogue, the drug trade, and teenagers’ involvement in it, will soon lead to boys being armed as well. This will in turn disrupt all of the codes and rules that boys like Canada grew up learning.

“I am alive today because he was a seasoned professional, not a scared kid with a gun.”

One lesson that Canada learns from Mike is how to read the body language of gunmen. If a gunman is calm and quick in his bearing, he is a professional; if he is agitated and jumpy, he is an amateur. Canada learns that it is the amateurs from whom he has the most to fear. The fatalism in this lesson (either you will die, or you will not die) anticipates the fatalism that Canada describes, in the book’s Epilogue, among the armed young men in the Bronx today.

“A young man who ‘bopped’ told the world that he was street tough, prepared to fight if challenged.”

Canada normally “bops”–walks in an aggressive, cocky way–only when he is in relatively safe territory; that is, in his own neighborhood. However, carrying a knife in his pocket is his figurative passport; it allows him to walk this way even when he is in strange neighborhoods. This episode foreshadows how he will later feel walking through the new gangs in his neighborhood while carrying a gun in his pocket.

“Better to live with a crooked finger and a knife in the South Bronx, than a straight finger and no knife.”

This line shows Canada’s stoicism and bravado, both important qualities in his neighborhood. It is more important for him to be armed than it is for him to heal his injury (which, of course, he got from being armed). This is a slightly ridiculous episode which still makes a serious point about the wounding and self-perpetuating nature of machismo.

“And so it was at age fourteen that I was thinking of Mike’s admonitions about how to act when a gun was pointing at you and hoping I had learned my lesson well.”

Canada finds himself confronted by the sort of gunman against whom Mike had warned him: not a professional but an angry, jumpy amateur. He knows enough to identify this gunman as an amateur, and therefore to be guarded around him. Ultimately, though, whether or not he survives depends not on any lessons that he has learned but on the whim of the gunman; that is, on chance and luck. This is an example of how one can prepare for gun violence only up to a point.

“When I look back on the power the gun had over my personality and my judgment I am amazed. It didn’t happen all at once; the change was subtle.”

Canada realizes that carrying a gun makes him more likely to seek confrontation and violence; it makes him defensive and angry. He is self-aware enough to notice these changes in himself, and he also has the advantage of having left the Bronx for a very different environment–college in Maine–which allows him some perspective on his old neighborhood. As he states later in the book, there are many armed young men in his neighborhood who do not have these advantages and who feel that they have no choice but to carry guns.