Ty-Ron Douglas, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Missouri, has spent much of his adult life researching black masculinity, black family and African Diaspora Studies. And now he has written his third book. In the first exclusive extract from Border Crossing Brothas: Black Males Navigating, Race, Place and Complex Space, Dr Douglas takes us to chapter six and into the neighbourhood of Shaka, a typically adventurous young man who came to realise that “momma don’t play”

While many would describe Shaka’s Webster’s Cliff neighbourhood as “bad”, Shaka is far more complimentary. In fact, he describes Webster’s Cliff as the “best neighbourhood on the island”, citing as evidence neighbourhood block parties, “pop-a-wheelie races” and “fairly tight living quarters”, which meant there were always people outside playing cricket, swimming and fixing bikes.

Shaka claims he was often away from home “for hours” experimenting in the neighbourhood, and that every neighbourhood influence was not positive. He credits his parents’ surveillance for keeping him from totally losing his way when he was a rebellious 14-year-old who would leave home, without permission, on Friday night and not return until Sunday night.

He claims he was “just roaming the neighbourhood” because there were so many people outside to play with from the houses and apartments. He notes that, unlike today, there were a lot more “grannies” and “uncles” around, which facilitated generational connections, community fun and neighbourhood accountability that kept children “settled”.

Shaka’s recollections are akin to the African family traditions of intimate, extended family connections (McAdoo, 2007; Sudarkasa, 2007). More precisely, Shaka’s experiences and feelings of attachment in his neighbourhood are relevant to the claims of scholars like Stack (1974), who asserts that “[s]ocial space assumes great importance in a crowded living area” (p. 7), and Sudarkasa (2007), who highlights the importance of the village or neighbourhood for black families.

During the summer vacation, though, Shaka notes that kids were often unsupervised while playing and swimming in the neighbourhood. It was common for four or five children to swim for miles along the length of the shoreline while holding on to “black car inner tubes”.

Shaka’s mother never condoned this unsupervised experimentation, but he did it anyway while she was at work. As Shaka got older, he began to test his boundaries, much like Kofi did at about the same age. But there was one significant difference between Shaka and Kofi’s relationships with their parents: Shaka was “petrified” of his parents — particularly, his mother! Shaka’s mother saw no need to send him to his daddy’s house, like Kofi’s mother did. Instead, Shaka says his parents would “chase me down” from any location at any time of day or night.

Shaka explains: My mother used to look for me. [If] I wasn’t at home, I would show up at a place, [and] they would say, “Yeah, your momma’s here.” “What do you mean?!” ... [I] took off [running]. ... [Another] time I was up there hanging out on the wall [with] the hardest guys ... and what did I hear? My momma’s bike [motorcycle]. I said, that sounds like it [her bike]. So I went over to the side, looked around, looked in the alley, but I saw the bike and didn’t see her, and that was the worst thing, to not see her ...

I [was] knocking on 16 [years old], bigger than my momma [but] ... petrified that this woman I can’t see [is after me]. So I ... jumped down the cut [the alley], ran through the park, hopped over the [elementary school] wall, ran along the school field to the gate at the bottom of the hill at Webster’s Cliff.

... So I’m walking up the hill, I heard my momma’s bike coming, right? So I’m thinking … I’ve got her. Yeah, right ... she put down her little helmet, got off the bike, [and] just started attacking, “whew, whew, whew, get yourself here, rah, rah, rah.” [She] searched my pockets looking for marijuana. One time, she smelled marijuana on us, or she saw our eyes were red or something — she called the policeman; the police search[ed] my bedroom ... on my momma’s call. She made me and my brother walk from Webster’s Cliff to the hospital one late, late night ... to get drug tested. So all that type of stuff was how she fought — like she weren’t having it.

Clearly, Shaka was not left alone to navigate through the negative influences and experimentation of his neighbourhood. His parents exerted a powerful and positive influence on the identity he was forming, particularly as it related to his social and academic development. Shaka’s parents, however, were less active in his spiritual development. He says surrogate parents in the neighbourhood who provided positive experiences to support the spiritual journeys of the children, and the accumulation of positive influences and surveillance when he was in community-based settings, helped Shaka cross many educational borders: he successfully completed high school, Bermuda College, and university abroad at an HBCU.

• Extracted from Border Crossing Brothas: Black Males Navigating Race, Place and Complex Space by Ty-Ron Douglas, PhD. Published by Peter Lang Publishing on October 4 for $38 ($42.95 in the United States). Dr Douglas will be available for the book launch at Brown & Co tomorrow from 6.30 before serving as keynote speaker on Wednesday at the Fifth Annual International Colloquium on Black Males in Education at The Fairmont Southampton