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

In this chapter, Canada is six years old. His family has moved to a different neighborhood in the Bronx, and Canada is still young enough that he is not allowed to leave the apartment alone very often. Once in a while, though, his mother sends him out on small errands. One day, she gives him a dollar and sends him to a nearby supermarket to buy a can of pork and beans. This is a thrilling errand for Canada, as it makes him feel grown-up and independent.

At the supermarket check-out line, a slightly older boy befriends him. He has a raggedy and sinister appearance, but his manner is friendly and Canada suspects nothing. He is happy to have made a new friend in his new neighborhood. The boy suggests that he and Canada walk home together, then turns on him in a deserted alley and robs Canada of his remaining change. Canada is so startled by the boy’s treachery that he does nothing to defend himself. It occurs to him that he could hit the boy on his head with the can of pork and beans that he has just bought, but he is too frozen to do so. He knows that the sixty-one cents the boy has taken is “not a trivial amount of money” for his family, and he fears his mother’s reaction. He is also afraid that she will never allow him to go out alone again (18). 

Canada’s mother is not as angry as he had feared. She gives him a lecture about the necessity of keeping his guard up, but later in the summer allows him to go out on another solitary supermarket errand: “she could tell how much my confidence had been shaken by being robbed” (19). Canada spends his time out on the streets looking around for the thief and fantasizing about taking his revenge.

Canada is startled again when his mother takes him and his three brothers over to the apartment of a new friend of hers: the friend’s son turns out to be the thief. He does not recognize Canada, and he is a very different person in his own apartment than he was out on the street. He reveals himself to be just another timid boy who wants to fit in and be liked. Canada later tells his mother who the boy is, and his mother is able to get the stolen money back from the thief’s mother. Canada’s confidence is restored; he believes that, in vanquishing this thief, “I had worked out all of the violence and fear issues in my life” (23).

Canada is seven years old in this chapter, and his family has moved again, this time to a large apartment on Union Avenue. Canada and his brothers are initially excited and happy to live in a big apartment and in a neighborhood where there are a lot of children playing on the street. However, a few events soon shake them up and open their eyes to the realities of life in the Bronx.

First, Canada’s older brother, Daniel, is robbed of ten dollars by a teenager on the street. As Canada says, ten dollars is “probably one fifth of what we had to live on for the week” and the robbery in their minds is serious enough for them to call the cops (27). Two white cops respond to the call and are clearly dismissive and unconcerned: “It was nothing they did, it was what they didn’t do. They didn’t take us seriously” (28). The encounter teaches Canada that the police, whom he had thought of as representing authority and safety, are not going to protect him after all.

In this chapter, Canada and his older brothers are also inducted into the “pecking order” of the boys out on the street (33). It involves organized fights among boys, so that these boys can prove themselves and belong, and also so that they can present a tough, menacing front to boys in other neighborhoods. Canada’s brother, John, is the first of them to be made to fight; he fights a boy named Paul Henry, who later becomes his friend. Canada himself is then later made to fight a friend of his named David, a fight that ends in a tie. While Canada is fast learning the complicated codes of behavior in his neighborhood, he is still not much of a fighter.

In this chapter, Canada discovers the hierarchies and codes of violence that exist in his public school. At his new school, he learns that the Bronx is full of blocks like Union Avenue; each block is like its own small army, and school is where they all mingle and fight one another. 

One day, Canada witnesses an older boy named Butchie being brutally beaten up. Butchie is a “gentle giant,” whose only crime is that he refuses to fight, therefore giving his block a bad reputation; the attack on him is intended as a lesson, both to him and to the younger boys watching (44).

Canada describes the regular fights that take place in his school, altercations that often surprise the fighters themselves. A kid will be on his way out of school and will suddenly find a crowd waiting for him on the sidewalk, along with his designated opponent. If the boy refuses to fight, he is mocked at best, and is at worst beaten up, like Butchie. He must fight in order to show that he has “heart” and is not a coward (49). At the end of the chapter, Canada realizes that this whole exhausting cycle of proving himself will begin all over again once he is in junior high. He realizes this when he hears that the two dominating figures of his school, older boys named Tyrone and Anthony, are now in junior high themselves, and that they “ain’t running shit” there (52). He becomes depressed and thinks, “If it gets much tougher than this, when does it end?” (52).