On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (10 page)

The support Ronny gave Mike during his court dates, and the money he risked his life
to obtain to pay Mike’s bail, seemed to have prompted a reconciliation between them.
Though Mike treated Ronny somewhat coldly in the following months, he stopped telling
people that Ronny had snitched.

Two years later, Mike was in state prison for a gun case, and Ronny’s botched motorcycle
theft came up in conversation in the visiting room. Mike and I had a good laugh about
how stupid Ronny and his friends had been to try to break into the motorcycle store,
and Mike recalled that he had run across a covered pool for the first time in his
life. Then
Mike cursed Ronny’s friend for snitching on him. He said that if he ever saw the kid
again, he’d beat the shit out of him. I didn’t mention that Ronny had snitched, too,
and Mike didn’t, either.

Five years after this initial snitching incident, Mike was back home, and Ronny got
into a fight with a young man who, after Ronny had beaten him soundly, began talking
about how Ronny had snitched on Mike a while ago, though “a lot of niggas don’t know
that.” Mike handed Ronny his T-shirt to clean himself off and said to the offending
young man, “Get your fucking facts straight, nigga. Everybody knows Ronny ain’t do
that shit.”

Ronny’s strategy to repair his public persona and his relationship with Mike after
he had informed on him was to post Mike’s bail, attend his court dates, and slowly
regain his trust and forgiveness. He also denied that he had snitched, and after a
time Mike denied it along with him, even sticking up for Ronny when others tried to
revisit this piece of history.

.   .   .

For young men around 6th Street who worry that the police will take them into custody,
the everyday relations, localities, and activities that others rely on for their basic
needs become a net of entrapment. The police and the courts become dangerous to interact
with, as does showing up to work or to places like hospitals. Instead of a safe place
to sleep, eat, and find acceptance and support, their mother’s home is transformed
into a last known address, one of the first places the police will look for them.
Close relatives, friends, and neighbors become potential informants.

One strategy for coping with the risky nature of everyday life is to avoid dangerous
places, people, and interactions entirely. Thus, a young man learns to run and hide
when the police are coming. He doesn’t show up at the hospital when his child is born,
nor does he seek medical help when he is badly beaten. He doesn’t seek formal employment.
He doesn’t attend the funerals of his close friends or visit them in prison. He avoids
calling the police when harmed or using the courts to settle disputes. A second strategy
is to cultivate unpredictability—to remain secretive and to dip and dodge. Thus, to
ensure that those close to him won’t inform on him, a young man comes and goes in
irregular and
unpredictable ways, remaining elusive and untrusting, sleeping in different beds,
and deceiving those close to him about his whereabouts and plans. He steadfastly avoids
using his own name. He also lays out a good deal of money to silence potential informants
and to purchase fake documents, clean urine, and the like. If a man exhausts these
possibilities and does encounter the police, he may flee, hide, or try to bargain
for his freedom by informing on the people he knows.

The danger a wanted man comes to see in the mundane aspects of everyday life, and
the strategies he uses to avoid or reduce these risks, have some larger implications
for the way he sees the world, the way others view him, and consequently the course
his life may take. At a minimum, his hesitancy to go to the authorities when harmed
leads him to become the target of others who are looking for someone to prey upon.
His fear of the hospital means that he doesn’t seek medical care when he’s badly beaten,
turning instead to underground assistance of questionable repute.

More broadly, a man in this position comes to see that the activities, relations,
and localities that others rely on to maintain a decent and respectable identity become
for him a system that the authorities exploit to arrest and confine him. Such a man
finds that as long as he is at risk of confinement, staying out of prison and maintaining
family, work, and friend relationships become contradictory goals: engaging in one
reduces his chance of achieving the other. Once a man fears that he will be taken
by the police, it is precisely a stable and public daily routine of work and family
life, with all the paper trail that it entails, that allows the police to locate him.
It is precisely his trust in his nearest and dearest that will land him in police
custody. A man in legal jeopardy finds that his efforts to stay out of prison are
aligned not with upstanding, respectable action but with being a shady and distrustful
character.

THREE

When the Police Knock Your Door In

To round up enough young men to meet their informal quotas and satisfy their superiors,
the police wait outside hospitals serving poor Black communities and run the IDs of
the men walking inside. They stop young men sitting on the stoop and search their
pockets for drugs. But the police also deploy a less direct strategy to make their
stats: they turn to girlfriends, mothers, and relatives to provide information about
these young men’s whereabouts and activities.

The reliance on intimates as informants is not the dirty dealing of a few rogue cops
or the purview of a few specialized officers. Police don’t reserve this treatment
for the families of those few men who make their most wanted list. In our 2007 household
survey of the 6th Street neighborhood, 139 of 146 women reported that in the past
three years, a partner, neighbor, or close male relative was either wanted by the
police, serving a probation or parole sentence, going through a trial, living in a
halfway house, or on house arrest. Of the women we interviewed, 67 percent said that
during that same period, the police had pressured them to provide information about
that person.

As the police lean on women to help round up their partners, brothers, and sons, women
face a crisis in their relationship and their self-image. Most help the police locate
and convict the young men in their lives, and so must find a way to cope publicly
and privately with their betrayals. A rare few manage to resist police pressure outright,
garnering significant local acclaim. A greater number work to rebuild themselves and
their relationships after they have informed, which is sometimes successful and sometimes
not. These cases are considered at the end.

GETTING THE NEWS

The journey from intimate to informant (or, in rarer cases, from intimate to resister)
often begins when a woman discovers that the man in her life has become wanted by
the police, or has become more legally precarious than he had been.
¹

On an unusually warm Sunday afternoon in March, Aisha and I sat on the wide cement
steps of her four-story subsidized apartment building. Her boyfriend, Tommy, leaned
on the railing beside her, chatting with a neighbor who had stopped on his way home.
Aisha’s aunt and neighbor sat farther up the steps, waiting for their clothes to finish
at the Laundromat across the street. We passed around a bag of jalapeño sunflower
seeds and kept our eye out for Aisha’s cousin, who was supposed to be coming back
with a six-pack from the corner store. Time dragged on, and Tommy remarked that she’d
probably taken our pooled money and gone to the bar.

As we sat watching the kids play and spitting the shells into little piles beside
us, Tommy unfolded a notice he had received that day from family court, a notice that
he must appear before a judge because the mother of his two-year-old son was asking
for back payments in child support. If he came to court empty handed, he told us,
the judge might take him into custody on the spot. If he didn’t show up, a warrant
might be issued for his arrest for contempt.

“She just mad you don’t mess with her no more,” Aisha said. “She knows you pay for
all his clothes, all his sneaks. Everybody knows you take care of your son.”

“When is the court date?” I asked.

“Next month,” Tommy answered, without looking up.

“Are you going to go?”

“He don’t have six hundred dollars!” Aisha cried.

We tried to calculate how many days in jail it would take to work off this amount,
but we couldn’t remember if they subtract five dollars or ten dollars for each day
served. Aisha’s aunt said she thought it was less than that. Aisha concluded that
Tommy would lose his job at the hospital whether he spent two weeks or two years in
jail, so the exact amount he would work off per day was of little consequence.

Tommy looked at Aisha somberly and said, “If I run, is you riding?”

“Yeah, I’m riding.”

A neighbor’s five-year-old son started to cry, claiming that an older boy had pushed
him. Aisha yelled at him to get back onto the sidewalk.

“If they come for me, you better not tell them where I’m at,” Tommy said quietly.

“I’m not talking to no cops!”

“They probably don’t even have your address. They definitely coming to my mom’s, though,
and my baby-mom’s. But if they do come, don’t tell them nothing.”

“Shoot,” Aisha said. “Let them come. I’ll sic Bo right on them.”

“Yeah?” Tommy grinned appreciatively and nudged Aisha with his shoulder.

Aisha’s aunt turned and eyed her skeptically, shaking her head.

“I’m not letting them take him,” Aisha fired back. “For what? So he can just sit in
jail for four months and lose his job? And don’t see his son?”

Aisha and Tommy began dating shortly after I first met her, when she was a high school
freshman. What she liked about him then was that he was gorgeous, for one, and dark
skinned, even darker than she was. Tommy, she said later, was not only her first;
he was also her first love. They kept in touch for years afterward, though Tommy had
a child with another woman, and Aisha began seriously seeing someone else. When Aisha
turned twenty-one, this second man was sentenced to fifteen years in a federal penitentiary
in Ohio. About six months later, Aisha and Tommy got back together. Soon after that,
Tommy began working as a custodian at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
When he got the call for the job, they cried and hugged in the living room. Aisha
had never dated a guy with a real job before, and became the only woman in her extended
family with this distinction.

.   .   .

“If they lock me up, you going to come see me?” Tommy asked her.

“Yeah, I’ma come see you. I’ma be up there every week.”

“I know that’s right,” Aisha’s neighbor said. “Them guards up there going to know
your name. They going to be like, ‘You
always
coming up here, Aisha!’
”
²

We laughed quietly.

Later that evening, two of Aisha’s girlfriends came by. She told them about her conversation
with Tommy: “He talking about, ‘if I run, is you riding?’ Shoot, they ain’t taking
him! They’re going to have to kill me first.”

For Aisha, the news that Tommy may be taken came as a crushing personal blow. But
it was also an opportunity to express her devotion, meditate on their relationship,
and contemplate the lengths she would go in the future to hold it together.

Other women considered their family member’s pending imprisonment in more political
terms. Mike’s mother, Miss Regina, was in her late thirties when we met. A reserved
and proper person, she had made good grades in high school and got accepted to a local
college. She became pregnant with Mike that summer. The way she told it, Mike’s father
was the first person she had ever slept with, and she hoped they would get married.
But the man became a heavy crack user, and was in and out of jail during Mike’s early
years. By the time Mike was ten, Miss Regina told his father to stop coming around.
³

By all accounts, Miss Regina worked two and sometimes three jobs while Mike was growing
up, and she raised him with little help from her own parents. Mike got into a lot
of trouble during his high school years, but managed to get his diploma by taking
night classes.

By the time Mike came of age, the drama with the mother of his two children and his
frequent brushes with the authorities had caused Miss Regina “a lifetime of grief.”
By twenty-two, Mike had been in and out of county jail and state prison, mostly on
drug charges.

When we met, Miss Regina was working for the Salvation Army as a caretaker to four
elderly men and women whose homes she visited for twelve- or eighteen-hour shifts
three times a week. She had moved to Northeast Philadelphia a few months before we
met, noting that the 6th Street neighborhood had become too dangerous and dilapidated.
The house she was renting was spotless; she even had a special machine to clear away
the smoke from her cigarettes.

Miss Regina had just gotten home from work, and had started a load of laundry in the
basement. Her mother and I were watching the soap opera
Guiding Light
on the plush loveseat in the living room when the
phone rang. From the kitchen Miss Regina yelled, “I don’t believe this.” She passed
me the phone; it was Mike, who told me his PO (probation officer) had issued him a
warrant for breaking curfew at the halfway house last night. He had come home from
prison less than a month ago; this violation would send him back for the remainder
of his sentence, pending the judge’s decision. When we hung up, Miss Regina lit a
cigarette and paced around the living room, wiping down the surfaces of the banister
and TV stand with a damp rag.

“He’s going to spend two years in prison for breaking curfew? I’m not going to let
them. They are taking all our sons, Alice. Our young men. And it’s getting younger
and younger.”

Miss Regina’s mother, a quiet, churchgoing woman in her sixties, nodded and mumbled
that it is indeed unfair to send a man to prison for coming home late to a halfway
house. Miss Regina continued to pace, now spraying cleaning solvent on the glass table.