On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (15 page)

After Mike’s mother and grandmother and I attended his court dates and saw Michelle’s
statement, Mike declared that she was a snitch, and
stopped talking to her for a while. The news spread quickly to Mike’s boys—both those
on the block and those locked up.

Though at first Michelle was able to justify her actions by noting that the police
had threatened to take her children away and that Mike had in fact been cheating on
her, these details seemed to have been forgotten in the neighborhood’s collective
memory as the weeks dragged on, and she increasingly came to feel that she had betrayed
a good man. As his trial dates came and went, she began visiting him more often, and
sending money and letters. Slowly, Michelle and Mike began to reconcile.

Some months later, Mike and I were chatting in the visiting room. He mentioned that
the girlfriend of one of his friends had recently testified against that man in court.
“She’s a fucking rat,” Mike said. “She don’t give a fuck about him.” We debated the
circumstances of this, and I commented on how difficult it is to remain silent when
the police threaten to evict you or take your kids. As an example, I noted that while
Michelle clearly loved Mike, she had informed on him under just this kind of police
pressure.

At this point our weekly gossip turned into a heated argument. Other visitors in the
room began to stare as Mike forcefully explained to me that Michelle had not snitched.
In fact, it was the woman in whose house he had been renting a room that had given
the statement against him.

“You supposed to be keeping tabs! Like, that’s your
job
. You’re getting stupid. You used to remember every fucking thing.”

“I really thought it was Michelle,” I replied limply.

“What the fuck good are you if you can’t even get basic shit right?”

My confidence as the group’s chronicler quite shaken, I apologized profusely. At his
next court date a month later, I asked Mike’s lawyer to show me the statement again.
Checking over the lengthy police report, I realized that my notes were accurate. Michelle
had informed on Mike, on three separate occasions. I wasn’t sure whether she had convinced
Mike that she had remained silent, or they were both simply trying to put it behind
them, but I decided it would be best not to bring it up again.

On our next visit, Mike lamented that one of his boys was continuing to call Michelle
a snitch.

“Niggas is gonna hate,” he said. “That’s been my whole life, since middle school.
Everybody wants what I got.”

I nodded my head in solidarity.

THE DIZZYING JOURNEY FROM RIDER TO SNITCH

Many women in the 6th Street neighborhood view the forcible and unexpected removal
of a boyfriend, brother, or son to be, as Mike’s girlfriend once put it, “the end
of everything.” When a woman gets the news that the police may be after the man in
her life, she may take it as her obligation to help him hide from the authorities.
Through protecting him, she makes a claim for herself as a loyal girlfriend or a good
mother, an honorable and moral human being.

If the police never come looking for the man, she can continue to believe that she
would do her utmost to shield him from the authorities, should the occasion for bravery
and sacrifice arise. But if the police do come, they typically put pressure on her
to provide information.

For the police and the district attorney, the task of turning intimates into informants
is mostly a technical problem, one of many that arise in the work of rounding up and
processing enough young men to meet informal arrest quotas and satisfy their superiors.
But the role the police ask women to play in the identification, arrest, and conviction
of the men they love presents deeper problems for women: problems for their sense
of self.

To be sure, some of the women I came to know on 6th Street didn’t seem to care very
much whether their legally entangled family members or neighbors were in jail or not.
Some even considered the confinement of these troublesome young men a far preferable
alternative to dealing with them on the outside. But those who took these positions
tended to keep their distance from the men the police were after, and consequently
tended not to know enough about their whereabouts to be very useful to the authorities.
It is the women actively involved in the daily affairs of legally precarious men who
prove most helpful in bringing about their arrest, so those women who consider the
possible confinement of a son or boyfriend a grave event, a wrenching apart of their
daily life, are the ones the police enlist to capture and confine them.

When the police begin their pressure, when they raid a woman’s house or pull her in
for questioning, a woman faces a crisis in her relationship and in the image she has
of herself: the police ask her to help imprison the very man she has taken it as a
sacred duty to protect. Not only do the police ask her, they make her choose between
her own security and his freedom. For many of the women I have come to know on 6th
Street, this choice is one they are asked to make again and again. It is part of what
enduring the police and the prisons is about.

Relatives and neighbors looking in on this crisis from the outside may see a woman’s
options in stark terms: she can prove herself strong in the face of threats and violence
and protect the man, or she can cave under the pressure and betray him. If she withstands
the police, she will garner public acclaim as a rider. If she caves, she will suffer
humiliation as an abandoner or an informant.

But as a woman comes under increasing police pressure, her perspective on right and
wrong begins to shift. As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, she
finds herself increasingly cut off from the man she loves, and interacting more and
more with the authorities. The techniques they use to gain her cooperation turn her
basic understandings about herself and her significant others upside down. She learns
that her children and her home aren’t safe, nor are the other people she holds dear.
She begins to see her daily life as an almost endless series of crimes, for which
she may be arrested at any moment the police see fit. She learns that the man she
loves doesn’t care about her, and comes to see her involvement with him as sordid,
shameful, and pathetic.

As the police show the woman that her boyfriend has cheated, or that her son may try
to blame her for his crimes, she comes to realize that protecting him from the authorities
may not be such a good idea after all. Threatened with eviction, the loss of her children,
her car, or all future housing benefits, her resolve to shield him weakens. By the
time the police assure her of confidentiality, she begins to see the merits of working
with the authorities.

.   .   .

There is an excitement surrounding wanted men. They are, in a certain way, where the
action is.
¹⁴
But wanted men also stop coming around
as much or as routinely. Their contributions to the household, though perhaps meager
to begin with, may cease altogether. Their life on the run may be exciting, but it
is a holding pattern; it has no forward motion. To some degree, a man’s wanted status
demands that a woman live in the present, and this present is a dizzying and uncertain
one.

Out of this morass, the police offer the woman a dubious path: she can turn against
the man; she can come over to their side. As she begins to orient herself to the their
way of thinking, she finds a way out of the dizzying holding pattern created by the
man’s evasion and the police’s pressure. She is now able to chart some forward path,
and leave the upside-down world the raids and interrogations have created. Maybe he
will hate her and she will hate herself, but at least she is moving forward.

As the police make it harder for her to remain on the man’s side, they construct a
vision of what life would be like without him, independent of the involvement with
crime and with the police that he requires. They create a distinctive path for the
woman that involves a change in how she judges herself and others.

A woman who contemplates changing sides discovers that a number of lines of action
become available to her. She may urge the man to turn himself in, or, if pressure
persists, she may give him an ultimatum: give yourself up or I will. She may openly
call the police on the man, in plain view of their mutual family and friends. She
may turn him in secretly, and attempt to conceal that she has cooperated with the
authorities. Alternately, she may cut off ties with him, refuse to speak to him anymore,
or kick him out of the house.

During this process, the pressure imposed by the police allows the woman to reconcile
herself to her behavior, and the police’s techniques of persuasion come in handy as
justifications for her actions. But when the man is taken into custody and the pressure
from the police lifts, it becomes increasingly difficult for the woman and for the
rest of the community to accept what she did. She must now deal head-on with the public
humiliation and private shame that come with abandoning or informing on the man she
professed to care for.

It is in the nature of policing that officers tend to interact most with those in
whose behavior they find fault, such that the woman’s encoun
ters with the police begin when she refuses to comply and end when she comes over
to their side. That is, her intense and intimate association with the authorities
lasts only for the duration of their denigration and her resistance. Once she cooperates
and gives the man up, the police abandon their interest in her. At the moment she
changes sides, she finds herself surrounded by neighbors and family who mock and disdain
her, who consider her actions immoral and betraying.

Throughout this process, the woman takes a journey rife with emotional contradictions.
The news that the man in her life has become wanted prompts a renewal of her attachment,
such that she strengthens her commitment to him just as he ceases to play an active
role in her daily life, to furnish her with any concrete future, or to assist her
financially. When the man is taken into custody and the pressure to inform on him
lifts, a woman can pledge her devotion once more and make amends. Unlike life on the
run, his sentence or trial has a clear end point. She can coordinate her life around
the visiting hours, and the phone calls in the morning and evening. She can make plans
for his return.
¹⁵
But since she has contributed to his confinement, her attempts to repair the relationship
coincide with his most heated anger against her. Even if he forgives her, a woman
can renew her commitment to him, and return to regarding him as good and honorable,
only after he has left her daily life most completely, as he sits in jail or prison.

Once a woman’s son or partner is incarcerated, she may come full circle. As she did
when she first got the news that the authorities might come looking, she returns to
thinking that the police, the courts, and the prisons are unjust, and she will do
just about anything to protect and support the man she loves.

A few skilled intimates do not travel the path the police put forward, as they are
able to resist the pressure in the first place. They learn to anticipate raids, and
to mitigate the damage that a raid may cause. They learn to make a scene and become
a problem for police by vocally demanding their rights, by attracting a large audience,
or by threatening to sue or go to the newspapers. They practice concerted silence,
learning how to reveal as little as possible. They distract the officers from the
direction the man ran, or the box in which incriminating evidence may be found. They
also make counteroffers, such as sexual favors, or
provide information about someone else the police might be interested in. Their refusal
to cave under pressure means that their conduct calls for little explanation, and
their relationships need few repairs.

Though some women manage to redeem their relationships, their reputations, and their
sense of self after they cooperate, and a rare few are able to withstand police pressure
and garner some honor and acclaim, it must be said that the police’s strategy of arresting
large numbers of young men by turning their mothers and girlfriends against them goes
far in creating a culture of fear and suspicion, overturning women’s basic understandings
of themselves as good people and their lives as reasonably secure, and destroying
familial and romantic relationships that are often quite fragile to begin with.

FOUR

Turning Legal Troubles into Personal Resources

The police and the courts are certainly making life difficult for families in the
6th Street neighborhood: breaking loved ones apart, sowing suspicion and distrust.
But residents aren’t simply the unwilling pawns of oppressive authorities. Both men
and women at times actively make use of the form this intervention takes, appropriating
their legal entanglements for their own purposes. In their ongoing struggles to negotiate
family and work, and to make claims for themselves as honorable people, young men
and women turn the heavy presence of the police, the courts, and the prisons to their
advantage in ways the authorities neither intended nor expected.
¹

JAIL AS A SAFE HAVEN

Prisons were designed to be so unpleasant that even those living in quite harsh conditions
outside their walls would find them a deterrent from crime.
²
To be sure, young men around 6th Street usually take great pains to elude the police
and stay out of jail. But confinement begins to look more attractive to them during
times of sustained violent conflict. When the 6th Street Boys found themselves under
threat from other groups of young men from neighboring blocks, they sometimes manipulated
their legal entanglements so as to get taken into custody voluntarily, in effect using
jail as a safe haven from the streets.