On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (16 page)

During a dice game one evening, Tino put a gun to Jay-Jay’s head and demanded all
his money. Tino had moved to 6th Street only a few
months before, so Chuck and Mike considered him only a candidate member of the group—a
recent transplant on probationary status. Jay-Jay, who was originally from 4th Street
but a frequent guest on 6th, didn’t think that Tino was seriously trying to rob him,
and told him to stop playing. Tino had been “wetted” (that is, taking wet [PCP]) all
weekend and was now humiliated by Jay-Jay’s refusal to take his robbery seriously;
he demanded again that Jay-Jay give him everything in his pockets. Jay-Jay again refused.
³
By this time, Chuck and Reggie were yelling at Tino to put down the gun. Steve, also
wetted out that night, was laughing—he didn’t think that Tino had what it took to
rob Jay-Jay or to shoot him, and said so. Tino pulled the trigger and Jay-Jay fell
to the pavement.

Later, sitting in the basement with Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and me, Tino held his knees
and rocked back and forth, repeating, “My intentions wasn’t to shoot him. My intentions
wasn’t to shoot him.”

Steve fired back, “You was wrong. No two ways about it. You was wrong.”

Reggie’s phone rang three times that night with messages from the 4th Street Boys:
“It’s on.”

Jay-Jay’s death triggered what is called a war, a series of shootouts between members
of one block and those of another. In this case, Jay-Jay’s boys from 4th Street and
the Boys Across the Bridge joined forces. They began driving up and down 6th Street
and shooting at the 6th Street Boys.

At first the 6th Street Boys hesitated to go to 4th Street and shoot at the men attacking
them. Steve mentioned many times that since Jay-Jay had been killed, the 4th Street
Boys had every right to shoot at them. But Steve’s and Chuck’s families were in danger:
Steve’s brother had stopped going to baseball practice, and his sister, who slept
on the living room couch right by the window, had to move down to the basement. A
bullet went right past Tim’s knee while he was watching TV. These young men wouldn’t
stop, the guys thought, until they fired back.

Most of the 6th Street Boys weren’t present for this war. Mike, Ronny, and Anthony
were in prison or jail, and Alex had moved off the block and was working at his dad’s
heating and air-conditioning repair shop. After he killed Jay-Jay at the dice game,
Tino moved to North Philadelphia, where he went into hiding for three months. This
meant that only
Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and Steve’s younger cousin were left to fight two blocks of
young men by themselves. After a couple of weeks, Chuck and Steve had both been shot—Chuck
in the neck and Steve in the thigh. Fresh bullet holes dotted five houses on Chuck’s
street.

As the weeks went by, I watched the remaining members of the 6th Street Boys get taken
into custody—not in connection with these shootings, but for quite minor probation
and parole violations, or for bench warrants for not showing up at court or for failure
to pay fines and fees.

A few days after he was shot, Steve paid an unscheduled visit to his probation officer
and asked to be tested for drugs. His urine test came back positive for marijuana,
a result he had skillfully evaded in many previous tests. The PO issued him a warning
for the positive test, letting him know that the next time he failed the test he would
go back to jail for the violation. Two weeks later, Steve returned and was again tested
for drugs. This time the judge sent him back to jail for six months.

Steve’s younger cousin went to the police station and turned himself in on a bench
warrant he had been issued ten months earlier for not paying his court fees. The officer
who took the report later told me that the judge had offered to release him and put
him on a payment plan for the court fees, but he declared that he was never going
to pay the money and that they might as well keep him until he worked off the court
fees and costs in jail. (The judge had ruled that his fees would be reduced by ten
dollars for every day he spent in custody.) Chuck had no warrants pending and wasn’t
on probation at the time, so he remained on the block a few weeks after Steve and
his cousin got taken into custody. Then he drove a friend’s off-road motorbike past
the police station and allowed himself to be chased for two blocks before he stopped
the bike and put up his hands. The police charged him with fleeing the police and
driving an off-road bike on city streets, and took him in. This left Reggie, who had
a body warrant out for his arrest for a robbery. After a week on his own, he went
down to the local police station and turned himself in.

The four members of the 6th Street Boys who were present on the block during this
war may have allowed themselves to be taken into custody for reasons having nothing
to do with the conflict. It is also possible that they didn’t elect to get taken into
custody and were caught,
but these alternative explanations seem unlikely. Steve’s cousin freely turned himself
in on a low-level bench warrant and then refused to accept the judge’s offer that
would have allowed him to remain out of jail. This was the first time I had known
Steve’s cousin to turn himself in. Steve appeared at his probation officer’s without
being asked, and then volunteered for a drug test—the only time he had done so in
the three years I had known him. He had managed to pass all his drug tests and adhere
to other requirements of probation in the previous eight months. Chuck, who rode an
illegal motorbike past the police station, may have been doing so for the thrill of
publicly evading the authorities. Mike, for one, delighted in outrunning the cops
before an audience of neighbors, family members, and women. But Chuck had no history
of driving off-road motorbikes near police officers, let alone driving by police stations
on them.

I believe that Reggie was the last person to get himself taken into custody because
he already had a body warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery; he worried that
if he turned himself in, he’d sit in jail during a lengthy trial and then possibly
serve a number of years in prison. Chuck, Steve, and Steve’s cousin, who turned themselves
in more quickly, faced only a few months in jail apiece for their less serious violations:
just enough time to let the violence on the street subside. Reggie tried to stay out
as long as he could, but with dwindling numbers of the group still out on 6th Street
it became too dangerous to try to make it on his own. A few years of prison seemed
like the better option.

Three members of the group who were already in custody admitted to me that they were
glad to be locked up so that they didn’t have to participate in this war. This also
led me to think that Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and Steve’s cousin got arrested deliberately,
using their wanted status to get out of harm’s way.

.   .   .

Sometimes women, too, used jail as a safe haven, calling the police on their sons
or partners when they decided the streets had become too dangerous.

When Steve got into an altercation with a guy from 4th Street, his girlfriend, Taja,
called the cops and told them where they could find Steve; he had a warrant out for
violating his parole. Taja told me that
she’d have called the cops on the men who were trying to shoot him but feared retaliation,
so instead she told the police to come get Steve. In her mother’s kitchen, she and
I talked over her decision with her sister:

TAJA: I miss him or whatever, but better that than I get the call like, “Yo, come
to the hospital.” Right?

HER SISTER: Niggas is trying to get at him [kill him]. You did what you needed to
do.

Though Steve’s girlfriend may have saved his life, he refused to speak to her for
over a month while he sat in jail, refusing her visits and returning her letters.
This, she said, hurt her deeply. Still, she remained adamant that she had done the
right thing, and after a few months in jail he began to forgive her.

While men may quietly turn themselves in to save themselves from mortal danger, women
looking to prevent the men in their lives from getting killed find that jail isn’t
such an easy option. Even if a man would, in his heart, rather be locked up than face
a gun battle in the streets, he cannot admit this openly, and so makes quite a public
show of his displeasure with the woman who put him there. For women, using jail as
a safe haven for partners or relatives in danger comes with a heavy price.

THE BAIL OFFICE AS A BANK

After a man’s trial ends, he or his family are entitled to 80 percent of the bail
they put up for his release. Bail money becomes available six months after the close
of a case, and must be claimed within a year; otherwise it goes into the city’s coffers.

Instead of recovering the bail money right away, people sometimes leave it at the
bail office until they have a particular need for it, effectively using the bail office
as a short-term bank.

Like most young men on 6th Street, Chuck didn’t have a bank account. He attempted
to squirrel away money in his mother’s basement, in various holes in the walls, and
on his person, but his mother would often find the wads of cash and spend them on
drugs. When his girl
friend Brianna was pregnant with their first child, Chuck had three cases end within
a span of a few months. Instead of collecting the bail money immediately, he kept
it at the bail office, checking in on it periodically. When Brianna gave birth to
their baby girl, he cashed it out, and spent the bulk of the twelve hundred dollars
on a stroller, crib, breast pump, baby clothes, and groceries.

Young men around 6th Street also leverage their bail money to obtain informal loans.
Mike once got a loan for one thousand dollars from the local marijuana dealer, under
the arrangement that Mike would pay it back with interest when his bail came through
a few months later. He used his bail papers as proof that this money was indeed coming
to him, and on the day the money was available, he and the dealer went down to the
office together to retrieve it.

Bail money accrues no interest while it sits at the bail office; what’s more, 20 percent
of the original amount paid cannot be recovered. Even so, leaving the money at the
bail office often seems like a better alternative than withdrawing it, given how hard
it is to keep money safe and to control how one’s money gets spent. In this way, bail
provides some banking privileges and even some informal credit to men who otherwise
don’t have access to conventional bank accounts.

BEING WANTED AS A MEANS OF ACCOUNTING FOR FAILURE

Once a man finds himself in legal jeopardy, being a dependable friend, spending time
regularly with his partner and family, going to work, and calling the police when
threatened or harmed are no longer safe options. These actions may expose him to the
authorities and lead to his confinement. Yet when wanted men (or social analysts,
for that matter) imply that being wanted by the police is the root cause of their
inability to get a job, see their children, trust the police, or live in an apartment
in their own name, they may be stretching the facts. Long before the rise in imprisonment
rates, Black men distrusted the police and faced substantial difficulties in finding
work and participating in their families’ lives.
⁴
While a compromised legal status may exacerbate these difficulties, being wanted
also serves as a way to save face and to explain personal inadequacies.

Urban anthropologist Elliot Liebow wrote that the unemployed men he spent time with
in the late 1960s accounted for their failures with the theory of manly flaws.
⁵
Instead of admitting that their marriages failed because they couldn’t support their
spouses, they explained that they were too manly to be good husbands—they couldn’t
stop cheating, or drinking, or staying out late. This reasoning allowed them to save
face in light of their failure to secure a job and provide for wives and children.
For the young men of 6th Street, who also find themselves unable to secure a decent
job, being on the run takes the place of, or at least works in concert with, the manly
flaws described by Liebow as a means to retain self-respect in the face of failure.
In this way, a warrant becomes a resource in addition to a constraint.

.   .   .

Steve had eight warrants issued on him during the time I knew him, mostly for probation
violations, unpaid court fees, and failure to appear for court dates. When he had
a warrant out for failure to pay $141 in court fines and fees, he repeatedly mentioned
how he couldn’t get work because of it:

If I had a whip [car], I’d go get me a job up King of Prussia [a mall in a neighboring
county] or whatever. But I can’t work nowhere in Philly. That’s where niggas be fucking
up. You remember when Chuck was at McDonald’s? He was like, “No, they [the police]
ain’t going to see me, I’m working in the back.” But you can’t always be back there,
like sometimes they put you at the counter, like if somebody don’t show up, you know
what I mean? How long he worked there before they [the police] came and got him? Like,
a week. They was like, “Um, can I get a large fry and your hands on the counter because
your Black ass is booked!” And he tried to run like shit, too, but they was outside
the jawn [the restaurant] four deep [four police officers were outside] just waiting
for him to try that shit.

Though Steve often invoked his warrant as an explanation for his unemployment, the
fact was that he didn’t secure a job in the six years that I knew him, including the
many periods during which he had no warrant out for his arrest.

Jamal, eighteen, moved into the neighborhood with his aunt, and
after a while became Reggie’s young boy. Like the other guys, he often talked about
his court cases or mentioned that he had to go see his probation officer. One afternoon,
Steve, Mike, Chuck, and I were sitting on Chuck’s back-porch steps when Reggie drove
up the alleyway and announced, “Yo, the boy Jamal, he
clean
, dog! He ain’t got no warrant, no detainer, nothing. He don’t even got, like, a parking
ticket in his name.” Reggie told us that he’d just been to see Jamal’s mother across
town, and she’d complained to him that her son hadn’t yet found a job. She informed
Reggie that Jamal had no pending cases or anything else “in the system that would
hold him,” so he should have had no problem finding employment.