On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (17 page)

Reggie then talked about what he would do if he had his warrant lifted, as the guys
suspected Jamal had:

I wish I would get my shit [warrant] lifted. I’d be bam, on my J-O [job], bam, on
my A-P [apartment], bam, go right to the bank, like, “Yeah, motherfucker, check my
shit, man.
Run
that shit. My shit is clean, dog. Let me get that account.” I be done got my elbow
[driver’s license] and everything.

Here Reggie explains how his wanted status blocked him from getting jobs, using banks,
obtaining a driver’s license, and renting an apartment. Yet the things he thought
a “clean” person should do weren’t things that he himself did when he was in good
standing with the authorities over the the years that I have known him; nor were they
things that most of the other men on the block did. Alex, Mike, and Chuck sometimes
got jobs when they didn’t have warrants out for their arrest, and Chuck even got a
job once when he did have one. But others, like Reggie and Steve, remained unemployed
whether they had warrants or not. None of them obtained a valid driver’s license in
the six years of the study.
⁶
Only Mike and Alex secured their own apartments during this time, but they kept them
for less than three months. None of the men opened a bank account, to my knowledge.

.   .   .

Being wanted, then, can work as an excuse for a wide variety of unfulfilled obligations
and expectations. Having a warrant may not be the reason why Steve, for example, didn’t
look for work, but police officers
do in fact come to a man’s workplace to arrest him, and some of the men, like Chuck,
experienced this firsthand. In the context of their ongoing struggles, the explanations
young men give for their failures to find a job, see their families, secure an apartment,
apply for a driver’s license, or open a bank account amount to reasonable half-truths
that can convincingly account for these failures, in both their minds and those of
others who have come to see their own lives in similar terms.
⁷

THE THREAT OF PRISON AS A TOOL OF SOCIAL CONTROL

Many women in the 6th Street neighborhood devote themselves to the emotional and material
support of their legally compromised partners and kin, taking the protection of their
partners and male relatives from the police as part of their sacred duty as mothers,
sisters, partners, and friends. But these relationships don’t always run smoothly.
Sometimes men break their promises; sometimes they cheat, in plain view of the neighborhood
gossips, bringing humiliation to women; sometimes they become violent. At this point
women may find that a man’s legal precariousness can come in handy as a weapon against
him. In anger and frustration at men’s bad behavior, women at times harness a man’s
warrant or probation sentence as a tool of social control, to dictate his behavior
or to punish him for various wrongs.

When I met Alex, he was twenty-two and living with his girlfriend, Donna, who later
became pregnant with his second child. Alex was serving a two-year parole term and
had recently gotten a job at his father’s heating and air-conditioning repair shop.
He was spending less time on the block than he used to, when he was unemployed and
selling marijuana.

The repair shop closed at five o’clock. Donna worked in a liquor store, which closed
some hours later. On Thursday and Saturday nights, she also tended bar at the KatNip.
This meant that after he got off work, Alex could go and visit his old friends from
6th Street before Donna had the chance to haul him back home. Sometimes he would stay
on the block drinking and talking until late at night.

Donna frequently argued with Alex over what time he got home and his drunken condition.
During these fights, she occasionally threatened
to call his parole officer and claim that Alex had violated his parole. She also threatened
to report him if he broke up with her or cheated on her, or if he didn’t contribute
enough of his money to the household. The 6th Street Boys often joked that Alex couldn’t
stay out past eight o’clock, because Donna would call the PO and report him for staying
out past curfew.
⁸
As the night went on, Mike would say, “Okay, Alex, better get your fat ass home before
your mizz [missus] pick up the phone!”

Aside from this ability to call the parole officer and notify him of a violation—which
could easily send Alex back to prison—Donna also had the advantage that Alex was paroled
to her apartment. This meant that she could phone the parole office and tell them
she no longer wanted Alex to live there. In this case, he would be placed in a halfway
house.
⁹

In the early morning after a party, Mike and I drove Alex back to Donna’s apartment.
She was waiting on the step for him:

DONNA: Where the fuck you been at?

ALEX: Don’t worry about it.

DONNA: You must don’t want to live here no more.

ALEX: Come on, Don. Stop playing.

DONNA: Matter of fact, I’ll give you the choice. You’re going to sleep in a cell or
you want to sleep in the halfway house.

MIKE: You drawling [acting crazy], Donna, damn!

DONNA [
to Mike
]: Ain’t nobody talking to
you
, nigga!

ALEX: Come on, Don.

DONNA [
to Alex
]: Uh-unh, you not staying here no more. I’m about to call your PO now, so you better
make up your mind where you going to go [either jail or a halfway house].

ALEX: I’m tired, man, come on, open the door.

DONNA: Nigga, the next time I’m laying in the bed by myself, that’s a wrap [that’s
the end].

ALEX: I got you!

Later that day, Donna phoned me to vent. She listed a number of reasons why she needed
to threaten Alex like this. If she didn’t keep him on a tight leash, he’d spend all
his money on lap dances or on drugs or alcohol. And, she explained, he might violate
his probation and spend another year in jail:

I can’t let that nigga get locked up for some dumb shit, like he gets caught for a
DUI or he gets stopped in a Johnny [a stolen car] or some shit. What the fuck I’m
supposed to do? Let that nigga roam free? And then next thing you know, he locked
up, and I’m stuck here by myself with Omar [their son] talking about “Where daddy
at?”

Donna seemed to view her threats as necessary efforts to rein Alex in. Threatening
to call the police gave her some chance of keeping him home with her instead of out
in the street, where he might get into trouble. His presence in the house also meant
that she’d have more help with their two-year-old son. And the more time he spent
at home with her, the less money he would be spending on beer or marijuana or other
women. If his paycheck got diverted to other expenses, it would be difficult for her
to pay the bills. Donna also indicated that she missed Alex and wanted to spend more
time with him.

To Alex, her threats seemed manipulative and underscored the unfair balance of power:

I fucking hate my BM [baby-mom]. Just because she can call the law she think she in
control, like she can just run all over me. One day she’s going to get it, though.
She’s going to see [she will lose me to this poor treatment and regret it].

Yet Alex was determined to complete his probation, and believed that in order to do
this, he must comply with Donna’s demands. He remarked, “It’s better for me to be
locked up in her house than locked up in that house [jail].” With her power to call
the police and land him in prison, he also thought there was little he could do to
fight back when she did things like take his house keys, put holes in his tires, or
throw his clothes out the second-story window: “I can’t do nothing, you understand.
I just got to wait.”

Mike and Chuck were sure that Alex would continue to live with Donna even after finishing
his parole, but he proved them wrong. A week after he completed that two-year term,
he left her house and rented his own apartment.

Marie, the mother of Mike’s two children, lived on Chuck’s block in a house with her
mother, grandmother, and five other relatives. She, too,
used the threat of the police to gain some measure of control over her partner. The
couple had started dating in high school; their son was born during their senior year,
and their daughter two years later.

A few years after their second child was born, Mike began openly seeing a woman named
Chantelle. He claimed that he and Marie had broken up and he could do as he wished.
Marie, however, hadn’t agreed to this split, and maintained that they were still together
and that he was in fact cheating. “He don’t be telling me we not together when he’s
laying in the bed with me!” she lamented.

Mike began riding past Marie’s block with Chantelle on the back of his ATV motorbike.
Marie was infuriated by the insult of her baby-dad riding through her block with another
woman for all her family and neighbors to see, and told him that he could no longer
come to visit their two children. Mike and Marie spent many hours on the phone arguing
over this. Mike would plead with her to see the children and she would explain that
in order to do this, he’d have to tell Chantelle that it was over.

Chantelle wanted to fight Marie, and almost did so one afternoon. Marie was standing
outside her house with seven relatives behind her, waving a baseball bat and shouting,
“Get your kids, bitch. I got mine” (meaning that she had more claim to Mike than Chantelle
did, because they shared two children). One of Chantelle’s girlfriends and I held
Chantelle back while she took off her earrings and screamed, “I got your bitch, bitch!”
¹⁰
and “I’ma beat the shit out this fat bitch.”

Marie began threatening that she would call the cops on Mike if he continued to see
Chantelle, since he had a bench warrant out for his arrest. For a time, Marie and
Mike’s conversations on the phone would end like this:

MARIE: Alright, nigga. In five minutes the cops is going to be up there.

MIKE: You’re not calling the cops.

MARIE: You still fucking her?

MIKE: I’m doing what I’m doing.

MARIE: Do you see the [police] car outside? It should be there by now.

Despite her threats, Marie tried a number of tactics to get Mike to stop sleeping
with Chantelle before she resorted to actually calling the
police on him. She poured bleach on the clothes that he kept at her house so that
he didn’t have nice clothes to wear when he went out with the other woman. She took
her house keys and drew a white line in the paint on his car, and then she threw a
brick through his car window. She attempted to throw hot grease on him when he came
into the kitchen, but he ducked, and most of it missed him. She began prank-calling
his mother, Miss Regina, pretending to be Chantelle, in an attempt to find out how
close Chantelle and Mike had become, and what this new woman’s relationship was with
Mike’s mother.

After the hot grease and the prank phone calls, Mike consulted his mother and his
friends Chuck and Steve. All agreed that Marie needed to be taught a lesson—even Miss
Regina, who in Mike’s words is “not a violent person.”

Mike paid a woman who lived down the street a large bag of marijuana to beat up Marie.
According to him, he and this woman drove to the bus stop and waited until Marie appeared.
Then the woman got out of the car and beat Marie against a fence. Mike stayed in the
car and called to her to hit Marie again and again. Mike said that Marie didn’t fight
back, only put her arms up to block the blows to her face.

A few days after the swelling around Marie’s eyes and cheeks had gone down, Mike and
I were sitting on a neighbor’s porch steps. A police car pulled up, and two officers
arrested him on the warrant. He didn’t think to run, he told me later, because he
only had a bench warrant and assumed they were coming for two young men sitting next
to us, who had recently robbed a convenience store.

While Mike sat in the police car, Marie came out of her house and talked at him through
the window in a voice loud enough for the rest of us to hear: “You not just going
dog me [publicly cheat on or humiliate me]! Who the fuck he think he’s dealing with?
Let that nigga sit for a minute [stay in jail for a while]. Don’t let me catch that
bitch up there, either [coming to visit in jail].”
¹¹

During the first few weeks that Mike was in jail, he refused to speak to Marie or
allow her to visit him. In a letter to his mother, he wrote, “I love Marie, but she
loves the cops too much, so I think I’m going leave her and be with Chantelle.”

Yet as the trial dragged on, Mike started asking me if Marie knew about the court
dates and if she’d be there. On the dates that he wasn’t
brought out of the holding cell and into the courtroom, he’d call me later to ask
if Marie had shown up. On the day of his sentencing a year and a half later, Marie
appeared in the courthouse in a low-cut top with a large new tattoo of his name on
her chest. When Mike came into the room, they locked eyes and both began to cry. On
the way out of the courthouse, Miss Regina joked, “I don’t know why I bothered to
come today. I should have gone to work. All he was looking at was that damn Marie.”

So Mike forgave Marie for calling the cops on him when he had a warrant, though he’d
sometimes bring up this betrayal in later years when they were fighting.

.   .   .

Marie had gotten Mike taken into custody for a warrant on a case he
already
had pending, but at times I observed women going a step further: bringing new charges
against a man because of some personal wrong.

Lisa was in her late thirties and lived on Mike’s block with her two nieces. Her son
was a car thief and typically spent only a couple of weeks in the neighborhood between
stints in jail. Lisa had a crack habit, and sometimes allowed Mike and his friends
to hang out or sell out of her house in exchange for money and drugs. She was also
a part-time student at Temple University, though the guys joked that she’d been in
school for nearly two decades.