On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (18 page)

Lisa and Miss Linda were such good friends that Miss Linda’s sons Chuck and Reggie
stayed overnight at Lisa’s house many times when they were growing up, and considered
her something of an aunt. Then, when he was eighteen years old, Reggie got Lisa’s
sixteen-year-old niece pregnant. He refused to help pay for her abortion or even to
acknowledge that he had impregnated her. Lisa declared that she “wasn’t fucking with
Reggie no more,” meaning that she was cutting off the long-standing relationship between
their families. Her two nieces threatened to have him beaten up by various young men
they were involved with. Because Reggie usually hung out on the corner only two houses
away, this became a frequent conflict.

That same spring, the war with 4th Street was under way. The 4th Street Boys had united
with the Boys Across the Bridge and were driving through 6th Street, shooting at Reggie
and his older brother, Chuck.
On one of these occasions, Reggie fired two shots back as their car sped away. These
bullets hit Lisa’s house, breaking the glass in the front windows and lodging in the
living room walls. Although no one was wounded, Lisa’s two nieces had been home at
the time. They phoned their aunt, who called the police. She told them that Reggie
had shot at her family, and the police put out a body warrant for his arrest for a
double count of attempted murder.

After five weeks, the police found Reggie hiding in a shed and took him into custody.
Miss Linda and Chuck tried to talk Lisa and her nieces out of showing up in court
so that the charges would be dropped and Reggie could come home.
¹²
From jail, Reggie phoned Anthony, his mother, and me, and discussed this in a four-way
conversation:
¹³

REGGIE: The bitch [Lisa] know I wasn’t shooting at them [her nieces]. She knows we’re
going through it right now [are in the middle of a series of shootouts with young
men from another block]. Why would I shoot at two females that live on my block? She
knows I wasn’t shooting at them.

ANTHONY: You might have to pay her a couple dollars and put her up in the ’tel [to
ensure that she won’t be home if the police should try to drag her in to testify].

REGGIE: She just mad because her son locked up. She’s hurting right now, so she’s
trying to take it out on me.

MISS LINDA: What you really need to do is call that bitch up and tell her that you
apologize [for not taking responsibility for the pregnancy].

REGGIE: True, true.

Reggie did apologize to Lisa and her nieces—before the court date—and spread the word
that he was responsible for getting Lisa’s niece pregnant. Lisa and her nieces didn’t
show up for three consecutive court dates, and after five months Reggie came home
from jail. Lisa seemed pleased with this result:

You not just going get my niece pregnant, then you talking about that’s not your child,
you know what I’m saying? That nigga used to be over my house every day when he was
a kid. [Meaning that because Reggie had known their family for so long, he should
have shown more respect.] Fuck
out of here. No. I mean, I wasn’t trying to see that nigga sit for an attempt [an
attempted murder conviction], but he needed to sit for a little while. He got what
he needed to get. He had some time to sit and think about his actions, you dig me?
He done got what he needed to get.

.   .   .

From these examples, we can see that young women and men around 6th Street sometimes
reappropriate the intense surveillance and the looming threat of prison for their
own purposes. Even as women endure police raids and interrogations, and suffer the
pain of betraying the man they’d rather protect, they occasionally make use of a man’s
“go to jail” card to protect him from what they perceive to be mortal danger. In anger
and frustration at men’s bad behavior, they can sometimes use men’s precarious legal
status to control them, to get back at them, and to punish them for any number of
misdeeds. In doing so, they get men taken into custody, not for the crimes or violations
the police are concerned with, but for personal wrongs the police may not know or
care about.

Perhaps more remarkably, the young men who are the targets of these systems of policing
and surveillance occasionally succeed in using the police, the courts, and the prisons
for
their
own purposes. They may check themselves into jail when they believe the streets have
become too dangerous, transforming jail into a safe haven. When they come home from
jail or prison, they may turn the bail office into a kind of bank, storing money there
for specific needs later on, or using those funds as collateral for informal loans.
Young men even turn their fugitive status into an advantage by invoking a warrant
as an excuse for a variety of unmet obligations and personal failings.

In these ways, men and women in the neighborhood turn the presence of the police,
the courts, and the prisons into a resource they make use of in ways the authorities
neither sanction nor anticipate. Taken together, these strategies present an alternative
to the view that 6th Street residents are simply the pawns of the authorities, caught
in legal entanglements that constrain and oppress them.

FIVE

The Social Life of Criminalized Young People

In the neighborhood of 6th Street and others like it, boys begin in school, but many
make the transition to the juvenile courts and detention centers in their preteen
or teenage years. By the time many young men in the neighborhood have entered their
late teens or early twenties, the penal system has largely replaced the educational
system as the key setting of young adulthood. These boys and young men are not freshmen
or seniors but defendants and inmates, spending their time in courtrooms instead of
classrooms, attending sentencing hearings and probation meetings, not proms or graduations.

As the criminal justice system has come to occupy a central place in their lives and
by extension those of their partners and families, it has become a principal base
around which they construct a meaningful social world. It is through their dealings
with the police, the courts, the parole board, and the prisons that young men and
those close to them work out who they are and who they are to each other.

CHILDREN’S LEGAL WOES AS MOTHER’S WORK

When I first met Miss Linda, her eldest son, Chuck, was eighteen, her middle son,
Reggie, was fifteen, and her youngest son, Tim, was nine. Chuck and Reggie were already
in jail and juvenile detention centers, respectively, but I was around to watch Tim
move from middle school to the juvenile courts as he turned twelve and thirteen. At
this point
Miss Linda transferred much of her parental energies to this new setting. The following
scene is an excerpt from field notes:

We are sitting in small wooden chairs lined up in rows in Room K of the Juvenile Courthouse,
located at 18th and Vine in downtown Philadelphia. The room has high, recessed ceilings
and paneled walls. It is 9:10 in the morning, and the room begins to fill with boys
and their mothers or guardians. Miss Linda’s youngest son, Tim, 13 now, is sitting
to my left with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands making a cup holding up
his head. He checked his cell phone at the entrance and so has little to do now but
watch the other people or try to sleep.

Miss Linda sits on his other side and fidgets, moving her legs up and down in quick
motion.

Tim asks her if she still has any gum, and she says no, unless you want half of what
I got in my mouth. He shakes his head emphatically. She says, “Don’t act like you
don’t be taking the gum out of my mouth just ’cause Alice here.”

My stomach is growling, and Tim turns to me and says, “That you?”

I nod. Miss Linda and I had split a 25-cent bag of corn chips this morning as we waited
for Tim to shower and iron his clothes, but that was hours ago.

We watch the other boys file in. They look to me to be 10, 11, and 12 years old, a
few of them, like Tim, in their early teens. Some of them are walking in with their
mothers and are coming from home to attend probation hearings or to be tried for various
crimes. Others are accompanied by caseworkers and come from juvenile detention facilities.
These boys hope to be released today, so they carry on their shoulders large white
cloth bags containing their clothing and other meager possessions. By 9:30 there are
about 50 boys in the room and 5 girls. Two of the boys look Latino to me; all the
others are Black. A sea of silent Black boys waiting to be tried.

A white uniformed guard moves down the aisle and tells two boys to take off their
baseball caps, which they do grudgingly. One of the boys reveals hair that had been
braided a couple of months ago and badly needs to be taken out and redone; he tries
to smooth it out with the palm of his hand.

The guard tells the woman behind us that she can’t eat those crackers in the courthouse.
She says, “This isn’t the courthouse; this is the waiting
room.” He says, “Ma’am, put the crackers away or go outside and eat them.” She puts
them in her pocket, and when the guard is a few rows behind us she mumbles that she’s
a diabetic and has to eat at certain times.

Mothers approach a middle-aged white man in khaki pants who sits at a desk in the
front of the room. They ask questions which I can’t quite hear from the middle row
where we are sitting. After a while the man stands and says, “If you have court today,
form a line to check in.” He holds a thick printout with a long list of names and
leafs through it, telling the boys in line which courtroom they will have. He pauses
to listen to a mother who has approached him at the desk, who says her son was unable
to come to court today. She says something else, and the man replies loudly that he
doesn’t decide who gets a warrant and has nothing to do with warrants. He looks up
her son’s name on the sheets of paper and tells her which courtroom to go to. One
of the boys in line has a heavy metal leg restraint that causes him to limp as he
drags it along the floor. Another is handcuffed in the front with a white plastic
band.

We move to a small courtroom now, where we sit on long benches and wait for a judge
to appear and begin hearing the cases. In the rows around us sit mothers and their
sons, some with their younger children also. A mother in front of us recognizes a
woman in our row; they reach over the bench and talk about mutual friends and relations,
one mother saying, “Yeah, he passed in May,” the other responding, “I’m sorry to hear
that.”

Two guards stand at the front, and the public defenders and some case managers sit
in the first row. A thin white woman, who I assume is a public defender, stands and
turns toward us and calls a name; no one replies. She calls another name, and a boy
and his mother or guardian approach her and speak in muffled voices. Miss Linda recognizes
one of the public defenders as the lawyer who defended her middle son, Reggie, some
years back. The judge emerges from a door behind the bench, and the guard asks us
to stand and then to be seated.

Tim had caught this case last year when he attempted to leave school in the middle
of the day; his teacher pursued him out of the school and into the street. Tim threw
rocks at the teacher as he ran away, and though none of these rocks hit the teacher,
he pulled a hamstring while in pursuit, and so the school police arrested Tim on charges
of aggravated assault.
¹

Eventually, Tim’s name is called, and he walks with his mother to the front of the
desk. The judge asks if a certain person is here; I assume this
is the teacher. The prosecutor says, “No, Your Honor, I do not believe he is here,
but I did reach him last night, and he told me he was planning to be here.” The public
defender, the judge, and the prosecutor all look at their calendars and go back and
forth for a while until they find a good date to continue the case. The court clerk
passes a paper to Miss Linda, and it is all over. Tim and his mother move toward the
door, signaling me to get up.

We walk quickly out of the room and through the building, past security, as if staying
any longer might cause the judge to change his mind or find something in the file
indicating that Tim should be detained. When you go to court, there’s always a chance
that they might take you; we will celebrate Tim’s continued freedom when we get home.

As we drive back from the juvenile court building, Miss Linda is smiling and laughing.
She calls her boyfriend on my cell phone, and says, “Yup. We on our way home now.
I knew he wasn’t coming.” If Tim’s teacher doesn’t show up another two times, the
case will be thrown out for lack of a witness to the crime. We all know this, and
it’s a very exciting prospect.

I drive up the back alley and park in the driveway Miss Linda shares with the house
connected to hers. Miss Linda and Tim walk up the iron stairs to the balcony over
the garage, and then into the house from the back kitchen entrance. The sun has come
out, and I sit on the iron steps. From here you can see the backs of the houses from
the next block over, which share the alleyway.

Miss Linda comes out with a cup of Irish Rose and smiles. “I’m celebrating!” she says.
To a neighbor who has opened his back door she calls out, “You want some?” He nods,
and she says he’ll have to give her a dollar—a dollar per cup. He laughs, and she
tells him that she isn’t joking.

She hears the phone ring from inside the house and jumps up, saying it might be Chuck.
It isn’t, and I can hear her telling whoever it is that she’s happy because she’ll
get to keep her son here with her, at least for the time being. “To keep it real,”
she says, “one is enough. At least if Chuck and Reggie are locked up, I know they
good. When all three of my sons are home, I can’t get no sleep. Let them come home
when these streets cool down, you feel me?”

The day is getting warmer now, and Miss Linda’s cat, named Rat, emerges from the garage
and finds a place in the sun next to some empty Hugs bottles and chicken bones and
cigarette butts in the alleyway.