On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (21 page)

Getting arrested is nothing to be proud of, but news may travel of a young man’s bravery
during the beating that sometimes accompanies the arrest—like it did when Ronny neither
cried nor begged when the police broke his arm with their batons. An arrest warrant
is certainly bad news, but surviving on the run requires skill and cunning, for which
a person can be admired and granted some degree of respect. Given the number of restrictions
a man on probation or parole has, and
the frequency in which these supervisory sentences result in a violation and a subsequent
return to jail or prison, merely continuing to live on the outside can be seen by
others as a significant accomplishment.

COMMITMENT AND SACRIFICE IN A FUGITIVE COMMUNITY

Just as young people work out their social relations in the courtroom or construct
an honorable identity by handling their legal woes with dignity, so too do they demonstrate
their devotion by taking legal risks on one another’s behalf. With police stops and
searches a daily occurrence, and many residents either going through court cases or
risking arrest on sight, there is simply not enough safety from the authorities to
go around. Saving oneself may mean giving up a brother, son, or best friend. In the
context of legal insecurity, people show their love and commitment to one another
by protecting those close to them from the police, sometimes at the cost of their
own safety. Some of these gestures are as small as telling a cop that they didn’t
see which way a man went. Some are bigger, like when a man with a warrant risks an
encounter with the police to attend the birth of his child. And some are as big as
offering oneself up for another’s arrest. Small or large, all these gestures carry
deep meaning, becoming rituals that people perform to show respect, to demonstrate
love or intimacy, to uphold the revered status of others, and to identify themselves
as good people. In this way, people construct a moral world through the looming threat
of prison, finding opportunities for acts of protection and sacrifice that bind them
to others.

One major risk young men take on behalf of those they hold dear is to attend the funerals
of close friends who have been shot. Police usually show up at these services to videotape
the mourners with a tripod camera.

Recall that when Ronny’s cousin was shot and killed, Reggie attended the funeral although
he had a warrant out for his arrest. Reggie phoned me afterward specifically to let
me know he had taken this risk on behalf of his deceased friend.

Indeed, a certain amount of this kind of legal risk-taking is expected in very close
relationships, such that when a man fails to sacrifice his
personal safety to fulfill his social obligations, it is taken as an indication of
selfishness, or a sign that he isn’t sufficiently invested in the relationship.

.   .   .

When Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, was due with their first child, he promised to attend
the birth despite having a low-level warrant out for his arrest. In the end he stayed
home, later sitting with me and lamenting how angry Brianna would be that he had failed
to show up as he had promised. He wasn’t wrong about her reaction—when I arrived at
the hospital to see her and the new baby, her mother and aunt were sitting next to
her bed, discussing his failures as a father and partner:

BRIANNA: He don’t care. I mean, he care, but he don’t care
enough
. He going to say [he was saying], “If I get locked up, how I’ma take care of the
baby?” It’s not like they got him on a body [a murder case] or something—if they did
come grab him [arrest him at the hospital], all he would do is sit for a quick three
months [the minimum for a probation violation]. The longest it would be would be like
six months. Plus, it’s not even a guarantee that they would come grab him.

BRIANNA’S AUNT: Keisha baby-dad was up here last month [for the birth of their baby]
and he came home. That nigga had a couple jawns [warrants] on him.

BRIANNA: He just don’t want to be up there no more [in jail] because he was there
like all last year.

BRIANNA’S MOTHER: But think about it, like, in ten years when he looks back, he’s
going to wish he saw his baby born, he’s not going to care that he was sitting [was
in jail] for a couple months.

BRIANNA: Exactly.

Chuck’s decision to stay home hurt his baby-mom, not only because he had failed to
attend the birth of their daughter, but also because he had refused to risk his own
safety on behalf of his new family. For Brianna, his willingness to take this risk
stood as a folk test of his attachment to her. His failure to show up was a hurtful
act, a demonstration of his lack of commitment.

Though young men with warrants or under court supervision are expected to risk their
own safety for the people they love, a man may also measure his feelings for a woman
according to how little legal risk he allows
her
to take on his behalf. Mike and Chuck agreed that they’d ask only “hood rats” to
smuggle drugs into the visiting room when they were in county jail, never a relative
or a real girlfriend, as the risk of arrest was too great. They looked down on other,
younger men who thought nothing of having their main girlfriend or baby-mom run balloons
of marijuana or pills into the visiting room.
⁶

Protecting a loved one from arrest could serve as an apology as well, healing the
breach of past wrongs. Chuck and Reggie’s mother, Miss Linda, was a consistent user
of crack, and would periodically take the money from their pants pockets while they
slept (this is called “digging in pockets”). It got to the point that the brothers
came up with a series of hiding places in the house, including a hole in the wall
and a loose floorboard. Typically, they had only small sums, but one winter night,
their mother discovered four hundred dollars in Chuck’s back pocket.

Chuck told Mike and me that when he woke up and found the money gone, he confronted
Miss Linda, who flatly denied taking it. Chuck declared that he was finished with
her, that this was the last time—he would be sleeping at friends’ houses or his girlfriend’s
house from now on.

At the time, Chuck was buying drugs with Mike and Steve; they were pooling their money
so they could buy a larger amount at a lower price. They were buying on consignment,
receiving the drugs first and making payment after the sales. The four hundred dollars
was Chuck’s portion of the money they owed their supplier or “connect.” This meant
that Mike, Steve, and Chuck couldn’t pay him back—and worse, couldn’t get any more
drugs to sell. They were concerned about what their connect would do to them, and
also how they’d make any money in the future.

MIKE: I told you not to sleep at your mom’s, nigga! You a nut for that. You a fucking
nut. Who she give it to [which drug dealer did she give the money to]? I’ma fuck that
nigga up, man. I told those niggas from John Street don’t go around there, don’t serve
her [sell drugs to Chuck’s mother]. How many times I got to tell them don’t serve
her?

True to his word, Chuck stopped sleeping at Miss Linda’s and didn’t answer when she
called his cell phone. This went on for two weeks, until the police showed up at Miss
Linda’s door, looking for Chuck’s younger brother Reggie. The officers came to the
house four times over the next two weeks. Each time, Miss Linda refused to give them
any information, though she said they threatened to take her youngest son, Tim, away
and cut off her welfare. Chuck began phoning to check on her and see how she was doing.
When the police stopped coming, he moved back home.

It seemed as if by protecting Reggie from the police, and by withstanding the violence
of the raids, Miss Linda made amends for the money she’d stolen. The first night that
Chuck was back sleeping at her house, she beamed: “I
always
protect my sons. You can say a lot of things about me, but I’m not letting them take
my babies.”

Just as protecting someone from arrest is considered an act of commitment and affection,
carelessly putting others at risk is taken to be a sign of negligence, an indication
of a person’s bad character.

It is a warm spring day, and Anthony and I are sitting on Miss Linda’s steps along
with a few neighbors and friends. Miss Linda pokes her head out the kitchen door and
says her stomach is talking; she asks Ant to go and get hoagies. She tells him she
also wants three bags of pork rinds. Her youngest son, Tim, who is fifteen now, gives
Anthony two dollars for loosies (single cigarettes) and says that he wants his change
back, and that Ant better not smoke any of them before he gets back. I get up and
say, “I’ll go with you,” and Miss Linda jokes, “Yeah, you better go, ’cause Ant ain’t
got no money.” As we get up to go, Miss Linda starts trying to persuade a neighbor
to play spades with her, a dollar a hand. He is protesting that he has to go to work
soon.

Anthony and I walk down the alley and over to Pappi’s store. Ant puts the pork-rind
chips on the counter and says, “Let me get three.” Pappi’s son passes him three single
cigarettes, which cost a dollar fifty. I pick up the hoagies from the back counter
where Pappi’s youngest daughter is on the grill, and she hands them to me silently.

As Anthony and I walk out of the store, we see two cop cars stopped about fifty yards
to the left. Two people, a young man and a young woman who look no older than 15,
stand facing the side of one of the cars, with
their arms up over their heads and their forearms leaning on the car. A Black, heavy-set
cop in his forties is patting down the young man while a thinner white cop in his
midthirties stands nearby.

As he crosses the street in front of me, the white cop looks at Ant, who immediately
starts running toward Miss Linda’s house. The cop starts off after him and by the
time I catch up, Anthony is walking out of Miss Linda’s house in handcuffs, followed
by the cop. The cop is on the radio asking for someone to search the bushes in the
front of the house; he thinks Anthony threw a gun there.

Anthony is yelling that his lip is busted and bleeding. Then he turns to me and says,
“It’s cool, A, I’ma be home in a minute. It’s cool,” to which Miss Linda replies,
“Shit. He ain’t staying
here
.”

The cop puts Anthony into the backseat, placing his hand on top of Ant’s head as he
gets into the car. Anthony is talking at me through the closed window, but I can’t
hear him; I shrug at him and shake my head. Two more squad cars pull up into the alleyway
with sirens blaring and lights flashing. Neighbors are coming outside or leaning out
of their windows to look.

The cop who chased down Anthony asks Miss Linda her name, whether this is her house,
and what her relationship is to Anthony. She flatly denies that he lives with her
and says he is just someone she knows from around the neighborhood. The cop asks her
for his name, and she says, “Ask
him
what his name is.” The cop asks her who I am to her, and Miss Linda replies, “That’s
my fucking white girl. Is it a problem?” The cop tells her not to use profanity and
to take a seat.

Miss Linda begins yelling at Anthony through the closed window of the police car:
“Don’t you ever bring the law to my house! That’s what you get, nigga! That’s what
the fuck you get. Don’t think I’ma take your calls, either; don’t even bother putting
this number on your list!”

The cop tells us not to go back inside, and I wonder where Tim is. It seems to take
a long time for the police to fill out the paperwork, and a small crowd has now gathered
at the end of the alley.

When the police leave, Miss Linda goes inside and calls to Tim, who has been hiding
in a fallen wall of the basement. “Ain’t nobody looking for you,” she says as he crawls
out.

Miss Linda is now convinced the police will come back that night and raid the house.
She grabs her glass pipes and her marijuana stash from
the top shelf of the glass china cabinet in the dining room and phones Mike, asking
him to come for Chuck’s gun. She leaves to put her contraband in her secret hiding
spot and returns a few minutes later, looking calmer, though she continues to say
over and over how this has messed up her whole day. Then Reggie calls from jail, and
she picks up the phone and says:

“This dickhead runs into the house! Brings the cops all in here. They found the holster,
the bullets. Don’t ask me which fucking bullets; I don’t know which bullets. Mike
needs to get back here and get all the shit out of here, before they come back again.
Because they definitely coming back—if not tonight, tomorrow night.”

After pouring another drink and taking a drag from a neighbor’s cigarette, she starts
talking about past raids on her house. Then she says, “Anthony’s problem is he is
selfish. He don’t think. They almost took my son today, and I just got him back two
fucking weeks ago [from juvenile detention]. Not even two weeks.”

And so the giving and taking of legal risk becomes a way that people in the neighborhood
of 6th Street define their relationships, honor or dishonor someone, and draw moral
distinctions among one another. Giving up another person under pressure is seen as
a shameful act of betrayal. Doing so voluntarily is considered an act of retribution,
or the start of an open conflict. The unintentional bringing of “heat” is taken as
a sign of negligence or of bad character.

.   .   .

From these examples, we can see that the heavy presence of the police and the looming
threat of prison enter into the rituals of gift-giving that unite people. Like the
giving of food, shelter, or child care,
⁷
protecting loved ones from the police, or risking arrest on their behalf, becomes
part of an ongoing give-and-take that creates and sustains social relationships.

This brings us to an interesting wrinkle. Despite the norm of silence and the high
value placed on protecting others, doing so—particularly at personal expense—doesn’t
always reflect well on the person making the sacrifice. Someone can put herself at
risk too freely, or for people with whom she is not perceived to be on terms intimate
enough to merit the gesture, thus diminishing the value of the protection and
that of the giver. Sometimes people are perceived to protect others in a desperate
or manipulative way, to increase their intimacy with someone who may not otherwise
be interested in a closer connection. Such was the case when Chuck’s ex-girlfriend
allowed him to stay at her place for a month while he was on the run, without asking
for anything in return but his company.