On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (22 page)

Protecting others, or risking one’s safety for their wellbeing, is hazardous to the
giver not only because of the risk of arrest or other harm, but also because either
action signals a strength of attachment that may later be mocked. For instance, a
woman may risk arrest on behalf of her boyfriend by sneaking drugs into jail, only
to find out that this man has cheated on her, or has told others that she means little
to him. A man may protect a friend with whom he has been arrested, only to learn later
the friend gave him up quickly when the police offered him a deal. Hence, protecting
others opens a person up to the humiliation of being scorned or used.

THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LAW

We have seen how the looming threat of prison can provide opportunities for someone
to demonstrate love, affection, or antagonism toward others; make claims about his
own character or sentiments; or draw conclusions about other people’s.

When Anthony ran into Miss Linda’s house as the police chased him, he had clearly
placed others at risk, and Miss Linda’s anger was understood to be an appropriate
reaction to his thoughtless actions. But often it is not so clear who has placed whom
at risk, or how much risk an individual had really added to what a person already
faced. If someone has protected another and risked arrest to do so, disputes may arise
concerning how much protection was given, or how serious the risk really was. The
giver may feel that the recipient has undervalued the gesture, that he’s squandered
his safety on someone who didn’t appreciate it. Or the recipient may feel that the
giver is trying to claim credit for a gesture that wasn’t intended to be benevolent.
Because police encounters, court hearings, and probation meetings have unpredictable
outcomes, it’s not always obvious how a given brush with the authorities
would have gone if a person had acted differently. The functionality of run-ins with
the law as expressive opportunities in social relationships is complicated by the
inherent ambiguity of these encounters.

The following extended excerpt from field notes reveals this ambiguity:

We are going OT—out of town. I am driving with a girlfriend of mine from school, who
sits across from me in the passenger seat. Mike and Chuck are sitting in the backseat.
They are smoking an L (a marijuana cigarette), passing it back and forth and ashing
it out the window.

A cop car flashes us to pull over. My girlfriend yells, “Oh, shit!” and gets a bottle
of perfume out of her purse; she begins spraying the car and the rest of us. “Grass,”
from the Gap. Mike throws the butt of the L out the window as we pull over onto the
gravel.

Two white police officers come to the car and ask me for my license and registration.
I ask them why I am being pulled over, and one says that I was going over the speed
limit. They walk back to their car to run my name and the tags. As we are waiting,
Mike asks how fast I’d been driving, and I feel that he’s accusing me. Chuck says
quietly, “She wasn’t going more than like a pound,” which means fifty.

One of the officers comes back to the window and says that he smelled marijuana when
he approached the vehicle, and asks us all to get out of the car. They tell my girlfriend
and me to stand over to the side, and they tell Mike and Chuck to face the car, put
their hands up on the hood, and spread their legs. One officer is radioing for a female
cop to come and search us, though in the end he never bothers with it. He pats Mike
down as he is pressed up against the car.

The officer who had been on the radio begins searching the car. I watch as he pulls
the contents out of the side door pockets and from under the seat. Mostly papers of
mine from school. I think about what could incriminate us there. In the side door
pocket on the driver’s side, the officer finds some needle-and-tube contraption. He
sort of chuckles and holds it up to the other officer like he’s found something good.
I explain that it is part of the kit Mike’s baby-mom is learning from in her studies
to become a nurse’s assistant, which is in fact exactly what it is. He lets it go.

The officer searching Mike demands to know who was smoking marijuana, who it belonged
to. Mike says loudly, “It was mine. It was mine.” The
officer asks, “Where is it?” Mike says, “There ain’t no more, I smoked it all.” As
the officer turns toward us, Mike says to him, “They don’t have nothing on them, they
don’t even smoke weed.”

After Mike declares that it was his marijuana, the officer searches him again, opening
the pockets of his jacket and jeans. A small bag of marijuana falls out. The officer
puts handcuffs on him and says that he will be taken to the police station and charged.
He tells the three of us to go, without ever touching me or my girlfriend. I ask if
we can stay and wait to hear where they are taking Mike, but they say no, and order
us to drive away.

Later, Mike tells me that at the precinct they made him pull up his testicles and
cough, and a small bag of cocaine dropped from his anus. Now he’s being charged with
possession of marijuana and possession of cocaine, though very small amounts of both.
Later, I ask Chuck if he had drugs on him, and he nods. In the lining of your jeans?
He nods again. But they hadn’t searched him.

I know that Mike must be bailed out quickly if he’s going to make it out on bail at
all, because he’s on probation in Bucks County. At some point the detainer from that
probation will show up in the system, and then his bail will be denied, because a
person on probation isn’t allowed to make bail in another case.

Chuck falls easily asleep, not seeming concerned. My girlfriend and I stay up all
night, going to different houses and collecting money. When I get the call from Mike
the next morning that he has had the bail hearing and we need to come to the courthouse
with $500, we are ready, and post it within the hour. I drive out to the county jail
alone. I wait for many hours for Mike to be released, twisting my hair in ringlets
and trying to ignore a young man who keeps asking if I am here for my boyfriend. Then
Mike comes out, and we drive home.

As soon as he walks out the door, I am full of descriptions of recent events—how we
found out what police station he was being held at, who we got the money from, how
we ran to the courthouse before anyone found out about the detainer to post the bail,
how quickly I drove to the county jail to get him, how long I waited, who was in the
waiting room, how I dodged their advances, and so forth.

Mike stops me finally, telling me to be quiet, looking frustrated and angry.

“What are you mad for? I spend two days making sure you come home, and now you have
attitude?”

Mike explains that I don’t appreciate the gravity of what has happened, of how close
I’d come to being arrested. He had prevented this by taking the blame himself, which
he didn’t have to do.

I protest that since it was in fact his marijuana and cocaine, and he was the one
who’d been smoking in the car, I shouldn’t have to thank him for keeping me safe from
an arrest.

He counters with the argument that his actions during this police encounter differed
from his habitual practice. He says that when the cops come, people typically remove
the drugs from their person and place them in the car if they can’t toss them successfully
from the vehicle. The drugs get found in the car, nobody admits guilt, and down at
the police station the chips fall where they may. Most of the time, Mike explains,
this means that the driver takes the fall, even if he wasn’t the one carrying the
drugs. By not placing the drugs in the car, and by vocally admitting his guilt at
the start of the search, he’d spared the rest of us from arrest, and me—the driver—in
particular.

Mike then explains that he wouldn’t have done this for just anyone; in fact, if Chuck
had been the only other person with him, he wouldn’t have admitted to anything. But
he felt like I had really been there for him, and so he wanted to do this thing for
me, to show me that I was appreciated. He seems angry that I don’t understand the
weight of this gesture, and frustrated that he has to explain it to me.

The next day, Chuck and I discuss what happened, and when I mention that Mike had
taken the blame on our behalf, Chuck frowns and says, “That’s what he’s saying?” He
then explains that when Mike said he could have tossed the drugs in the car, leading
me, the driver, to potentially take the blame, he was lying, because he hadn’t actually
thought of that at the time. Chuck claims that Mike hadn’t remembered he was carrying
the weed bag until it dropped out of his pocket while the cop searched him. He hadn’t
remembered he had the small bag of cocaine, either, until he was in the back of the
police car. If he had remembered these items before he was searched, Chuck says, he
probably would have tossed them both in the car, no matter what the consequences.

“But what about when he said that we didn’t have anything on us, when he said it was
his weed?” I ask. Clearly this was an instance of Mike’s taking
the blame squarely and gallantly on his shoulders, saving the rest of us from a potential
arrest. Chuck then explains that Mike’s speaking up actually didn’t protect us. If
he hadn’t spoken up, we might all have been taken to the police station and questioned.
But my girlfriend and I wouldn’t have been charged with anything, Chuck says, since
we were clean—we had no drugs on us, we didn’t have any warrants, we weren’t on probation
(which we would be violating by driving), and no drugs were in fact found in the car.
He says, “They was going to let you go regardless.” He then explains that Mike probably
figured that since I’d been questioned only once before, and wasn’t practiced in withstanding
threats from police, he couldn’t count on my silence. Especially not my girlfriend’s,
Chuck points out. “Who is Mike to her?”

“Now he wants to act like he did that shit for you,” Chuck says. “But think about
it: like, if you going to get booked, it’s better to get booked
alone
.”

To work out whether Chuck’s account is valid, I try to think of what my friend from
school could have possibly told the police about Mike. Well, at least his real name.
In the hope that his other cases wouldn’t come into play and to make it harder for
them to find him once he made bail, Mike had given the two officers a fake name and
had scraped his fingertips off on a metal grate in the cell so that they couldn’t
find him through his prints.

After a few days, Mike still seems angry with me that I didn’t express gratitude for
the sacrifice he’d made on my behalf, and that I didn’t accept his version of events.
I speak to Aisha on the phone, relaying the events of the past days to her, describing
what Mike had done and how close we had come to being arrested. I make sure Mike is
within earshot while I talk to her, and this seems to patch things up between us.
Chuck says nothing else to me about it.

From these field notes, we can see that it can be quite unclear who has taken the
blame for whom, or how much risk there really was in the first place. I believed that
Mike had taken blame that was rightfully his, but he felt that he had made a significant
sacrifice for me, and that I didn’t understand the situation enough to appropriately
value his gesture. I began to be convinced by Mike’s arguments until I talked with
Chuck, who had a different interpretation from either of us. Chuck agreed with Mike
that keeping drugs on you instead of throwing them
in the car should be understood as a gesture of sacrifice, protecting the driver at
your personal expense. That is, he didn’t dispute that passengers in a car ordinarily
drop the drugs, leaving the driver holding the bag. What Chuck was disputing was whether
Mike had
remembered
that he had drugs on him. If he’d actually forgotten, then he’d kept the rest of
us safe unintentionally and was now trying to get credit for it. Furthermore, by quickly
admitting to the police that he was carrying the marijuana and we weren’t, Mike actually
wasn’t preventing our arrest. According to Chuck, what he was preventing was the possibility
that we’d talk. Mike was trying to avoid putting us in a position where we’d compromise
his freedom.

Added to these interpretations is a fourth, which I came up with while rereading my
field notes a few days later. The person who actually may have benefited from Mike’s
impromptu confession was not me or my friend from school but Chuck, who did have drugs
on him, and likely would have been searched next if Mike hadn’t spoken up and claimed
responsibility when he did. Chuck would have been in a much more vulnerable position
to inform on Mike to reduce his own charges, so Mike’s taking the blame prevented
that from happening. Neither Chuck nor Mike mentioned this, at least not while I was
present. In fact, Mike specifically told me that he wouldn’t have taken the blame
if only Chuck had been in the car.

From this single police stop, a great many interpretations of the risks involved and
the motivations behind the actions of the parties present can be put forth. One reason
it may have been important for Mike to provide a version of the events that involved
his taking the blame for us is that a person’s character is defined in part by whether
he will risk arrest to protect the people he cares about. Residents of the 6th Street
neighborhood tend to downplay how much they put others at risk, and to exaggerate
their acts of protection and sacrifice. Men spread the news widely when they testify
on behalf of a friend on trial, wanting others to know of their loyalty and good character.
On the other hand, people suspected of caving under police pressure vehemently deny
having done so, though the strength of the denial is at times taken as a sign of guilt
in itself.

The inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of encounters with the police, trial dates,
probation hearings, and the like make these events diffi
cult ones on which to base decisions about people’s characters, feelings, or motivations.
And yet, in part because these events are so uncertain and ambiguous, they leave considerable
room for interpretation, sometimes allowing those involved to construct a version
of events in which they behaved bravely and honorably.