On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (28 page)

“Maybe six years. No, longer than that, ’cause Dre [his best friend from high school,
who had been killed in a car accident] was still alive. Must be like ten years.”

“Does he live nearby?”

“I have no idea. All I know is he better stay the hell away from me. I can’t get mixed
up in any of that. Dipping and dodging the police and all that.”

“I know that’s right,” Keisha said.

Lamar’s cousin shook his head, acknowledging the importance of steering clear of such
people.

A CLEAN FAMILY IN ISOLATION

When I first met Miss Deena, she managed the basement level of a cafeteria on the
western edge of Penn’s campus. There, she directed ten or so staff to serve sandwiches
and boxed salads along with cookies, fruit, and granola bars. We met in 2001, when
she hired me to make
sandwiches and ring up orders. At 4’9” and approaching sixty-five, she commanded great
respect from her employees, and led with a quiet and dignified reasonableness.

Miss Deena lived with her daughter, Rochelle, and her daughter’s son, Ray, in a long-established
mixed-income Black neighborhood. Rochelle was in her midforties, and recently laid
off from a job as a classroom assistant at an elementary school. Ray was a senior
in high school, and hoped to go to college.

Like many people devoted to taxing jobs, Miss Deena seemed lonely and tired at home,
uncomfortable even. She would return from her shift looking exhausted and walking
gingerly, her energy clearly spent. After exchanging a few pleasantries, she’d change
into her slippers, pat her small dog Dutchess, make herself a bowl of leftovers, and
retreat upstairs to her bedroom, which her daughter and grandson dubbed “the fortress.”
Sometimes she’d contemplate visiting the retirement community two blocks away to socialize;
maybe she’d meet some nice man at their bingo night. On Saturday afternoons, she’d
often iron her clothes for church, only to rehang them the next morning, not having
the energy to go.

Though Miss Deena was the financial provider in her household, little of the respect
she commanded at work seemed to extend to the home she shared with her daughter and
grandson. Rochelle and Ray seemed to dominate the social life of the home, using the
kitchen and dining room to cook, go online, or watch TV. Occasionally, Miss Deena
would come down and try to chat with them, but she often dozed off where she sat.
Other times, she’d begin a story about the ceiling leak at work or her troubles with
diabetes, but her daughter or grandson would interrupt her before she could finish,
or simply walk out of the room. With shame, I also found myself guilty of this behavior;
something about her way of telling stories made it difficult to stay focused.

From September to December of 2002, I spent two to three evenings a week at Miss Deena’s
house, first as a tutor for her two grandchildren, then gradually also as a guest.
With her grandson Ray, it was SAT prep, college essays, and financial aid forms, to
which his mother was tirelessly devoted. And in my sessions with her granddaughter
Aisha, who stopped by Miss Deena’s after school, we concentrated on homework
and strategies for staying away from the girls with whom she was getting into fights.

The first encounter that I observed the family to have with a person caught up in
the criminal justice system occurred one Tuesday afternoon in early November. The
doorbell rang, and Ray got up to answer it. He didn’t invite the man in but spoke
to him outside, with the door half-shut behind him. As he spoke to the man, Rochelle
leaned toward the door with what looked to me like trepidation.

“I just want to see if it’s who I think it is,” she said.

When Ray came back, she looked at his face and said, “I knew it.”

Ray told us that the man had asked for Tyrell, though he didn’t explain to me who
Tyrell was. Before Ray could tell us what else the man had said, Rochelle launched
into a series of stories about him: how he and his wife would come over empty handed
and eat up the whole house; how his wife was “country” but street smart and eventually
left him; how he’d come by the house even then, just by himself; how he had given
a bath to his fourteen-year-old daughter when he said her armpits smelled. From what
I could gather, this man was a friend of Tyrell’s, though it was still unclear who
Tyrell was.

Apparently, this man who hadn’t been allowed inside had just returned from jail, or
perhaps a halfway house. Rochelle explained to me how he had held a great job at the
electrical plant, but lost the position when he was charged with sexual harassment
for picking up a female coworker and moving her out of the way to get to the Coke
machine. Rochelle also didn’t like that he had once come to the house and insulted
Ray, telling him he should mind his manners and behave. How dare he insult her son
in his own house, in front of everyone! Rochelle described the man as “sort of bipolar.”
Miss Deena said simply, “We still pray for him, but he can’t be trusted.”

Talk of the visit passed; the family resumed their previous conversations. It wasn’t
until a month later that I learned that the Tyrell this man had asked for was Miss
Deena’s son and Aisha’s father, currently sitting in prison upstate. His crime, Rochelle
told me, was dressing up as her, his own sister, walking into her bank, and attempting
to empty her twelve-hundred-dollar savings account. “He had stockings on and everything,”
she laughed half-heartedly. “Even a wig!”

For this attempted robbery, Tyrell had been in prison for five years.

It’s very likely that Miss Deena’s family had been making a special effort to conceal
the fact of their imprisoned family member from me and spoke about him more frequently
when I wasn’t around. But that any knowledge of Miss Deena’s imprisoned son could
be kept from someone spending twenty hours a week in their living room, tutoring this
man’s daughter, is important information—a testament to their success in carving out
a life apart. In the families on 6th Street that I would later come to know, it would
have been impossible to conceal such a thing, because daily life is flooded with court
dates, prison visits, phone calls from probation or parole officers, parole regulations,
and police raids.

Also significant was the deep embarrassment Miss Deena’s family appeared to feel about
Tyrell’s imprisonment. For many of the neighborhood families jail and prison were
simply the places where many relatives were located.

Once the topic of Miss Deena’s imprisoned son had been broached, he occasionally came
up in conversation. On these days Rochelle would shake her head about him, as if to
say, “Yeah, he’s my worthless brother. What can you do?”

For Miss Deena and Rochelle, Tyrell’s imprisonment seemed a quiet sadness lurking
in the background, a reminder of an earlier era in which their lives had been more
chaotic and troubled. Sometimes Miss Deena expressed fears about the havoc he might
wreak on their calm and stable household if he returned to Philadelphia upon his release.
At other times, she expressed shame at how her son had turned out and what he had
done. Perhaps she also felt guilty that she could not to steer him in the right direction.
But Tyrell seemed more of an offstage emptiness than a daily problem. Nobody went
to visit him, and mostly nobody wrote to him, though they did accept his phone calls
every so often and read his occasional letter.

One afternoon in December 2002, Aisha drafted a response to her father:

5:30–8:00 pm Miss Deena’s House

Aisha lets me in, and I say hi to Dutchess. Miss Deena and her daughter are downstairs
in the kitchen when I get there. They are talking about
someone in the hospital. Aisha is working on a letter to send to her father. The letter
explained that she was going to be a computer technician when she grew up. Her father
had requested this info, and she had been worrying about her reply for some time.
The letter also mentioned that she wanted to bake pies and cakes and cookies as good
as grandma’s. Then it said she wanted to be just like her dad. At the very end, it
said, “You told me when you come home you want to start youre won business [
sic
].” That was the last sentence. She signed it and I explained what a P.S. was, which
she said she’d like to do, and later we got an envelope from her aunt.

Aisha didn’t spend much time talking to her father or writing to him, nor did she
ever visit him during the years he was away on the sentence discussed here. But she
did occasionally talk about how angry she was at him, or reflect on the things he
had said, giving me the sense that her father and his absence were never far from
her thoughts.

For Miss Deena, her daughter, Rochelle, and Rochelle’s son, Ray, their imprisoned
family member seemed rarely to intrude into everyday life. This isn’t to say that
they didn’t think about him, worry about him, or feel ashamed about him—just that
on a day-to-day basis, they led their lives separately from his and from the involvement
in the courts and the prisons that he required.

A GRANDFATHER LIVING APART

When his three grandsons were sitting in jail, the house quieted down and Mr. George
would come outside, sit on the porch, and drink a beer. Sometimes he talked about
the neighborhood’s better days or about his childhood.

George Taylor, known as Mr. George to his grandsons’ friends, had come up from Georgia
when he was five. His mother and father worked the cotton fields south of Atlanta;
like many sharecroppers, they often came up short at the yearly settle, since the
cost of the basic necessities they had bought on credit from the plantation store
was more than what they cleared in the fields. Mr. George remembers his father cursing
the owner of the small plantation for manipulating the numbers,
which his father could not read, and the family leaving late at night for the next
farm, his mother hopeful that this one would be better.
²

The Second World War meant opportunity up North, so with hundreds of thousands of
fellow field hands, Mr. George’s father boarded a train to Philadelphia. He sent for
his wife and three children later that year, once he found work. This was 1943.

For most of Mr. George’s childhood, the family lived in a two-room flat in South Philadelphia.
His father shoveled coal down at the docks; like many a stevedore, he showed up for
work not knowing if he’d get any and faced long hours of backbreaking labor if he
did. Mr. George’s mother cooked and cleaned house for two white families in downtown
Philadelphia. To his father’s shame, it was this money that really supported the family.
Neither job paid as much as had been promised when the family made the move North
during the war.

Mr. George’s parents fought a lot in their cramped apartment, but the couple stayed
together and had two more children. Mr. George graduated from high school with strong
grades and entered the US Army in 1959. Anything to get out of the house, he explained.

Mr. George did well in his newly integrated unit and left the military with a bad
knee and an honorable discharge before the Vietnam War began. It was a piece of luck
that he never forgot. He applied for a job with the postal service, and worked as
a clerk at a branch in Southwest Philadelphia from the age of twenty-one until he
retired at sixty-five.

A few years after taking this job, Mr. George bought a three-bedroom row home on a
quiet, tree-lined block in the neighborhood of 6th Street, right at the edge of the
city limits. At the time, he was raising his young daughter, Linda, alone. His wife
had taken off with another man.

Mr. George and his daughter were among the first Black families to move to the neighborhood,
and after them came physicians, bank tellers, government workers, and shop owners.
Like Mr. George, these middle-class families hoped to escape the crowded and run-down
ghetto by moving just past its outer edges.

The move to 6th Street represented the culmination of years of effort for Mr. George
and his family, but in many ways his military career, his job at the post office,
and now this spacious house in a good neighborhood also exemplified the triumphs of
the Civil Rights Move
ment. Gone were the days of separate drinking fountains, perpetual debt, and police
harassment. In one generation, the Taylors had moved from second-class tenant farmers
in the Jim Crow South to white-collar respectability in the North.

Not that their new neighbors had exactly welcomed them with open arms. One of the
families that moved in shortly after Mr. George and Linda got a brick thrown through
their living room window, and Linda refused to sleep in her own bedroom after that.

Mr. George hoped his daughter would grow up in an integrated community, but by the
1980s every white family in the 6th Street neighborhood had packed up and moved. Legal
segregation had ended, but not a single white student attended his daughter’s school.
Even so, 6th Street remained a middle-class area, less violent than other Black neighborhoods
nearby, with cleaner sidewalks and better-kept lawns.

In the mid-1980s this, too, began to change. Developers started placing low-income
housing in the area, initiatives that the older residents didn’t have the political
power to resist. It was this second wave of less refined residents, George felt, that
set his daughter, Linda, down the wrong path.

By her own account, Miss Linda’s father had spoiled her hopelessly as a child, especially
after her mother left. She came of age at the height of the crack boom and dropped
out of high school during her junior year. The men she dated worked at the bottom
of the crack business, which at the time offered decent wages and even the promise
of wealth to unemployed young men growing up around 6th Street. Many of her boyfriends
also shared her addiction. During a decade of hard living, Linda gave birth to three
sons: Chuck in 1984, Reggie in 1987, and Tim in 1991. By this time, the ghetto Mr.
George had worked so hard to escape seemed to have grown up around them.