On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (29 page)

By the late 1980s, the neighborhood of 6th Street and others like it had a heavy police
presence. At first Mr. George and his neighbors viewed this as a welcome sign of change:
the neighborhood had been neglected by law enforcement for far too long. But as more
and more young men disappeared into jail and prison, Mr. George and his neighbors
started to question the motivation behind this ramped-up policing. Some suspected
that under the cloak of tough-on-crime rhetoric
was white discomfort about Black civic and economic incorporation. To put it more
bluntly, they figured that white people were not going to accept Black people as full
citizens without a fight.
³

When I met Mr. George’s family, the house he shared with his daughter Linda and her
three sons had deteriorated well past the point of basic decency. Small roaches and
ants crawled incessantly across the countertops and floors, over the couch and TV,
and frequently onto the house’s inhabitants. The house itself reeked of cigarette
smoke, urine, vomit, and alcohol. In the kitchen, cabinets were sticky with grease
and dirt; cat urine and feces covered a corner of the floor. Ashtrays in the kitchen,
dining room, and living room collected mountains of old cigarette butts and would
frequently topple to the floor, dumping their contents into the carpet. Linda refused
to throw the butts away, insisting that they were her reserves when she had no money
for cigarettes. The upholstered couches, the living room carpet, and the walls were
stained a monochromatic brown—the aftermath of years of smoke and dirt. A gaping hole
in the floor between the toilet and the tub in the upstairs bathroom made washing
up or relieving oneself quite perilous. The floor and wall tile had also crumbled
away.

Yet the state of the house’s interior was hardly as disconcerting or worrisome as
the daily lives of its inhabitants. By my count, the police came to the house thirty-two
times over the six years I knew the Taylors. After the police on one of these calls
broke the lock on the front door, Miss Linda started sleeping in the living room with
a shotgun by her side, in case someone should push the door open and try to rob the
family. Also during my time on 6th Street, each of her three sons got into shootouts
with other young men in the neighborhood, and for a while afterward Miss Linda did
not feel it was safe to walk outside alone.

Amid this chaos, filth, legal drama, and violence, Mr. George somehow succeeded in
living a life apart. He would leave in the midmorning and return in the early evening,
often bringing his longtime companion home with him. The couple lived in a separate
apartment on the second floor, complete with a kitchenette and bathroom Mr. George
had built himself during the 1980s. During the day, the heavy door to this apartment
stayed firmly shut with the help of a deadbolt. In case his daughter or grandsons
should find their way in through the windows, Mr.
George had padlocked his refrigerator. This way, the rest of the family and whoever
else they had running through the house couldn’t eat up the groceries that his companion
brought over on Sunday afternoons.

I had seen Mr. George’s apartment only once, when I came up the stairs and knocked
on the door to tell him that Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, was giving birth. As he
opened the door, I glimpsed shiny white linoleum floors and a spotless countertop.
I’m not sure if he was able to keep the roaches out—they had so deeply infested the
rest of the house—but I saw none on the walls or the floor, and the room itself smelled
fresh, like clean laundry.

How did these two households coexist under the same roof? After a few years of knowing
the Taylors, I noted a number of tacit house rules, which Linda and her boys more
or less stuck to—or at least acknowledged when breaking them. One rule was that no
friends or partners could live in the house. Mr. George wasn’t running a shelter or
a hotel for everybody in the neighborhood, he said. An exception was made for Chuck’s
two daughters, who frequently came to stay for weeks at a time since shortly after
their birth. Another rule was that Mr. George would not tolerate loud noise inside
the house or outside his window after about 11:00 p.m. Often when we were sitting
outside, Chuck or Reggie would tell their friends to pipe down around this time. A
third house rule was that if the police ever came looking for one of the boys or a
friend of theirs, Mr. George would immediately pick up the phone and alert the police
the next time he saw the young man in question. He refused to shield his grandsons
from the law.

In supporting the family, Mr. George contributed a great deal: he paid the mortgage,
the heating, water, and phone bills. He would not, he said, pay for collect calls
from jail or prison and did not allow this service on the landline, which he limited
to local calls. He also gave Linda money to buy food and other household items. And
he allowed his daughter and grandsons to live in his house rent free, though Miss
Linda sometimes persuaded her sons to pay rent directly to her without relaying any
to her father.

In the day-to-day activities of his daughter and grandsons, Mr. George didn’t appear
to intervene much. Miss Linda had free reign of the house, which she considered hers
to do with as she deemed fit. Her father didn’t tell her to clean the house, nor did
he tell her boys what
to do or when to come in at night. So long as his daughter and grandsons weren’t bringing
the police to his door, what they did was their business.

In their early teens, Chuck and his younger brother Reggie began selling crack in
the neighborhood. Their ready access to the drug seemed to help control the chaos
that their mother’s addiction had brought into their lives. By supplying their mother,
they could reduce the number of food stamps she sold to get drugs, and keep her from
trading or selling off their possessions for crack. They could also reduce the number
of men she would have sex with in exchange for drugs. Sometimes these men beat her,
and Chuck would come home and get into fights in an effort to defend her. Through
much of this, I gathered, Mr. George remained up in his apartment.

Mr. George and I had only a few lengthy conversations, but during those he’d speak
about the neighborhood’s early years and once in a while about his childhood. He did
not talk about the troubles with his daughter and grandsons, and he dodged my questions
about them the few times I asked. I wanted to know about the period when his teenage
daughter became addicted to crack and gave birth to his three grandsons. I also wanted
to know when and how the house had deteriorated to its present condition, and how
he’d come to allow his daughter and her sons to live there without having much to
do with them.

I was able to piece together some of this family history through the stories that
Chuck and Reggie would occasionally offer. The excerpt below is taken from field notes
in the late summer of 2006, when Chuck was twenty-two and Reggie was eighteen.

Chuck and I are on our way to visit Reggie at CFCF [Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility],
the county jail on State Road. As we drive through West Philly, we pass a park with
a couple of swing sets and a basketball court.

“I used to play in this park,” Chuck comments.

“Did you used to live around here?”

“Yeah, for a little bit.”

I’m surprised by this. In four years of knowing the family, I had never heard Chuck
or his two younger brothers mention living anywhere but their grandfather’s house
on 6th Street. I say as much, and Chuck replies:

“We were staying here with Reggie’s dad. My grandpop kicked us out
and shit, and we went to this homeless shelter for a minute [a little while] and I
guess my mom wanted to get out of there, so she called Reggie’s dad and he came and
got us. He used to live right there in that building.”

I look at the dilapidated gray and brown high-rise building and nod my head.

“That was the first time I ever saw somebody get shot.”

Chuck pauses after this, and I wait to see if he will go on. He doesn’t.

“Who got shot?”

“Reggie’s dad.”

“Who shot him?”

“My grandpop.”

Another pause.

I ask, “Over what?”

“I remember I was happy as shit to leave the shelter, but then he used to beat her,
like, not just slap her, but really fuck her up, and I used to be mad, like, and try
to jump on him and pull him off of her.”

“So you used to protect her.”

“Not really. I couldn’t do no real damage, ’cause I was only like seven. Yeah, seven,
’cause Tim was just born. One night, he was beating her and he just kept going and
then he started choking her and I called Pop-Pop [Mr. George]. Pop-Pop came over there,
shot him three times in the stomach. Then he said get your stuff.”

“Then you went back to live with him on 6th Street.”

“Yep.”

“When you saw him get shot, were you scared?”

“No, I was happy. I was relieved.”

“Did Pop-Pop [Mr. George] catch a case?”

“No. Reggie’s pop never reported him. He never did no time or nothing.”
⁴

From stories like these, I came to understand that while Mr. George’s general policy
was to live alongside his daughter and grandsons without much interference, he would
occasionally step in—sometimes for their benefit, such as the time he rescued the
family from an abusive man and agreed to house them once again, and sometimes for
his own, such as in late 2006 when, after repeated raids on the house, he cleared
out his daughter’s belongings and told her she could not return if she continued to
hide Reggie from the police.

After these raids, Chuck and Reggie were sitting in county jail and state prison,
respectively. A month later, their younger brother Tim got booked outside the Chinese
takeout store for resisting arrest and possession of a small amount of crack. In the
absence of his three grandsons, the house became strangely quiet, and Mr. George began
sitting outside on the second-floor porch. One evening the following fall, after I’d
come back from visiting Chuck in county jail, we sat down and had a beer and a cigarette:

I’ll tell you. [
shakes his head
] I feel sorry for the man with sons. What’s the use of raising a boy today? You feed
him and clothe him and teach him how to ride a bike and you done checked his tests,
then at fifteen they shipping him off to juvie. You don’t know when you going to see
him again. Maybe he makes it to 18 before they take him away. And once they grab him,
that’s it! Your son locked in a cage, just sitting. And the worst part about it is,
you still supporting him! Even though you can’t see him, you can’t watch him go to
school, go to work, have kids of his own, he can’t do nothing but just sit, and you
still supporting him. You put money on his books, visitation, he come home for a few
months, go back in. You worry about him, what’s happening in there. You hope he come
home and do what he’s supposed to be doing. You hope and pray he don’t tear your life
apart, put
you
in jail. That’s the most you can hope for. Or you say I can’t do it, I’m not getting
involved. I wash my hands. They say it’s changed now with Obama, it’s a new era. But
can’t nobody protect our sons, not even the president. I’m telling you, if I was thirty
years younger, I’d be praying for girls. If I had a son I’d be done lost my mind by
now. I’d start mourning and praying the day he was born.
⁵

.   .   .

Each of the people described in the chapter thus far manage to insulate themselves
from the police, the courts, and the prisons as well as from their legally entangled
neighbors and family members. Some, like Miss Deena and Lamar, accomplish this by
cutting off ties to sons and brothers who are either sitting in prison or living on
the run. Others, like Mr. George, continue to provide support from a distance, even
if that distance is only the space of a thick door and a deadbolt. The next section
concerns a young man who remained deeply connected to his
neighborhood friends, yet managed to go to college and secure a well-paying job while
they dodged the police and cycled in and out of jail.

A CLEAN MAN WITH DIRTY FRIENDS

Directly across the shared alleyway from Mr. George, his daughter, and his grandsons
on 6th Street lived a mother and her three children, the youngest of whom was a young
man named Josh. Josh was three years older than Miss Linda’s oldest son, Chuck; the
two had played together as children and remained close all through high school. Josh’s
mother, who worked in administration at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania,
had two daughters with her first husband before marrying a second time and giving
birth to Josh. Neither marriage lasted longer than a few years, so she raised the
family on her Penn salary and intermittent child support payments. When Chuck’s mother
went out searching for drugs, he would often walk across the shared alleyway and eat
at Josh’s. When Miss Linda didn’t come home for a few days, he’d take his younger
brother Tim with him, and spend a few nights there.

When I started hanging out on the block, Josh was twenty years old, and getting his
degree in business administration from a historically Black college in Upstate New
York. When he returned home for the holidays, he’d spend evenings with Chuck and his
other neighbors. A tall man who spoke quietly and laughed easily, Josh seemed eager
to reunite with his boys from back home, and quickly fell into their routine of late-night
drinking and marijuana smoking. For their part, these young men seemed happy that
one of their own had made it. They didn’t expect him to partake in the drama of the
streets. When they were in shootouts, for example, nobody looked to Josh to strap
up.

Right out of college, Josh moved back home and began working for a doctor who was
conducting trials for a pharmaceutical company. His college girlfriend had moved back
to Virginia and given birth to their son, so he traveled back and forth a few times
a year to visit them, and his son came up for Halloween and most of the summer. Josh
seemed to always be talking about the boy, and to look forward to their visits. They’d
speak on the phone a few times a week.