On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (31 page)

As the prom drew nearer, problems began cropping up in the plans. I had taken Ray
and Cory to the Department of Motor Vehicles a number of times to work through the
costly and lengthy process of obtaining a driver’s license, but after we obtained
the necessary doctor’s form and assembled all the other required documentation, Ray
failed the computer permit test despite months of studying. A month later he failed
it a second time, dashing all hope of driving his date to the prom himself. Cory had
a learner’s permit, but it kept expiring because he couldn’t afford the thirty dollars
to take the driver’s test. I took him twice to get the permit renewed, but he finally
had to let it lapse when his doctor’s form became invalid after one year. At that
point, he couldn’t afford a new doctor’s form or the fee to take the driving test.

Around this time, Desiree’s boyfriend got shot in the hip, and according to Ray, she
entered a period of prolonged depression. She refused to go to the prom with Ray or
with anyone, preferring to “practically live” at the hospital.

As if this weren’t enough, a week later Ray had to abandon his plans for a custom-made
suit when he discovered that the tailor wanted three hundred dollars to make it. In
fact, he couldn’t afford to buy a regular suit and shoes, or even to rent them. Finally,
he admitted to me that even if he somehow came up with the money to rent a suit, he
wouldn’t be able to find a date who could afford her own sixty-dollar ticket. He couldn’t
pay for another person’s in addition to his own.

Ray and Cory began saying that they didn’t want to go to the prom after all. The weekend
before the event, Ray told me they were planning on going to an “anti-prom” party
at a friend’s house, which was infinitely preferable to the corniness of a prom being
held in “a warehouse in South Philly.”

“I never wanted to go,” Cory informed me. “I’m not into the school thing, that’s Ray.”
Later he said, “There ain’t nobody to go with! All the pretty girls graduated last
year.”

When I asked Ray’s mom about the prom, she mentioned nothing
about the high cost, saying only, “Yeah, I guess he doesn’t want to go anymore, he
thought it would be stupid. I kept telling him he’d regret it.”

On the night of prom, Ray called me around 9:30.

“Are you busy?” he said.

“No.”

“Can you give us a ride to South Philly?”

“For what?”

“For the prom.”

“I thought you were going to that other party.”

“He’s not having it. His mom came home, I think.”

“Oh.”

“So will you take us? It’s just on 16th and Passyunk.”

“How are you going to get in?”

“We’re not going in the prom. This girl I know is having an after-party down the shore,
so I’m gonna meet everybody there.”

“Okay, what time?”

“Now? If you aren’t doing anything . . .” Ray said, rather sheepishly.

I picked up Ray and Cory, who was wearing a pretty threadbare sweatshirt. Ray carried
a duffel bag, which I assumed contained their change of clothes and maybe some alcohol.
They gave no explanation for their change of heart, nor did I ask for any. We drove
to the prom location, which did indeed seem to be a warehouse, and parked in the large
lot, full of cars and even a few limos.

“Can you pull up closer?” Ray said.

“To what?”

“To the door!”

“Okay.”

We waited pretty quietly for about ten minutes as Ray and Cory watched the two large
metal doors on a dimly lit side of the concrete building. Then the doors opened and
a young woman in a sheer purple dress came out, walking carefully and adjusting her
hair. Cory and Ray leaped out of the car and then stopped short, hesitating to approach
the door, and finally leaned against the car. I realized then that Cory was clutching
a disposable camera. Young women in dresses and heels began to emerge with their dates
into the night, and Cory and Ray talked in whispers about who looked good, and who
had come with whom.
They saw a couple they knew, and walked over shyly to say hi. Ray shook the guy’s
hand, and Cory told the girl how nice she looked.

This continued for about forty minutes, and halfway through Cory used up his roll
of film. He seemed happy to be posing with the girls in all their finery.

Then Ray saw a girl he liked, and he turned to us with an embarrassed smile. Cory
whispered, “Go up to her!” which he finally did. The girl give him a hug, keeping
a fair distance between them so as not to smudge her makeup or dislodge her hair,
and he came back smiling. Then he spotted the group who were having the party down
the shore, and asked me to pop the trunk. As Ray got his bag, Cory opened the passenger
side of my car.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting in the car.”

“Wait, you’re not going to the after-party?”

Cory shook his head.

“So why did you come with Ray, then?”

“For the Let Out,” Cory said.

I looked confused.

“To see everybody come out,” he tried to explain.

It was an uncomfortable ride home. Cory looked bleakly out the window most of the
way, and I couldn’t think of a single topic to lift the mood. All I could think was
how adamantly he had argued that he wanted no part of the prom, and then how he had
come anyway, to watch from the parking lot as his wealthier classmates made their
grand exit. I wished I hadn’t conveyed my expectation that he’d be going to the after-party,
because now he had that added shame. At one point in the thirty-minute drive home,
though, his face lit up a bit and he said, “I got pictures with, like, eight different
girls.”

Both Ray and Cory graduated from high school that spring, and Ray enrolled in a historically
Black college down South. His mother and grandmother proudly drove him down there
in early September and got his dorm room all set up. Then after six months, Ray dropped
out—the family could no longer afford the tuition, and his student loans weren’t nearly
enough. Now he works as a security guard at the mall, and as of this writing has paid
off about half his college debt.

The second disappointment that has stuck with me through the years concerns Ray’s
grandmother, Miss Deena.

One afternoon in late April of 2002, Miss Deena and I were in the kitchen when she
began to talk about how hard it was working at the cafeteria. I asked her what she
was doing that summer, hoping that she’d be getting some time off. She confirmed that
she would be taking some vacation days. I asked where she might spend them, and she
said she was thinking of visiting her sister in California, who said she would pay
for her ticket.

“California’s nice,” I say.

“Or I might go to Florida, to see my friend.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He asked me to marry him. We were going to get married, but then we didn’t, and he
moved to Florida.”

I had never heard anything about Miss Deena’s love life before. I am embarrassed to
say that at twenty years old, the idea that Aisha’s grandmother might have a love
life hadn’t occurred to me.

“When did he move?”

“About a few years ago, when he retired.”

“Oh.”

“He just got strange, so I didn’t go with him.”

The discussion turned to the summer cutbacks, and her concerns about what would happen
to her staff members if management laid them off. She told me how in the summertime
it’s really hard, because the Penn students have gone home, and the area high school
kids, who are part of college prep programs, come in. And they are bad, really bad.
They get into fights in the dining room, all kinds of trouble. Then Miss Deena circled
back to her called-off engagement and the man who moved away.

“He was a really nice man. I met him at the cafeteria. He collected Westerns, loved
Western movies—new ones, classic ones, those really hard-to-find ones. But he didn’t
watch them, he just collected them. He was going to watch them when he retired. That’s
what he got them for. He had, like, must have been over two hundred. And I used to
ask to watch them, but after a while I just gave up because he really didn’t want
to watch them yet, he was saving them.”

I nodded for her to go on.

“So he retired and we were planning to go to Florida. And then one night, someone
broke into his house and stole all his movies.”

“My god.”

“I asked him what he was going do if he found him, and he says, ‘Deena, I won’t tell
you what I’ma do with him, but I will make it so’s he don’t do that to nobody else.’
”

“Wow.”

“And that scared me, ’cause I thought: what is he going to do to me if I do something
to upset him or make him mad?”

“Right.”

“And then he bought some barbed wire, you know that wire that you get all caught up
in that they use for fences and everything, and he bought that new kind, the kind
that really gets you so’s you can’t get out, and do you know, Alice, he put it all
over his living room and his house, he lined the walls all up and down, so he could
only use the kitchen and the bathroom and the upstairs, and you couldn’t hardly get
around down there at all.”

“He didn’t hurt himself?”

“Well, he knew where they was laid, I guess. So after that I said I can’t marry you.
You being really strange. I can’t trust you, so I’m not going to go with you.”

“What did he say?”

“He says, ‘I’ma wait and see if you change your mind. I’ma give you three weeks; if
you don’t change your mind, I’ma go to Florida.’
”

“Wow.”

“But I couldn’t change my mind, ’cause after all that, I didn’t know what would happen,
I didn’t know what he was going to do. So he came to me after three weeks and says,
‘Deena, did you change your mind?’ and I says, ‘Nope, my mind’s the same.’ And he
says, ‘Well, they’ll be other prospects in Florida, anyway.’
”

“Huh.”

“But I guess he didn’t find no other prospects yet, ’cause he wants me to come visit
this summer.”
⁷

Miss Deena didn’t make it to Florida that summer to see her former fiancé, or to see
her sister in California. Instead, she got laid off from the cafeteria—seven months
before her retirement would have kicked
in. To this day, she receives no pension from the University, though she worked there
full time for twenty-two years. Her daughter, Rochelle, and I were horrified, and
made a number of futile attempts to right the wrong. Miss Deena took it with stoic
optimism. “At least I get to sleep in now, and rest my feet.”

Those walking around with warrants and court cases and probation sentences sometimes
viewed people like Miss Deena and her grandson Ray as the privileged and free: clean
people who could go to school, work legal jobs, and build a family, all without looking
over their shoulder or getting the rug pulled out from under them. The disappointments
that Miss Deena and Ray sustained over the time that I knew them remind us that the
constraints the criminal justice system imposes are only additional to the poverty,
poor schools, and unjust and racist institutions that have long dampened the hopes
and happiness of Black families living in segregated Northern cities.

.   .   .

As the police chase neighbors and family members through the streets, some residents
in the 6th Street community are successfully living a life apart from prisons, court
dates, and probation regulations. They negotiate relationships with their legally
entangled friends, neighbors, and relatives in ways that limit the risks they bring
and the damage they cause. Some clean residents go to school or work every day with
a relatively easy lack of awareness of the young men locked up or running from the
police; others manage a more concerted and sometimes painful avoidance; and still
others negotiate a complicated interweaving of the dirty and clean worlds.

Miss Deena’s family steered clear of the dirty world by remaining indoors, cutting
themselves off from neighborhood life, sending their son to a charter school outside
the neighborhood, and cutting ties with a son who had gone to prison. Lamar and his
friends steadfastly avoided young men who sold drugs or had warrants over their heads,
drawing a firm line between their indoor lives and legal jobs and pastimes and the
guys out there on the corner who were dipping and dodging the police. Mr. George didn’t
cut himself off from his legally entangled grandsons—in fact, he lived with them and
supported them financially. Yet he kept relatively free from their drama by building
himself
a separate apartment in the house, and keeping out of their affairs so long as they
abided by basic house rules. Josh succeeded in going to college and securing a job
as a project manager in the pharmaceutical industry, all while remaining connected
to his old friends from the neighborhood as they went in and out of jail or lived
on the run. These relationships sometimes became highly problematic, but they also
offered him support and a rewarding way to help others.

The question of why some young men wind up in prison and others do not is an age-old
one, and I can’t pretend to fully speak to it, let alone answer it, here. Certainly,
it is poorer young men around 6th Street who tend to find themselves arrested and
sentenced to jail and prison, though the crimes that start them off in the penal system
are often crimes of which richer young men, both Black and white, are also guilty:
fighting, drug possession, and the like.

In a community where only few young men end up in prison, we might speak of bad apples
or of people who have fallen through the cracks. Given the unprecedented levels of
policing and imprisonment in poor Black communities today, these individual explanations
make less sense. We begin to see a more deliberate social policy at work. In that
context, simply bearing witness to the people who
are
avoiding the authorities and the penal system seems worth a few pages. The people
featured here are all, in a variety of ways, leading clean lives in a dirty world.
In so doing, they demonstrate that the criminal justice system has not entirely taken
over poor and segregated Black neighborhoods like 6th Street, only parts of them.