On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (34 page)

Over the course of this research and writing, a number of people hosted conferences,
read portions of the book, or took the time to mention things about the project that
significantly shaped my thinking. Others extended friendship when I felt myself losing
the struggle to inhabit university classrooms and the 6th Street community simultaneously.
Among these generous friends and colleagues are Eva Harris, Rebecca Sherman, Sara
Goldrick-Rab, Hilary Levey, Alexandra Murphy, Mafalda Cardim, Theo Strinopoulos, Kathleen
Nolan, Forrest Stuart, Colin Jerolmack, Joseph Ewoodzie, Jooyoung Lee, Jacob Avery,
Mariah Wren, Susanna Greenberg, Nikki Jones, Laura Clawson, Corey Fields, Matthew
Desmond, Anna Haskins, John Sutton, Mario Small, Loïc Wacquant, Paul Willis, William
Kornblum, Terry Williams, Megan Comfort, Iddo Tavory, Fredrick Wherry, Brian Kelly,
Cristobal Young, Glenn Loury, Javier Auyero, Monica White, Marion Fourcade, and Diane
Vaughan.

Carol Stack, Howard Becker, and Herbert Gans have been invaluable correspondents—I
am grateful for all they taught me from afar. Howard Becker, Robert Emerson, Jack
Katz, David Garland, Bruce Western, and Susanna Greenberg read the final manuscript
with great care, each providing comments that improved it considerably. Doug Mitchell
deserves his reputation as the heart of the editorial group at the University of Chicago
Press. Working with him, and with his colleagues Tim McGovern and Levi Stahl, has
been a great gift.

In the final stages of writing, I relied on the superb research and editorial assistance
of Morgen Miller, Martina Kunovic, Esther HsuBorger, Heather Gordon, Katrina Quisumbing
King, Sarah Ugoretz, Matthew Kearney, and Garrett Grainger. Sandra Hazel at the University
of Chicago Press lent her considerable wisdom and editorial assistance to the final
manuscript.

This book is dedicated to Reggie and Tim’s older brother Chuck, whose ready laugh
and moral strength live on in our memories.

APPENDIX

A Methodological Note

To evaluate any work of social science, it helps to learn how the researcher found
out what he or she claims to know. For the study that became this book, this means
explaining how a white young woman came to spend her twenties with Black young men
dipping and dodging the police in a lower-income Black neighborhood in Philadelphia.
In what follows, I describe how the study came about, how the research was approached
and conducted, what difficulties arose and how I tried to overcome them, how the project
developed, and how it ended. The reader may also learn something about how my identity
shaped what I came to learn, what those inside and outside the group made of my presence
in the neighborhood, and how the years on 6th Street affected me.

STARTING OUT

During my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, David Grazian offered an
urban ethnography class to undergraduates. Dave was a new hire from Chicago, steeped
in a tradition of studying urban life through firsthand observation. Early in the
course, he instructed us to pick a field site where we would be able to observe social
life and take notes. My first choice was to work at TLA, an independent movie rental
store in downtown Philadelphia. I believe I was interested in the relationship between
the rather snooty staff, who carried on a near-constant internal conversation about
obscure and artsy films, and the
far less knowledgeable and ambitious customers, who glanced through the offbeat movies
but usually chose from among the newest Hollywood releases. This idea was an utter
failure: the manager wouldn’t give me a job, the stated reason being that I didn’t
know enough about film.

The next place I tried was a large cafeteria building on the western edge of Penn’s
campus, where I ate with fellow students a few times a week. There, too, I noticed
an interesting tension between staff and customers: the mostly white and fairly privileged
Penn undergrads spent a lot of time complaining about the older Black women who served
their lunch and dinner, though to me the staff seemed perfectly pleasant and highly
competent. I wanted to get a job there and understand what the staff made of the students.

Success! I got the job the week after I applied.

I was hired by Miss Deena, a short and reserved Black woman in her sixties who managed
a largely Black staff on the basement level. Miss Deena was entering her third decade
of service at the university’s cafeteria, and her fifteenth year in management. That
fall I worked under her twice a week, mostly making sandwiches and taking food orders.

In the first week I learned that the cafeteria staff didn’t spend any time worrying
about their interactions with students. Instead, they were embroiled in internal disputes
over de-unionization. Penn had stopped hiring student workers, and had begun changing
over its almost entirely Black cafeteria staff from a unionized labor force to part-time
employees working for a private food services company. As the union workers retired
or went on medical leave, the University replaced them with women and men in their
twenties who worked under twenty-five hours a week and were being paid through this
outside company. I watched Miss Deena patiently train these new employees who were
taking the place of her lifelong friends, and the conflicts between the older unionized
women and the younger part-time staff became the focus of my field notes.

After a few months, it dawned on me that many of Miss Deena’s employees—both union
and nonunion—couldn’t read very well. I began to notice the things she did to accommodate
them, like offering job applicants the option of taking the employment forms home
and
returning them the next day instead of filling them out on the spot. The sandwich-making
job required affixing a small white label to the plastic wrap covering each sandwich
to indicate whether it was turkey and Swiss, ham and cheddar, peanut butter and jelly,
and so on. The salad-making job didn’t require labeling, as there were only two kinds
of salads, and they were easily distinguishable from each other. Miss Deena separated
the salad making and the sandwich making into two rooms so that her staff could choose
which room they wanted to work in. Her staff gave lots of reasons for wanting to work
in the room she had designated for salads: because the chairs were more comfortable
there, or the music more to their liking. Alongside these perfectly legitimate reasons
were hidden ones: the salad room allowed a person to work an entire shift without
coming across any printed words.

When workers called in sick or had to care for their children, Miss Deena was occasionally
obliged to move someone from the salad room over to the sandwich room. To deal with
this eventuality, she organized a system by which the sandwich labels went in manila
folders marked with drawings, so workers could memorize that turkey and Swiss went
with the star, and ham and cheddar with the smiley face. Those not attuned to this
system would sometimes return the labels to the wrong folders, so Miss Deena checked
the folders and re-sorted them at the end of each day. One week, when she was out
with kidney stones, I came to work to find that forty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
had been labeled turkey and Swiss.

Another problem for staff with lower levels of reading were the time cards they had
to use for clocking in and out; these sat in towering rows in metal holders on the
wall near management’s office on the first floor. With over seventy name cards lined
up on the wall, and the names written in a small cursive hand, it often took me more
than a minute to locate my own card. It wasn’t possible to memorize a card’s position
on the wall, because the upper-level managers removed the cards each day to count
the hours.

Staff members had different ways of dealing with this problem. A few of the older
women would stand under the clock, telling anyone who asked that the clock on the
wall was fast, and that they were waiting for their final hour to clear so they would
get their full pay. While
they waited, someone who was “taller” would offer to take down their card for them,
for which they got thanked politely.

The younger men who began arriving as members of the part-time staff had a different
strategy for dealing with the time-card problem: they would tell a friend on another
floor that they were leaving early and ask him or her to punch them out at a later
time. At first I thought they were stealing time, but soon came to realize that more
often than not, they left when their shift ended, giving only the appearance of logging
more hours than they had worked. Stealing time was a way to cover up the fact that
they could not locate their name on the wall.

Not only did Miss Deena look the other way, she actively embraced these strategies
as a management technique. She personally clocked out some of her employees, offering
to do this on her way to get extra napkins or place food orders. As I continued to
observe, I realized she was also helping some of the staff on the first and second
floors to clock in and out.

To the two white men sitting in the supervisor’s office on the first floor, the almost
entirely Black staff appeared lazy, difficult, or patently dishonest. They saw the
women refusing to work in the sandwich room for all kinds of silly reasons, the young
men stealing time, the older women standing around the clock; and once after Miss
Deena had gone home, I heard them rail against her for putting up with such insubordination.
They also accused her of hiring her relatives and friends, though I never observed
her to do this. Despite the tension with the management, Miss Deena seemed to take
great pride and pleasure in her work. As far as I could tell, most of her staff respected
and trusted her.

.   .   .

I wrote up my final paper for David Grazian’s class and quit the cafeteria job when
the term ended.

The following fall, I asked Miss Deena if she knew anyone who needed tutoring. She
immediately volunteered her two grandchildren: her daughter’s son, Ray, a senior in
high school who lived with her along with his mother, and her son’s daughter, Aisha,
a freshman in high school who lived with her mother and siblings a few blocks away.
Miss Deena said Ray was a good boy who was applying to college. Aisha, on the other
hand, was having considerable difficulty staying out of
trouble. We agreed that I would tutor Ray and Aisha in English, history, and SAT preparation.

What I can remember of my motivation for tutoring was that I wanted to understand
the lives of my fellow workers at home and in the neighborhood, outside the mainly
white campus where they came for their jobs. After working alongside a number of people
with quite poor reading skills, I was also preoccupied with the problem of literacy.
In any event, tutoring seemed a decent reason for a young, middle-class white woman
to be spending time in a working-class-to-poor Black section of the city.

The first time I drove to Miss Deena’s, I couldn’t find the right address. As I walked
around peering at the two-story brick row homes, a young man stopped and asked me
if I was a cop or a caseworker, there apparently being no other reason that a person
like me would be in the area. I had grown accustomed to being the only white person
working at the cafeteria, but there the students and the surrounding area were majority
white. When I began coming to Miss Deena’s house for evening tutoring, I entered a
world in which white people were a tiny minority.
¹

To my relief, Miss Deena’s family was warm and welcoming. Her daughter, Rochelle,
was a talkative and vivacious woman in her forties who had worked as a teacher’s assistant
at a day care downtown before getting laid off. She and her son, Ray, both seemed
to be acquainted with the wealthy white section of the city in which I’d been raised,
and attuned to my gaps in cultural knowledge.

Miss Deena’s granddaughter, Aisha, was also very welcoming, but seemed to have experienced
little outside Black Philadelphia. Like many who grow up in segregated northern cities,
she spoke in what linguists refer to as African American Vernacular English.
²
Added to this, she had the rapid and muffled speech of a teenager. At the beginning
of this tutoring, I frequently couldn’t understand what she said, and would awkwardly
ask her to repeat it. Or I’d pretend to follow, and she’d realize well into the conversation
that I hadn’t understood her at all.

For the school year, I tutored Aisha and Ray at Miss Deena’s house two and then three
evenings a week. After a few months, I could follow Aisha’s stories much better, and
even our phone conversations had become largely intelligible to me.

AISHA’S FAMILY

After about four months, Aisha’s mother stopped by Miss Deena’s house to meet me.
A somewhat overweight woman in her late thirties with a light complexion and cornrows
in her short and thinning hair, she looked as if she had seen it all before, or simply
was exhausted by her diabetes and caring for her three children. Our meeting was fairly
awkward on both sides, but at the end of it she told me I was welcome to stop by the
apartment a few blocks away. After spending months in Miss Deena’s pristine home with
its museum-like quiet and plastic-covered furniture, this was a big breakthrough.
A whole world of extended family and neighbors was opening up to me.

I began spending time at Aisha’s place, and got to know her mother and older sister
as well as a number of her relatives, friends, and neighbors. We would sit on the
steps of her apartment building, cook food, do laundry at the corner Laundromat, or
walk to the Chinese takeout store. As we went around the neighborhood, Aisha introduced
me to a cousin working as a deli clerk, an uncle selling DVDs from a stand on the
street, and another uncle who managed the corner seafood joint. Her family had been
in Philadelphia for many generations; she counted what seemed to be a vast number
of neighbors as close relations.