On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (35 page)

Slowly, I began to perceive the social distance between Aisha’s and Miss Deena’s households.
At Miss Deena’s the fridge was often full, the family had no problems keeping the
lights and gas on, and Ray spent his evenings on SAT prep and college applications.
I never observed any member of the household to sit outside on the stoop, and relations
with neighbors were polite but brief. In my two years of spending most weekday afternoons
at their place, I observed them entertaining guests only twice, and one of these was
a relative from out of town. In contrast, Aisha lived with her mother and sister in
a four-story, Section 8–subsidized housing unit on a poorer block. A steady stream
of family and neighbors came into and out of the apartment, and Aisha’s family also
spent a lot of time at their neighbor’s, whose three kids they considered part of
the family.

Aisha’s mother admitted to me that she had sold drugs for a while before going on
welfare. While she had been out doing her thing during Aisha’s childhood, Aisha’s
maternal grandmother had taken over
her care. She was a thin woman in her sixties with shockingly bright dyed-red hair
and a love of cognac. In middle school, Aisha would join her at the corner bar, spending
the evening laughing with fellow customers and walking home with her grandmother late
into the night. By the time I met Aisha, she regarded this bar as a second home, coming
and going as she pleased, borrowing a dollar or grabbing a bite.

In those early months, Aisha seemed often on the cusp of expulsion or dropping out;
the week that we met, she had been suspended for punching her teacher in the mouth.
Later I would learn that she was Miss Deena’s granddaughter through her errant middle
son, who was in prison upstate. The following year, in Elijah Anderson’s urban ethnography
class, I would learn about the tension between
decent
and
street
, and the divides between Miss Deena’s and Aisha’s households began to make a lot
more sense.

MOVING TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD

In the middle of my sophomore year of college my lease was up, and with encouragement
from Aisha and her family, I started searching for a place nearby. This proved difficult:
I could not find a real-estate agent willing to rent to me in the Black section of
the city of which Aisha’s neighborhood was a part. Some agents never returned my call,
while others said I wouldn’t want the apartment that was listed or told me it had
been taken. Finally, Aisha’s older sister made some calls on my behalf and came with
me to the appointments.
³

Once I’d moved into a one-bedroom a few blocks from Miss Deena’s, I began to spend
most days and evenings with Aisha’s extended family and friends or at Miss Deena’s
house, commuting to Penn for classes. At this point I had become interested in the
experience of mothers and daughters, aunts and grandmothers—the domestic world of
women in Aisha’s community. My time on Penn’s campus was limited mostly to the Sociology
Department, where I tried to take classes in which I could turn in a final paper based
on the fieldwork I was doing. Though I continued to tutor Aisha for three and a half
more years until she graduated from high school, my role was gradually changing from
tutor to friend and resident.

MEETING THE 6TH STREET BOYS

In December of 2002, Aisha’s fourteen-year-old cousin Ronny came home from a juvenile
detention center. He was short for his age, and the worn ends of his pants dragged
and frayed in long trails behind him when he walked. He had light skin and curly hair,
a soft voice, and a big grin when he saw Aisha. I hadn’t heard much about Ronny in
his absence, but on the day he returned, Aisha ran up the street to greet him, hugging
him and hanging on him the whole afternoon. It was the first time I had heard her
really laugh.

Ronny and Aisha were cousins because her aunt had taken him in when his own mother
had proved unable to care for him, due largely to her crack addiction, Aisha told
me. This aunt had died the year before Aisha and I met, leaving Ronny to move in with
his grandmother, who didn’t seem to understand the first thing about him. The trips
to detention centers started shortly afterward.

When Ronny came home this time, he was a freshman in high school, though he spent
most weekdays outside the classroom, running from truant officers or serving suspensions.
He was living with his grandmother about fifteen blocks away from Aisha, in a neighborhood
called 6th Street. Ronny was a self-proclaimed troublemaker raised, as he put it,
by the streets. An impressive dancer, he’d sometimes jump out of a car at the light
to put on a quick show for whoever happened to be walking by.

Upon hearing that Aisha was single, Ronny decided to set her up with his friend Tommy,
a quiet and dark-skinned young man of fourteen who lived on 6th Street a few houses
down. Tommy was tall, shy, and very handsome—a perfect counterpoint to Ronny’s mischievous
exuberance. Aisha was smitten. She began taking the bus over to 6th Street one or
two afternoons a week. I came along, with Aisha introducing me sometimes as her tutor,
and sometimes as her godsister or simply her sister.

The Date

One afternoon as we were hanging out on 6th Street with Ronny and Tommy, Ronny told
me that his old head Mike wanted to meet me.
According to Aisha, who had heard it from Ronny, Mike had grown up next door to Ronny’s
grandmother, and he looked
good
.

Until that point, I’d resisted Aisha’s attempts to set me up with various boys she
knew, though I’d always declined politely, taking her offer as a genuine gift of teenage
friendship. But in the weeks leading up to this discussion about Mike, I’d attended
a birthday party for Aisha’s younger brother, where I overheard a disturbing conversation
between her mother and another relative. After the cake, the woman quietly asked Aisha’s
mother what I was doing spending so much time with Aisha and her girlfriends. Aisha’s
mother answered firmly that I was her daughter’s tutor and also her nephew’s tutor,
and that I lived down the street. The woman asked what I was getting for all this
tutoring, and Aisha’s mother said she thought it was for school. Where does she take
her? the woman wanted to know. Aisha’s mom stated that I took her to the library,
the bookstore, and sometimes out for food. Does she go with anybody? No, Aisha’s mother
replied, I think she’s single. The woman nodded, as if my lack of a boyfriend confirmed
some suspicion. Aisha’s mother then said that I was “like a big sister” and “part
of the family.”

I left the party humiliated and distressed. Without coming out and saying it, I imagined
that the woman was implying that because I had no boyfriend to speak of, I might have
some interest in high school girls. At least, it was strange that I was unattached,
and spending so much time with Aisha and her friends. Aisha’s mother’s behavior toward
me didn’t seem to change, but the idea that a rumor could circulate that my motives
toward Aisha and her teenage girlfriends were questionable left me horrified. The
next time someone offered to set me up with a guy, I instantly agreed. This someone
was Ronny’s old head Mike.

When Ronny introduced us in January of 2003, Mike was a thin young man of twenty-two—a
year older than I was. We had a few short phone conversations, followed by one excruciatingly
awkward date to the movies on 69th Street. It was a group outing: I brought Aisha
along, and one of her girlfriends; for his part, Mike brought his two young boys Ronny
and Tommy. We piled into Mike’s ten-year-old Bonneville—more like a boat than a car—with
the kids squished into the back and me riding shotgun next to Mike. Aisha seemed thrilled
to be on this date with Tommy, and the friend she brought along tried her best to
flirt with Ronny, though she was a good ten inches taller than he.

One of the first things Mike told me about himself as we drove to the movies was that
he had recently finished a long course of physical therapy after a gunshot wound to
the upper thigh. Did I want to see the scar? With some apologies that he wasn’t trying
to be ignorant by exposing himself, he pulled down his jeans to show me where the
bullet had entered just below his hip bone. Later, I heard that he’d been shot by
a man who was trying to rob him after a dice game.
⁴

We bought popcorn and Swedish Fish candy and played video games while we waited for
the movie to start. I was the only white person in the theater but I was prepared
for that, and nobody stared too much or said anything particularly unsettling. Things
started to go downhill soon after the movie started, though. I’d suggested
The Recruit
, with Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, thinking it would be a good action movie. It turned
out to contain not enough action or comedy, tons of boring dialogue, and no Black
characters whatsoever. Mike and Ronny fell asleep within fifteen minutes. Aisha’s
girlfriend got sick midway through—perhaps from Twizzler and slushie overload—and
so I spent a large part of the movie in the bathroom with her. On the way home, I
realized that the showtime had been quite late, which had likely contributed to our
party’s younger members nodding off, so then I felt irresponsible as well as lame.
I said something about the movie on the drive home—I didn’t write down what it was
and can’t remember now—that caused Ronny and Tommy to burst out laughing and Aisha
to attempt a repair on my behalf, saying, “She didn’t grow up around our way.”

After we dropped off the girls at home, I made a joke to Mike about Ronny’s ill-conceived
matchmaking.

“You ain’t ugly,” Mike said frankly. “And you got a nice lil’ body.”

“Thanks.”

“You just . . . you don’t know how to act.”

Mike then explained precisely what it would take for me to become attractive to the
men in his neighborhood—not just to an in-the-way (no-account) guy but to a worthwhile
suitor. First off, my clothes were all wrong—they didn’t even match. My toenails were
bare and uneven, and what was I doing wearing flip-flops in January anyway? Maybe
I
could answer this question for him: why did white people wear shorts and sandals in
the dead of winter? I needed sneaks—white Air Force Ones would work, he mused. The
way that I spoke was strange, and I could stand to get a little more husky. Plus,
I didn’t know how to walk or hold my body right. I had a bad habit of staring at people,
which was rude, especially since I was a white girl. And I was trying way too hard
to be liked. I should stick up for myself when someone insulted me, not stand there
speechless and take it. And I should be a lot less generous. Why was I offering to
pay so often? Finally, my hair looked like I’d slept on it and left the house without
even combing it through. For this critique I at least had a counterargument:

“Well, yeah, I don’t comb it because it’s kind of curly . . .”

Mike shook his head in exasperation.

At this point I said something like, “Okay. Thanks for making me feel even more strange
and unappealing than I already did.”

The date was humiliating, but it gave me something to talk about with Aisha and her
family for a good two weeks. And it helped me get over the deep anxiety the suspicious
woman at the party had prompted about how people might be perceiving my motives toward
Aisha and her friends.

Mike Takes Me under His Wing

The date had gone so badly that I assumed I wouldn’t be hearing from Mike again. To
my great surprise, he occasionally called me in the weeks that followed. He’d ask
how I was doing, and what the girls and I were up to. Or he’d say he was on his way
to work, which apparently was a warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia. Once he told
me he’d gotten into a fight, and his hand was sore. Sometimes he’d promise to stop
by Aisha’s block and say hi, perhaps with one of his young boys in tow, though he
never did. These fleeting exchanges fueled a great many conversations with Aisha and
her family: Would he call again? Did I truly like him, or only feel interested because
he was so hard to pin down?

I’m not sure if people’s behavior toward me changed, but I imagined that this date
with Mike helped something click for Aisha’s neighbors and relatives. If I had been
something of a puzzle before, now my presence in the neighborhood made sense: I was
one of those white girls who liked Black guys.

Shortly after our group outing to the movies, Ronny got into a fist-fight with his
sister’s boyfriend and got shipped back to a juvenile detention facility on charges
of aggravated assault. Aisha was crushed. Mike bemoaned Ronny’s parting also, especially
since his other close friend and neighbor, Chuck, had gotten locked up recently. He
was sitting in county jail on charges of assault and fleeing the police, also for
a fight in the schoolyard.

Perhaps it was partly because of this temporary gap in his social circle that Mike
began phoning me and telling me to stop by 6th Street. Or maybe it had nothing to
do with the absence of Ronny and Chuck; maybe he simply liked having a white girl—however
awkward and poorly dressed—sitting on the alley stoops with him. Whatever his motivations,
I began hanging out with him at his uncle’s house, in his absent friend Chuck’s house,
and other homes around the neighborhood. Bit by bit, Mike introduced me to other young
men who were part of his circle.

One night, he called me around ten to ask if I had a state ID. I said I did. He then
said, “Take this ride with me.” We drove down to the local police station, where Mike
indicated that I should sign for Chuck’s younger brother Reggie to be released. He
was being held for making a terroristic threat and fighting with a boy from school
(the terroristic threat purportedly had been “I’ma hurt you”). On the form, I wrote
that I was his mother, though it was plain to the women working behind the counter
that we weren’t related. When he emerged from the side door, a heavy and dark-skinned
fifteen-year-old towering over my five-foot-two- inch frame, he grinned and greeted
me with “Yo, Mommy! Thanks for coming to get me.”