On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (36 page)

At this point I was still tutoring Aisha and her cousin Ray twice a week. I believed
that the study I was conducting concerned the world of women: Miss Deena and her daughter,
Aisha and her mother and sister, the other teenage girls she hung out with, their
neighbor across the way, her three children, and so on. But more and more, my notes
began to concern Mike and his friends over on 6th Street—people who sometimes overlapped
with Aisha’s group of friends and family, and sometimes didn’t.

There were probably a number of reasons why I began spending more of my time with
Mike and his friends, beyond the need to demonstrate
that I wasn’t molesting teenage girls. For one, I had been reading
All Our Kin
,
⁵
Making Ends Meet
,
⁶
and
No Shame in My Game
,
⁷
and had learned a lot about the lives of working poor people and women struggling
on welfare. I wasn’t sure how much my notes about Aisha and her family and friends
could add to what these books had already said. Mike and his friends, on the other
hand, were a mystery. They sort of had jobs, but they also seemed to have income that
they didn’t speak about. They were getting arrested and coming home on bail and visiting
their probation officers. They got into fights; their cars were stolen or seized by
the police. It was all confusion and chaos—I couldn’t follow what was happening from
minute to minute.

In late March of 2003, I asked Mike what he thought of my writing about his life for
my undergraduate thesis at Penn, due the following spring. We agreed that I’d conceal
his name and the neighborhood location, and that I wouldn’t include any events he
wanted me to leave out. Over the next weeks, I broached the topic with Chuck, Steve,
Alex, Anthony, and some of the other young men who hung out together on 6th Street.
Over time, I discussed it with their mothers, girlfriends, and other relatives.

Mike Catches a Case

A few months into hanging out with Mike, he phoned me in a panic at four in the morning
to say that the police had just raided his uncle’s house looking for him. He was at
his baby-mom’s house, and his uncle had just called to warn him that the law would
probably be there next. The police had issued a warrant for Mike’s arrest on a shooting
charge. He told me he hadn’t been involved in any shooting, and for the next week
he hid out in friends’ apartments, including mine, while he figured out what to do.

Since this was a “body warrant” for a new and significant crime, rather than a bench
warrant for, say, failure to appear in court, failure to pay court fees, or technical
probation and parole violations, a number of police divisions started actively searching
for Mike, raiding his family and friends’ houses and interrogating and intimidating
his uncle, his mom, and the mother of his two children. After a few weeks of dipping
and dodging the police, he secured a lawyer and turned himself in. From county jail
he’d phone me for the ten minutes he was allotted in
the morning and then again for ten minutes at night, and I’d three-way his other friends
or the girl he was dating, or we’d catch up on what was happening back on the block.

Mike was being held at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF, locally known
as the F), which is the largest county jail in Philadelphia. It’s a pink and gray
building that sits on State Road in Northeast Philly. As this was my first time visiting
someone in jail or prison, I was quite intimidated by the other women in the waiting
room. A visitor to CFCF can easily spend five hours waiting to be called, so there’s
a lot of time for women to talk and size one another up. Some of these women knew
each other, and sometimes they’d openly insult me or ask who I was going to see and
how we were related and was he Black.

My first attempts to visit Mike were unsuccessful: once I got turned away because
my clothing hadn’t conformed to jail visitor policy (no white T-shirts, no flip-flops,
no hoodies, no tops exceeding hip length) another time because Mike’s visit period
had already been used up a few hours before, and the third time because the warden
had canceled all visits when the evening count of prisoners didn’t clear. I got the
hang of it after about a week.

A few weeks later, Mike got into a fight with another inmate and got sent to solitary
confinement. After he spent three days of solitude in the dark, his mother, Miss Regina,
and his grandmother raised the fifteen-hundred-dollar bail to bring him home. Miss
Regina and I went to the bail office in the basement of the courthouse to pay it,
and then I waited for six long hours down at the county jail on State Road for him
to be released.

The night Mike came home, we drove back to the block around 2:30 a.m. With almost
everyone asleep and the neighborhood quiet, he couldn’t get anybody to wake up and
celebrate his homecoming. We drove around for a while, and then Mike told me to pull
up next to a dark truck. He knocked on the passenger door, and soon a man rose from
the seat cushions and opened it for us.

This was Anthony, a thin man of twenty-three with outgrown hair who smelled of sweat
and cigarettes. Apparently, he’d been living at his aunt’s house on 6th Street, but
she had kicked him out when she caught him stealing money from her purse (accusations
he vehemently
denied). We shared a celebratory cigarette, and then Mike said goodbye and Anthony
went back to sleep. Mike shrugged. “He’s homeless, but that’s our man, though.” When
I asked later, he told me that Ant had been living in various abandoned cars around
6th Street for over a year.

When Mike had first gotten the news that he was wanted on this shooting charge, I
was quite shaken, and thought the case was a unique and significant experience in
his life. When he came home on bail, his first court date was scheduled for the next
month, and as the date neared I urged him strongly to buy a suit. When he refused,
I attempted to persuade him to at least locate some khakis and a tie. Instead, Mike
came to court wearing jeans, sneakers, and a well-pressed white T-shirt.

His initial hearing was at the small courthouse within the district police station
that served his neighborhood and many adjacent ones, located about a mile from 6th
Street. As we approached the cement building, he recognized a man he knew and smoked
a cigarette with him while they exchanged some details about their respective cases.
As we walked into the building, he shook hands with more young men he knew by name;
by the time we were sitting in the benches on the defendant’s side of the large wood-paneled
courtroom, he’d greeted over a dozen more young men awaiting trial. While we waited,
he whispered the back story on three of the cops who were standing against the wall
waiting to testify. He recognized two of the public defenders, and told me which guys
from the block had been assigned to them for various cases they’d caught.

Another shock: compared with many of these young men, Mike’s jeans and T-shirt looked
like formal attire. Or at least, they were new and clean and pressed. Some defendants
had visible holes in their clothing; others had matted-down hair or worn and dirty
shoes without laces. I began to understand that this case for attempted murder, though
not insignificant for Mike, was nothing new—not to him or the other guys he hung out
with. In fact, this was the third criminal case Mike had caught in the past two years.
He had just finished going to trial dates for one of them and had recently completed
probation from the other. Gradually, I realized that a great many young men in the
neighborhood were getting arrested regularly, living with warrants, going to court
date after court date, and dipping and dodging the po
lice. And judging by the clothing and shoes they could assemble for their day in court,
these men were poor—far poorer than Mike, whose economic circumstances had seemed
quite desperate to me previously.

NEGOTIATING A PLACE ON 6TH STREET

When I first began spending time with Ronny and Mike on 6th Street, their neighbors
and relatives often remarked on my whiteness and asked me to account for my presence.
I don’t think they wondered what I was doing there as much as Aisha’s friends and
neighbors had when I met them, because I’d come in via Aisha and so was already connected
to Ronny and Mike through a series of family ties. Even before they met me, their
friends and relatives had “seen me around” with Ronny’s cousin and aunts and grandmother
for half a year. Then after Mike came home on bail, he began referring to me as his
godsister or simply as his sister. Sometimes I also mentioned that I lived nearby.

Because Mike held some sway among the young men in the neighborhood, being his adopted
sister gave me a good deal of legitimacy. It also seemed to establish that I wasn’t
available for sex or romance, as Mike simply wouldn’t put up with his sis “messing
with a no-job-having, in-and-out-of-jail-going, weed-smokin’ motherfucker.”

I’m not sure how to account for Mike’s adopting this protective older-brother relationship
with me. Sometimes he mentioned that as an only child he’d often wanted a sister.
At the time we met, Mike had a great many women pursuing him: Marie, the mother of
his two children, other ex-girlfriends, and a number of neighborhood women he was
seeing casually. Like many other young men in the neighborhood, he’d sometimes sleep
with these women when he was broke, receiving room and board or a small amount of
cash, and often talked about sex with them as something of a chore. So maybe he liked
having a female friend who wasn’t asking for sex. Or maybe on the whole he didn’t
enjoy sleeping with women very much. Whatever his reasons, getting adopted by Mike
as a kind of sister was a major stroke of luck.

As an adopted sis, cousin, and chronicler, my role with Chuck and Mike and their friends
might be similar to that of a female buddy at a fraternity. Fraternity brothers distinguish
between two types of women
who are attached to their group: buddies and slutties. Slutties are women who sleep
with fraternity members and are viewed as sex objects to be shared around. Buddies
are women who don’t sleep with any of the members and serve as largely desexualized,
gender-neutral sidekicks.
⁸

Often I was the only woman present in the group from 6th Street.

For his twenty-third birthday, Mike threw a party at a local motel. He paid for the
room and bought two hundred dollars’ worth of hard liquor and another fifty dollars’
worth of marijuana for his guests. Steve and Alex split the cost of a large birthday
cake covered in green icing. Nobody remembered to bring plates or forks, though, so
the cake sat uneaten until Reggie took a fistful, grinning and saying, “I’m fuckin’
hungry
, man.” With Chuck locked up at the time, fifteen-year-old Reggie was relishing the
time with his brother’s friends.

Mike hadn’t invited any women to the party, so the event consisted of fifteen of his
friends crammed into the small room, drinking and watching music videos on the television.
As the night went on and Mike got drunker, guys he barely knew started coming in and
out of the room, taking the half-full bottles of booze he’d spread out on the windowsill.
By 1:00 a.m., he was sitting below the windowsill with his gun out in his lap, threatening
to pistol-whip the next guy who came in that tried to touch the booze he bought for
his guests. He railed for a while about how nobody had contributed any money to the
room or to the alcohol, only to a twelve-dollar fucking cake, and then he fell asleep.

I thought Mike had passed out completely, but then he began screaming, “Where the
fuck is my money at?” Apparently, someone had taken the roll of bills he’d wedged
into the side pocket of his jeans while he slept drunkenly on the floor.

Steve drew his gun and started pointing it at the party guests, demanding that they
return Mike’s money. I had never seen anybody pull a gun before and took the opportunity
to promptly leave the party. As I made my way down the corridor to the elevator, Steve
bounded up behind me, apologizing profusely.

“My bad, Alice. I ain’t mean no disrespect. You understand, like, I can’t just let
niggas take advantage of my man. They think it’s sweet [an easy target] ’cause he
drunk, but it’s
not
sweet! I’m on they
ass
, A.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re a good friend, Steve. I was getting tired anyway.”

Fifteen minutes later, Mike phoned triumphantly to say that the money had “magically”
reappeared on the bedside table, and all had been forgiven. Did I want to come back
to the party?

.   .   .

My role of sidekick and adopted sister to Mike didn’t mean that sex or romance never
came up. Occasionally when men were incarcerated, they wrote me letters explaining
that their confinement had made them realize that they were in fact romantically interested
in me. In the language of the community, I chalked this up as jail talk: in all but
one case, this interest, or at least its overt expression, ended when the man came
home and had access to a wider range of women.

Outside our circle, people had different stories about what I was doing on the block
and what my relationships to Mike and Chuck and the other young men were. The owner
of the apartment I rented, a retired Black man in his sixties, referred to Mike as
my friend, indicating he assumed we were romantic partners. Some of the 6th Street
residents also thought I was sleeping with one or even many of the 6th Street crew,
and some young men’s girlfriends remained perpetually suspicious about this. While
we were out in public or in court or in jail visiting rooms, we sometimes let people
assume that we were romantic partners. Though they mostly ignored me during stops,
interrogations, and raids, the cops sometimes indicated that they believed I was looking
for drugs, or for sex with a Black man (in their words, “Black dick”). In contrast,
some people in the neighborhood assumed I was a lesbian, which helped to explain why
I liked to hang out with the guys. Miss Regina would often say I was her son Mike’s
right hand, and should have been born a man. Some just seemed to think I was a bit
of a loser, unable to make friends with people like myself in the neighborhood I had
come from. Even when Mike and I began talking about the possibility of my writing
a book, and I discussed this with Chuck and others, these interpretations and suspicions
didn’t go away.