On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (38 page)

While my race came into and out of focus depending on the context, my behavior and
appearance were gradually changing as well. Scholars in the social constructionist
tradition have written about race as a performance versus race as cognition.
¹⁶
In a similar approach, Reggie sometimes took it as his mission to instruct me on
matters of language, dress, and movement, proudly proclaiming to others that he was
turning me “into a Black chick.” Of course he didn’t mean this literally; I think
he was referring to a set of behaviors, attitudes, and orientations toward the world
that a person can acquire.

I wasn’t always as dedicated a student as Reggie wished. When I came back to the neighborhood
after attending a family wedding out of state, he accused me of sounding and acting
like a white girl again, as if those three days had undone all his careful teachings.
The next summer, I spent two weeks out of town with my parents, and Mike insisted
that this hiatus had “taken all the Black” out of me.

Becoming a Fly on the Wall

The most consistent technique I adopted to reduce the impact of my difference was
social shrinkage—to become as small a presence as possible. If the goal was to find
out what life for the residents of 6th Street was like when my strange presence wasn’t
screwing things up, then I’d try to take up as little social space as I could.

Blending into the background became an obsession. When sitting on a stoop, I’d sit
behind a bigger person or I’d sit halfway inside the house, so that people walking
by wouldn’t necessarily see me. This is something like how people learn to hide a
deformed or scarred limb, only I learned to do it with my whole body. I also learned
to become a quiet person, someone who doesn’t say or do much, who isn’t known to have
strong opinions.

I came up with tests for how well I was doing. If someone told a story about a past
event and couldn’t remember whether I had present for it, then I knew I was doing
fairly well. If Mike or Chuck began a distinctly different kind of conversation or
used another tone of voice once I’d
gone to bed or left the room, I inferred that my presence was in the forefront of
their awareness, and I had work to do.

Receding into the background became a technique to reduce my influence on the scene
but also to limit any risk I might be placing people under. This was particularly
concerning given that the older policing literature says that the police start paying
attention when they see something out of the ordinary. Was I increasing Mike’s or
Chuck’s dealings with the police simply by hanging around? After a while I decided
that this wasn’t the case: the tough-on-crime policing approach currently at work
in Black neighborhoods like 6th Street doesn’t wait for something out of the ordinary—police
routinely swooped into the neighborhood to make stops, conduct raids, and search men
who were walking around whether I was present or not. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be
as small a presence as possible.
¹⁷

At a practical level, my goal of not altering the scene could be difficult to work
out. In order to understand whether one’s words or actions are creating something
strange and foreign, one must first learn what is normal. In a scene so different
from any I’d known, it took months and sometimes years for me to work this out.

Take violence. Young men on the block often made promises to beat up or shoot someone
who’d injured or insulted them or someone they held dear. For instance, one afternoon
Steve, Chuck and I were sitting on a porch. Steve was rolling marijuana into a hollowed-out
Phillies cigar when Reggie came walking up the block.

REGGIE: I’m about to fuck this nigga up, man.

CHUCK: Who, Devon?

REGGIE: Yeah! I ain’t like that shit, man.

At first when Reggie or Mike would make these threats, I sat quietly by, like a good
fly on the wall, waiting to see what would happen. Later, I learned that people within
earshot of these threats often take it on themselves to talk the person down or even
to physically restrain him. In fact, young men and sometimes women typically make
it a point to make these promises to fight or to shoot when someone else was around
whom they can count on to hold them back; in this way a person can preserve his honor
without risking his life. Of course, this isn’t
all show—often people promising to go and shoot genuinely want to, at least for a
time. At any rate, months later I realized that as a friend or sis or cousin, men
were expecting me to hold them back; to fail to do this would put them in danger of
having to make good on their promises. So after a time I learned that taking someone’s
car keys or hiding a gun wasn’t changing the outcome of events as much as sitting
idly by would be. Blocking the door was the way to blend into the walls.

Roommates

When I met Mike, he’d been working nights at a warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia—a
great job paying $7.50 an hour that his mother had found for him. He was supplementing
this income with sporadic work in the crack business, which also intermittently employed
his friends Chuck and Steve along with many other guys from the neighborhood. Shortly
after we met, Mike’s second child was born, and after complications with the birth,
he didn’t show up for two weeks of work. He lost the warehouse job and moved to selling
crack full time.

Later that year, Chuck returned from county jail. He had spent nine months there awaiting
trial for a school yard fight in which he had pushed a fellow student’s face into
the snow. Unlike his younger brother Reggie, Chuck had attended school regularly before
he was taken into custody; during the months he spent in jail awaiting trial, he lost
a full year of school. When he returned to his high school the following fall, after
the case was dismissed, he tried to register again as a senior. He was then nineteen,
and the secretary said he was too old to enroll.

In the weeks after Chuck came home, he and Mike drove around looking for work. They
applied online or in person at Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Kmart, PetSmart,
and Taco Bell. They listed the landline at my apartment or my cell as their contact,
since their cell phones got shut off too often to be reliable conduits for job leads.
They’d come in and play the machine every evening, or ask me if anyone had called
when we met up in the afternoons. No employer ever did.

After weeks without a single job lead, Chuck, Mike, and their close friend Steve pooled
their money and bought some crack to sell. Some days they’d begin cutting and bagging
the drug around midday, and then spend the afternoon and evening selling it hand to
hand to people in the neighborhood. Mostly these customers were frail and thin mem
bers of their parents’ generation, who I gathered had started smoking crack when it
was cool and popular in the ’80s. But many days Mike and Chuck had no crack to sell:
their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed
this “connect” had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and
search, and so they’d been unable to pay the man back and hence obtain any more drugs.
Sometimes they’d made enough money the previous week to get by without selling any.
Though they sometimes spoke of ambitions to become major dealers, Mike and Chuck approached
selling as a part-time and undesirable income-generating activity. They picked up
the work when they had no other income or had exhausted the women or family members
who’d give them small bits of money to live on.
¹⁸
Chuck in particular frequently articulated his distaste for crack and for selling
it to people who, like his own mother, had been ruined by the drug and couldn’t help
themselves.

In the spring of 2003, Mike lost the lease to his apartment on 6th Street, which his
mother had left to him when she moved across town. We packed up the apartment and
he moved back in with his mom. During this time Mike, Chuck, and Steve would stop
by my place to hang out or do their laundry. They’d often fall asleep watching movies
on the couch. Getting back to his mother’s at the end of the night was a major inconvenience,
so Mike began keeping more and more of his possessions at my place. After a while
I said that if he was going to be crashing so much, he should contribute to the bills
and groceries. Gradually we became roommates, with Mike taking the pull-out couch
in the large living room and Chuck taking the smaller couch next to it. Steve alternated
sleeping at his grandmother’s house on 6th Street, his girlfriend’s house a few blocks
over, and our living room floor.

Becoming a roommate was a gradual and unplanned thing, but it greatly enhanced the
depth of the study. I could now compare what happened on the block with what happened
at home, and for days on end. I was also able to take notes as events and conversations
took place, often transcribing them on my laptop in real time as they were going on
around me. This meant, too, that Chuck, Mike, and other young men could read over
my shoulder as I was typing these field notes, correcting something I’d written or
commenting on what I was writing about. A few times, Mike and Chuck read some of the
notes as they watched
TV and remarked, “Yo. She gets every fucking thing!!” Very occasionally someone would
say, “Don’t write this down” or “I’m going to say some shit right now, and I don’t
want it to go in the book.” In these cases, I took careful heed and did as people
requested.

.   .   .

During these months, I was learning a lot about work at the lowest levels of the local
drug trade. I was also learning about relations between men and women in the neighborhood.
I was spending so much time on 6th Street that few people there hadn’t met me, and
things were starting to become much less awkward.

One problem I still encountered during this period was that Mike, Chuck, their neighbors,
and their relatives didn’t think I had any female friends. When you get older and
have a job and a family to attend to, friends may not be such a big deal—but when
you’re twenty-one and friendless, especially in a community of dense social networks
and extensive family ties, being friendless can be a major point of shame. Though
I gradually developed close friendships with Reggie’s girlfriend, Aisha’s older sister,
and other women my own age, people wanted to know where my friends were from my own
community, friends who looked like me. They’d ask whether I had any and who and where
they were, wondering out loud if in my community I was somewhat of a lame, as I was
here.

From time to time I’d mention various friends from high school and even a few from
college, but then Reggie or Alex would ask me to set them up. As Mike’s sis I was
off limits, but that didn’t go for my girlfriends. Where were my girlfriends? And
what about my younger sister? Where was she? Did she like Black guys? Sometimes I
was stricken with the thought that I was keeping these social worlds apart in a way
that concretized the unequal status of Mike and Chuck and Alex, as if I were saying
that Black men from 6th Street weren’t good enough for my white sister and friends.
Other times I attempted mixed outings or events with disastrous results.

At my twenty-second birthday party that year, white friends from high school and grade
school came to the apartment to throw a dinner party. When Aisha and a number of her
friends walked in, my best friend from eighth grade immediately offered them some
brie and
crackers. Aisha assumed that the round of cheese was cake, and spit it out on the
floor when she tasted the sour rind. Then a high school friend got so afraid when
Mike and Chuck and Steve came in that she left only a few minutes after their arrival,
claiming to have a sudden migraine. I was outraged and humiliated, and apologized
profusely.

Walking in the Shoes

Beyond being a fly on the wall, I wanted to be a participant observer. I wanted to
live and work alongside Mike and his friends and neighbors so that I could understand
their everyday worries and small triumphs from the inside. The method of participant
observation involves cutting yourself off from your prior life and subjecting yourself
as much as possible to the crap that people you want to know about are being subjected
to.
¹⁹
How do you do this when nobody treats you the same way? When you are a different
color, and class, and gender?

At a practical level, the divides between us made participant observation a confusing
endeavor. Should I try to take on the attitudes and behaviors and routines of Mike
and Chuck and their friends, though I was clearly not a man? Or should I instead try
to take on the role of a woman associated with them? This made more sense, except
that the world of women was a separate sphere from the life of the street. Certainly,
the experience of a girlfriend or mother of a man on the run is different from the
experience of this man, who is actually dodging the authorities. Over time, I tried
to take on some of both.

In her ethnography of police, Jennifer Hunt describes how the officers she studied
assigned one of three roles to the women in their lives: good woman, slut, and dyke.
Yet for her study she successfully operated outside these categories, negotiating
a new role “betwixt and between” that was something like “street woman researcher.”
²⁰

Though I came to 6th Street as a young blond woman, my body, speech, clothing, and
general personality marked me as somewhat strange and unappealing. After spending
a few months with Mike and his friends, I moved even further away from their ideals
of beauty or femininity, in part as a strategy to conduct the fieldwork, and in part
because I was, as a participant observer, adopting their male attitudes, dress, habits,
and even language.

What about relations with the police? That the police consistently ignored me when
they approached Mike and Chuck and their friends was in many ways very lucky. It certainly
helped to reassure me that I wasn’t placing anyone in greater danger just by hanging
around. But it also made it difficult for me to experience searches, arrests, or jail
time—all fundamental experiences for these young men. Should I try to get arrested
on purpose? Even if I did, I’d go to a woman’s jail as a white female, a first-time
inmate, knowing nobody from my own community. This seemed significantly different
from the experience that Mike and Chuck and Reggie had when they got locked up. And
given that the police largely disregarded me, I might have to go to great lengths
to get taken into custody. This would seem like madness to the guys on 6th Street,
who devoted so much energy to avoiding the authorities. It might even cause them to
question whether having me on the block was a safe or reasonable thing.