On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (40 page)

More than discomfort and awkwardness, I feared the hordes of white people. They crowded
around me and moved in groups. I skipped the graduate college’s orientation to avoid
what I expected would be large numbers of white people gathered together in a small
space. In cafeterias and libraries and bus and train stations, I’d search for the
few Black people present and sit near them, feeling my heart slow down and my shoulders
relax after I did.

Above everything, I feared white men. Not all white men: white American men who were
relatively fit, under the age of fifty, with short hair. I avoided the younger white
male faculty at all costs. On some level, I knew they weren’t cops, they probably
wouldn’t beat me or insult me, but I could not escape the sweat or the pounding in
my chest when they approached. Office hours were out—I couldn’t be in a room
alone with them. When I had to pass them in the hallways, I could feel my heart racing,
like I was getting ready to run. Very few professors of color were in the Sociology
Department at the time, so for advising I stuck to women, non-American men, and men
who had accents or who were otherwise far outside the cop mold. Retired professors
were good. I took an independent study course with Marvin Bressler, a retired Jewish
professor in his seventies.

I also discovered that sudden noises, like a balloon popping or a pan falling from
the counter, left me panicked. So did quick and close movements. I had been heading
out of Princeton with another grad student in a heavy downpour. At a traffic light,
a fellow motorist walked over to our car and knocked loudly on the driver’s-side window.
I threw up my arms to shield my face when she rapped on the glass, protecting myself
from whatever she meant to aim at us. When I realized why she’d come up to us—simply
to alert me that my headlights weren’t on—I began to cry right in front of my passenger,
who said kindly that at first she hadn’t realized what the noise was, either. Later,
Mitch Duneier and I were entering a restaurant in New York when a flock of birds flew
out of the rafter, passing quite near us. I walked out of the restaurant and stayed
out for a number of minutes, my hand on my chest. Mitch came out and gently remarked,
“I’m sorry, that must have really scared you. Do you want to eat somewhere else?”
Around that time a friend of Chuck’s had been shot and killed while exiting my car
outside a bar; one of the bullets pierced my windshield, and the man’s blood spattered
my shoes and pants as we ran away. I had been staying at Mitch’s spare apartment in
Princeton for a few days until things calmed down.

These visits to Princeton also made it clear that I’d developed substantial confusion
about my sexual and gender identities. After spending six years in a Black neighborhood,
hanging out with young men, I’d come to feel almost asexual. During college, I dated
no one; I’d sometimes feel surprise when a mirror returned the image of a young woman.
Putting my gender and sexual identity aside seemed like an easier path, given that
I couldn’t live up to the 6th Street community’s ideals of femininity: I wasn’t “thick”
enough, I didn’t dress the right way, I couldn’t dance. I was not Black. It was a
shock when I began to spend time again with middle-class white academics that some
of them found me young and at least somewhat attractive. More than this, they
were fixated on what sexual relationship I may or may not be having with the guys
on 6th Street, as if it were the first thing that popped into their minds when they
saw me and heard about the project.

There was also the confusion of thinking and seeing like Mike and his friends.

Upon meeting my fellow grad students during the sociology orientation, I quickly sized
up the women in the cohort, and as one walked away I turned to admire her. This is
how we passed a lot of time around 6th Street: standing or sitting on the stoop, watching
women walk by and talking about their various attributes. This woman turned around
just as I was looking, and actually caught me staring. There was very little else
I could have been doing, and I’m fairly certain my face registered open appreciation.
I never did become friends with her, though who knows if she even remembers this incident.

Social awkwardness and identity confusion aside, driving to New Jersey a few times
a week was in many ways a good thing. The hour-long ride gave me some distance from
the chaos and emergencies of 6th Street, and a chance to think about what I was seeing.

I was also learning for the first time about mass incarceration. With Devah Pager
and Bruce Western both in the Sociology Department at the time, the corridors of Wallace
Hall were a hotbed of activity on the causes and consequences of the prison boom.
After muddling through a slew of topics and themes, I came to see, through Devah and
Bruce’s influence and Mitch Duneier’s guidance, that my project could be framed as
an on-the-ground look at mass incarceration and its accompanying systems of policing
and surveillance. I was documenting the massive expansion of criminal justice intervention
into the lives of poor Black families in the United States.

By the spring of my first year of graduate school, I was visiting Mike in state prison
on the weekends and spending my evenings in Philadelphia with the group of guys I’d
met shortly before I left Penn—the ones who were working regular jobs. I’d learned
a lot about how they differed from Mike and his friends—for example, when one of them
lost his job, he didn’t move to selling crack but instead relied on the support of
friends and relatives. This group had virtually no legal entanglements and didn’t
run when the police approached. Some of them had brothers or cousins whose lives more
closely resembled those of Mike and his
friends, but they made a considerable effort to avoid these men and the risks that
any association would pose.

.   .   .

One night, Chuck’s younger brother Reggie, now nearly eighteen, phoned to tell me
that a man who was loosely associated with the 6th Street Boys had killed a man from
4th Street during a botched robbery at a dice game. He insisted that I come immediately
to his uncle’s basement, where the guys were assembling to work out what to do next.

I sat on top of the washing machine for four hours and listened while five men berated
the shooter for his thoughtless actions, discussed what the fallout would be from
this death, and whether and when to shoot at the guys who they knew without question
were now coming for them. In those four hours I learned more about gun violence than
I had in my previous three years in the neighborhood.

In the end, nobody strapped up. The plans fizzled, and we parted ways around 3:00
a.m.
²³

Through this emergency, it seemed I’d somehow been asked to come back to 6th Street—not
as someone connected to Mike, but on my own steam. Reggie seemed to feel that as at
least a resident guest of 6th Street and the group’s main chronicler, I shouldn’t
miss these important events.

Over the following weeks, young men from 4th Street drove through the 6th Street neighborhood
and shot up the block. Chuck took a partial bullet in the neck, and Steve took a bullet
in his right thigh. Neighbors stopped going outside and instructed children to play
indoors. From prison, Mike sent heated letters home to Chuck and Reggie, voicing his
outrage that they’d allow me to be on the block during these dangerous times. I was
pretty pissed off about how Mike reacted, though looking back I can understand how,
sitting in prison, he may have felt that the younger men no longer listened, or that
the world was moving on without him.

By that summer Mike and I had reconciled, and Chuck, Steve, and Reggie were sitting
in jail and prison. For four years of graduate school, I continued to live near 6th
Street, coming into the university two or three times a week and spending much of
the rest of my time hanging out with whichever members of the group were home, as
well as with
Aisha and her family and friends. On the weekends, I visited incarcerated members
of the group in jails and prisons across the state. Chuck’s and Mike’s families already
knew me well, but I came to know the families of other young men better as we dealt
with the police together, attended court dates, and made long drives upstate for visiting
hours.

After serving his full sentence in state prison, Mike returned to 6th Street in 2007.
As often happens when a man comes home, he spent the first couple of weeks admonishing
his boys on the block for failing to do enough for him while he was away—for not visiting
enough, for not writing back to his letters, for not sending money when they had promised,
and for sleeping with various girls he had dated and then lying about it. As time
went on, he seemed to forgive and forget; it appeared things were back to normal.

That summer, Chuck gave me the nickname A-Boogie. It remains the way many members
of the group refer to me, like when addressing letters from prison. Now when I go
back to the block, people often say I am from 6th Street, though that’s not literally
true, as I never actually lived on the street.

THE SHOOTING AND ITS AFTERMATH

In the summer of 2007, a tragedy rocked the 6th Street community and altered the lives
of the 6th Street Boys, as well as my own. For many it represented a pivotal event,
an event around which other events, relationships, or habits came either before or
after. For some, it even signaled a final ending to a young adulthood spent in the
streets, trying to make it by selling drugs and dipping and dodging the police.

Around ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, Mike phoned me with the news that Chuck had
been shot in the head outside the Chinese takeout store. As Mike had heard it, he’d
been walking there to buy dinner for himself and his youngest brother, Tim, who was
with him and saw him fall. I asked Mike how serious it was, remembering the time a
bullet had merely grazed the skin above Mike’s ear a few years before.

“He got shot in the
head
,” Mike said. “What the fuck do you think?”

I debated whether to go right to the hospital or drive for an hour to pick up Mike
from the suburb where he’d been staying. Finally, Mike
persuaded me to get him, and I headed out. We drove back into Philly in silence. The
idea that Chuck might not make it was incomprehensible to me, so I thought about his
long recovery, with physical therapy and pain and depression. I made a mental list
of what I would do to lift his spirits. I thought about the day before, when Chuck
and I had shared a quick meal of cheese fries and a cigarette, and made plans to visit
his middle brother, Reggie, in county jail. Chuck hadn’t seemed to feel that tensions
with 4th Street were particularly high that day; things had been calmer for the past
few weeks. Did they catch him off guard? I thought about the times Chuck and I had
driven to visit Mike in state prison before Mike came home last month, and about how
silly Chuck would get in the visiting room, trying to make Mike laugh. And about a
few years ago, when the three of us had first become roommates.

As we approached the hospital, Mike told me that apart from Chuck’s mom and girlfriend
and baby-mom, females really shouldn’t be around right now; it would be a whole bunch
of niggas in there, since the shit was fresh, talking about shit that females didn’t
need to hear about.

He was right: as we pulled up, we saw a crowd of men on the corner outside the ER.
There were, by my count, twenty-seven young men standing across the street from the
hospital. And just as if 6th Street had been fully transported downtown, two white
cops stood across the street, watching them and talking to each other. I recognized
a number of the guys and realized that some had open warrants or pending cases and
were risking a great deal to stand here, in plain view, obviously linked to a man
who had just been shot. An act of respect and love and sacrifice. A midnight vigil
for Chuck.

Mike went over to stand with them, giving me another look to indicate that I was in
no way welcome to join. I parked and walked into the ER instead. No one in the crowd
of men said anything to me as I passed, or even nodded.

The waiting room was full of cops and patients waiting to be called—Chuck’s was one
of three shootings that had come in that evening. I gave his name to the woman behind
the counter, and she told me he was in the intensive care unit, and that only immediate
family could go in. Not wanting to walk again past the men outside, who had become
strangers now in downtown Philadelphia, and not wanting to leave Chuck in this strange
place, I got lost in the wings of the hospi
tal, finally walking out another way. On the drive home, I pondered whether Steve
and the other guys had ignored me because they thought I shouldn’t be there, or simply
because in white Philadelphia we aren’t supposed to know each other or stand together.
Perhaps they’d just been preoccupied with their grief, and with figuring out who had
shot Chuck: the conversations men hold when no women are present.

I’d been home for a while when Mike called to say that the cops had cleared them off
the sidewalk and told Chuck’s uncle and girlfriend, who were waiting inside, that
they had to go home. He said they’d all gone back to Chuck’s mother’s house, where
they would be sitting with her until there was any news. Then he asked me if I had
an update on Chuck’s condition.

“I’m at home.”

“You left?”

“You told me not to be there.”

Mike made a noise to indicate that I didn’t understand anything, and hung up. His
surprise and annoyance that I’d left was enough encouragement; I drove back to the
hospital immediately.

Chuck’s family and friends and neighbors had gone. When I asked at the desk, I was
told that Chuck was no longer in the ICU; he was in the NICU, the neuro intensive
care unit. Seeing his description in the computer, the white woman at the desk raised
her eyebrows, and asked if I knew him. What kind of a question was that? I said yes.
She responded: you know he got shot in the head, right? Yes. She asked who I was,
and without thinking I said what I say when I go to visit Chuck in jail: that we’re
cousins.