On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (39 page)

Should I instead learn their techniques of evasion and do my best not to get arrested?
This would be comparatively easy, given the police’s lack of interest in me, but at
least here I would be taking on something of how they saw the world and oriented themselves
toward it. In the end I went with this second approach, of learning how to spot undercovers,
anticipate raids, conceal incriminating objects or activities. “Approach” may imply
too much concerted effort—I believe I simply picked up this orientation by spending
time with Mike and Chuck and their friends. Still, given that the young men I was
attempting to understand got arrested with great frequency, often had multiple criminal
cases going at once, and spent half their young adult lives in jail, in prison, or
under court supervision, I missed a lot by not moving through the criminal justice
system alongside them.

Selling drugs was another conundrum. I’d surely learn a lot by selling crack alongside
Chuck and Mike and Steve, but hustling was considered largely men’s work, not the
purview of women. It required skills I didn’t have, like tough negotiating techniques
and violence. On some level, Chuck and Mike and their friends considered this work
the work of desperation, second only to robbing dealers at gunpoint. It was morally
polluted, not to mention legally and physically risky. They looked askance at young
men in the neighborhood who came from good fami
lies but nevertheless wanted to try their hand at the game. This all led me to think
that as a woman and a person from a comparatively well-off family, selling crack would
appear to be a strange thing to do. On the other hand, how else would I learn what
it felt like to work in the drug trade, especially in this Tough on Crime era in which
arrests and jail time are so routine? In the end, my participation was more like what
girlfriends and mothers who lived with men selling drugs were exposed to.

Some aspects of life on 6th Street were easier to adopt, and involved fewer moral
dilemmas. After a couple of years, I abandoned my vegetarian diet and started drinking
wine coolers and liquors like Courvoisier and Hennessy. I lived on very little money
and unpredictable amounts of it—not the same as being truly poor, but I certainly
felt firsthand the strain of having bills to pay and no money to pay them with. One
thing I did not adopt was smoking marijuana—it inhibited my memory and dulled my reflexes.
Also, it hampered writing the field notes. I wrote these most evenings and often throughout
the morning and early afternoon as well. They formed the main record available to
me to make sense of a complex world I was struggling to understand; I couldn’t afford
for them to suffer.

I restricted my media to what Chuck and his friends watched, read, and listened to.
This meant mainstream hip-hop and R&B, and gangster movies. Aside from coursework,
I read what Mike and his friends read: “
’hood” novels while they were in jail, and the paper when someone we knew had been
killed.

I cut myself off from most of my previous friends in Philadelphia, restricting my
social life as much as possible to the world of 6th Street. Of course, as I came to
spend more and more time in that neighborhood, my old friends cut me off, too—some
of these relationships ended with harsh words about the strange and risky life I was
leading.

I learned how to sleep on cue and in short intervals, and amid the clamor of others;
to distinguish between gunshots and other loud bangs; to run and hide when the police
were coming; to identify the car models, haircuts, and body language of undercover
cops in plain clothes. I learned how to get through a stop without placing myself
or anyone else at greater risk, and how to remain silent during an inter
rogation so as not to give up any information. I learned how to be a woman closely
linked to a man on the run, to go through his hunt and capture and court dates and
confinement and release. Some of the ways in which I gradually became more like Mike
and Aisha and their friends and family were deliberate and planned. Others, like my
appreciation for hip-hop and my fear of the police, developed organically over time.

It is virtually impossible for ethnographers to become full members of a community
not their own.
²¹
It scarcely bears mentioning, then, that this was also the case for me. Beyond the
situations and events I never experienced, my background and identity were so different
from those of the people I was observing that I couldn’t always trust my reactions
to events and situations that I did experience firsthand. That is, I had to be cautious
in generalizing from my reactions to the feelings or experiences of others.

With all these frustrating barriers, a lot can be said for sustained observation and
involvement. If I didn’t understand exactly what Mike and Chuck or their girlfriends
and mothers were going through, I approximated it in various ways. Certainly, I came
closer to understanding than when I started out.

THINGS TAKE A TURN FOR THE WORSE

In the last semester of my junior year of college in 2004, Mike’s case for attempted
murder was finally coming to a close after a year and a half of monthly court dates.
Because he’d made bail before the detainer on another case could come through, he
was in a state of legal limbo—not technically wanted but with a detainer out, and
liable to get taken into custody if the police stopped him or if he showed up in court.
On his court dates, his mother and I would wait nervously down at the courthouse for
his lawyer to appear. Mike would hover a few blocks away, waiting to hear if the case
was proceeding and he needed to come in. If the lawyer didn’t show, Mike would get
a warrant for failure to appear, and then the cops would be really looking for him.
Since the lawyer Mike had paid dearly for was typically over forty-five minutes late,
this was harrowing.

At the same time this was happening, Mike and I started noticing that unmarked cars
were following us around 6th Street and to the apartment. Mike’s parole officer confirmed
that the feds were indeed considering a case against him. To make matters worse, Reggie
had come home from county and reignited the conflict with the 4th Street Boys, which
his older brother, Chuck, had largely managed to squash in his absence. Mike returned
to the apartment one night with seven bullet holes in the side of his car. We hid
it in a shed so the cops wouldn’t see. As he looked ahead to a long stay in state
prison, and negotiated this precarious holding pattern of making his court dates without
actually showing up, he took to wearing a bulletproof vest and watching for any unknown
cars on our block. Steve, Chuck, and Reggie seemed increasingly concerned about getting
shot as well. If we were away from one another, we’d check in every half hour or so
via text message.

You good?

Yeah
.

Okay
.

At school, things were deteriorating at a rapid pace. I’d been taking extra courses
each semester and attending classes during the summer so I could graduate a year early
and get to grad school. But I started to think that I wouldn’t make it through this
final semester. It was becoming hard for me to do anything but focus on the drama
and emergencies on 6th Street.

The first real sign I was slipping away from academic life was the missed meetings.
I had made an appointment with historian Michael Katz, and then failed to either show
up or cancel it. I remembered the meeting only days later, and in the vague way you
remember a dream, or perhaps a movie you had seen years before while intoxicated or
very tired. Michael graciously agreed to another meeting, which I also forgot about.
I showed up a week later, hoping he might happen to be in his office, which he wasn’t.
What concerned me was not so much that I’d missed these meetings with a professor
I greatly admired, but that I couldn’t find it in myself to feel bad about it. Amid
the swiftly changing fortunes and limited resources of Mike and Chuck and their friends
on 6th Street, a promise to be somewhere in the future is understood
as a wish in the moment more than a concrete eventuality or binding contract, and
I was starting to absorb that same orientation.

It happened again with Elijah Anderson, who had agreed to supervise my senior thesis,
a paper based on the field notes I’d been collecting while living with Mike, Chuck,
and Steve. I got an e-mail from Eli asking what had happened—apparently we had agreed
to meet at the Down Home Diner in the Reading Terminal. This missed meeting was even
more troubling than the one with Michael Katz, because I couldn’t recall even having
made the appointment. It became clear that my memory itself was changing, not just
my orientation to time and obligations. The consummate fieldworker, Eli later wrote
up the experience in his book
The Cosmopolitan Canopy
.
²²

That spring, I had to take a number of required courses I’d been putting off, such
as science and statistics. These were courses that had no link to the fieldwork, no
way to write it up and have it count toward the grade. I registered for these dreaded
requirements, but didn’t attend the classes or even remember to drop them. This lapse
scared me, too, especially as Fs began appearing on my transcript.

The prospect of graduate school became my lifeline. I had applied to UCLA and to Princeton
with my fall grades, hoping they’d accept me though I was only a junior, since I could
show I had most of the needed credits. I figured that if I didn’t get in to either
place, I would likely drop out of Penn. There was no way I could complete another
year of school and continue in the 6th Street neighborhood, that was for sure. At
this point I was still taking daily field notes, but in most other ways I was leaving
the academic world behind. Its rules and obligations were ceasing to matter. With
the cops circling the apartment and the feds looking into Mike’s case, the threats
they had been making to arrest me—for harboring fugitives, or interfering with an
arrest, or holding drugs in the apartment—were becoming more and more real. The likelihood
that I’d soon go to prison seemed about equal to the chance I would make it to graduate
school. After looking over my shoulder for so long, the prospect of prison came almost
as a relief.

In the spring of that year Mike’s attempted murder case closed after more than a year
of monthly court dates. On the advice of his lawyer, he pleaded guilty for gun possession
and took a deal for a one- to
three-year term in state prison, shipping off to Graterford that night. In a silent
apartment filled with Timberland boots, empty cartridges, and a sizable gangster movie
collection, I found out I had been accepted to graduate school at Princeton.

REGROUPING

When Mike got taken into custody, I lost all three roommates, since Chuck and Steve
had been staying at the apartment at Mike’s invitation. More than my roommates, though,
I lost the right to hang out on the block. I was still spending a lot of time in Aisha’s
neighborhood with her family and friends, and after Mike went upstate, I kept in touch
with a number of the guys from 6th Street who wanted to know how he was doing. But
I was, at the time, only Mike’s person—there was no reason for me to hang out on 6th
Street with him sitting in state prison. I was cut off from the block before I had
fully worked out what was happening there.

To bide my time in the last months of junior year, I started hanging out with a group
of guys I’d met through a man who worked security for a building on Penn’s campus.
These young men lived in the same Black section of Philadelphia, about fifteen blocks
from 6th Street. But some of them had legitimate jobs, and even proper addresses.
They also had driver’s licenses. Their routine of working a legal job during the day
and drinking beer and playing video games in the evening provided a nice counterpoint
to the insecurity and unpredictability of Mike’s group of friends, and I welcomed
the calm and safety of men whose only connection to guns, drugs, or the police came
in the form of video games.

CULTURE SHOCK

In September, classes at Princeton began, and I decided to continue with my research
in Philadelphia rather than relocate to New Jersey. I began commuting from the 6th
Street neighborhood to class a few times a week. These day trips to the tree-lined
campus, nestled in the wealthy and white suburban town of Princeton, were not an easy
ad
justment. The first day, I caught myself casing the classrooms in the Sociology Department,
making a mental note of the TVs and computers I could steal if I ever needed cash
in a hurry. I got pulled over for making a U-turn, and then got another ticket for
parking a few inches outside some designated dotted line on the street that I hadn’t
even noticed.

The students and the even wealthier townies spoke strangely; their bodies moved in
ways that I didn’t recognize. They smelled funny and laughed at jokes I didn’t understand.
It’s one thing to feel uncomfortable in a community that is not your own. It’s another
to feel that way among people who recognize you as one of them.

I also began to realize how much I had missed by not living in the dorms or hanging
out with other undergrads during college. The Princeton students discussed indie rock
bands—white-people music, to me—and drank wine and imported beers I’d never heard
of. They had witty chitchat and e-mail banter. They listened to iPods, and checked
Facebook. I’d also apparently missed finding a spouse in college—many of the students
had brought one along to graduate school. And since I’d been restricting my media
only to what Mike and his friends read and watched and heard, I couldn’t follow conversations
about current events, and learned to be silent during any political discussions lest
I embarrass myself. Moreover, I had missed cultural changes, such as no-carb diets
and hipsters. Who were these white men in tight pants who spoke about their anxieties
and feelings? They seemed so feminine, yet they dated women.