On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

BECOMING A SNITCH OR AN ABANDONER

  As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, as they raid a woman’s house and pull her in for questioning, the woman’s public reckoning begins. Relatives, neighbors, and friends watch to see how she will hold up as the police threaten to arrest her, to evict her, or to take her children away.

  When the raids and interrogations begin, many women find that they cannot live up to the hopes they and others had for their conduct. Rather than be the man’s “ride-or-die chick,” they implore him to turn himself in. Rather than hide him and help him survive, they kick him out of the house and cut off all contact, perhaps leaving him without food or shelter. Rather than remain silent in the face of police questioning, they give up all the information they can.

  Shortly after Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, had given birth to their second child, the police came to his mother’s house looking for him on a gun charge. When Marie heard this news, she called me on the phone to discuss it and, in between her screams and cries, explained her concerns for him:

  You remember last time? He stopped eating! And then they put him in the hole [solitary confinement] for no reason. Remember how he was in the hole? I can’t take those calls no more. He was really losing it. No sunlight. Nobody to talk to. Plus, he could get stabbed up, or get AIDS. How I’m supposed to take care of the baby? They don’t care he got a bullet in his hip. Won’t none of them guards pay attention to that, and I can tell it’s getting ready to come out [push through the skin].

  Firm in her conviction that Mike would suffer in jail, and determined to keep her growing family together, Marie promised to do whatever she could to protect him from the authorities.

  Then the police paid a visit to Marie’s house. They came early in the morning, waking up the baby. They didn’t search the house, but sat and talked with her about the necessity of turning Mike in.

  I came over that afternoon. Visibly shaken, Marie seemed to have adopted quite a different view of things:

  MARIE: He needs to get away from these nut-ass niggas out here, Alice. It’s not safe for him on the streets; he could get killed out here. He needs to go in there, get his mind right, and come out here—

  MARIE’S MOTHER:—and act like a man.

  MARIE: Yes. Because the drama has to stop, Alice. He has too much stuff [legal entanglements]. He needs to go in and get all that taken care of. How he supposed to get a job when he got two warrants on him? He needs a fresh start. He ain’t going to like it, but he going. Soon as I see him [I’m calling the number on the card the police gave me].

  In fact, Marie did not call the police on Mike right away; she tried to persuade him to turn himself in. Mike refused, and Marie continued to try to “talk some sense into him” over the next few days. She called the number on the card on the fifth day, after a second visit from the police. As they drove him off in handcuffs, we sat on the stoop and talked.

  MARIE: I know he not going to take my visits right away but I don’t care, like, it had to be done. It’s too much drama, Alice. He can call me a snitch, I don’t care. I know in my heart—

  MARIE’S MOTHER:—that was the right thing to do.

  After Marie got Mike taken away, he castigated her daily from jail and spread the word that she had snitched. This, she said, was nothing compared to the internal anguish she felt over betraying the father of her two children, and her most trusted friend. The pains of his confinement, she explained, rested on her shoulders:

  Every time he hungry in there, or he lonely, or the guards is talking shit to him, that’s on my head. Every time he miss his son—I did that to him.

  THE TRUE RIDER

  Overwhelmingly, women who come under police pressure cave: they cut off ties to the man they had promised to protect, or they work with the police to get him arrested and convicted. When this happens, women suffer public humiliation and private shame, and face the difficult task of salvaging their moral worth in the wake of their betrayals. Most often, the relationship is permanently ruined; to salvage her dignity, the woman may start over with a new man in a new social scene—perhaps a few blocks away, or better yet, in another neighborhood. Four times I observed women pack up and move after being publicly labeled a snitch.

  I witnessed a number of situations in which the police pressure never materialized. The man turned himself in, or wasn’t pursued after all, or the police caught up to him quickly and so didn’t get around to putting pressure on his girlfriend or relatives. In these cases, the woman doesn’t have to manage her spoiled identity or reconstruct her relationship, because she didn’t have to resort to betraying her boyfriend, brother, or son.

  In other cases, a woman is able to support and protect the man because the police don’t connect her to him, and therefore don’t put pressure on her or her family directly. Because a man’s main girlfriend and close relatives tend to be known to the police and targeted for information, he often finds his inner circle untrustworthy, while someone with whom he has a weaker connection—a new friend, an old girlfriend, or a more distant cousin—turns out to be the true rider.

  Most of the time, women who are identified by the police cave quickly under their pressure. But a few women around 6th Street showed remarkable strength in resisting them. Miss Linda’s ability to resist police pressure was widely recognized in the 6th Street community. As Mike once proclaimed to a small crowd assembled on her steps after a raid, “She might be a thief and her house might be dirty as shit, but Miss L ain’t talking. She don’t care if they bang her door in, she don’t give a fuck!”

  Miss Linda would often say that she rode hard for her three sons because she had more heart than other women, but the truth of the matter was that she also had more practice. Chuck, Reggie, Tim, and their friends and associates brought the law to her house on at least twenty-three occasions during my six years on 6th Street.12

  When her middle son, Reggie, was seventeen, the police stopped him for loitering on the corner, and he allowed them to search him. An officer discovered three small bags of crack in the lining of his jeans, and Reggie started running. The cops lost him in the chase, and an arrest warrant was issued for possession of drugs with intent to distribute.

  That evening, Miss Linda prepared her house for the raid she seemed sure was coming. She located the two guns that Reggie and his older brother, Chuck, had hidden in the ceiling, and stashed them at a neighbor’s. She did the same with Chuck’s bulletproof vest, his bullets, and the tiny plastic baggies he used to hold the small amounts of crack he was selling at the time. She took her marijuana stash, along with her various crack-smoking paraphernalia, to her boyfriend’s house three blocks up. And after some effort, she secured accommodations for Chuck’s close friend Anthony, who had been sleeping in their basement and had a bench warrant out for failure to appear. She let her neighbors know that the police were coming so that their sons and cousins could go elsewhere for the night. (This was in case the police got the wrong house, which had happened before, or in case they decided to search the houses nearby.) She dug out the sixty dollars Reggie had hidden in the wall, as the police typically take whatever cash they find. She persuaded her father, Mr. George, to sleep at his girlfriend’s place that night, in case “the law gives him a coronary.”

  Though Miss Linda had instructed Reggie to leave the house before midnight, he fell asleep by accident, and was still there when a three-man SWAT team busted the door in at about four in the morning. (The door remains broken and unlocked to this day.) Miss Linda had slept on the couch in preparation and, unsure if Reggie was still in the house, launched into a heated argument with the officers to delay their going upstairs. This ruse proved successful. According to Reggie, he was able to leave through a window in his bedroom and run through the alley before they could catch him.

  The next night, three officers returned and ordered Reggie’s younger brother, Tim, and Mr. George to lie facedown on the floor with their hands on their heads while they searched the house. According to Tim, a
n officer promised Miss Linda that if she gave Reggie up, they would not tell him that she was the one who had betrayed him. If she did not give her son up, the officer said he’d call Child Protective Services and have her youngest son taken away, because the house was infested with roaches, covered in cat shit, and unfit to live in. On this night, she again refused to tell the police where Reggie was.

  Shaken but triumphant, Miss Linda came out early the next morning to tell her friends and neighbors the story. We sat on her iron back-porch steps that look out onto the shared alleyway.

  MISS LINDA: I do my dirt, I’m the first to admit it. Some people say I’m a bad mother. You can say what you want about me, but everybody knows I protect my sons. All three of them. These girls out here can talk all they want, but watch when the fucking law comes BAM! knocks they door in. Don’t none of these girls know about that. They can talk, but won’t none of them ride like me. Only some females is true riders, and I’m one of them females. [Takes a drag from her cigarette, nods her head confidently. Grins.] They can come back every night.

  When her cousin came to sit with us, Miss Linda repeated the story, adding that she had deliberately worn her sexiest lingerie for the raid, and had proudly stuck out her chest and butt when the officer was cuffing her against the wall. She acted this out to shrieks of laughter. She said that she told a particularly good-looking officer, “Honey, you so fine, you can search me anytime!”

  Later in the day, more police officers came to search the house, and while they were pulling it apart once again, Reggie phoned to see if they were still there and if his mother was alright. Sitting not two feet from one of the officers, she coolly replied, “Yeah, Mom-Mom. I got to call you back later, because the police are here looking for Reggie. You haven’t seen him, have you? Okay, alright. I’ll call you back later. I’ll pick up the Pampers when I go food shopping.”

  When the police left, Miss Linda told me: “Big George [her father] is going to tell me to clean this shit up as soon as he comes in. But I’m not cleaning till next week. They’re going to keep coming, and I’m not putting this house back together every fucking morning.”

  I was there two nights later when the police raided Miss Linda’s house for the third time. On this night, three officers put plastic cuffs on us and laid us facedown on the living room floor while they searched the house. Despite her previous boasts of telling off the police and propositioning them with “I got three holes, pick one,” Miss Linda cried and screamed when they dropped her to the floor. An officer mentioned that the family was lucky that Mr. George owned the house: if it were a Section 8–subsidized building, Miss Linda and her sons could be immediately evicted for endangering their neighbors and harboring a fugitive. (Indeed, I had seen this happen recently to two other families.) Upstairs, the police found a gun that Miss Linda couldn’t produce a permit for; they arrested her and took her to the police station. When Tim and I picked her up that afternoon, she said she was told that she would face gun charges unless she told the police where to find Reggie. They also promised her anonymity, though she said she didn’t believe them for a second.

  By her own and Tim’s accounts Miss Linda had been quite stalwart up until this point, but the third raid and the lengthy interrogation seemed to weaken her resolve. When Reggie came around later to pick up the spaghetti she had prepared for him, she begged him to turn himself in. He refused.

  A week later, Miss Linda was coming home from her boyfriend’s house and found her TV and clothing dumped in the alleyway. Her father, Mr. George, told her that he would no longer allow her to live there with Tim if she continued to hide Reggie from the police:

  This ain’t no damn carnival. I don’t care who he is, I’m not letting nobody run through this house with the cops chasing him, breaking shit, spilling shit, waking me up out of my sleep. I’m not with the late-night screaming and running. I open my eyes and I see a nigga hopping over my bed trying to crawl out the window. Hell, no! Like I told Reggie, if the law run up in here one more time I be done had a stroke. Reggie is a grown-ass man [he was seventeen]. He ain’t hiding out in my damn house. We going to fuck around and wind up in jail with this shit. They keep coming, they going to find some reason to book my Black ass.

  Mr. George began calling the police whenever he saw Reggie in the house, and Miss Linda told her son that he could no longer stay there. For two months, Reggie lived in an abandoned Buick LeSabre parked in a nearby alleyway.

  Here under extreme duress, Miss Linda nonetheless refused to tell the police where to find Reggie. And though she ultimately begged him to turn himself in, and then kicked him out of the house when her father threatened to evict her, she never gave her son up to the police. While Reggie was sleeping in the Buick, she kept in close touch with him, supplying him with food almost every evening. Her neighbors and family, and Reggie himself, seemed to believe that she had done the best she could, better than anyone else could have done. The evening the cops took Reggie in, I sat with Miss Linda and some of her neighbors. She poured Red Irish Rose wine into small plastic cups for us.

  MISS LINDA: Well, at least he don’t have to look over his shoulder anymore, always worried that the law was going to come to the house. He was getting real sick of sleeping in the car. It was getting cold outside, you know, and plus, Reggie is a big boy and his neck was all cramped up. And he used to come to the back like: “Ma, make me a plate,” and then he’d come back in twenty minutes and I’d pass him the food from out the window.

  Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, responded, “You ride harder than any bitch out here, and Reggie knows that.”

  THE RIDER REBORN

  Veronica was eighteen when she met Reggie, who was nineteen. She had been dating one of Reggie’s friends, though not seriously, and this man never had much time for her. He would leave her with Reggie while he was busy, and as Reggie put it, one thing led to another. Soon Veronica was spending most evenings at Reggie’s. Chuck and Tim were starting to call her Sis.

  “At first I couldn’t fall asleep,” she told me a few weeks into this relationship. “I was scared the bugs would crawl on me at night. You really have to love a Taylor brother to sleep in that house.” Indeed, the kitchen crawled with roaches, ants, and flies; the floors themselves looked like they were moving, as if you were in some psychedelic bug dream.

  One night, Veronica woke up thinking that the roaches were crawling on the bed again, only to see Reggie scrambling to make it out the window while yelling at her to push him through. This was not easy, as Reggie is a young man of substantial girth. Then two cops busted through the bedroom door and threw Veronica out of the bed. They cuffed her to the bed frame for an hour while they searched the house, she told me the next day, even though it should have been plain to them that Reggie had fled through the still-open window, which naturally would be shut in February. She said they told her they’d find out every illegal thing she did, every time she smoked weed or drove drunk, and they’d pick her up every time they came across her. They would put a special star in her file and run her name, and search her and whoever she was with whenever they saw her. They told her they had tapped her cell phone and could bring her up on conspiracy charges. Despite these threats, Veronica couldn’t tell them where Reggie had run, because she simply did not know.

  Later that day, Reggie called her from a pay phone in South Philly. Veronica pleaded with him to turn himself in. He refused, and she told him then and there that they were through.

  Reggie put Veronica “on blast,” telling his friends, relatives, and neighbors that she had cut him loose when the police started looking for him. He then began seeing Shakira, a woman he had dated in high school.

  The next day, Veronica called me in tears: Reggie had told everyone on the block that she wasn’t riding right, that she didn’t really give a fuck about him, and that she was out as soon as shit got out of hand. He told her he would never have expected it, thought she was better than that.

  As Veronica retreated
from 6th Street, Shakira stepped up to help Reggie hide. She met him at his friend’s house, and spent the next few days holed up in the basement with him. She arranged for a friend to bring them food. In the meantime, the police raided Miss Linda’s house, Veronica’s house, and Reggie’s uncle’s house. But they didn’t visit Shakira’s house or question her family, which seemed to allow her to preserve her role as a brave and loyal person. I went to see her and Reggie on the third day.

  SHAKIRA: I been here the whole time, A. When they [the police] came to his mom’s we was both there, and he went out the back and I been here this whole time.

  REGGIE: She riding hard as shit.

  ALICE: That’s what’s up [that’s good].

  REGGIE: Remember Veronica? When she found out the boys [the police] was looking for me, she was like: click [the sound of a phone hanging up]. She’d be like, “I see you when I see you.” Shakira ain’t like that, though; she riding like a mug [motherfucker, i.e. very hard]. She worried about me, too.

  We didn’t hear from Veronica for a few weeks, and then the police found Reggie hiding in another shed nearby. They came in cars and helicopters, shutting down the block and busting open the shed with a battering ram.

  When Reggie could make a phone call, he let Veronica know that he wasn’t seeing Shakira anymore. Veronica wrote him a letter, and then she started visiting him. It took three hours on the bus to get to Northeast Philadelphia where the county jails are, because the routes don’t line up well. Veronica had never visited a guy in jail before, and we’d often discuss what outfit she could wear to look her best while complying with the jail’s regulations.

  As Veronica made the weekly trek to the county jail on State Road, Reggie’s friends stayed home. They didn’t write; they didn’t put any money on his books.

  Every day, Reggie voiced his frustration with his boys over the phone to me:

  Niggas ain’t riding right! Niggas ain’t got no respect. G probably going to do it [put money on his books], but Steve be flajing [bullshitting; lying]. When I come home, man, I’m not fucking with none of these niggas. Where the fuck they at? They think it’s going to be all love when I come home, like, what’s up, Reggie, welcome back and shit. . . . But fuck those niggas, man. They ain’t riding for me, I got no rap for them when I touch [get home]. On my word, A, I ain’t fucking with none of them when I get home. I would be a fucking nut for that. Brandon especially, A. I was with this nigga every day. And now he’s on some: “My bad, I’m fucked up [broke].” Nigga, you wasn’t fucked up when I was out there! I banged on that nigga, A [hung up on him].