The younger men who began arriving as members of the part-time staff had a different strategy for dealing with the time-card problem: they would tell a friend on another floor that they were leaving early and ask him or her to punch them out at a later time. At first I thought they were stealing time, but soon came to realize that more often than not, they left when their shift ended, giving only the appearance of logging more hours than they had worked. Stealing time was a way to cover up the fact that they could not locate their name on the wall.
Not only did Miss Deena look the other way, she actively embraced these strategies as a management technique. She personally clocked out some of her employees, offering to do this on her way to get extra napkins or place food orders. As I continued to observe, I realized she was also helping some of the staff on the first and second floors to clock in and out.
To the two white men sitting in the supervisor’s office on the first floor, the almost entirely Black staff appeared lazy, difficult, or patently dishonest. They saw the women refusing to work in the sandwich room for all kinds of silly reasons, the young men stealing time, the older women standing around the clock; and once after Miss Deena had gone home, I heard them rail against her for putting up with such insubordination. They also accused her of hiring her relatives and friends, though I never observed her to do this. Despite the tension with the management, Miss Deena seemed to take great pride and pleasure in her work. As far as I could tell, most of her staff respected and trusted her.
. . .
I wrote up my final paper for David Grazian’s class and quit the cafeteria job when the term ended.
The following fall, I asked Miss Deena if she knew anyone who needed tutoring. She immediately volunteered her two grandchildren: her daughter’s son, Ray, a senior in high school who lived with her along with his mother, and her son’s daughter, Aisha, a freshman in high school who lived with her mother and siblings a few blocks away. Miss Deena said Ray was a good boy who was applying to college. Aisha, on the other hand, was having considerable difficulty staying out of trouble. We agreed that I would tutor Ray and Aisha in English, history, and SAT preparation.
What I can remember of my motivation for tutoring was that I wanted to understand the lives of my fellow workers at home and in the neighborhood, outside the mainly white campus where they came for their jobs. After working alongside a number of people with quite poor reading skills, I was also preoccupied with the problem of literacy. In any event, tutoring seemed a decent reason for a young, middle-class white woman to be spending time in a working-class-to-poor Black section of the city.
The first time I drove to Miss Deena’s, I couldn’t find the right address. As I walked around peering at the two-story brick row homes, a young man stopped and asked me if I was a cop or a caseworker, there apparently being no other reason that a person like me would be in the area. I had grown accustomed to being the only white person working at the cafeteria, but there the students and the surrounding area were majority white. When I began coming to Miss Deena’s house for evening tutoring, I entered a world in which white people were a tiny minority.1
To my relief, Miss Deena’s family was warm and welcoming. Her daughter, Rochelle, was a talkative and vivacious woman in her forties who had worked as a teacher’s assistant at a day care downtown before getting laid off. She and her son, Ray, both seemed to be acquainted with the wealthy white section of the city in which I’d been raised, and attuned to my gaps in cultural knowledge.
Miss Deena’s granddaughter, Aisha, was also very welcoming, but seemed to have experienced little outside Black Philadelphia. Like many who grow up in segregated northern cities, she spoke in what linguists refer to as African American Vernacular English.2 Added to this, she had the rapid and muffled speech of a teenager. At the beginning of this tutoring, I frequently couldn’t understand what she said, and would awkwardly ask her to repeat it. Or I’d pretend to follow, and she’d realize well into the conversation that I hadn’t understood her at all.
For the school year, I tutored Aisha and Ray at Miss Deena’s house two and then three evenings a week. After a few months, I could follow Aisha’s stories much better, and even our phone conversations had become largely intelligible to me.
AISHA’S FAMILY
After about four months, Aisha’s mother stopped by Miss Deena’s house to meet me. A somewhat overweight woman in her late thirties with a light complexion and cornrows in her short and thinning hair, she looked as if she had seen it all before, or simply was exhausted by her diabetes and caring for her three children. Our meeting was fairly awkward on both sides, but at the end of it she told me I was welcome to stop by the apartment a few blocks away. After spending months in Miss Deena’s pristine home with its museum-like quiet and plastic-covered furniture, this was a big breakthrough. A whole world of extended family and neighbors was opening up to me.
I began spending time at Aisha’s place, and got to know her mother and older sister as well as a number of her relatives, friends, and neighbors. We would sit on the steps of her apartment building, cook food, do laundry at the corner Laundromat, or walk to the Chinese takeout store. As we went around the neighborhood, Aisha introduced me to a cousin working as a deli clerk, an uncle selling DVDs from a stand on the street, and another uncle who managed the corner seafood joint. Her family had been in Philadelphia for many generations; she counted what seemed to be a vast number of neighbors as close relations.
Slowly, I began to perceive the social distance between Aisha’s and Miss Deena’s households. At Miss Deena’s the fridge was often full, the family had no problems keeping the lights and gas on, and Ray spent his evenings on SAT prep and college applications. I never observed any member of the household to sit outside on the stoop, and relations with neighbors were polite but brief. In my two years of spending most weekday afternoons at their place, I observed them entertaining guests only twice, and one of these was a relative from out of town. In contrast, Aisha lived with her mother and sister in a four-story, Section 8–subsidized housing unit on a poorer block. A steady stream of family and neighbors came into and out of the apartment, and Aisha’s family also spent a lot of time at their neighbor’s, whose three kids they considered part of the family.
Aisha’s mother admitted to me that she had sold drugs for a while before going on welfare. While she had been out doing her thing during Aisha’s childhood, Aisha’s maternal grandmother had taken over her care. She was a thin woman in her sixties with shockingly bright dyed-red hair and a love of cognac. In middle school, Aisha would join her at the corner bar, spending the evening laughing with fellow customers and walking home with her grandmother late into the night. By the time I met Aisha, she regarded this bar as a second home, coming and going as she pleased, borrowing a dollar or grabbing a bite.
In those early months, Aisha seemed often on the cusp of expulsion or dropping out; the week that we met, she had been suspended for punching her teacher in the mouth. Later I would learn that she was Miss Deena’s granddaughter through her errant middle son, who was in prison upstate. The following year, in Elijah Anderson’s urban ethnography class, I would learn about the tension between decent and street, and the divides between Miss Deena’s and Aisha’s households began to make a lot more sense.
MOVING TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD
In the middle of my sophomore year of college my lease was up, and with encouragement from Aisha and her family, I started searching for a place nearby. This proved difficult: I could not find a real-estate agent willing to rent to me in the Black section of the city of which Aisha’s neighborhood was a part. Some agents never returned my call, while others said I wouldn’t want the apartment that was listed or told me it had been taken. Finally, Aisha’s older sister made some calls on my behalf and came with me to the appointments.3
Once I’d moved into a one-bedroom a few blocks from Miss Deena’s, I began to spend most days and evenings with Aisha’s extended family and friends or at Mi
ss Deena’s house, commuting to Penn for classes. At this point I had become interested in the experience of mothers and daughters, aunts and grandmothers—the domestic world of women in Aisha’s community. My time on Penn’s campus was limited mostly to the Sociology Department, where I tried to take classes in which I could turn in a final paper based on the fieldwork I was doing. Though I continued to tutor Aisha for three and a half more years until she graduated from high school, my role was gradually changing from tutor to friend and resident.
MEETING THE 6TH STREET BOYS
In December of 2002, Aisha’s fourteen-year-old cousin Ronny came home from a juvenile detention center. He was short for his age, and the worn ends of his pants dragged and frayed in long trails behind him when he walked. He had light skin and curly hair, a soft voice, and a big grin when he saw Aisha. I hadn’t heard much about Ronny in his absence, but on the day he returned, Aisha ran up the street to greet him, hugging him and hanging on him the whole afternoon. It was the first time I had heard her really laugh.
Ronny and Aisha were cousins because her aunt had taken him in when his own mother had proved unable to care for him, due largely to her crack addiction, Aisha told me. This aunt had died the year before Aisha and I met, leaving Ronny to move in with his grandmother, who didn’t seem to understand the first thing about him. The trips to detention centers started shortly afterward.
When Ronny came home this time, he was a freshman in high school, though he spent most weekdays outside the classroom, running from truant officers or serving suspensions. He was living with his grandmother about fifteen blocks away from Aisha, in a neighborhood called 6th Street. Ronny was a self-proclaimed troublemaker raised, as he put it, by the streets. An impressive dancer, he’d sometimes jump out of a car at the light to put on a quick show for whoever happened to be walking by.
Upon hearing that Aisha was single, Ronny decided to set her up with his friend Tommy, a quiet and dark-skinned young man of fourteen who lived on 6th Street a few houses down. Tommy was tall, shy, and very handsome—a perfect counterpoint to Ronny’s mischievous exuberance. Aisha was smitten. She began taking the bus over to 6th Street one or two afternoons a week. I came along, with Aisha introducing me sometimes as her tutor, and sometimes as her godsister or simply her sister.
The Date
One afternoon as we were hanging out on 6th Street with Ronny and Tommy, Ronny told me that his old head Mike wanted to meet me. According to Aisha, who had heard it from Ronny, Mike had grown up next door to Ronny’s grandmother, and he looked good.
Until that point, I’d resisted Aisha’s attempts to set me up with various boys she knew, though I’d always declined politely, taking her offer as a genuine gift of teenage friendship. But in the weeks leading up to this discussion about Mike, I’d attended a birthday party for Aisha’s younger brother, where I overheard a disturbing conversation between her mother and another relative. After the cake, the woman quietly asked Aisha’s mother what I was doing spending so much time with Aisha and her girlfriends. Aisha’s mother answered firmly that I was her daughter’s tutor and also her nephew’s tutor, and that I lived down the street. The woman asked what I was getting for all this tutoring, and Aisha’s mother said she thought it was for school. Where does she take her? the woman wanted to know. Aisha’s mom stated that I took her to the library, the bookstore, and sometimes out for food. Does she go with anybody? No, Aisha’s mother replied, I think she’s single. The woman nodded, as if my lack of a boyfriend confirmed some suspicion. Aisha’s mother then said that I was “like a big sister” and “part of the family.”
I left the party humiliated and distressed. Without coming out and saying it, I imagined that the woman was implying that because I had no boyfriend to speak of, I might have some interest in high school girls. At least, it was strange that I was unattached, and spending so much time with Aisha and her friends. Aisha’s mother’s behavior toward me didn’t seem to change, but the idea that a rumor could circulate that my motives toward Aisha and her teenage girlfriends were questionable left me horrified. The next time someone offered to set me up with a guy, I instantly agreed. This someone was Ronny’s old head Mike.
When Ronny introduced us in January of 2003, Mike was a thin young man of twenty-two—a year older than I was. We had a few short phone conversations, followed by one excruciatingly awkward date to the movies on 69th Street. It was a group outing: I brought Aisha along, and one of her girlfriends; for his part, Mike brought his two young boys Ronny and Tommy. We piled into Mike’s ten-year-old Bonneville—more like a boat than a car—with the kids squished into the back and me riding shotgun next to Mike. Aisha seemed thrilled to be on this date with Tommy, and the friend she brought along tried her best to flirt with Ronny, though she was a good ten inches taller than he.
One of the first things Mike told me about himself as we drove to the movies was that he had recently finished a long course of physical therapy after a gunshot wound to the upper thigh. Did I want to see the scar? With some apologies that he wasn’t trying to be ignorant by exposing himself, he pulled down his jeans to show me where the bullet had entered just below his hip bone. Later, I heard that he’d been shot by a man who was trying to rob him after a dice game.4
We bought popcorn and Swedish Fish candy and played video games while we waited for the movie to start. I was the only white person in the theater but I was prepared for that, and nobody stared too much or said anything particularly unsettling. Things started to go downhill soon after the movie started, though. I’d suggested The Recruit, with Al Pacino and Colin Farrell, thinking it would be a good action movie. It turned out to contain not enough action or comedy, tons of boring dialogue, and no Black characters whatsoever. Mike and Ronny fell asleep within fifteen minutes. Aisha’s girlfriend got sick midway through—perhaps from Twizzler and slushie overload—and so I spent a large part of the movie in the bathroom with her. On the way home, I realized that the showtime had been quite late, which had likely contributed to our party’s younger members nodding off, so then I felt irresponsible as well as lame. I said something about the movie on the drive home—I didn’t write down what it was and can’t remember now—that caused Ronny and Tommy to burst out laughing and Aisha to attempt a repair on my behalf, saying, “She didn’t grow up around our way.”
After we dropped off the girls at home, I made a joke to Mike about Ronny’s ill-conceived matchmaking.
“You ain’t ugly,” Mike said frankly. “And you got a nice lil’ body.”
“Thanks.”
“You just . . . you don’t know how to act.”
Mike then explained precisely what it would take for me to become attractive to the men in his neighborhood—not just to an in-the-way (no-account) guy but to a worthwhile suitor. First off, my clothes were all wrong—they didn’t even match. My toenails were bare and uneven, and what was I doing wearing flip-flops in January anyway? Maybe I could answer this question for him: why did white people wear shorts and sandals in the dead of winter? I needed sneaks—white Air Force Ones would work, he mused. The way that I spoke was strange, and I could stand to get a little more husky. Plus, I didn’t know how to walk or hold my body right. I had a bad habit of staring at people, which was rude, especially since I was a white girl. And I was trying way too hard to be liked. I should stick up for myself when someone insulted me, not stand there speechless and take it. And I should be a lot less generous. Why was I offering to pay so often? Finally, my hair looked like I’d slept on it and left the house without even combing it through. For this critique I at least had a counterargument:
“Well, yeah, I don’t comb it because it’s kind of curly . . .”
Mike shook his head in exasperation.
At this point I said something like, “Okay. Thanks for making me feel even more strange and unappealing than I already did.”
The date was humiliating, but it gave me something to talk about with Aisha and her family for a good two weeks. And it h
elped me get over the deep anxiety the suspicious woman at the party had prompted about how people might be perceiving my motives toward Aisha and her friends.
Mike Takes Me under His Wing
The date had gone so badly that I assumed I wouldn’t be hearing from Mike again. To my great surprise, he occasionally called me in the weeks that followed. He’d ask how I was doing, and what the girls and I were up to. Or he’d say he was on his way to work, which apparently was a warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia. Once he told me he’d gotten into a fight, and his hand was sore. Sometimes he’d promise to stop by Aisha’s block and say hi, perhaps with one of his young boys in tow, though he never did. These fleeting exchanges fueled a great many conversations with Aisha and her family: Would he call again? Did I truly like him, or only feel interested because he was so hard to pin down?
I’m not sure if people’s behavior toward me changed, but I imagined that this date with Mike helped something click for Aisha’s neighbors and relatives. If I had been something of a puzzle before, now my presence in the neighborhood made sense: I was one of those white girls who liked Black guys.
Shortly after our group outing to the movies, Ronny got into a fist-fight with his sister’s boyfriend and got shipped back to a juvenile detention facility on charges of aggravated assault. Aisha was crushed. Mike bemoaned Ronny’s parting also, especially since his other close friend and neighbor, Chuck, had gotten locked up recently. He was sitting in county jail on charges of assault and fleeing the police, also for a fight in the schoolyard.
Perhaps it was partly because of this temporary gap in his social circle that Mike began phoning me and telling me to stop by 6th Street. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the absence of Ronny and Chuck; maybe he simply liked having a white girl—however awkward and poorly dressed—sitting on the alley stoops with him. Whatever his motivations, I began hanging out with him at his uncle’s house, in his absent friend Chuck’s house, and other homes around the neighborhood. Bit by bit, Mike introduced me to other young men who were part of his circle.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 26