On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  One night, he called me around ten to ask if I had a state ID. I said I did. He then said, “Take this ride with me.” We drove down to the local police station, where Mike indicated that I should sign for Chuck’s younger brother Reggie to be released. He was being held for making a terroristic threat and fighting with a boy from school (the terroristic threat purportedly had been “I’ma hurt you”). On the form, I wrote that I was his mother, though it was plain to the women working behind the counter that we weren’t related. When he emerged from the side door, a heavy and dark-skinned fifteen-year-old towering over my five-foot-two- inch frame, he grinned and greeted me with “Yo, Mommy! Thanks for coming to get me.”

  At this point I was still tutoring Aisha and her cousin Ray twice a week. I believed that the study I was conducting concerned the world of women: Miss Deena and her daughter, Aisha and her mother and sister, the other teenage girls she hung out with, their neighbor across the way, her three children, and so on. But more and more, my notes began to concern Mike and his friends over on 6th Street—people who sometimes overlapped with Aisha’s group of friends and family, and sometimes didn’t.

  There were probably a number of reasons why I began spending more of my time with Mike and his friends, beyond the need to demonstrate that I wasn’t molesting teenage girls. For one, I had been reading All Our Kin,5 Making Ends Meet,6 and No Shame in My Game,7 and had learned a lot about the lives of working poor people and women struggling on welfare. I wasn’t sure how much my notes about Aisha and her family and friends could add to what these books had already said. Mike and his friends, on the other hand, were a mystery. They sort of had jobs, but they also seemed to have income that they didn’t speak about. They were getting arrested and coming home on bail and visiting their probation officers. They got into fights; their cars were stolen or seized by the police. It was all confusion and chaos—I couldn’t follow what was happening from minute to minute.

  In late March of 2003, I asked Mike what he thought of my writing about his life for my undergraduate thesis at Penn, due the following spring. We agreed that I’d conceal his name and the neighborhood location, and that I wouldn’t include any events he wanted me to leave out. Over the next weeks, I broached the topic with Chuck, Steve, Alex, Anthony, and some of the other young men who hung out together on 6th Street. Over time, I discussed it with their mothers, girlfriends, and other relatives.

  Mike Catches a Case

  A few months into hanging out with Mike, he phoned me in a panic at four in the morning to say that the police had just raided his uncle’s house looking for him. He was at his baby-mom’s house, and his uncle had just called to warn him that the law would probably be there next. The police had issued a warrant for Mike’s arrest on a shooting charge. He told me he hadn’t been involved in any shooting, and for the next week he hid out in friends’ apartments, including mine, while he figured out what to do.

  Since this was a “body warrant” for a new and significant crime, rather than a bench warrant for, say, failure to appear in court, failure to pay court fees, or technical probation and parole violations, a number of police divisions started actively searching for Mike, raiding his family and friends’ houses and interrogating and intimidating his uncle, his mom, and the mother of his two children. After a few weeks of dipping and dodging the police, he secured a lawyer and turned himself in. From county jail he’d phone me for the ten minutes he was allotted in the morning and then again for ten minutes at night, and I’d three-way his other friends or the girl he was dating, or we’d catch up on what was happening back on the block.

  Mike was being held at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF, locally known as the F), which is the largest county jail in Philadelphia. It’s a pink and gray building that sits on State Road in Northeast Philly. As this was my first time visiting someone in jail or prison, I was quite intimidated by the other women in the waiting room. A visitor to CFCF can easily spend five hours waiting to be called, so there’s a lot of time for women to talk and size one another up. Some of these women knew each other, and sometimes they’d openly insult me or ask who I was going to see and how we were related and was he Black.

  My first attempts to visit Mike were unsuccessful: once I got turned away because my clothing hadn’t conformed to jail visitor policy (no white T-shirts, no flip-flops, no hoodies, no tops exceeding hip length) another time because Mike’s visit period had already been used up a few hours before, and the third time because the warden had canceled all visits when the evening count of prisoners didn’t clear. I got the hang of it after about a week.

  A few weeks later, Mike got into a fight with another inmate and got sent to solitary confinement. After he spent three days of solitude in the dark, his mother, Miss Regina, and his grandmother raised the fifteen-hundred-dollar bail to bring him home. Miss Regina and I went to the bail office in the basement of the courthouse to pay it, and then I waited for six long hours down at the county jail on State Road for him to be released.

  The night Mike came home, we drove back to the block around 2:30 a.m. With almost everyone asleep and the neighborhood quiet, he couldn’t get anybody to wake up and celebrate his homecoming. We drove around for a while, and then Mike told me to pull up next to a dark truck. He knocked on the passenger door, and soon a man rose from the seat cushions and opened it for us.

  This was Anthony, a thin man of twenty-three with outgrown hair who smelled of sweat and cigarettes. Apparently, he’d been living at his aunt’s house on 6th Street, but she had kicked him out when she caught him stealing money from her purse (accusations he vehemently denied). We shared a celebratory cigarette, and then Mike said goodbye and Anthony went back to sleep. Mike shrugged. “He’s homeless, but that’s our man, though.” When I asked later, he told me that Ant had been living in various abandoned cars around 6th Street for over a year.

  When Mike had first gotten the news that he was wanted on this shooting charge, I was quite shaken, and thought the case was a unique and significant experience in his life. When he came home on bail, his first court date was scheduled for the next month, and as the date neared I urged him strongly to buy a suit. When he refused, I attempted to persuade him to at least locate some khakis and a tie. Instead, Mike came to court wearing jeans, sneakers, and a well-pressed white T-shirt.

  His initial hearing was at the small courthouse within the district police station that served his neighborhood and many adjacent ones, located about a mile from 6th Street. As we approached the cement building, he recognized a man he knew and smoked a cigarette with him while they exchanged some details about their respective cases. As we walked into the building, he shook hands with more young men he knew by name; by the time we were sitting in the benches on the defendant’s side of the large wood-paneled courtroom, he’d greeted over a dozen more young men awaiting trial. While we waited, he whispered the back story on three of the cops who were standing against the wall waiting to testify. He recognized two of the public defenders, and told me which guys from the block had been assigned to them for various cases they’d caught.

  Another shock: compared with many of these young men, Mike’s jeans and T-shirt looked like formal attire. Or at least, they were new and clean and pressed. Some defendants had visible holes in their clothing; others had matted-down hair or worn and dirty shoes without laces. I began to understand that this case for attempted murder, though not insignificant for Mike, was nothing new—not to him or the other guys he hung out with. In fact, this was the third criminal case Mike had caught in the past two years. He had just finished going to trial dates for one of them and had recently completed probation from the other. Gradually, I realized that a great many young men in the neighborhood were getting arrested regularly, living with warrants, going to court date after court date, and dipping and dodging the police. And judging by the clothing and shoes they could assemble for their day in court, these men were poor—far poorer than Mike, whose economic circumstances had
seemed quite desperate to me previously.

  NEGOTIATING A PLACE ON 6TH STREET

  When I first began spending time with Ronny and Mike on 6th Street, their neighbors and relatives often remarked on my whiteness and asked me to account for my presence. I don’t think they wondered what I was doing there as much as Aisha’s friends and neighbors had when I met them, because I’d come in via Aisha and so was already connected to Ronny and Mike through a series of family ties. Even before they met me, their friends and relatives had “seen me around” with Ronny’s cousin and aunts and grandmother for half a year. Then after Mike came home on bail, he began referring to me as his godsister or simply as his sister. Sometimes I also mentioned that I lived nearby.

  Because Mike held some sway among the young men in the neighborhood, being his adopted sister gave me a good deal of legitimacy. It also seemed to establish that I wasn’t available for sex or romance, as Mike simply wouldn’t put up with his sis “messing with a no-job-having, in-and-out-of-jail-going, weed-smokin’ motherfucker.”

  I’m not sure how to account for Mike’s adopting this protective older-brother relationship with me. Sometimes he mentioned that as an only child he’d often wanted a sister. At the time we met, Mike had a great many women pursuing him: Marie, the mother of his two children, other ex-girlfriends, and a number of neighborhood women he was seeing casually. Like many other young men in the neighborhood, he’d sometimes sleep with these women when he was broke, receiving room and board or a small amount of cash, and often talked about sex with them as something of a chore. So maybe he liked having a female friend who wasn’t asking for sex. Or maybe on the whole he didn’t enjoy sleeping with women very much. Whatever his reasons, getting adopted by Mike as a kind of sister was a major stroke of luck.

  As an adopted sis, cousin, and chronicler, my role with Chuck and Mike and their friends might be similar to that of a female buddy at a fraternity. Fraternity brothers distinguish between two types of women who are attached to their group: buddies and slutties. Slutties are women who sleep with fraternity members and are viewed as sex objects to be shared around. Buddies are women who don’t sleep with any of the members and serve as largely desexualized, gender-neutral sidekicks.8

  Often I was the only woman present in the group from 6th Street.

  For his twenty-third birthday, Mike threw a party at a local motel. He paid for the room and bought two hundred dollars’ worth of hard liquor and another fifty dollars’ worth of marijuana for his guests. Steve and Alex split the cost of a large birthday cake covered in green icing. Nobody remembered to bring plates or forks, though, so the cake sat uneaten until Reggie took a fistful, grinning and saying, “I’m fuckin’ hungry, man.” With Chuck locked up at the time, fifteen-year-old Reggie was relishing the time with his brother’s friends.

  Mike hadn’t invited any women to the party, so the event consisted of fifteen of his friends crammed into the small room, drinking and watching music videos on the television. As the night went on and Mike got drunker, guys he barely knew started coming in and out of the room, taking the half-full bottles of booze he’d spread out on the windowsill. By 1:00 a.m., he was sitting below the windowsill with his gun out in his lap, threatening to pistol-whip the next guy who came in that tried to touch the booze he bought for his guests. He railed for a while about how nobody had contributed any money to the room or to the alcohol, only to a twelve-dollar fucking cake, and then he fell asleep.

  I thought Mike had passed out completely, but then he began screaming, “Where the fuck is my money at?” Apparently, someone had taken the roll of bills he’d wedged into the side pocket of his jeans while he slept drunkenly on the floor.

  Steve drew his gun and started pointing it at the party guests, demanding that they return Mike’s money. I had never seen anybody pull a gun before and took the opportunity to promptly leave the party. As I made my way down the corridor to the elevator, Steve bounded up behind me, apologizing profusely.

  “My bad, Alice. I ain’t mean no disrespect. You understand, like, I can’t just let niggas take advantage of my man. They think it’s sweet [an easy target] ’cause he drunk, but it’s not sweet! I’m on they ass, A.”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re a good friend, Steve. I was getting tired anyway.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Mike phoned triumphantly to say that the money had “magically” reappeared on the bedside table, and all had been forgiven. Did I want to come back to the party?

  . . .

  My role of sidekick and adopted sister to Mike didn’t mean that sex or romance never came up. Occasionally when men were incarcerated, they wrote me letters explaining that their confinement had made them realize that they were in fact romantically interested in me. In the language of the community, I chalked this up as jail talk: in all but one case, this interest, or at least its overt expression, ended when the man came home and had access to a wider range of women.

  Outside our circle, people had different stories about what I was doing on the block and what my relationships to Mike and Chuck and the other young men were. The owner of the apartment I rented, a retired Black man in his sixties, referred to Mike as my friend, indicating he assumed we were romantic partners. Some of the 6th Street residents also thought I was sleeping with one or even many of the 6th Street crew, and some young men’s girlfriends remained perpetually suspicious about this. While we were out in public or in court or in jail visiting rooms, we sometimes let people assume that we were romantic partners. Though they mostly ignored me during stops, interrogations, and raids, the cops sometimes indicated that they believed I was looking for drugs, or for sex with a Black man (in their words, “Black dick”). In contrast, some people in the neighborhood assumed I was a lesbian, which helped to explain why I liked to hang out with the guys. Miss Regina would often say I was her son Mike’s right hand, and should have been born a man. Some just seemed to think I was a bit of a loser, unable to make friends with people like myself in the neighborhood I had come from. Even when Mike and I began talking about the possibility of my writing a book, and I discussed this with Chuck and others, these interpretations and suspicions didn’t go away.

  . . .

  People have asked how I “negotiated my privilege” while conducting fieldwork. Given that I am a white woman who comes from an educated and well-off family, this is a good question. In fact, I had more privilege than whiteness, education, and wealth: my father was a prominent sociologist and fieldworker. Though he died when I was an infant, his ideas hung in the air of my childhood household, and I had read some of his books by the time I entered college. My mother and adopted father were also professors and devoted fieldworkers: my mother an anthropologist turned sociolinguist who had conducted studies in Papua New Guinea and Montreal, and my second father a well-known linguist who had done studies in Harlem and other parts of Manhattan as well as Martha’s Vineyard and Philadelphia. Not only did my parents give substantial financial support, they understood what I was trying to do and brought their own experience to bear on the project I was undertaking.

  This peculiar background may have given me the confidence and the resources to embark on this research as an undergraduate, and consequently the years to get established and take it in various directions. The shadow of my late father may have pushed me to go further than was safe or expected. Perhaps my background, and the extra knowledge and confidence it gave me, also contributed to professors encouraging the work and devoting their time so freely to my education. It may have also grounded me and kept me going in the face of the profound discomfort that accompanies a new social milieu.

  None of these advantages seemed to translate into what sociologist Randall Collins refers to as situational dominance, or at least not very often.9 On 6th Street I often felt like an idiot, an outsider, and at times a powerless young woman. The act of doing fieldwork is a humbling one, particularly when you’re trying to understand a community or a job or a life that’s far away from who you are a
nd what you know.10 In many situations, my lack of knowledge put me at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I hung out on 6th Street at the pleasure of Mike and Chuck, along with their friends and neighbors and family. They knew exactly what I was doing and what I had on the line; whether I got to stay or go was entirely up to them.

  Gaining a Basic Working Knowledge

  My initial efforts to describe what was happening for Mike and his friends were at first greatly hampered by a lack of knowledge about the neighborhood, the police and the courts, the local drug trade, and relations between men and women. My confusion in these early months cannot be overstated; I couldn’t seem to follow events and conversations, and people were often too busy or frustrated to explain things to me when I asked. My sense of stupidity wasn’t just internal—people would openly express their frustration and bafflement at how slow I was to grasp the meaning of what was going on.

  In part, I was struggling to overcome a language barrier. Mike and Chuck used what linguists have called African American Vernacular English, and unlike Aisha’s mother and aunt, they didn’t shift their speech much for my benefit. They also employed more slang than Aisha and her girlfriends did. I had to work hard to learn the grammar and vocabulary they were using.

  From a late night on Chuck’s back porch in the summer of 2005:

  There are a few cars that drive by, and when they do, Chuck and Steve discuss the clandestine doings of these neighbors. Chuck says to Steve, “You see Lamar creeping? He probably came home, came right back out.” They both laugh.

  “Yo, you know who your young-boy, you know who your young-boy?” Chuck says. “The boy Lamar your young-boy.”

  “No he not!” Steve says, laughing and protesting. “I put all these niggas on, A,” he tells me.