On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Steve leaves to see his girlfriend, saying, “I’m out, A. I’m ’bout to go get me some cock.” I ask Anthony about this, and he confirms that the word cock can mean sex with a woman as well as male genitalia. In the discussions about the neighbors’ late-night activities, I also learn four new words for orgasm: to bust (buss), to yam, to chuck, and to nut.

  The confusion ran deeper than this language barrier: I didn’t understand the significance of events as they occurred, misinterpreting people’s gestures and actions.

  Once I saw Ronny in a fistfight with some other boys, and along with two young men standing nearby, I went over and tried to break up the fight. Only I was pulling Ronny away from another young man who was also trying to break up the fight, thinking he was the one Ronny was fighting. One of the other guys started shouting, “Not him! Not him!”

  What a fucking idiot, I thought. I can’t even tell which person is fighting and which person is pulling the fighters away from each other. The looks I got that afternoon humiliated me further.

  Dealing with Difference

  Some ethnographers maintain that their difference is an asset to the research: their distinct background, gender, or race allows them to see what the locals or natives cannot; their foreign identity gives them some special status or opens certain doors; their situation as an outsider prompts people to explain things that would otherwise go unsaid; their novice mistakes and blunders reveal the social fabric that would otherwise remain obscured.11

  I didn’t take this approach. Or rather, I didn’t have this experience. In some ways my identity was an encumbrance, and one I had to invest significant time and effort to overcome. Particularly in the early months on 6th Street, the presence of a white young woman seemed to make people uneasy if not outright angry or visibly threatened. My lack of familiarity with what sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton referred to as the lower shadies of the Black community, my lack of familiarity with the neighborhood, and my wholly different family background meant that I didn’t understand what was going on much of the time, and so had to work hard just to keep up. My concern about how my strange presence was changing the scene and my efforts to reduce its impact became preoccupations in their own right, distracting me from understanding what daily life was like for Mike and his friends and neighbors. If it is indeed true that an ethnographer’s mistakes are revealing, I could not afford to make them. Here an extra word during a police stop could cost a man his freedom.

  Like many outsiders have done, I learned to defuse tension by making a joke out of my difference. Though in practice I was steadily adopting more and more of Mike and Chuck’s attitudes and ways of doing things, I learned to give verbal credence to expectations about my white, college-educated preferences, like whiny rock music and sushi and cut-up vegetables with no dressing. With those young men around 6th Street who seemed interested in flirting with me, I learned how to negotiate a joking sexual banter, to strike a delicate balance of them wanting me around without feeling like they could approach me directly about a romantic relationship.

  In his study of street vendors in Greenwich Village, Mitch Duneier notes that his status as a white and middle-class Jewish man wasn’t fixed but became more or less salient depending on the circumstance.12 Likewise, my gender seemed to come into and out of focus depending on what was going on. Sometimes my status as a woman seemed in the forefront of people’s consciousness, like when the police had to call a female cop to the scene in order to search me. But there were many other times when it seemed I was taken almost as an honorary man, permitted to hang around when men spoke about shootouts and drug deals and robberies, or about romantic escapades with women other than their main partner.

  That I was Jewish, or rather, half-Jewish on my father’s side, didn’t seem to register very much, perhaps because last names were so little used. Reggie complained to me once about another guy who wouldn’t share his profits after a gambling win, saying that the guy was “acting like a Jew.”

  “Do you know any Jews?” I asked.

  “No. It’s a fucking expression.”

  “You know I’m Jewish, right?”

  “You ain’t a Jew. You white.”

  “I’m half-Jewish, Reggie, swear to god.”

  “Where’s your beard?” he laughed.

  If my Jewish identity wasn’t readily recognized, certainly my whiteness was. Though I have little way of proving it, I am fairly confident that Mike and his friends and family spoke more about race, and about the racial politics of policing and imprisonment, when I wasn’t around. Sometimes they discussed these topics when I was with them, but not, I believe, as freely or as frequently as they did in my absence.

  If my being white was a permanent fact that nobody ever forgot, it, too, seemed to come into and out of focus, as if my whiteness were a property of the situation or interaction in play, not merely a trait I possessed.

  One winter, a pair of white female police officers began appearing around 6th Street, chasing young men in cars, stopping people on the street and running their names, and searching houses. In a week they’d taken eleven young neighborhood men into custody on new arrests or old warrants. Mike, Chuck, and their friends began referring to them as The White Bitches, with a small apology to me after they did so.

  ALEX: Just seen the White Bitches come through—no offense, A.

  ALICE: None taken. Where’d they go?

  After a while the apologies stopped, and my being the same color and gender as these most hated officers seemed to move further down in people’s consciousness.

  Though I never exactly blended in on 6th Street, by showing up every day, month after month, I became an expected part of the scene. The Puerto Rican family who ran the corner grocery store began affectionately calling me Vanilla, which they eventually shortened to Nil. After about a year, young men in the group began referring to me as their sister, cousin, or “our homie” who “goes way back.” As Howard Becker has pointed out, it’s virtually impossible for people to continue to take special notice of something or someone they see day in and day out.13

  Yet even after people had gotten used to me, my whiteness became problematic during certain occasions, at certain locations, and among certain groups of people.

  Prison and jail visiting rooms were among the easiest public places for me, once I’d gotten the hang of them. The guards have seen it all and don’t bat an eye when a white woman comes to visit a Black man. In fact, many women coming to visit Black men in state prison are white; even in county jail, my sense is that there are more interracial couples than what would be found in public in Black or white neighborhoods. I often figured this was because a community’s interracial couples have learned how to hide in public—for example, by going to the grocery store late at night—but in a visiting room this is impossible. Or perhaps inmates have more interracial relationships than their communities do as a whole.

  Courtrooms, bail offices, and probation offices were other public spaces in which Mike and I tended to feel more at ease, at least those located in downtown Philadelphia and in the district. Perhaps the shared legal woes and the collective fear of jail time helped forge some bond between the white and Black people on the defendants’ side of the courtroom. The easy conversations across racial lines might even qualify these courtroom seating areas as what Elijah Anderson has referred to as a Cosmopolitan Canopy—a place where many kinds of people come together and keep their ethnocentric opinions in check, treating one another decently.14

  Venturing out together into white neighborhoods or into various other buildings in Center City besides the courthouse could be difficult. As any interracial couple knows, the simple act of appearing together in public can create a level of tension that is difficult to bear. Often, people would be so thrown off when Mike and I showed up together that we learned to walk some distance apart from each other on the sidewalk, so that passersby wouldn’t necessarily know we were together. We’d often enter a store or bar or r
estaurant separately, so that clerks and hostesses and security guards wouldn’t have to address us simultaneously.

  When Chuck, Mike, or Reggie and I went into the city’s white neighborhoods, those which Anderson refers to as more ethnocentric,15 sometimes people were openly rude, or would tell us that the kitchen was closed or that we couldn’t enter. Sometimes we got the impression that we were catching people on a very bad day. Beyond our skin color, our ages and apparent class differences helped make these interactions highly charged, though it was hard to know if these reactions stemmed from the sight of Black young men with a white young woman, a middle-class white woman with Black men who appeared decidedly “ghetto,” or Black men in white spaces, period.

  In addition to public spaces and white ethnic neighborhoods, large social gatherings on 6th Street remained tense for me. In seven years I attended nineteen funerals for young neighborhood men who’d been killed by gunfire, as well as three funerals for older people. I learned to dread these occasions, along with the far rarer event: weddings. Inevitably, these occasions brought in strangers and relatives I’d never met before, who demanded to know who I was and how exactly I was connected to the deceased or the bridal couple. Large gatherings also involved special activities or behaviors I hadn’t learned, and the chance to screw them up before a large audience. And they involved the mixing of many audiences; the public display of private relationships.

  Methodologically, my task was not to let my comfort level guide the inquiry. That is, I tried to be careful not to give greater weight to the places and situations where I was most at ease, or to the people or places that gave an easier time to the biracial group that the 6th Street Boys and I became whenever I was present.

  While my race came into and out of focus depending on the context, my behavior and appearance were gradually changing as well. Scholars in the social constructionist tradition have written about race as a performance versus race as cognition.16 In a similar approach, Reggie sometimes took it as his mission to instruct me on matters of language, dress, and movement, proudly proclaiming to others that he was turning me “into a Black chick.” Of course he didn’t mean this literally; I think he was referring to a set of behaviors, attitudes, and orientations toward the world that a person can acquire.

  I wasn’t always as dedicated a student as Reggie wished. When I came back to the neighborhood after attending a family wedding out of state, he accused me of sounding and acting like a white girl again, as if those three days had undone all his careful teachings. The next summer, I spent two weeks out of town with my parents, and Mike insisted that this hiatus had “taken all the Black” out of me.

  Becoming a Fly on the Wall

  The most consistent technique I adopted to reduce the impact of my difference was social shrinkage—to become as small a presence as possible. If the goal was to find out what life for the residents of 6th Street was like when my strange presence wasn’t screwing things up, then I’d try to take up as little social space as I could.

  Blending into the background became an obsession. When sitting on a stoop, I’d sit behind a bigger person or I’d sit halfway inside the house, so that people walking by wouldn’t necessarily see me. This is something like how people learn to hide a deformed or scarred limb, only I learned to do it with my whole body. I also learned to become a quiet person, someone who doesn’t say or do much, who isn’t known to have strong opinions.

  I came up with tests for how well I was doing. If someone told a story about a past event and couldn’t remember whether I had present for it, then I knew I was doing fairly well. If Mike or Chuck began a distinctly different kind of conversation or used another tone of voice once I’d gone to bed or left the room, I inferred that my presence was in the forefront of their awareness, and I had work to do.

  Receding into the background became a technique to reduce my influence on the scene but also to limit any risk I might be placing people under. This was particularly concerning given that the older policing literature says that the police start paying attention when they see something out of the ordinary. Was I increasing Mike’s or Chuck’s dealings with the police simply by hanging around? After a while I decided that this wasn’t the case: the tough-on-crime policing approach currently at work in Black neighborhoods like 6th Street doesn’t wait for something out of the ordinary—police routinely swooped into the neighborhood to make stops, conduct raids, and search men who were walking around whether I was present or not. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be as small a presence as possible.17

  At a practical level, my goal of not altering the scene could be difficult to work out. In order to understand whether one’s words or actions are creating something strange and foreign, one must first learn what is normal. In a scene so different from any I’d known, it took months and sometimes years for me to work this out.

  Take violence. Young men on the block often made promises to beat up or shoot someone who’d injured or insulted them or someone they held dear. For instance, one afternoon Steve, Chuck and I were sitting on a porch. Steve was rolling marijuana into a hollowed-out Phillies cigar when Reggie came walking up the block.

  REGGIE: I’m about to fuck this nigga up, man.

  CHUCK: Who, Devon?

  REGGIE: Yeah! I ain’t like that shit, man.

  At first when Reggie or Mike would make these threats, I sat quietly by, like a good fly on the wall, waiting to see what would happen. Later, I learned that people within earshot of these threats often take it on themselves to talk the person down or even to physically restrain him. In fact, young men and sometimes women typically make it a point to make these promises to fight or to shoot when someone else was around whom they can count on to hold them back; in this way a person can preserve his honor without risking his life. Of course, this isn’t all show—often people promising to go and shoot genuinely want to, at least for a time. At any rate, months later I realized that as a friend or sis or cousin, men were expecting me to hold them back; to fail to do this would put them in danger of having to make good on their promises. So after a time I learned that taking someone’s car keys or hiding a gun wasn’t changing the outcome of events as much as sitting idly by would be. Blocking the door was the way to blend into the walls.

  Roommates

  When I met Mike, he’d been working nights at a warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia—a great job paying $7.50 an hour that his mother had found for him. He was supplementing this income with sporadic work in the crack business, which also intermittently employed his friends Chuck and Steve along with many other guys from the neighborhood. Shortly after we met, Mike’s second child was born, and after complications with the birth, he didn’t show up for two weeks of work. He lost the warehouse job and moved to selling crack full time.

  Later that year, Chuck returned from county jail. He had spent nine months there awaiting trial for a school yard fight in which he had pushed a fellow student’s face into the snow. Unlike his younger brother Reggie, Chuck had attended school regularly before he was taken into custody; during the months he spent in jail awaiting trial, he lost a full year of school. When he returned to his high school the following fall, after the case was dismissed, he tried to register again as a senior. He was then nineteen, and the secretary said he was too old to enroll.

  In the weeks after Chuck came home, he and Mike drove around looking for work. They applied online or in person at Target, Walmart, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Kmart, PetSmart, and Taco Bell. They listed the landline at my apartment or my cell as their contact, since their cell phones got shut off too often to be reliable conduits for job leads. They’d come in and play the machine every evening, or ask me if anyone had called when we met up in the afternoons. No employer ever did.

  After weeks without a single job lead, Chuck, Mike, and their close friend Steve pooled their money and bought some crack to sell. Some days they’d begin cutting and bagging the drug around midday, and then spend the afternoon and evening selling it hand
to hand to people in the neighborhood. Mostly these customers were frail and thin members of their parents’ generation, who I gathered had started smoking crack when it was cool and popular in the ’80s. But many days Mike and Chuck had no crack to sell: their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed this “connect” had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and search, and so they’d been unable to pay the man back and hence obtain any more drugs. Sometimes they’d made enough money the previous week to get by without selling any. Though they sometimes spoke of ambitions to become major dealers, Mike and Chuck approached selling as a part-time and undesirable income-generating activity. They picked up the work when they had no other income or had exhausted the women or family members who’d give them small bits of money to live on.18 Chuck in particular frequently articulated his distaste for crack and for selling it to people who, like his own mother, had been ruined by the drug and couldn’t help themselves.

  In the spring of 2003, Mike lost the lease to his apartment on 6th Street, which his mother had left to him when she moved across town. We packed up the apartment and he moved back in with his mom. During this time Mike, Chuck, and Steve would stop by my place to hang out or do their laundry. They’d often fall asleep watching movies on the couch. Getting back to his mother’s at the end of the night was a major inconvenience, so Mike began keeping more and more of his possessions at my place. After a while I said that if he was going to be crashing so much, he should contribute to the bills and groceries. Gradually we became roommates, with Mike taking the pull-out couch in the large living room and Chuck taking the smaller couch next to it. Steve alternated sleeping at his grandmother’s house on 6th Street, his girlfriend’s house a few blocks over, and our living room floor.

  Becoming a roommate was a gradual and unplanned thing, but it greatly enhanced the depth of the study. I could now compare what happened on the block with what happened at home, and for days on end. I was also able to take notes as events and conversations took place, often transcribing them on my laptop in real time as they were going on around me. This meant, too, that Chuck, Mike, and other young men could read over my shoulder as I was typing these field notes, correcting something I’d written or commenting on what I was writing about. A few times, Mike and Chuck read some of the notes as they watched TV and remarked, “Yo. She gets every fucking thing!!” Very occasionally someone would say, “Don’t write this down” or “I’m going to say some shit right now, and I don’t want it to go in the book.” In these cases, I took careful heed and did as people requested.