. . .
During these months, I was learning a lot about work at the lowest levels of the local drug trade. I was also learning about relations between men and women in the neighborhood. I was spending so much time on 6th Street that few people there hadn’t met me, and things were starting to become much less awkward.
One problem I still encountered during this period was that Mike, Chuck, their neighbors, and their relatives didn’t think I had any female friends. When you get older and have a job and a family to attend to, friends may not be such a big deal—but when you’re twenty-one and friendless, especially in a community of dense social networks and extensive family ties, being friendless can be a major point of shame. Though I gradually developed close friendships with Reggie’s girlfriend, Aisha’s older sister, and other women my own age, people wanted to know where my friends were from my own community, friends who looked like me. They’d ask whether I had any and who and where they were, wondering out loud if in my community I was somewhat of a lame, as I was here.
From time to time I’d mention various friends from high school and even a few from college, but then Reggie or Alex would ask me to set them up. As Mike’s sis I was off limits, but that didn’t go for my girlfriends. Where were my girlfriends? And what about my younger sister? Where was she? Did she like Black guys? Sometimes I was stricken with the thought that I was keeping these social worlds apart in a way that concretized the unequal status of Mike and Chuck and Alex, as if I were saying that Black men from 6th Street weren’t good enough for my white sister and friends. Other times I attempted mixed outings or events with disastrous results.
At my twenty-second birthday party that year, white friends from high school and grade school came to the apartment to throw a dinner party. When Aisha and a number of her friends walked in, my best friend from eighth grade immediately offered them some brie and crackers. Aisha assumed that the round of cheese was cake, and spit it out on the floor when she tasted the sour rind. Then a high school friend got so afraid when Mike and Chuck and Steve came in that she left only a few minutes after their arrival, claiming to have a sudden migraine. I was outraged and humiliated, and apologized profusely.
Walking in the Shoes
Beyond being a fly on the wall, I wanted to be a participant observer. I wanted to live and work alongside Mike and his friends and neighbors so that I could understand their everyday worries and small triumphs from the inside. The method of participant observation involves cutting yourself off from your prior life and subjecting yourself as much as possible to the crap that people you want to know about are being subjected to.19 How do you do this when nobody treats you the same way? When you are a different color, and class, and gender?
At a practical level, the divides between us made participant observation a confusing endeavor. Should I try to take on the attitudes and behaviors and routines of Mike and Chuck and their friends, though I was clearly not a man? Or should I instead try to take on the role of a woman associated with them? This made more sense, except that the world of women was a separate sphere from the life of the street. Certainly, the experience of a girlfriend or mother of a man on the run is different from the experience of this man, who is actually dodging the authorities. Over time, I tried to take on some of both.
In her ethnography of police, Jennifer Hunt describes how the officers she studied assigned one of three roles to the women in their lives: good woman, slut, and dyke. Yet for her study she successfully operated outside these categories, negotiating a new role “betwixt and between” that was something like “street woman researcher.”20
Though I came to 6th Street as a young blond woman, my body, speech, clothing, and general personality marked me as somewhat strange and unappealing. After spending a few months with Mike and his friends, I moved even further away from their ideals of beauty or femininity, in part as a strategy to conduct the fieldwork, and in part because I was, as a participant observer, adopting their male attitudes, dress, habits, and even language.
What about relations with the police? That the police consistently ignored me when they approached Mike and Chuck and their friends was in many ways very lucky. It certainly helped to reassure me that I wasn’t placing anyone in greater danger just by hanging around. But it also made it difficult for me to experience searches, arrests, or jail time—all fundamental experiences for these young men. Should I try to get arrested on purpose? Even if I did, I’d go to a woman’s jail as a white female, a first-time inmate, knowing nobody from my own community. This seemed significantly different from the experience that Mike and Chuck and Reggie had when they got locked up. And given that the police largely disregarded me, I might have to go to great lengths to get taken into custody. This would seem like madness to the guys on 6th Street, who devoted so much energy to avoiding the authorities. It might even cause them to question whether having me on the block was a safe or reasonable thing.
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 families 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 abou
t 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 interrogation 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 pro
vided 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 adjustment. 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.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 29