More than discomfort and awkwardness, I feared the hordes of white people. They crowded around me and moved in groups. I skipped the graduate college’s orientation to avoid what I expected would be large numbers of white people gathered together in a small space. In cafeterias and libraries and bus and train stations, I’d search for the few Black people present and sit near them, feeling my heart slow down and my shoulders relax after I did.
Above everything, I feared white men. Not all white men: white American men who were relatively fit, under the age of fifty, with short hair. I avoided the younger white male faculty at all costs. On some level, I knew they weren’t cops, they probably wouldn’t beat me or insult me, but I could not escape the sweat or the pounding in my chest when they approached. Office hours were out—I couldn’t be in a room alone with them. When I had to pass them in the hallways, I could feel my heart racing, like I was getting ready to run. Very few professors of color were in the Sociology Department at the time, so for advising I stuck to women, non-American men, and men who had accents or who were otherwise far outside the cop mold. Retired professors were good. I took an independent study course with Marvin Bressler, a retired Jewish professor in his seventies.
I also discovered that sudden noises, like a balloon popping or a pan falling from the counter, left me panicked. So did quick and close movements. I had been heading out of Princeton with another grad student in a heavy downpour. At a traffic light, a fellow motorist walked over to our car and knocked loudly on the driver’s-side window. I threw up my arms to shield my face when she rapped on the glass, protecting myself from whatever she meant to aim at us. When I realized why she’d come up to us—simply to alert me that my headlights weren’t on—I began to cry right in front of my passenger, who said kindly that at first she hadn’t realized what the noise was, either. Later, Mitch Duneier and I were entering a restaurant in New York when a flock of birds flew out of the rafter, passing quite near us. I walked out of the restaurant and stayed out for a number of minutes, my hand on my chest. Mitch came out and gently remarked, “I’m sorry, that must have really scared you. Do you want to eat somewhere else?” Around that time a friend of Chuck’s had been shot and killed while exiting my car outside a bar; one of the bullets pierced my windshield, and the man’s blood spattered my shoes and pants as we ran away. I had been staying at Mitch’s spare apartment in Princeton for a few days until things calmed down.
These visits to Princeton also made it clear that I’d developed substantial confusion about my sexual and gender identities. After spending six years in a Black neighborhood, hanging out with young men, I’d come to feel almost asexual. During college, I dated no one; I’d sometimes feel surprise when a mirror returned the image of a young woman. Putting my gender and sexual identity aside seemed like an easier path, given that I couldn’t live up to the 6th Street community’s ideals of femininity: I wasn’t “thick” enough, I didn’t dress the right way, I couldn’t dance. I was not Black. It was a shock when I began to spend time again with middle-class white academics that some of them found me young and at least somewhat attractive. More than this, they were fixated on what sexual relationship I may or may not be having with the guys on 6th Street, as if it were the first thing that popped into their minds when they saw me and heard about the project.
There was also the confusion of thinking and seeing like Mike and his friends.
Upon meeting my fellow grad students during the sociology orientation, I quickly sized up the women in the cohort, and as one walked away I turned to admire her. This is how we passed a lot of time around 6th Street: standing or sitting on the stoop, watching women walk by and talking about their various attributes. This woman turned around just as I was looking, and actually caught me staring. There was very little else I could have been doing, and I’m fairly certain my face registered open appreciation. I never did become friends with her, though who knows if she even remembers this incident.
Social awkwardness and identity confusion aside, driving to New Jersey a few times a week was in many ways a good thing. The hour-long ride gave me some distance from the chaos and emergencies of 6th Street, and a chance to think about what I was seeing.
I was also learning for the first time about mass incarceration. With Devah Pager and Bruce Western both in the Sociology Department at the time, the corridors of Wallace Hall were a hotbed of activity on the causes and consequences of the prison boom. After muddling through a slew of topics and themes, I came to see, through Devah and Bruce’s influence and Mitch Duneier’s guidance, that my project could be framed as an on-the-ground look at mass incarceration and its accompanying systems of policing and surveillance. I was documenting the massive expansion of criminal justice intervention into the lives of poor Black families in the United States.
By the spring of my first year of graduate school, I was visiting Mike in state prison on the weekends and spending my evenings in Philadelphia with the group of guys I’d met shortly before I left Penn—the ones who were working regular jobs. I’d learned a lot about how they differed from Mike and his friends—for example, when one of them lost his job, he didn’t move to selling crack but instead relied on the support of friends and relatives. This group had virtually no legal entanglements and didn’t run when the police approached. Some of them had brothers or cousins whose lives more closely resembled those of Mike and his friends, but they made a considerable effort to avoid these men and the risks that any association would pose.
. . .
One night, Chuck’s younger brother Reggie, now nearly eighteen, phoned to tell me that a man who was loosely associated with the 6th Street Boys had killed a man from 4th Street during a botched robbery at a dice game. He insisted that I come immediately to his uncle’s basement, where the guys were assembling to work out what to do next.
I sat on top of the washing machine for four hours and listened while five men berated the shooter for his thoughtless actions, discussed what the fallout would be from this death, and whether and when to shoot at the guys who they knew without question were now coming for them. In those four hours I learned more about gun violence than I had in my previous three years in the neighborhood.
In the end, nobody strapped up. The plans fizzled, and we parted ways around 3:00 a.m.23
Through this emergency, it seemed I’d somehow been asked to come back to 6th Street—not as someone connected to Mike, but on my own steam. Reggie seemed to feel that as at least a resident guest of 6th Street and the group’s main chronicler, I shouldn’t miss these important events.
Over the following weeks, young men from 4th Street drove through the 6th Street neighborhood and shot up the block. Chuck took a partial bullet in the neck, and Steve took a bullet in his right thigh. Neighbors stopped going outside and instructed children to play indoors. From prison, Mike sent heated letters home to Chuck and Reggie, voicing his outrage that they’d allow me to be on the block during these dangerous times. I was pretty pissed off about how Mike reacted, though looking back I can understand how, sitting in prison, he may have felt that the younger men no longer listened, or that the world was moving on without him.
By that summer Mike and I had reconciled, and Chuck, Steve, and Reggie were sitting in jail and prison. For four years of graduate school, I continued to live near 6th Street, coming into the university two or three times a week and spending much of the rest of my time hanging out with whichever members of the group were home, as well as with Aisha and her family and friends. On the weekends, I visited incarcerated members of the group in jails and prisons across the state. Chuck’s and Mike’s families already knew me well, but I came to know the families of other young men better as we dealt with the police together, attended court dates, and made long drives upstate for visiting hours.
After serving his full sentence in state prison, Mike returned to 6th Street in 2007. As often happens when a man comes home, he spent the first couple of weeks admonishing his boys on the block for fa
iling to do enough for him while he was away—for not visiting enough, for not writing back to his letters, for not sending money when they had promised, and for sleeping with various girls he had dated and then lying about it. As time went on, he seemed to forgive and forget; it appeared things were back to normal.
That summer, Chuck gave me the nickname A-Boogie. It remains the way many members of the group refer to me, like when addressing letters from prison. Now when I go back to the block, people often say I am from 6th Street, though that’s not literally true, as I never actually lived on the street.
THE SHOOTING AND ITS AFTERMATH
In the summer of 2007, a tragedy rocked the 6th Street community and altered the lives of the 6th Street Boys, as well as my own. For many it represented a pivotal event, an event around which other events, relationships, or habits came either before or after. For some, it even signaled a final ending to a young adulthood spent in the streets, trying to make it by selling drugs and dipping and dodging the police.
Around ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, Mike phoned me with the news that Chuck had been shot in the head outside the Chinese takeout store. As Mike had heard it, he’d been walking there to buy dinner for himself and his youngest brother, Tim, who was with him and saw him fall. I asked Mike how serious it was, remembering the time a bullet had merely grazed the skin above Mike’s ear a few years before.
“He got shot in the head,” Mike said. “What the fuck do you think?”
I debated whether to go right to the hospital or drive for an hour to pick up Mike from the suburb where he’d been staying. Finally, Mike persuaded me to get him, and I headed out. We drove back into Philly in silence. The idea that Chuck might not make it was incomprehensible to me, so I thought about his long recovery, with physical therapy and pain and depression. I made a mental list of what I would do to lift his spirits. I thought about the day before, when Chuck and I had shared a quick meal of cheese fries and a cigarette, and made plans to visit his middle brother, Reggie, in county jail. Chuck hadn’t seemed to feel that tensions with 4th Street were particularly high that day; things had been calmer for the past few weeks. Did they catch him off guard? I thought about the times Chuck and I had driven to visit Mike in state prison before Mike came home last month, and about how silly Chuck would get in the visiting room, trying to make Mike laugh. And about a few years ago, when the three of us had first become roommates.
As we approached the hospital, Mike told me that apart from Chuck’s mom and girlfriend and baby-mom, females really shouldn’t be around right now; it would be a whole bunch of niggas in there, since the shit was fresh, talking about shit that females didn’t need to hear about.
He was right: as we pulled up, we saw a crowd of men on the corner outside the ER. There were, by my count, twenty-seven young men standing across the street from the hospital. And just as if 6th Street had been fully transported downtown, two white cops stood across the street, watching them and talking to each other. I recognized a number of the guys and realized that some had open warrants or pending cases and were risking a great deal to stand here, in plain view, obviously linked to a man who had just been shot. An act of respect and love and sacrifice. A midnight vigil for Chuck.
Mike went over to stand with them, giving me another look to indicate that I was in no way welcome to join. I parked and walked into the ER instead. No one in the crowd of men said anything to me as I passed, or even nodded.
The waiting room was full of cops and patients waiting to be called—Chuck’s was one of three shootings that had come in that evening. I gave his name to the woman behind the counter, and she told me he was in the intensive care unit, and that only immediate family could go in. Not wanting to walk again past the men outside, who had become strangers now in downtown Philadelphia, and not wanting to leave Chuck in this strange place, I got lost in the wings of the hospital, finally walking out another way. On the drive home, I pondered whether Steve and the other guys had ignored me because they thought I shouldn’t be there, or simply because in white Philadelphia we aren’t supposed to know each other or stand together. Perhaps they’d just been preoccupied with their grief, and with figuring out who had shot Chuck: the conversations men hold when no women are present.
I’d been home for a while when Mike called to say that the cops had cleared them off the sidewalk and told Chuck’s uncle and girlfriend, who were waiting inside, that they had to go home. He said they’d all gone back to Chuck’s mother’s house, where they would be sitting with her until there was any news. Then he asked me if I had an update on Chuck’s condition.
“I’m at home.”
“You left?”
“You told me not to be there.”
Mike made a noise to indicate that I didn’t understand anything, and hung up. His surprise and annoyance that I’d left was enough encouragement; I drove back to the hospital immediately.
Chuck’s family and friends and neighbors had gone. When I asked at the desk, I was told that Chuck was no longer in the ICU; he was in the NICU, the neuro intensive care unit. Seeing his description in the computer, the white woman at the desk raised her eyebrows, and asked if I knew him. What kind of a question was that? I said yes. She responded: you know he got shot in the head, right? Yes. She asked who I was, and without thinking I said what I say when I go to visit Chuck in jail: that we’re cousins.
A white male doctor in his early thirties walked past the desk at that point and asked if I needed directions, offering to walk with me to the NICU. It was now after 3:00 a.m. We walked together through closed and empty wings, and I realized that I wasn’t scared of white men if they were wearing a lab coat. I explained to him that my cousin had been shot in the head. We moved through a bunch of security doors and into the NICU, and then right to the door of Chuck’s room.
Chuck lay in the raised bed, his upper body covered in casts, a brace closed around his neck. His face was propped up high, elongating his neck, and thick white bandages covered his head. His face was bloated and his expression unfamiliar, like it belonged to someone else. The small TV on the wall played commercials and he was propped up to face the screen, as if he were watching them. The doctor gave me his card, saying that if I needed anything I should ask for him.
As soon as the doctor left, the nurse told me I couldn’t be in the room; Chuck’s condition was very critical. She explained that the family spokespeople were his uncle and grandfather, that she could release information only to them. I said okay. But nobody told me to leave, so I stayed an hour, then another, there in the hallway outside Chuck’s room. Like I was standing watch.
At around 6:00 a.m., a flood of people rushed in with machines and tense expressions, and someone asked where the number to the family was. I yelled that I had it, and then a nurse picked up a speaker and yelled, “Code Blue.” A man came in and said he was from the organ-donor program. He told me that Chuck was brain-dead, his brain not functioning, the bullet had gone in and split into a dozen pieces, too much blood. Chuck had no heartbeat and they were trying to get it back, but only for harvesting the organs because his brain was dead. I wondered: Like a coma? Can’t they keep him alive with that? I called Miss Linda, Chuck’s mother; I didn’t know whether Chuck was dead, and if he was I didn’t want to be the one to tell her. So I handed the phone to the organ guy. He told her that he was very sorry, but Chuck’s brain was dead, too many pieces of bullet. He asked her if she’d like the organs to go to people who needed them, and she said, as I told him she would, that no part of his body would be going to anybody else.
I was asking to see him and they were telling me no, and I was crying, squatting on the floor among the medical staff, and then a guy told me that Chuck’s heart had stopped. I was texting Mike that he was gone and that no, they weren’t going to revive him; his brain was dead, it was just the organs they were hoping to save. Mike said, “Don’t move. I’m on my way.”
At this point it occurred to me that I’d snuck through a grea
t deal of hospital that night, and had absolutely no business being there. I asked Mike via text if Miss Linda was mad that I’d stuck around. Mike said no, and left it at that.
One of the nurses said I could go into Chuck’s room, so I crouched on the floor beside his bed. He’d been cleaned up again, the casts removed, the blood no longer oozing from his head. I put my arm over the rail and held his hand. I cried to him and told him that I loved him. I told him I was sorry. A kind male nurse came in and gave me a chair, offered apple juice. I sat with Chuck for an hour, maybe more. I noticed his watch lying on a white paper towel on the bedside table, and I remembered the day he got it, and how much he liked it, even though it was very plain, and I took it and put it in my purse, in the little pocket, and didn’t tell anyone.
I was still there like that when Alex and Chuck’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, Tanesha, entered the room. I immediately gave up my spot next to Chuck, in the chair the nice nurse had brought in. Tanesha was talking to him, and telling Alex and me what she saw: how he moved his arm because he was fighting, he always was a fighter; how she had followed the ambulance here. How could he leave her and leave his girls? She noticed that his body was beginning to grow stiff. Her legs were shaking and she was crying softly, saying she couldn’t go to work today. Said, “You are my baby, why did you leave me?” She said she should have stayed last night. She told about how she had found Chuck on the ground with Tim on top of him, how Tim had phoned her and said come here, so she pulled back around and saw Chuck on the ground. Tim still at the station, held for questioning. And his brother dead.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 30