On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Read online

  Despite their continued promises to visit and to send money, after three months not one of Reggie’s boys had made the trip. Only Veronica came. She wrote him about two letters every week, with him writing two or maybe three letters back. Sometimes she and I would go together to visit him. On Reggie’s birthday, Veronica wrapped a tiny bag of marijuana in a twenty-dollar bill and smuggled it to him in the visiting room.

  One afternoon, Veronica and I were sitting on Miss Linda’s second-floor porch playing Spades with her. Though usually quiet, Veronica spoke for the longest I’d heard:

  Ain’t none of his boys go visit him, none of them. . . . The only people that visit is me and Alice. Like, that should tell him something. Your homies ain’t really your homies—I’m the only one that’s riding. I’m the only real friend he got. Who’s putting money on your books? They said they was going to put some on there, but they ain’t do it. The only money he got on his books is from me and you.

  It seemed that Veronica, who had dropped Reggie while he was on the run, who was humiliated as a weak and disloyal person, was now, through the work of visiting and writing letters, reborn a faithful and stalwart companion.

  A woman can also salvage her relationship and self-worth by gradually letting the details of a man’s confinement fade, and joining with him to paint her conduct in a more positive light. Eight times I noted that a woman visiting a man in custody would join with him to revise the events leading up to his arrest and trial in ways that downplayed her role in his confinement.

  When Mike was twenty-four and his children were three and six years old, he began dating a woman from North Philly named Michelle. Within a month they had become very close: Michelle’s three-year-old son started calling Mike Daddy, and Michelle’s picture went up on Mike’s mother’s mantelpiece next to his graduation picture and the school photos of his son and daughter. He started spending most nights at her apartment.

  Michelle was the first Puerto Rican woman Mike had ever dated, and he had high hopes that her ethnic background would signify strong loyalty. “With Spanish chicks,” he said, “it’s all about family. Family is everything to them. Black chicks ain’t like that. They love the cops.”

  Michelle and Mike both explained to me that Michelle was nothing like the mother of Mike’s children, Marie, who so frequently called the police on him. Since Michelle’s father and brothers sold drugs, she was used to the police and the courts, and wouldn’t cave under their pressure. With strong memories of her mother struggling with her father’s legal troubles all through her childhood, Michelle told me that she was a second-generation rider. She also said that she loved Mike more than any man she had ever met, including her son’s father, who was currently serving ten years in federal prison.

  Michelle’s loyalty would be tested three months into their relationship. Mike missed a court appearance, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. Upon hearing the news, Michelle assured me that nothing—not the cops, not the judge, not the nut-ass prison guards—would break them apart.

  At around four o’clock the following Friday morning, she phoned me sobbing: the cops had knocked her door down and taken Mike. He tried to run, and they beat him out on the sidewalk with batons. She said they beat him so badly that she couldn’t stop screaming. Why did they have to do that? They had already put him in handcuffs.

  At the precinct, the police kept Mike cuffed to a desk for eighteen hours in the underwear they had found him in. The next morning, they brought Michelle down to the station and questioned her for three hours. Then they showed Mike Michelle’s statement, which detailed his activities, his associates, and the locations of his drug-selling business. When he got to county jail, he wrote her a letter, which she showed me:

  Don’t come up here, don’t write, don’t send no money. Take all your shit from my mom’s, matter of fact, I’ll get her to drop that shit off. You thought I wasn’t going to find out that you a rat? They showed me everything. Fuck it. I never gave a fuck about you anyway. You was just some pussy to me, and your pussy not even that good!

  Mike spread the word that Michelle was a snitch, and this news was the hot topic for a few days between his boys on the block and those locked up.

  Incensed and humiliated, Michelle explained to me that Mike had no right to be angry with her. He clearly didn’t care about her. In fact, despite all his claims to the contrary, the police had shown her the text messages and phone calls that proved he was still seeing Marie. Not only that, but Mike had tried to pin the drugs on her and to claim that the gun in the apartment belonged to her father. Michelle wrote him a scathing letter back:

  I should have known that you were still messing with your baby-mom. I felt like a fool when they showed me your cell phone calls and texts at 2 and 3 in the morning. And don’t even try to tell me that you were calling your kids, ’cause no 7 year old is up at 2 a.m. Did you think I wasn’t going to find out you tried to put that shit on me? I read every word. That bitch can have you.

  With concrete evidence of Mike’s infidelity, Michelle came to see that Mike did not value or respect her: their relationship had been a sham. She began to regard her past association with him as sordid and shameful, and her present efforts to protect him humiliating. At the same time, the police were showing Mike that she had betrayed him. Injured and humiliated, he rebuffed and belittled her just as she faced indisputable evidence of his duplicity, and confronted the possibility that this man who didn’t love her might let her hang for his crimes.

  Two days later, the cops took Michelle out to the suburbs where Mike had been selling. According to the police report, she gave up his stash spot, his runner, and all the customers she knew about.13

  A friend of Mike’s explained it like this:

  The girl said, “Fuck it, I’ve only known him for three months, I want to keep my kid.” Plus, her mom is in a nursing home, and she has custody of her two little sisters, so you know they told her they was going to kick her out the spot (the Section 8 building) and take her son and her sisters and shit. She has too much on the line. That bitch ain’t think twice. She was like: What do you want to know?

  After Mike’s mother and grandmother and I attended his court dates and saw Michelle’s statement, Mike declared that she was a snitch, and stopped talking to her for a while. The news spread quickly to Mike’s boys—both those on the block and those locked up.

  Though at first Michelle was able to justify her actions by noting that the police had threatened to take her children away and that Mike had in fact been cheating on her, these details seemed to have been forgotten in the neighborhood’s collective memory as the weeks dragged on, and she increasingly came to feel that she had betrayed a good man. As his trial dates came and went, she began visiting him more often, and sending money and letters. Slowly, Michelle and Mike began to reconcile.

  Some months later, Mike and I were chatting in the visiting room. He mentioned that the girlfriend of one of his friends had recently testified against that man in court. “She’s a fucking rat,” Mike said. “She don’t give a fuck about him.” We debated the circumstances of this, and I commented on how difficult it is to remain silent when the police threaten to evict you or take your kids. As an example, I noted that while Michelle clearly loved Mike, she had informed on him under just this kind of police pressure.

  At this point our weekly gossip turned into a heated argument. Other visitors in the room began to stare as Mike forcefully explained to me that Michelle had not snitched. In fact, it was the woman in whose house he had been renting a room that had given the statement against him.

  “You supposed to be keeping tabs! Like, that’s your job. You’re getting stupid. You used to remember every fucking thing.”

  “I really thought it was Michelle,” I replied limply.

  “What the fuck good are you if you can’t even get basic shit right?”

  My confidence as the group’s chronicler quite shaken, I apologized profusely. At his next court date
a month later, I asked Mike’s lawyer to show me the statement again. Checking over the lengthy police report, I realized that my notes were accurate. Michelle had informed on Mike, on three separate occasions. I wasn’t sure whether she had convinced Mike that she had remained silent, or they were both simply trying to put it behind them, but I decided it would be best not to bring it up again.

  On our next visit, Mike lamented that one of his boys was continuing to call Michelle a snitch.

  “Niggas is gonna hate,” he said. “That’s been my whole life, since middle school. Everybody wants what I got.”

  I nodded my head in solidarity.

  THE DIZZYING JOURNEY FROM RIDER TO SNITCH

  Many women in the 6th Street neighborhood view the forcible and unexpected removal of a boyfriend, brother, or son to be, as Mike’s girlfriend once put it, “the end of everything.” When a woman gets the news that the police may be after the man in her life, she may take it as her obligation to help him hide from the authorities. Through protecting him, she makes a claim for herself as a loyal girlfriend or a good mother, an honorable and moral human being.

  If the police never come looking for the man, she can continue to believe that she would do her utmost to shield him from the authorities, should the occasion for bravery and sacrifice arise. But if the police do come, they typically put pressure on her to provide information.

  For the police and the district attorney, the task of turning intimates into informants is mostly a technical problem, one of many that arise in the work of rounding up and processing enough young men to meet informal arrest quotas and satisfy their superiors. But the role the police ask women to play in the identification, arrest, and conviction of the men they love presents deeper problems for women: problems for their sense of self.

  To be sure, some of the women I came to know on 6th Street didn’t seem to care very much whether their legally entangled family members or neighbors were in jail or not. Some even considered the confinement of these troublesome young men a far preferable alternative to dealing with them on the outside. But those who took these positions tended to keep their distance from the men the police were after, and consequently tended not to know enough about their whereabouts to be very useful to the authorities. It is the women actively involved in the daily affairs of legally precarious men who prove most helpful in bringing about their arrest, so those women who consider the possible confinement of a son or boyfriend a grave event, a wrenching apart of their daily life, are the ones the police enlist to capture and confine them.

  When the police begin their pressure, when they raid a woman’s house or pull her in for questioning, a woman faces a crisis in her relationship and in the image she has of herself: the police ask her to help imprison the very man she has taken it as a sacred duty to protect. Not only do the police ask her, they make her choose between her own security and his freedom. For many of the women I have come to know on 6th Street, this choice is one they are asked to make again and again. It is part of what enduring the police and the prisons is about.

  Relatives and neighbors looking in on this crisis from the outside may see a woman’s options in stark terms: she can prove herself strong in the face of threats and violence and protect the man, or she can cave under the pressure and betray him. If she withstands the police, she will garner public acclaim as a rider. If she caves, she will suffer humiliation as an abandoner or an informant.

  But as a woman comes under increasing police pressure, her perspective on right and wrong begins to shift. As the police roll out their techniques of persuasion, she finds herself increasingly cut off from the man she loves, and interacting more and more with the authorities. The techniques they use to gain her cooperation turn her basic understandings about herself and her significant others upside down. She learns that her children and her home aren’t safe, nor are the other people she holds dear. She begins to see her daily life as an almost endless series of crimes, for which she may be arrested at any moment the police see fit. She learns that the man she loves doesn’t care about her, and comes to see her involvement with him as sordid, shameful, and pathetic.

  As the police show the woman that her boyfriend has cheated, or that her son may try to blame her for his crimes, she comes to realize that protecting him from the authorities may not be such a good idea after all. Threatened with eviction, the loss of her children, her car, or all future housing benefits, her resolve to shield him weakens. By the time the police assure her of confidentiality, she begins to see the merits of working with the authorities.

  . . .

  There is an excitement surrounding wanted men. They are, in a certain way, where the action is.14 But wanted men also stop coming around as much or as routinely. Their contributions to the household, though perhaps meager to begin with, may cease altogether. Their life on the run may be exciting, but it is a holding pattern; it has no forward motion. To some degree, a man’s wanted status demands that a woman live in the present, and this present is a dizzying and uncertain one.

  Out of this morass, the police offer the woman a dubious path: she can turn against the man; she can come over to their side. As she begins to orient herself to the their way of thinking, she finds a way out of the dizzying holding pattern created by the man’s evasion and the police’s pressure. She is now able to chart some forward path, and leave the upside-down world the raids and interrogations have created. Maybe he will hate her and she will hate herself, but at least she is moving forward.

  As the police make it harder for her to remain on the man’s side, they construct a vision of what life would be like without him, independent of the involvement with crime and with the police that he requires. They create a distinctive path for the woman that involves a change in how she judges herself and others.

  A woman who contemplates changing sides discovers that a number of lines of action become available to her. She may urge the man to turn himself in, or, if pressure persists, she may give him an ultimatum: give yourself up or I will. She may openly call the police on the man, in plain view of their mutual family and friends. She may turn him in secretly, and attempt to conceal that she has cooperated with the authorities. Alternately, she may cut off ties with him, refuse to speak to him anymore, or kick him out of the house.

  During this process, the pressure imposed by the police allows the woman to reconcile herself to her behavior, and the police’s techniques of persuasion come in handy as justifications for her actions. But when the man is taken into custody and the pressure from the police lifts, it becomes increasingly difficult for the woman and for the rest of the community to accept what she did. She must now deal head-on with the public humiliation and private shame that come with abandoning or informing on the man she professed to care for.

  It is in the nature of policing that officers tend to interact most with those in whose behavior they find fault, such that the woman’s encounters with the police begin when she refuses to comply and end when she comes over to their side. That is, her intense and intimate association with the authorities lasts only for the duration of their denigration and her resistance. Once she cooperates and gives the man up, the police abandon their interest in her. At the moment she changes sides, she finds herself surrounded by neighbors and family who mock and disdain her, who consider her actions immoral and betraying.

  Throughout this process, the woman takes a journey rife with emotional contradictions. The news that the man in her life has become wanted prompts a renewal of her attachment, such that she strengthens her commitment to him just as he ceases to play an active role in her daily life, to furnish her with any concrete future, or to assist her financially. When the man is taken into custody and the pressure to inform on him lifts, a woman can pledge her devotion once more and make amends. Unlike life on the run, his sentence or trial has a clear end point. She can coordinate her life around the visiting hours, and the phone calls in the morning and evening. She can make plans for his return.15 But since sh
e has contributed to his confinement, her attempts to repair the relationship coincide with his most heated anger against her. Even if he forgives her, a woman can renew her commitment to him, and return to regarding him as good and honorable, only after he has left her daily life most completely, as he sits in jail or prison.

  Once a woman’s son or partner is incarcerated, she may come full circle. As she did when she first got the news that the authorities might come looking, she returns to thinking that the police, the courts, and the prisons are unjust, and she will do just about anything to protect and support the man she loves.

  A few skilled intimates do not travel the path the police put forward, as they are able to resist the pressure in the first place. They learn to anticipate raids, and to mitigate the damage that a raid may cause. They learn to make a scene and become a problem for police by vocally demanding their rights, by attracting a large audience, or by threatening to sue or go to the newspapers. They practice concerted silence, learning how to reveal as little as possible. They distract the officers from the direction the man ran, or the box in which incriminating evidence may be found. They also make counteroffers, such as sexual favors, or provide information about someone else the police might be interested in. Their refusal to cave under pressure means that their conduct calls for little explanation, and their relationships need few repairs.