On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 16

  BRIANNA: He don’t care. I mean, he care, but he don’t care enough. He going to say [he was saying], “If I get locked up, how I’ma take care of the baby?” It’s not like they got him on a body [a murder case] or something—if they did come grab him [arrest him at the hospital], all he would do is sit for a quick three months [the minimum for a probation violation]. The longest it would be would be like six months. Plus, it’s not even a guarantee that they would come grab him.

  BRIANNA’S AUNT: Keisha baby-dad was up here last month [for the birth of their baby] and he came home. That nigga had a couple jawns [warrants] on him.

  BRIANNA: He just don’t want to be up there no more [in jail] because he was there like all last year.

  BRIANNA’S MOTHER: But think about it, like, in ten years when he looks back, he’s going to wish he saw his baby born, he’s not going to care that he was sitting [was in jail] for a couple months.

  BRIANNA: Exactly.

  Chuck’s decision to stay home hurt his baby-mom, not only because he had failed to attend the birth of their daughter, but also because he had refused to risk his own safety on behalf of his new family. For Brianna, his willingness to take this risk stood as a folk test of his attachment to her. His failure to show up was a hurtful act, a demonstration of his lack of commitment.

  Though young men with warrants or under court supervision are expected to risk their own safety for the people they love, a man may also measure his feelings for a woman according to how little legal risk he allows her to take on his behalf. Mike and Chuck agreed that they’d ask only “hood rats” to smuggle drugs into the visiting room when they were in county jail, never a relative or a real girlfriend, as the risk of arrest was too great. They looked down on other, younger men who thought nothing of having their main girlfriend or baby-mom run balloons of marijuana or pills into the visiting room.6

  Protecting a loved one from arrest could serve as an apology as well, healing the breach of past wrongs. Chuck and Reggie’s mother, Miss Linda, was a consistent user of crack, and would periodically take the money from their pants pockets while they slept (this is called “digging in pockets”). It got to the point that the brothers came up with a series of hiding places in the house, including a hole in the wall and a loose floorboard. Typically, they had only small sums, but one winter night, their mother discovered four hundred dollars in Chuck’s back pocket.

  Chuck told Mike and me that when he woke up and found the money gone, he confronted Miss Linda, who flatly denied taking it. Chuck declared that he was finished with her, that this was the last time—he would be sleeping at friends’ houses or his girlfriend’s house from now on.

  At the time, Chuck was buying drugs with Mike and Steve; they were pooling their money so they could buy a larger amount at a lower price. They were buying on consignment, receiving the drugs first and making payment after the sales. The four hundred dollars was Chuck’s portion of the money they owed their supplier or “connect.” This meant that Mike, Steve, and Chuck couldn’t pay him back—and worse, couldn’t get any more drugs to sell. They were concerned about what their connect would do to them, and also how they’d make any money in the future.

  MIKE: I told you not to sleep at your mom’s, nigga! You a nut for that. You a fucking nut. Who she give it to [which drug dealer did she give the money to]? I’ma fuck that nigga up, man. I told those niggas from John Street don’t go around there, don’t serve her [sell drugs to Chuck’s mother]. How many times I got to tell them don’t serve her?

  True to his word, Chuck stopped sleeping at Miss Linda’s and didn’t answer when she called his cell phone. This went on for two weeks, until the police showed up at Miss Linda’s door, looking for Chuck’s younger brother Reggie. The officers came to the house four times over the next two weeks. Each time, Miss Linda refused to give them any information, though she said they threatened to take her youngest son, Tim, away and cut off her welfare. Chuck began phoning to check on her and see how she was doing. When the police stopped coming, he moved back home.

  It seemed as if by protecting Reggie from the police, and by withstanding the violence of the raids, Miss Linda made amends for the money she’d stolen. The first night that Chuck was back sleeping at her house, she beamed: “I always protect my sons. You can say a lot of things about me, but I’m not letting them take my babies.”

  Just as protecting someone from arrest is considered an act of commitment and affection, carelessly putting others at risk is taken to be a sign of negligence, an indication of a person’s bad character.

  It is a warm spring day, and Anthony and I are sitting on Miss Linda’s steps along with a few neighbors and friends. Miss Linda pokes her head out the kitchen door and says her stomach is talking; she asks Ant to go and get hoagies. She tells him she also wants three bags of pork rinds. Her youngest son, Tim, who is fifteen now, gives Anthony two dollars for loosies (single cigarettes) and says that he wants his change back, and that Ant better not smoke any of them before he gets back. I get up and say, “I’ll go with you,” and Miss Linda jokes, “Yeah, you better go, ’cause Ant ain’t got no money.” As we get up to go, Miss Linda starts trying to persuade a neighbor to play spades with her, a dollar a hand. He is protesting that he has to go to work soon.

  Anthony and I walk down the alley and over to Pappi’s store. Ant puts the pork-rind chips on the counter and says, “Let me get three.” Pappi’s son passes him three single cigarettes, which cost a dollar fifty. I pick up the hoagies from the back counter where Pappi’s youngest daughter is on the grill, and she hands them to me silently.

  As Anthony and I walk out of the store, we see two cop cars stopped about fifty yards to the left. Two people, a young man and a young woman who look no older than 15, stand facing the side of one of the cars, with their arms up over their heads and their forearms leaning on the car. A Black, heavy-set cop in his forties is patting down the young man while a thinner white cop in his midthirties stands nearby.

  As he crosses the street in front of me, the white cop looks at Ant, who immediately starts running toward Miss Linda’s house. The cop starts off after him and by the time I catch up, Anthony is walking out of Miss Linda’s house in handcuffs, followed by the cop. The cop is on the radio asking for someone to search the bushes in the front of the house; he thinks Anthony threw a gun there.

  Anthony is yelling that his lip is busted and bleeding. Then he turns to me and says, “It’s cool, A, I’ma be home in a minute. It’s cool,” to which Miss Linda replies, “Shit. He ain’t staying here.”

  The cop puts Anthony into the backseat, placing his hand on top of Ant’s head as he gets into the car. Anthony is talking at me through the closed window, but I can’t hear him; I shrug at him and shake my head. Two more squad cars pull up into the alleyway with sirens blaring and lights flashing. Neighbors are coming outside or leaning out of their windows to look.

  The cop who chased down Anthony asks Miss Linda her name, whether this is her house, and what her relationship is to Anthony. She flatly denies that he lives with her and says he is just someone she knows from around the neighborhood. The cop asks her for his name, and she says, “Ask him what his name is.” The cop asks her who I am to her, and Miss Linda replies, “That’s my fucking white girl. Is it a problem?” The cop tells her not to use profanity and to take a seat.

  Miss Linda begins yelling at Anthony through the closed window of the police car: “Don’t you ever bring the law to my house! That’s what you get, nigga! That’s what the fuck you get. Don’t think I’ma take your calls, either; don’t even bother putting this number on your list!”

  The cop tells us not to go back inside, and I wonder where Tim is. It seems to take a long time for the police to fill out the paperwork, and a small crowd has now gathered at the end of the alley.

  When the police leave, Miss Linda goes inside and calls to Tim, who has been hiding in a fallen wall of the basement. “Ain’t nobody looking for you,” she says as he craw
ls out.

  Miss Linda is now convinced the police will come back that night and raid the house. She grabs her glass pipes and her marijuana stash from the top shelf of the glass china cabinet in the dining room and phones Mike, asking him to come for Chuck’s gun. She leaves to put her contraband in her secret hiding spot and returns a few minutes later, looking calmer, though she continues to say over and over how this has messed up her whole day. Then Reggie calls from jail, and she picks up the phone and says:

  “This dickhead runs into the house! Brings the cops all in here. They found the holster, the bullets. Don’t ask me which fucking bullets; I don’t know which bullets. Mike needs to get back here and get all the shit out of here, before they come back again. Because they definitely coming back—if not tonight, tomorrow night.”

  After pouring another drink and taking a drag from a neighbor’s cigarette, she starts talking about past raids on her house. Then she says, “Anthony’s problem is he is selfish. He don’t think. They almost took my son today, and I just got him back two fucking weeks ago [from juvenile detention]. Not even two weeks.”

  And so the giving and taking of legal risk becomes a way that people in the neighborhood of 6th Street define their relationships, honor or dishonor someone, and draw moral distinctions among one another. Giving up another person under pressure is seen as a shameful act of betrayal. Doing so voluntarily is considered an act of retribution, or the start of an open conflict. The unintentional bringing of “heat” is taken as a sign of negligence or of bad character.

  . . .

  From these examples, we can see that the heavy presence of the police and the looming threat of prison enter into the rituals of gift-giving that unite people. Like the giving of food, shelter, or child care,7 protecting loved ones from the police, or risking arrest on their behalf, becomes part of an ongoing give-and-take that creates and sustains social relationships.

  This brings us to an interesting wrinkle. Despite the norm of silence and the high value placed on protecting others, doing so—particularly at personal expense—doesn’t always reflect well on the person making the sacrifice. Someone can put herself at risk too freely, or for people with whom she is not perceived to be on terms intimate enough to merit the gesture, thus diminishing the value of the protection and that of the giver. Sometimes people are perceived to protect others in a desperate or manipulative way, to increase their intimacy with someone who may not otherwise be interested in a closer connection. Such was the case when Chuck’s ex-girlfriend allowed him to stay at her place for a month while he was on the run, without asking for anything in return but his company.

  Protecting others, or risking one’s safety for their wellbeing, is hazardous to the giver not only because of the risk of arrest or other harm, but also because either action signals a strength of attachment that may later be mocked. For instance, a woman may risk arrest on behalf of her boyfriend by sneaking drugs into jail, only to find out that this man has cheated on her, or has told others that she means little to him. A man may protect a friend with whom he has been arrested, only to learn later the friend gave him up quickly when the police offered him a deal. Hence, protecting others opens a person up to the humiliation of being scorned or used.

  THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LAW

  We have seen how the looming threat of prison can provide opportunities for someone to demonstrate love, affection, or antagonism toward others; make claims about his own character or sentiments; or draw conclusions about other people’s.

  When Anthony ran into Miss Linda’s house as the police chased him, he had clearly placed others at risk, and Miss Linda’s anger was understood to be an appropriate reaction to his thoughtless actions. But often it is not so clear who has placed whom at risk, or how much risk an individual had really added to what a person already faced. If someone has protected another and risked arrest to do so, disputes may arise concerning how much protection was given, or how serious the risk really was. The giver may feel that the recipient has undervalued the gesture, that he’s squandered his safety on someone who didn’t appreciate it. Or the recipient may feel that the giver is trying to claim credit for a gesture that wasn’t intended to be benevolent. Because police encounters, court hearings, and probation meetings have unpredictable outcomes, it’s not always obvious how a given brush with the authorities would have gone if a person had acted differently. The functionality of run-ins with the law as expressive opportunities in social relationships is complicated by the inherent ambiguity of these encounters.

  The following extended excerpt from field notes reveals this ambiguity:

  We are going OT—out of town. I am driving with a girlfriend of mine from school, who sits across from me in the passenger seat. Mike and Chuck are sitting in the backseat. They are smoking an L (a marijuana cigarette), passing it back and forth and ashing it out the window.

  A cop car flashes us to pull over. My girlfriend yells, “Oh, shit!” and gets a bottle of perfume out of her purse; she begins spraying the car and the rest of us. “Grass,” from the Gap. Mike throws the butt of the L out the window as we pull over onto the gravel.

  Two white police officers come to the car and ask me for my license and registration. I ask them why I am being pulled over, and one says that I was going over the speed limit. They walk back to their car to run my name and the tags. As we are waiting, Mike asks how fast I’d been driving, and I feel that he’s accusing me. Chuck says quietly, “She wasn’t going more than like a pound,” which means fifty.

  One of the officers comes back to the window and says that he smelled marijuana when he approached the vehicle, and asks us all to get out of the car. They tell my girlfriend and me to stand over to the side, and they tell Mike and Chuck to face the car, put their hands up on the hood, and spread their legs. One officer is radioing for a female cop to come and search us, though in the end he never bothers with it. He pats Mike down as he is pressed up against the car.

  The officer who had been on the radio begins searching the car. I watch as he pulls the contents out of the side door pockets and from under the seat. Mostly papers of mine from school. I think about what could incriminate us there. In the side door pocket on the driver’s side, the officer finds some needle-and-tube contraption. He sort of chuckles and holds it up to the other officer like he’s found something good. I explain that it is part of the kit Mike’s baby-mom is learning from in her studies to become a nurse’s assistant, which is in fact exactly what it is. He lets it go.

  The officer searching Mike demands to know who was smoking marijuana, who it belonged to. Mike says loudly, “It was mine. It was mine.” The officer asks, “Where is it?” Mike says, “There ain’t no more, I smoked it all.” As the officer turns toward us, Mike says to him, “They don’t have nothing on them, they don’t even smoke weed.”

  After Mike declares that it was his marijuana, the officer searches him again, opening the pockets of his jacket and jeans. A small bag of marijuana falls out. The officer puts handcuffs on him and says that he will be taken to the police station and charged. He tells the three of us to go, without ever touching me or my girlfriend. I ask if we can stay and wait to hear where they are taking Mike, but they say no, and order us to drive away.

  Later, Mike tells me that at the precinct they made him pull up his testicles and cough, and a small bag of cocaine dropped from his anus. Now he’s being charged with possession of marijuana and possession of cocaine, though very small amounts of both. Later, I ask Chuck if he had drugs on him, and he nods. In the lining of your jeans? He nods again. But they hadn’t searched him.

  I know that Mike must be bailed out quickly if he’s going to make it out on bail at all, because he’s on probation in Bucks County. At some point the detainer from that probation will show up in the system, and then his bail will be denied, because a person on probation isn’t allowed to make bail in another case.

  Chuck falls easily asleep, not seeming concerned. My girlf
riend and I stay up all night, going to different houses and collecting money. When I get the call from Mike the next morning that he has had the bail hearing and we need to come to the courthouse with $500, we are ready, and post it within the hour. I drive out to the county jail alone. I wait for many hours for Mike to be released, twisting my hair in ringlets and trying to ignore a young man who keeps asking if I am here for my boyfriend. Then Mike comes out, and we drive home.

  As soon as he walks out the door, I am full of descriptions of recent events—how we found out what police station he was being held at, who we got the money from, how we ran to the courthouse before anyone found out about the detainer to post the bail, how quickly I drove to the county jail to get him, how long I waited, who was in the waiting room, how I dodged their advances, and so forth.

  Mike stops me finally, telling me to be quiet, looking frustrated and angry.

  “What are you mad for? I spend two days making sure you come home, and now you have attitude?”

  Mike explains that I don’t appreciate the gravity of what has happened, of how close I’d come to being arrested. He had prevented this by taking the blame himself, which he didn’t have to do.

  I protest that since it was in fact his marijuana and cocaine, and he was the one who’d been smoking in the car, I shouldn’t have to thank him for keeping me safe from an arrest.

  He counters with the argument that his actions during this police encounter differed from his habitual practice. He says that when the cops come, people typically remove the drugs from their person and place them in the car if they can’t toss them successfully from the vehicle. The drugs get found in the car, nobody admits guilt, and down at the police station the chips fall where they may. Most of the time, Mike explains, this means that the driver takes the fall, even if he wasn’t the one carrying the drugs. By not placing the drugs in the car, and by vocally admitting his guilt at the start of the search, he’d spared the rest of us from arrest, and me—the driver—in particular.