On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  The funeral was held in a very small church, the coffin made of simple wood. Lamar hardly recognized anyone there, as most of the attendees were from his birth mother’s extended family, which he had never gotten to know. Later that day, he admitted to me that his adopted mother had paid for the bulk of the funeral and burial costs, though she hadn’t attended the service because she felt she might be unwelcome.

  Partway through the sermon, a man a bit younger than Lamar came to sit next to us in the pew. He wore coveralls and smelled of marijuana and clove cigarettes. His hair clumped haphazardly around his face, and he peered around at the other funeral attendees with visible concern. Lamar smiled an embarrassed and knowing smile, and told us that this man was his brother. We introduced ourselves to him and shook his hand.

  “How you been doing?” this man asked Lamar.

  “You know, staying out of trouble.”

  “Yeah? That’s good, that’s good.”

  “Yup. How you been doing?”

  “Hanging in there. I can’t stay too long—I got, like, three warrants on me.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lamar said, with a small chuckle.

  “Yeah. I just wanted to, you know . . .”

  “Okay. Well, it was good to see you.”

  “Yup . . .”

  When the man left, I asked Lamar how long it had been since he’d seen his brother.

  “Maybe six years. No, longer than that, ’cause Dre [his best friend from high school, who had been killed in a car accident] was still alive. Must be like ten years.”

  “Does he live nearby?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is he better stay the hell away from me. I can’t get mixed up in any of that. Dipping and dodging the police and all that.”

  “I know that’s right,” Keisha said.

  Lamar’s cousin shook his head, acknowledging the importance of steering clear of such people.

  A CLEAN FAMILY IN ISOLATION

  When I first met Miss Deena, she managed the basement level of a cafeteria on the western edge of Penn’s campus. There, she directed ten or so staff to serve sandwiches and boxed salads along with cookies, fruit, and granola bars. We met in 2001, when she hired me to make sandwiches and ring up orders. At 4’9” and approaching sixty-five, she commanded great respect from her employees, and led with a quiet and dignified reasonableness.

  Miss Deena lived with her daughter, Rochelle, and her daughter’s son, Ray, in a long-established mixed-income Black neighborhood. Rochelle was in her midforties, and recently laid off from a job as a classroom assistant at an elementary school. Ray was a senior in high school, and hoped to go to college.

  Like many people devoted to taxing jobs, Miss Deena seemed lonely and tired at home, uncomfortable even. She would return from her shift looking exhausted and walking gingerly, her energy clearly spent. After exchanging a few pleasantries, she’d change into her slippers, pat her small dog Dutchess, make herself a bowl of leftovers, and retreat upstairs to her bedroom, which her daughter and grandson dubbed “the fortress.” Sometimes she’d contemplate visiting the retirement community two blocks away to socialize; maybe she’d meet some nice man at their bingo night. On Saturday afternoons, she’d often iron her clothes for church, only to rehang them the next morning, not having the energy to go.

  Though Miss Deena was the financial provider in her household, little of the respect she commanded at work seemed to extend to the home she shared with her daughter and grandson. Rochelle and Ray seemed to dominate the social life of the home, using the kitchen and dining room to cook, go online, or watch TV. Occasionally, Miss Deena would come down and try to chat with them, but she often dozed off where she sat. Other times, she’d begin a story about the ceiling leak at work or her troubles with diabetes, but her daughter or grandson would interrupt her before she could finish, or simply walk out of the room. With shame, I also found myself guilty of this behavior; something about her way of telling stories made it difficult to stay focused.

  From September to December of 2002, I spent two to three evenings a week at Miss Deena’s house, first as a tutor for her two grandchildren, then gradually also as a guest. With her grandson Ray, it was SAT prep, college essays, and financial aid forms, to which his mother was tirelessly devoted. And in my sessions with her granddaughter Aisha, who stopped by Miss Deena’s after school, we concentrated on homework and strategies for staying away from the girls with whom she was getting into fights.

  The first encounter that I observed the family to have with a person caught up in the criminal justice system occurred one Tuesday afternoon in early November. The doorbell rang, and Ray got up to answer it. He didn’t invite the man in but spoke to him outside, with the door half-shut behind him. As he spoke to the man, Rochelle leaned toward the door with what looked to me like trepidation.

  “I just want to see if it’s who I think it is,” she said.

  When Ray came back, she looked at his face and said, “I knew it.”

  Ray told us that the man had asked for Tyrell, though he didn’t explain to me who Tyrell was. Before Ray could tell us what else the man had said, Rochelle launched into a series of stories about him: how he and his wife would come over empty handed and eat up the whole house; how his wife was “country” but street smart and eventually left him; how he’d come by the house even then, just by himself; how he had given a bath to his fourteen-year-old daughter when he said her armpits smelled. From what I could gather, this man was a friend of Tyrell’s, though it was still unclear who Tyrell was.

  Apparently, this man who hadn’t been allowed inside had just returned from jail, or perhaps a halfway house. Rochelle explained to me how he had held a great job at the electrical plant, but lost the position when he was charged with sexual harassment for picking up a female coworker and moving her out of the way to get to the Coke machine. Rochelle also didn’t like that he had once come to the house and insulted Ray, telling him he should mind his manners and behave. How dare he insult her son in his own house, in front of everyone! Rochelle described the man as “sort of bipolar.” Miss Deena said simply, “We still pray for him, but he can’t be trusted.”

  Talk of the visit passed; the family resumed their previous conversations. It wasn’t until a month later that I learned that the Tyrell this man had asked for was Miss Deena’s son and Aisha’s father, currently sitting in prison upstate. His crime, Rochelle told me, was dressing up as her, his own sister, walking into her bank, and attempting to empty her twelve-hundred-dollar savings account. “He had stockings on and everything,” she laughed half-heartedly. “Even a wig!”

  For this attempted robbery, Tyrell had been in prison for five years.

  It’s very likely that Miss Deena’s family had been making a special effort to conceal the fact of their imprisoned family member from me and spoke about him more frequently when I wasn’t around. But that any knowledge of Miss Deena’s imprisoned son could be kept from someone spending twenty hours a week in their living room, tutoring this man’s daughter, is important information—a testament to their success in carving out a life apart. In the families on 6th Street that I would later come to know, it would have been impossible to conceal such a thing, because daily life is flooded with court dates, prison visits, phone calls from probation or parole officers, parole regulations, and police raids.

  Also significant was the deep embarrassment Miss Deena’s family appeared to feel about Tyrell’s imprisonment. For many of the neighborhood families jail and prison were simply the places where many relatives were located.

  Once the topic of Miss Deena’s imprisoned son had been broached, he occasionally came up in conversation. On these days Rochelle would shake her head about him, as if to say, “Yeah, he’s my worthless brother. What can you do?”

  For Miss Deena and Rochelle, Tyrell’s imprisonment seemed a quiet sadness lurking in the background, a reminder of an earlier era in which their lives had been more chaotic and troubled. Sometimes Miss Deena expressed fe
ars about the havoc he might wreak on their calm and stable household if he returned to Philadelphia upon his release. At other times, she expressed shame at how her son had turned out and what he had done. Perhaps she also felt guilty that she could not to steer him in the right direction. But Tyrell seemed more of an offstage emptiness than a daily problem. Nobody went to visit him, and mostly nobody wrote to him, though they did accept his phone calls every so often and read his occasional letter.

  One afternoon in December 2002, Aisha drafted a response to her father:

  5:30–8:00 pm Miss Deena’s House

  Aisha lets me in, and I say hi to Dutchess. Miss Deena and her daughter are downstairs in the kitchen when I get there. They are talking about someone in the hospital. Aisha is working on a letter to send to her father. The letter explained that she was going to be a computer technician when she grew up. Her father had requested this info, and she had been worrying about her reply for some time. The letter also mentioned that she wanted to bake pies and cakes and cookies as good as grandma’s. Then it said she wanted to be just like her dad. At the very end, it said, “You told me when you come home you want to start youre won business [sic].” That was the last sentence. She signed it and I explained what a P.S. was, which she said she’d like to do, and later we got an envelope from her aunt.

  Aisha didn’t spend much time talking to her father or writing to him, nor did she ever visit him during the years he was away on the sentence discussed here. But she did occasionally talk about how angry she was at him, or reflect on the things he had said, giving me the sense that her father and his absence were never far from her thoughts.

  For Miss Deena, her daughter, Rochelle, and Rochelle’s son, Ray, their imprisoned family member seemed rarely to intrude into everyday life. This isn’t to say that they didn’t think about him, worry about him, or feel ashamed about him—just that on a day-to-day basis, they led their lives separately from his and from the involvement in the courts and the prisons that he required.

  A GRANDFATHER LIVING APART

  When his three grandsons were sitting in jail, the house quieted down and Mr. George would come outside, sit on the porch, and drink a beer. Sometimes he talked about the neighborhood’s better days or about his childhood.

  George Taylor, known as Mr. George to his grandsons’ friends, had come up from Georgia when he was five. His mother and father worked the cotton fields south of Atlanta; like many sharecroppers, they often came up short at the yearly settle, since the cost of the basic necessities they had bought on credit from the plantation store was more than what they cleared in the fields. Mr. George remembers his father cursing the owner of the small plantation for manipulating the numbers, which his father could not read, and the family leaving late at night for the next farm, his mother hopeful that this one would be better.2

  The Second World War meant opportunity up North, so with hundreds of thousands of fellow field hands, Mr. George’s father boarded a train to Philadelphia. He sent for his wife and three children later that year, once he found work. This was 1943.

  For most of Mr. George’s childhood, the family lived in a two-room flat in South Philadelphia. His father shoveled coal down at the docks; like many a stevedore, he showed up for work not knowing if he’d get any and faced long hours of backbreaking labor if he did. Mr. George’s mother cooked and cleaned house for two white families in downtown Philadelphia. To his father’s shame, it was this money that really supported the family. Neither job paid as much as had been promised when the family made the move North during the war.

  Mr. George’s parents fought a lot in their cramped apartment, but the couple stayed together and had two more children. Mr. George graduated from high school with strong grades and entered the US Army in 1959. Anything to get out of the house, he explained.

  Mr. George did well in his newly integrated unit and left the military with a bad knee and an honorable discharge before the Vietnam War began. It was a piece of luck that he never forgot. He applied for a job with the postal service, and worked as a clerk at a branch in Southwest Philadelphia from the age of twenty-one until he retired at sixty-five.

  A few years after taking this job, Mr. George bought a three-bedroom row home on a quiet, tree-lined block in the neighborhood of 6th Street, right at the edge of the city limits. At the time, he was raising his young daughter, Linda, alone. His wife had taken off with another man.

  Mr. George and his daughter were among the first Black families to move to the neighborhood, and after them came physicians, bank tellers, government workers, and shop owners. Like Mr. George, these middle-class families hoped to escape the crowded and run-down ghetto by moving just past its outer edges.

  The move to 6th Street represented the culmination of years of effort for Mr. George and his family, but in many ways his military career, his job at the post office, and now this spacious house in a good neighborhood also exemplified the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. Gone were the days of separate drinking fountains, perpetual debt, and police harassment. In one generation, the Taylors had moved from second-class tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South to white-collar respectability in the North.

  Not that their new neighbors had exactly welcomed them with open arms. One of the families that moved in shortly after Mr. George and Linda got a brick thrown through their living room window, and Linda refused to sleep in her own bedroom after that.

  Mr. George hoped his daughter would grow up in an integrated community, but by the 1980s every white family in the 6th Street neighborhood had packed up and moved. Legal segregation had ended, but not a single white student attended his daughter’s school. Even so, 6th Street remained a middle-class area, less violent than other Black neighborhoods nearby, with cleaner sidewalks and better-kept lawns.

  In the mid-1980s this, too, began to change. Developers started placing low-income housing in the area, initiatives that the older residents didn’t have the political power to resist. It was this second wave of less refined residents, George felt, that set his daughter, Linda, down the wrong path.

  By her own account, Miss Linda’s father had spoiled her hopelessly as a child, especially after her mother left. She came of age at the height of the crack boom and dropped out of high school during her junior year. The men she dated worked at the bottom of the crack business, which at the time offered decent wages and even the promise of wealth to unemployed young men growing up around 6th Street. Many of her boyfriends also shared her addiction. During a decade of hard living, Linda gave birth to three sons: Chuck in 1984, Reggie in 1987, and Tim in 1991. By this time, the ghetto Mr. George had worked so hard to escape seemed to have grown up around them.

  By the late 1980s, the neighborhood of 6th Street and others like it had a heavy police presence. At first Mr. George and his neighbors viewed this as a welcome sign of change: the neighborhood had been neglected by law enforcement for far too long. But as more and more young men disappeared into jail and prison, Mr. George and his neighbors started to question the motivation behind this ramped-up policing. Some suspected that under the cloak of tough-on-crime rhetoric was white discomfort about Black civic and economic incorporation. To put it more bluntly, they figured that white people were not going to accept Black people as full citizens without a fight.3

  When I met Mr. George’s family, the house he shared with his daughter Linda and her three sons had deteriorated well past the point of basic decency. Small roaches and ants crawled incessantly across the countertops and floors, over the couch and TV, and frequently onto the house’s inhabitants. The house itself reeked of cigarette smoke, urine, vomit, and alcohol. In the kitchen, cabinets were sticky with grease and dirt; cat urine and feces covered a corner of the floor. Ashtrays in the kitchen, dining room, and living room collected mountains of old cigarette butts and would frequently topple to the floor, dumping their contents into the carpet. Linda refused to throw the butts away, insisting that they were her reserves when she had no money for ci
garettes. The upholstered couches, the living room carpet, and the walls were stained a monochromatic brown—the aftermath of years of smoke and dirt. A gaping hole in the floor between the toilet and the tub in the upstairs bathroom made washing up or relieving oneself quite perilous. The floor and wall tile had also crumbled away.

  Yet the state of the house’s interior was hardly as disconcerting or worrisome as the daily lives of its inhabitants. By my count, the police came to the house thirty-two times over the six years I knew the Taylors. After the police on one of these calls broke the lock on the front door, Miss Linda started sleeping in the living room with a shotgun by her side, in case someone should push the door open and try to rob the family. Also during my time on 6th Street, each of her three sons got into shootouts with other young men in the neighborhood, and for a while afterward Miss Linda did not feel it was safe to walk outside alone.

  Amid this chaos, filth, legal drama, and violence, Mr. George somehow succeeded in living a life apart. He would leave in the midmorning and return in the early evening, often bringing his longtime companion home with him. The couple lived in a separate apartment on the second floor, complete with a kitchenette and bathroom Mr. George had built himself during the 1980s. During the day, the heavy door to this apartment stayed firmly shut with the help of a deadbolt. In case his daughter or grandsons should find their way in through the windows, Mr. George had padlocked his refrigerator. This way, the rest of the family and whoever else they had running through the house couldn’t eat up the groceries that his companion brought over on Sunday afternoons.

  I had seen Mr. George’s apartment only once, when I came up the stairs and knocked on the door to tell him that Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, was giving birth. As he opened the door, I glimpsed shiny white linoleum floors and a spotless countertop. I’m not sure if he was able to keep the roaches out—they had so deeply infested the rest of the house—but I saw none on the walls or the floor, and the room itself smelled fresh, like clean laundry.