How did these two households coexist under the same roof? After a few years of knowing the Taylors, I noted a number of tacit house rules, which Linda and her boys more or less stuck to—or at least acknowledged when breaking them. One rule was that no friends or partners could live in the house. Mr. George wasn’t running a shelter or a hotel for everybody in the neighborhood, he said. An exception was made for Chuck’s two daughters, who frequently came to stay for weeks at a time since shortly after their birth. Another rule was that Mr. George would not tolerate loud noise inside the house or outside his window after about 11:00 p.m. Often when we were sitting outside, Chuck or Reggie would tell their friends to pipe down around this time. A third house rule was that if the police ever came looking for one of the boys or a friend of theirs, Mr. George would immediately pick up the phone and alert the police the next time he saw the young man in question. He refused to shield his grandsons from the law.
In supporting the family, Mr. George contributed a great deal: he paid the mortgage, the heating, water, and phone bills. He would not, he said, pay for collect calls from jail or prison and did not allow this service on the landline, which he limited to local calls. He also gave Linda money to buy food and other household items. And he allowed his daughter and grandsons to live in his house rent free, though Miss Linda sometimes persuaded her sons to pay rent directly to her without relaying any to her father.
In the day-to-day activities of his daughter and grandsons, Mr. George didn’t appear to intervene much. Miss Linda had free reign of the house, which she considered hers to do with as she deemed fit. Her father didn’t tell her to clean the house, nor did he tell her boys what to do or when to come in at night. So long as his daughter and grandsons weren’t bringing the police to his door, what they did was their business.
In their early teens, Chuck and his younger brother Reggie began selling crack in the neighborhood. Their ready access to the drug seemed to help control the chaos that their mother’s addiction had brought into their lives. By supplying their mother, they could reduce the number of food stamps she sold to get drugs, and keep her from trading or selling off their possessions for crack. They could also reduce the number of men she would have sex with in exchange for drugs. Sometimes these men beat her, and Chuck would come home and get into fights in an effort to defend her. Through much of this, I gathered, Mr. George remained up in his apartment.
Mr. George and I had only a few lengthy conversations, but during those he’d speak about the neighborhood’s early years and once in a while about his childhood. He did not talk about the troubles with his daughter and grandsons, and he dodged my questions about them the few times I asked. I wanted to know about the period when his teenage daughter became addicted to crack and gave birth to his three grandsons. I also wanted to know when and how the house had deteriorated to its present condition, and how he’d come to allow his daughter and her sons to live there without having much to do with them.
I was able to piece together some of this family history through the stories that Chuck and Reggie would occasionally offer. The excerpt below is taken from field notes in the late summer of 2006, when Chuck was twenty-two and Reggie was eighteen.
Chuck and I are on our way to visit Reggie at CFCF [Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility], the county jail on State Road. As we drive through West Philly, we pass a park with a couple of swing sets and a basketball court.
“I used to play in this park,” Chuck comments.
“Did you used to live around here?”
“Yeah, for a little bit.”
I’m surprised by this. In four years of knowing the family, I had never heard Chuck or his two younger brothers mention living anywhere but their grandfather’s house on 6th Street. I say as much, and Chuck replies:
“We were staying here with Reggie’s dad. My grandpop kicked us out and shit, and we went to this homeless shelter for a minute [a little while] and I guess my mom wanted to get out of there, so she called Reggie’s dad and he came and got us. He used to live right there in that building.”
I look at the dilapidated gray and brown high-rise building and nod my head.
“That was the first time I ever saw somebody get shot.”
Chuck pauses after this, and I wait to see if he will go on. He doesn’t.
“Who got shot?”
“Reggie’s dad.”
“Who shot him?”
“My grandpop.”
Another pause.
I ask, “Over what?”
“I remember I was happy as shit to leave the shelter, but then he used to beat her, like, not just slap her, but really fuck her up, and I used to be mad, like, and try to jump on him and pull him off of her.”
“So you used to protect her.”
“Not really. I couldn’t do no real damage, ’cause I was only like seven. Yeah, seven, ’cause Tim was just born. One night, he was beating her and he just kept going and then he started choking her and I called Pop-Pop [Mr. George]. Pop-Pop came over there, shot him three times in the stomach. Then he said get your stuff.”
“Then you went back to live with him on 6th Street.”
“Yep.”
“When you saw him get shot, were you scared?”
“No, I was happy. I was relieved.”
“Did Pop-Pop [Mr. George] catch a case?”
“No. Reggie’s pop never reported him. He never did no time or nothing.”4
From stories like these, I came to understand that while Mr. George’s general policy was to live alongside his daughter and grandsons without much interference, he would occasionally step in—sometimes for their benefit, such as the time he rescued the family from an abusive man and agreed to house them once again, and sometimes for his own, such as in late 2006 when, after repeated raids on the house, he cleared out his daughter’s belongings and told her she could not return if she continued to hide Reggie from the police.
After these raids, Chuck and Reggie were sitting in county jail and state prison, respectively. A month later, their younger brother Tim got booked outside the Chinese takeout store for resisting arrest and possession of a small amount of crack. In the absence of his three grandsons, the house became strangely quiet, and Mr. George began sitting outside on the second-floor porch. One evening the following fall, after I’d come back from visiting Chuck in county jail, we sat down and had a beer and a cigarette:
I’ll tell you. [shakes his head] I feel sorry for the man with sons. What’s the use of raising a boy today? You feed him and clothe him and teach him how to ride a bike and you done checked his tests, then at fifteen they shipping him off to juvie. You don’t know when you going to see him again. Maybe he makes it to 18 before they take him away. And once they grab him, that’s it! Your son locked in a cage, just sitting. And the worst part about it is, you still supporting him! Even though you can’t see him, you can’t watch him go to school, go to work, have kids of his own, he can’t do nothing but just sit, and you still supporting him. You put money on his books, visitation, he come home for a few months, go back in. You worry about him, what’s happening in there. You hope he come home and do what he’s supposed to be doing. You hope and pray he don’t tear your life apart, put you in jail. That’s the most you can hope for. Or you say I can’t do it, I’m not getting involved. I wash my hands. They say it’s changed now with Obama, it’s a new era. But can’t nobody protect our sons, not even the president. I’m telling you, if I was thirty years younger, I’d be praying for girls. If I had a son I’d be done lost my mind by now. I’d start mourning and praying the day he was born.5
. . .
Each of the people described in the chapter thus far manage to insulate themselves from the police, the courts, and the prisons as well as from their legally entangled neighbors and family members. Some, like Miss Deena and Lamar, accomplish this by cutting off ties to sons and brothers who are either sitting in prison or living on the run. Others, like Mr. George, continue to provide support f
rom a distance, even if that distance is only the space of a thick door and a deadbolt. The next section concerns a young man who remained deeply connected to his neighborhood friends, yet managed to go to college and secure a well-paying job while they dodged the police and cycled in and out of jail.
A CLEAN MAN WITH DIRTY FRIENDS
Directly across the shared alleyway from Mr. George, his daughter, and his grandsons on 6th Street lived a mother and her three children, the youngest of whom was a young man named Josh. Josh was three years older than Miss Linda’s oldest son, Chuck; the two had played together as children and remained close all through high school. Josh’s mother, who worked in administration at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, had two daughters with her first husband before marrying a second time and giving birth to Josh. Neither marriage lasted longer than a few years, so she raised the family on her Penn salary and intermittent child support payments. When Chuck’s mother went out searching for drugs, he would often walk across the shared alleyway and eat at Josh’s. When Miss Linda didn’t come home for a few days, he’d take his younger brother Tim with him, and spend a few nights there.
When I started hanging out on the block, Josh was twenty years old, and getting his degree in business administration from a historically Black college in Upstate New York. When he returned home for the holidays, he’d spend evenings with Chuck and his other neighbors. A tall man who spoke quietly and laughed easily, Josh seemed eager to reunite with his boys from back home, and quickly fell into their routine of late-night drinking and marijuana smoking. For their part, these young men seemed happy that one of their own had made it. They didn’t expect him to partake in the drama of the streets. When they were in shootouts, for example, nobody looked to Josh to strap up.
Right out of college, Josh moved back home and began working for a doctor who was conducting trials for a pharmaceutical company. His college girlfriend had moved back to Virginia and given birth to their son, so he traveled back and forth a few times a year to visit them, and his son came up for Halloween and most of the summer. Josh seemed to always be talking about the boy, and to look forward to their visits. They’d speak on the phone a few times a week.
Josh worked long hours, so we didn’t see him much. Then the cops stopped him while he was driving with two friends from 6th Street. The officers searched the car and found a small amount of cocaine behind the front seat, and all three men were arrested. Josh made bail quickly enough to keep his job with the doctor, and the case went to trial a year later. The doctor let him take off work to attend the almost monthly court dates, and at the sentencing persuaded the judge to give Josh three years of parole instead of time in prison. Later that year, this doctor also got the judge to expunge Josh’s record—the only time I had heard of a judge doing this. Later, Josh described these events as a turning point: if it were not for this man, he would have done time and come home a convict.
In the summer of 2007, Chuck was shot and killed outside the Chinese takeout store, where he had gone to buy dinner for himself and his younger brother Tim.6 Tim had been standing just a few feet away and watched his brother fall. The 4th Street Boy who shot Chuck had apparently become fearful that Chuck, though unarmed, was going to shoot him first. Actually, for the past two months Chuck had been working hard to squash the ongoing conflict between the 4th Street Boys and the 6th Street Boys that had begun a few years earlier, when Tino killed Jay-Jay at a dice game.
It could be that Chuck’s peacekeeping efforts in this and other conflicts made his death more of a blow for his family and friends and for the neighborhood as a whole than the deaths of other young men whose funerals we attended every few months. For Tim, Chuck’s death meant the loss of the only father figure he had known.
There was little time for Tim to grieve. With many of the core members of the 6th Street Boys locked up that summer, the expectation to avenge Chuck’s death landed squarely on his fifteen-year-old shoulders. In anticipation of his retaliation, Tim received near daily calls and texts from the 4th Street Boys that they were going to kill him, and by the end of July he had been in three shootouts. It was a chilling way to come of age, and one that those of us watching events unfold seemed unable to stop.
At the time of Chuck’s death, Josh had already moved out of his mother’s house on 6th Street and was living with a roommate in the suburbs. He had landed a job doing administrative work for the medical research branch of a pharmaceutical company, and was earning a sixty-thousand-dollar salary. He began getting calls at work from Tim, who said that 4th Street was shooting at him and he needed a place to stay. A couple of times, Josh took a long lunch break to pick Tim up on 6th Street and take him to his apartment for safekeeping. Meanwhile, some of Josh’s coworkers found out about his expunged record for cocaine possession. To make matters worse, they overheard several of his conversations with Tim about flying bullets. Josh soon lost his job and went on unemployment for a number of months, and then for a bit longer when President Obama extended it. Didn’t help, he said later, that he was the only Black man working on the floor.
Josh could no longer afford his apartment outside the city and moved back in with his mother on 6th Street. In the first few months, he’d frequently talk about the wrong moves he’d made, or how things might have gone differently. He seemed to feel that he was largely responsible for losing the job and had been insufficiently appreciative when he had it.
A few weeks after Josh moved back to the neighborhood, we were walking to the corner store to buy beer when a young man of maybe fourteen approached him in the checkout line.
“Heard you was back on the block. Welcome home.”
“Yeah, I just moved back not too long ago.”
“That’s what’s up. You back to take what’s yours, Old Head?”
Josh’s face crumbled, clearly humiliated at the suggestion that he might go back to selling crack, as he’d done as a teenager.
“No, I’m not back back. I’m just job-hunting right now . . .”
“Okay, okay,” the young man replied, unconvinced.
When we got back to the block, Josh laughed it off, but in that moment all the confidence and pride of being the neighborhood success seemed to flood out of him. Years later, he would bring up this incident as one of the most humiliating of his adult life.
During two years of unemployment, Josh occupied himself by looking after the guys on 6th Street as well as their struggling family members. He visited his friends in jail and prison; he wrote them letters and accepted phone calls; he sent them some of his unemployment money for their commissary.
After Chuck’s death, Josh tried to keep Tim from getting killed, which was more than a fulltime job. He also tried to persuade Miss Linda to allow Tim to go to Virginia and stay with relatives, at least until the drama died down. But she refused to let Tim leave, and accused Josh of trying to take her last remaining son away from her.
Finally, Josh got Miss Linda to take Tim down South, away from the dangers of 6th Street. On the morning of their departure, we sent them off on a Greyhound bus with a cooler filled with sandwiches, chips, and fruit. But Miss Linda and Tim ran out of money two weeks later, and came back home. Apparently Miss Linda could find no relative willing to keep Tim, including his father, who had promised to do so before they made the trip.
“He a fuckin’ nut,” Tim said, hiding his hurt.
Josh and I started traveling back and forth together to visit Reggie and other incarcerated friends, pooling gas money and sharing the driving. Together, we tried to keep Tim safe from the guys who killed his brother. We hadn’t been close in the years before this, but with Chuck dead, and many more of our mutual friends in jail, we were united by our bond to the men no longer with us. We also commiserated and joked about the difficult relatives these friends had left behind, with Chuck’s heavily crack-addicted mother, Miss Linda, being first on that list.
As we drove together to jails and prisons, I soon realized that Josh faced a se
ries of dilemmas in dealing with men on the block as well as with their relatives. These weren’t the same dilemmas that young men dipping and dodging the authorities faced—they were particular to a clean person with dirty friends, not unlike some of the dilemmas I myself had experienced in the neighborhood over the years.
First was the dilemma of balancing his job and his middle-class life with the chaos and emergencies of his poor and legally entangled friends and neighbors. This he’d failed at when his efforts to help Tim after Chuck’s death cost him his corporate job.
But Josh’s clean identity also meant that people asked him to do things that they couldn’t ask of dirty people. After Chuck died, his paternal grandmother gave a speech at his midnight vigil, urging his friends and neighbors not to retaliate. She seemed to mean it at the time, but in private the next day she asked Josh to buy the guns that the remaining 6th Street Boys would need to support the coming war with the guys who had shot her grandson. As the only member of the 6th Street Boys with no felony convictions, pending criminal charges, or parole supervision, it fell on him, she said, to gear up. Josh was torn. Should he buy these guns? Guns that would avenge his best friend? These guns wouldn’t be just for vengeance, either. By this point the friends of the man who had shot Chuck were driving by 6th Street, shooting at innocent bystanders and leaving neighborhood residents terrified to come outside. The 6th Street Boys needed something to fire back with. In the end, however, Josh didn’t buy the guns—or if he did, I never found out about it.
Another time, a guy on the block came to Josh and asked to borrow three hundred dollars because the cops had taken the money he needed to pay back his “connect” (supplier) when they stopped and searched him. He said that the man he’d gotten the crack from would probably kill him if he couldn’t pay him back. Should Josh give this man the money and help him avoid a beating or even death? But then he’d have access to more crack on commission, which could get him locked up, or shot later on. In this case Josh didn’t loan the man the money, but he did let him hide in his apartment for a week.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 22
