On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Bail was another tough decision Josh faced. These payments require the payer to show ID at the bail counter, so the person who takes the money to the basement of the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Philadelphia needs to have a real ID, and one that isn’t going to return holds or warrants when it’s run through the system. Not surprisingly, then, when a young man on 6th Street got arrested, his family often would gather the money and ask Josh to go to the office and pay it. Should Josh help bail out his neighbors and their family members? What if they were shot, or rearrested for an even worse crime, while home? On the other hand, he also expressed his concern that if he didn’t help the family get the young man out, whatever happened to the young man in jail would be his doing, like the time a neighbor was stabbed in the stomach in the jail cafeteria the week after Josh refused to help his family make bail and get him home.

  In July of 2011, Josh’s bad luck broke. After two full years of unemployment at the height of the recession, he landed a job with another medical company. Within six months he was promoted to assistant director. He again became too busy to look after the 6th Street Boys or spend his days arguing with their difficult and addicted relatives. He got full custody of his son, who came to live with him in his mother’s house.

  . . .

  Josh’s ties to dirty people clearly played a role in his losing a well-paying management job in the suburbs. Being on intimate terms with legally compromised young men also presented him with a series of ethical dilemmas that those with their own legal entanglements didn’t face, and which at times caused him considerable distress. On the other hand, Josh’s devotion to the guys he had grown up with made the years of his unemployment more meaningful and fulfilling than they otherwise might have been. And this community welcomed him back whenever, in the subsequent years, he was spit out of the formal labor market.

  THE FANTASY (AND REALITY) OF BEING CLEAN

  Those walking around with a warrant or a pending court case often blame life’s disappointments on their legal entanglements. That is, dirty people often imagine that if they could just get past these difficulties, many of their other problems would go away: life would be easier, or better, or not so disappointing. Just as people in prison plan the good times they will have when they get out, or the straight line they will walk upon release, so those on the outside often talk about all the great things they will do once their warrant is lifted, their case dismissed, or their probation term ended. As a corollary, they sometimes assume that clean people have every opportunity for success open to them. In Mike’s words, clean people attend more weddings than funerals. If clean people aren’t leading the good life, it’s no one’s fault but their own.

  These beliefs aren’t entirely untrue: research has shown that those who have gone to prison do suffer from the experience, socially, civically, and economically, as do their families. And because those who avoid incarceration tend to be better educated, better employed, and better paid, the perception that clean people are better off is also accurate. But the rosy image that dirty people hold of clean people’s lives is not always matched by their lived experience.

  For Miss Deena’s family, life was filled with disappointments. But they were the older, more hidden injuries of class, race, and gender, not the more visible and readily blamable ones that accompany a compromised legal status. A few of these disappointments are worth mentioning here, as they have stayed with me despite the more traumatic events I later encountered on 6th Street with the kinds of people Miss Deena and her family were careful to avoid.

  The first misfortune I witnessed at Miss Deena’s concerned her grandson Ray. When we met, he was in his senior year of high school, and studying hard in the hope of going to college. His best friend, Cory, lived a few blocks away and spent a lot of time at Ray’s house, though he was quite shy around Ray’s family. Ray’s mom once mentioned that she was happy to feed Cory, because his family had a lot of kids and really didn’t have the money for a growing boy.

  Like many teenagers, Ray and Cory were looking forward to the events and occasions that mark the coming of age: getting a driver’s license, moving out of the house, going to college, and, of course, attending the prom. What set Ray apart from Cory, and from many of the teenagers I had come to know, was that at seventeen he seemed convinced of his own bright future. Perhaps his mother truly had succeeded in insulating him from the violence and poverty of neighborhood life, or in carving out a path for him that would lead out of it. Ray looked forward to graduation and to college with confidence, as if both were well within his reach.

  Months before prom season, Ray began talking about the dance—who he’d take and what he’d wear. He wanted matching outfits for him and his date, which he planned to design himself and get made by a local tailor. When I’d come over for SAT prep tutoring, he would show me his sketches of the different outfits, and I’d weigh in on the length and fabric. The one he finally settled on looked a bit like a Batman costume to me, but he seemed very enthusiastic about it.

  Ray was eyeing two girls to be his date: Charlene, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, and Desiree, the girl who cut and braided his hair. He had a big crush on Desiree, and was hoping to get up the courage to ask her out in the coming months.

  Every detail of the event was of great importance. One afternoon, we had a lengthy conversation about corsages, in which Ray lamented that girls change their hair so often nowadays that it would be very hard to plan the correct corsage in advance. His mother overheard our conversation and joked that Ray inherited a love of nice clothes and fancy occasions from her. She used to live for this kind of thing.

  As the prom drew nearer, problems began cropping up in the plans. I had taken Ray and Cory to the Department of Motor Vehicles a number of times to work through the costly and lengthy process of obtaining a driver’s license, but after we obtained the necessary doctor’s form and assembled all the other required documentation, Ray failed the computer permit test despite months of studying. A month later he failed it a second time, dashing all hope of driving his date to the prom himself. Cory had a learner’s permit, but it kept expiring because he couldn’t afford the thirty dollars to take the driver’s test. I took him twice to get the permit renewed, but he finally had to let it lapse when his doctor’s form became invalid after one year. At that point, he couldn’t afford a new doctor’s form or the fee to take the driving test.

  Around this time, Desiree’s boyfriend got shot in the hip, and according to Ray, she entered a period of prolonged depression. She refused to go to the prom with Ray or with anyone, preferring to “practically live” at the hospital.

  As if this weren’t enough, a week later Ray had to abandon his plans for a custom-made suit when he discovered that the tailor wanted three hundred dollars to make it. In fact, he couldn’t afford to buy a regular suit and shoes, or even to rent them. Finally, he admitted to me that even if he somehow came up with the money to rent a suit, he wouldn’t be able to find a date who could afford her own sixty-dollar ticket. He couldn’t pay for another person’s in addition to his own.

  Ray and Cory began saying that they didn’t want to go to the prom after all. The weekend before the event, Ray told me they were planning on going to an “anti-prom” party at a friend’s house, which was infinitely preferable to the corniness of a prom being held in “a warehouse in South Philly.”

  “I never wanted to go,” Cory informed me. “I’m not into the school thing, that’s Ray.” Later he said, “There ain’t nobody to go with! All the pretty girls graduated last year.”

  When I asked Ray’s mom about the prom, she mentioned nothing about the high cost, saying only, “Yeah, I guess he doesn’t want to go anymore, he thought it would be stupid. I kept telling him he’d regret it.”

  On the night of prom, Ray called me around 9:30.

  “Are you busy?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Can you give us a ride to South Philly?”

  “For what?” />
  “For the prom.”

  “I thought you were going to that other party.”

  “He’s not having it. His mom came home, I think.”

  “Oh.”

  “So will you take us? It’s just on 16th and Passyunk.”

  “How are you going to get in?”

  “We’re not going in the prom. This girl I know is having an after-party down the shore, so I’m gonna meet everybody there.”

  “Okay, what time?”

  “Now? If you aren’t doing anything . . .” Ray said, rather sheepishly.

  I picked up Ray and Cory, who was wearing a pretty threadbare sweatshirt. Ray carried a duffel bag, which I assumed contained their change of clothes and maybe some alcohol. They gave no explanation for their change of heart, nor did I ask for any. We drove to the prom location, which did indeed seem to be a warehouse, and parked in the large lot, full of cars and even a few limos.

  “Can you pull up closer?” Ray said.

  “To what?”

  “To the door!”

  “Okay.”

  We waited pretty quietly for about ten minutes as Ray and Cory watched the two large metal doors on a dimly lit side of the concrete building. Then the doors opened and a young woman in a sheer purple dress came out, walking carefully and adjusting her hair. Cory and Ray leaped out of the car and then stopped short, hesitating to approach the door, and finally leaned against the car. I realized then that Cory was clutching a disposable camera. Young women in dresses and heels began to emerge with their dates into the night, and Cory and Ray talked in whispers about who looked good, and who had come with whom. They saw a couple they knew, and walked over shyly to say hi. Ray shook the guy’s hand, and Cory told the girl how nice she looked.

  This continued for about forty minutes, and halfway through Cory used up his roll of film. He seemed happy to be posing with the girls in all their finery.

  Then Ray saw a girl he liked, and he turned to us with an embarrassed smile. Cory whispered, “Go up to her!” which he finally did. The girl give him a hug, keeping a fair distance between them so as not to smudge her makeup or dislodge her hair, and he came back smiling. Then he spotted the group who were having the party down the shore, and asked me to pop the trunk. As Ray got his bag, Cory opened the passenger side of my car.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting in the car.”

  “Wait, you’re not going to the after-party?”

  Cory shook his head.

  “So why did you come with Ray, then?”

  “For the Let Out,” Cory said.

  I looked confused.

  “To see everybody come out,” he tried to explain.

  It was an uncomfortable ride home. Cory looked bleakly out the window most of the way, and I couldn’t think of a single topic to lift the mood. All I could think was how adamantly he had argued that he wanted no part of the prom, and then how he had come anyway, to watch from the parking lot as his wealthier classmates made their grand exit. I wished I hadn’t conveyed my expectation that he’d be going to the after-party, because now he had that added shame. At one point in the thirty-minute drive home, though, his face lit up a bit and he said, “I got pictures with, like, eight different girls.”

  Both Ray and Cory graduated from high school that spring, and Ray enrolled in a historically Black college down South. His mother and grandmother proudly drove him down there in early September and got his dorm room all set up. Then after six months, Ray dropped out—the family could no longer afford the tuition, and his student loans weren’t nearly enough. Now he works as a security guard at the mall, and as of this writing has paid off about half his college debt.

  The second disappointment that has stuck with me through the years concerns Ray’s grandmother, Miss Deena.

  One afternoon in late April of 2002, Miss Deena and I were in the kitchen when she began to talk about how hard it was working at the cafeteria. I asked her what she was doing that summer, hoping that she’d be getting some time off. She confirmed that she would be taking some vacation days. I asked where she might spend them, and she said she was thinking of visiting her sister in California, who said she would pay for her ticket.

  “California’s nice,” I say.

  “Or I might go to Florida, to see my friend.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He asked me to marry him. We were going to get married, but then we didn’t, and he moved to Florida.”

  I had never heard anything about Miss Deena’s love life before. I am embarrassed to say that at twenty years old, the idea that Aisha’s grandmother might have a love life hadn’t occurred to me.

  “When did he move?”

  “About a few years ago, when he retired.”

  “Oh.”

  “He just got strange, so I didn’t go with him.”

  The discussion turned to the summer cutbacks, and her concerns about what would happen to her staff members if management laid them off. She told me how in the summertime it’s really hard, because the Penn students have gone home, and the area high school kids, who are part of college prep programs, come in. And they are bad, really bad. They get into fights in the dining room, all kinds of trouble. Then Miss Deena circled back to her called-off engagement and the man who moved away.

  “He was a really nice man. I met him at the cafeteria. He collected Westerns, loved Western movies—new ones, classic ones, those really hard-to-find ones. But he didn’t watch them, he just collected them. He was going to watch them when he retired. That’s what he got them for. He had, like, must have been over two hundred. And I used to ask to watch them, but after a while I just gave up because he really didn’t want to watch them yet, he was saving them.”

  I nodded for her to go on.

  “So he retired and we were planning to go to Florida. And then one night, someone broke into his house and stole all his movies.”

  “My god.”

  “I asked him what he was going do if he found him, and he says, ‘Deena, I won’t tell you what I’ma do with him, but I will make it so’s he don’t do that to nobody else.’”

  “Wow.”

  “And that scared me, ’cause I thought: what is he going to do to me if I do something to upset him or make him mad?”

  “Right.”

  “And then he bought some barbed wire, you know that wire that you get all caught up in that they use for fences and everything, and he bought that new kind, the kind that really gets you so’s you can’t get out, and do you know, Alice, he put it all over his living room and his house, he lined the walls all up and down, so he could only use the kitchen and the bathroom and the upstairs, and you couldn’t hardly get around down there at all.”

  “He didn’t hurt himself?”

  “Well, he knew where they was laid, I guess. So after that I said I can’t marry you. You being really strange. I can’t trust you, so I’m not going to go with you.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He says, ‘I’ma wait and see if you change your mind. I’ma give you three weeks; if you don’t change your mind, I’ma go to Florida.’”

  “Wow.”

  “But I couldn’t change my mind, ’cause after all that, I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know what he was going to do. So he came to me after three weeks and says, ‘Deena, did you change your mind?’ and I says, ‘Nope, my mind’s the same.’ And he says, ‘Well, they’ll be other prospects in Florida, anyway.’”

  “Huh.”

  “But I guess he didn’t find no other prospects yet, ’cause he wants me to come visit this summer.”7

  Miss Deena didn’t make it to Florida that summer to see her former fiancé, or to see her sister in California. Instead, she got laid off from the cafeteria—seven months before her retirement would have kicked in. To this day, she receives no pension from the University, though she worked there full time for twenty-two years. Her daughter, Rochelle, and I were horrified, and made a number of futile atte
mpts to right the wrong. Miss Deena took it with stoic optimism. “At least I get to sleep in now, and rest my feet.”

  Those walking around with warrants and court cases and probation sentences sometimes viewed people like Miss Deena and her grandson Ray as the privileged and free: clean people who could go to school, work legal jobs, and build a family, all without looking over their shoulder or getting the rug pulled out from under them. The disappointments that Miss Deena and Ray sustained over the time that I knew them remind us that the constraints the criminal justice system imposes are only additional to the poverty, poor schools, and unjust and racist institutions that have long dampened the hopes and happiness of Black families living in segregated Northern cities.

  . . .

  As the police chase neighbors and family members through the streets, some residents in the 6th Street community are successfully living a life apart from prisons, court dates, and probation regulations. They negotiate relationships with their legally entangled friends, neighbors, and relatives in ways that limit the risks they bring and the damage they cause. Some clean residents go to school or work every day with a relatively easy lack of awareness of the young men locked up or running from the police; others manage a more concerted and sometimes painful avoidance; and still others negotiate a complicated interweaving of the dirty and clean worlds.

  Miss Deena’s family steered clear of the dirty world by remaining indoors, cutting themselves off from neighborhood life, sending their son to a charter school outside the neighborhood, and cutting ties with a son who had gone to prison. Lamar and his friends steadfastly avoided young men who sold drugs or had warrants over their heads, drawing a firm line between their indoor lives and legal jobs and pastimes and the guys out there on the corner who were dipping and dodging the police. Mr. George didn’t cut himself off from his legally entangled grandsons—in fact, he lived with them and supported them financially. Yet he kept relatively free from their drama by building himself a separate apartment in the house, and keeping out of their affairs so long as they abided by basic house rules. Josh succeeded in going to college and securing a job as a project manager in the pharmaceutical industry, all while remaining connected to his old friends from the neighborhood as they went in and out of jail or lived on the run. These relationships sometimes became highly problematic, but they also offered him support and a rewarding way to help others.