On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Later, the detectives came in: three white guys in plain clothes. Hearing that I hadn’t been at the scene when Chuck was shot, they rolled right past me, taking Tanesha and Alex outside the room for questioning. Alex, who didn’t even live on 6th Street anymore, who now had a regular job and hadn’t been anywhere nearby when Chuck was shot.

  By this time I didn’t know exactly who’d killed Chuck, but I had a pretty good idea. We’d spent much of every day together in the months before he’d been shot, and I’d also been around for the previous war. I was thinking I certainly could’ve helped narrow it down for the police, if they’d bothered to ask me. But they didn’t, and so I was alone again in the room with Chuck. I held his hand. I talked to him. Mike texted me that the detectives grabbed him as he walked into the hospital, before he could even get up to the room.

  Then Tanesha walked back into the room with the detectives, and said if she heard anything she would tell them. They gave her their card. They asked her if she thought that Mike knew the shooter’s identity, to go with her gut. She said she didn’t know. They left.

  Mike got released from questioning and came up to the room and stood by Chuck’s bed. He looked at Chuck and gave a firm nod of his head and said, “It’s cool, it’s cool,” meaning: this will be handled; your death will be avenged. Then while looking down at Chuck, Mike cried a heaving, breathy cry. The sound of a person without much practice in crying, I thought.

  Sitting in the room around Chuck’s bed, we talked about bringing Reggie home from county jail on a funeral furlough. I said that if Reggie came home, all he was gonna do was go shoot someone, and Alex said, “Please—somebody gon’ die regardless,” and Mike nodded his head in agreement, and Tanesha, too. Alex counted one, two, three, four with his fingers. The number of people who would die. Then we talked about where the hell Chuck’s baby-mom Brianna was. We thought she might have been on a trip out of town, because Chuck’s mom had the girls at her house for the week. Had anyone gotten in touch with Brianna? Did she know?

  More of Chuck’s friends and neighbors have come in the room at this point. We didn’t think Chuck’s mother would come to the hospital—Miss Linda didn’t like to leave the house except for her son’s court dates, and in her state of shock and grief, she likely wouldn’t make it over. After a couple of hours, some medical person came in and told us they’d have to take the body away. I walked outside with this guy and explained that we were waiting on Chuck’s mother, and that they couldn’t move the body until she arrived. He agreed to keep Chuck in the room for a couple more hours.

  In the end, Miss Linda did come, accompanied by four young men from the block. She walked into the room and said quietly, “Let me see my son.” I was in the waiting room across the hall with Alex, who by that time was snoring loudly. He’d been up since six o’clock the morning before.

  Then Reggie called my phone from jail.

  “Reggie, do you know?”

  “Yeah, I know. I got to come home to see my brother go in the dirt.”

  I went into Chuck’s room, now crowded with people. Miss Linda was sitting on the bed holding her son’s hand, whimpering softly and rocking back and forth. She got on my phone with Reggie and said, “Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, no, it was one bullet,” then the phone died, and she passed it back to me. I pictured Reggie sitting in his cell grieving for his brother. I was squatting on the floor next to Chuck’s neighbor, who was sitting on the chair. I’d asked the kind nurse to bring in apple juice and more chairs. Tanesha was on the other side of the bed, another neighbor sat on the floor, and two other guys perched on the windowsill.

  Miss Linda lay on top of her son and moaned, “Oh baby, oh my baby.” She held his hand and repeated, “Squeeze my hand, baby. Chuck, squeeze my hand.” She rubbed his arms rapidly and forcefully, as if to warm his body. This made me cry and Tanesha cry. Then abruptly Miss Linda got up and walked out. I followed her and held out my arms, and she wept loudly into me. Tanesha came out and got on the other side of her, and the two of us held her up. Miss Linda said she wanted to go. Tanesha offered to drive her, and asked me if I would walk them down to the car. We were still holding Miss Linda up on either side. Miss Linda then asked if I would come immediately to the house. I said yes.

  I’d meant to follow Tanesha in my own car, but somehow I couldn’t seem to leave Chuck. After putting quarters in the meter, I came back to his room in time to see them putting him into the body bag, folding him to one side then the other, a tag on his big toe. I waited for an hour down at the ER to try to get his stuff back, but they told me that his belongings had been brought to the police station, held for evidence. Because of the nature of his death, they would be taking Chuck’s body to the city morgue.

  I charged my phone in the car, and as soon as it turned on, Miss Linda called and asked if I was on my way. I said yes. She said that if I couldn’t be there, I should give the money I’d promised her for Pampers to Tanesha, who was looking after Chuck’s daughters until their mother came back. She was worried about Chuck’s daughters. She was without any of her sons. Reggie at CFCF on $10,000 bail. Chuck dead. And Tim, fifteen, who had seen him die, still held at the police station. Did he even know yet that Chuck hadn’t made it?

  In the car I fought my own anxiety, the anxiety that always came with large social gatherings on 6th Street. I remembered Mike telling me that I couldn’t stand with the guys on the corner outside the hospital, and going into the ER to work out some alternate role, to be helpful in my difference. I remembered Chuck’s girlfriend throwing daggers at me with her eyes, clearly suspicious about our relationship but unwilling to come right out and ask me about it. What right had I to be at the hospital, the only person permitted to remain through the night? And also the only one to escape police questioning? Chuck’s thirty friends and relatives had been sent away, and his fifteen-year-old brother, who had seen him fall, and who loved him like a son loves a father, held for hours and hours at the police station. Had watched him fall, had crouched over him screaming before running away, Tanesha said. But I couldn’t leave Chuck alone at the hospital. I wanted to be there if he made it through the night, and I wanted to be there if he died.

  Late that afternoon, the police released Tim. He told us he hadn’t eaten or slept in the full fourteen hours they’d held him. For the rest of the day, he barely spoke, his eyes far away. In the evening we gathered on Miss Linda’s porch steps, and Tim sat down and looked out at nothing, tears slowly pooling and rolling down his cheeks. He brushed them away the same way he brushed away flies. Later, Tanesha and Mike and I took him to a diner for pancakes and cheese grits and turkey bacon. As we were leaving, I passed him the watch, its face now quite scratched, and he nodded a silent thank-you and put it on his wrist.

  . . .

  In the days leading up to the funeral, Miss Linda phoned me to come sit with her at the house and sometimes to stay the night. But she kept having to defend the presence of a white girl to the larger family and to people from out of town, and for this I felt ashamed and sorry. Chuck’s father’s family demanded that Miss Linda get the house fumigated before the funeral so the guests wouldn’t be subjected to the cockroaches and flies lining the walls while they ate and mourned. When the fumigator guy arrived with his tank of insecticide, he demanded to know outright what a white woman like me was doing in the house, prompting Miss Linda to yell what had become her usual answer: “That’s my fucking white girl. Is it a problem?” Chuck’s smallest daughter, only six months old, was happy to get passed from woman to woman, but instantly began crying when I held her, prompting massive embarrassment on my part and a mixture of sympathy and curiosity from others. Didn’t I know how to take care of a baby? Or was she scared to be in a white woman’s arms? Another child—the daughter of a cousin whom I’d never met before—spotted me and immediately leaped onto my lap, then clung to my leg for the rest of the evening. Her mother tried to pull her off, which made her start to cry, prompting her mother to sheepishly acknowle
dge: she likes white people.

  Compounding the disturbance of my sheer presence were the mistakes I made in the weeks following Chuck’s death. The first error was hugging Chuck’s father when I saw him at the house. He’d left his wife and kids to grieve with Miss Linda, an act she regarded as a strong sign of his continued attachment to her, as well as of his love for his firstborn son. She’d banished her longtime boyfriend during his stay, though he did attend the funeral.

  On the first night of mourning, we were sitting around the table outdoors, and Miss Linda was handing out the Rest in Peace T-shirts she had purchased from a kiosk at the Gallery, a downtown mall that caters to less affluent Black and white residents of the city. The T-shirts showed Chuck’s smiling prom picture from the job training program on the front, with dates of his birth and death below it, along with the words “Gone but Never Forgotten.”

  I saw Chuck’s father walk through the door. We both began to cry, and as he approached I got up and hugged him. Not a long embrace, a quick hug of sympathy.

  Tanesha promptly informed Miss Linda that I had just hugged Chuck’s father, and Miss Linda came over to yell at me and at him. He tried to laugh it off and calm her down, but she didn’t calm down, not for fifteen minutes. “You know I don’t play that!” she yelled.

  How could I have forgotten that it’s simply not appropriate for a young woman like me to embrace an older man who’s not a family member? And no less the father of Miss Linda’s firstborn? To think that I had compounded Miss Linda’s grief with jealousy and conflict—I left that evening and planned to stay away until the day of the funeral. But Miss Linda phoned me at five in the morning to say that she couldn’t sleep, and asked me to come back and sit with her.

  The family didn’t have enough money for the funeral home expenses, so we called the morgue and asked them to keep the body for a little longer. Days passed, and Reggie didn’t get the furlough—the cops said it was too risky, given the circumstances of his brother’s death.

  . . .

  After most of the extra cops had left the neighborhood, the hunt was on to find the man who had killed Chuck. Since Tim had seen the shooter from only a few feet away, many knew the man’s name and the guys he hung out with. But the man had gone deep underground—nobody could figure out where he was hiding. As Reggie berated his boys each day from jail—what they weren’t doing, how slow they were to avenge his brother’s murder, what he would do if he were home—the 6th Street Boys acquired more and more guns, gearing up for what they assumed would be coming: part three of the 4th Street War.

  Many nights, Mike and Steve drove around looking for the shooter, the guys who were part of his crew, or women connected to them who might be able to provide a good lead. On a few of these nights, Mike had nobody to ride along with him, so I volunteered. We started out around 3:00 a.m., with Mike in the passenger seat, his hand on his Glock as he directed me around the area. We peered into dark houses and looked at license plates and car models as Mike spoke on the phone with others who had information about the 4th Street Boys’ whereabouts.

  One night Mike thought he saw a 4th Street guy walk into a Chinese restaurant. He tucked his gun in his jeans, got out of the car, and hid in the adjacent alleyway. I waited in the car with the engine running, ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran back and got inside. But when the man came out with his food, Mike seemed to think this wasn’t the man he’d thought it was. He walked back to the car and we drove on.

  . . .

  During the period surrounding Chuck’s death, I started studying shootouts in earnest: how and when they happened and what the ongoing conflicts looked like over time. But I don’t believe that I got into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand about violence, or even because I wanted to prove myself loyal or brave. I got into the car because, like Mike and Reggie, I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.

  Perhaps Chuck’s death had broken something inside me. I stopped seeing the man who shot him as a man who, like the men I knew, was jobless and trying to make it at the bottom rung of a shrinking drug trade while dodging the police. I didn’t care whether this man had believed his life was threatened when he came upon Chuck outside the Chinese takeout store, or felt that he couldn’t afford to back down. I simply wanted him to pay for what he’d done, for what he’d taken away from us.

  Looking back, I’m glad that I learned what it feels like to want a man to die—not simply to understand the desire for vengeance in others, but to feel it in my bones, at an emotional level eclipsing my own reason or sense of right and wrong. But to go out looking for this man, in a car with someone holding a gun? At the time and certainly in retrospect, my desire for vengeance scared me, more than the shootings I’d witnessed, more even than my ongoing fears for Mike’s and Tim’s safety, and certainly more than any fears for my own.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. US Department of Justice, “Prisoners 1925–81” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 3.

  2. Christopher Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Melissa Thompson, “Democracy and the Civil Reintegration of Criminal Offenders,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605 (2006): 285, 287–88.

  3. US Department of Justice, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2011” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), 1.

  4. Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List,” 9th ed. (London: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2011), 3, 5.

  5. US Department of Justice, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2011” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), 3.

  6. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

  7. On the first page of his landmark study of social conditions in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward, W. E. B. DuBois included the footnote, “I shall throughout this study use the term ‘Negro,’ to designate all persons of Negro descent, although the appellation is to some extent illogical. I shall, moreover, capitalize the word, because I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” I have capitalized the word Black in this work for the same reasons, and to follow him. W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), 1.

  8. The Pew Center on the States, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” (Washington, DC: Pew Charitable Trusts), 6.

  9. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life-Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 151, 164.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73; Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241.

  2. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 5.

  3. On the increasing economic hardship and spatial isolation faced by residents of segregated Black neighborhoods in US cities after 1970, see Loïc Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (1989): 8–25.

  4. Urban ethnographies have documented laissez-faire and corrupt policing in segregated Black neighborhoods from the late 1800s up until the 1980s. On the police turning a blind eye to gambling and prostitution in the Black community in the 1930s and 1940s, see St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1993), 524. On widespread corruption among city police during the 1960s, see Jonathan Rubinstein, City Police (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). On the failure of the police to intervene when disputes arose among Black young men in the 1970s, see Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2. On police allowing open-air drug markets to flourish in Black neighborhoods in the 1980s, see Terry William
s, Crackhouse (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1992), 84. On the de facto system of justice that housing project leaders, drug dealers, and a few corrupt police officers enforced in the Chicago projects in the 1980s and 1990s, see Sudhir Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  5. Albert J. Reiss Jr., “Police Organization in the 20th Century,” Crime and Justice 15 (1992): 56.

  6. Data on the number of police officers in Philadelphia are taken from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports (1960 through 2000). Population estimates of Philadelphia are taken from the US Bureau of the Census.

  7. For a detailed investigation of the creation and spread of tough crime policy and its connection to welfare retrenchment and market deregulation in the United States, see Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2009).

  8. Christopher Wildeman, “Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration of Childhood Disadvantage,” Demography 46 (2009): 270.

  9. David Garland, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment,” in Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, ed. David Garland (London: Sage, 2001), 1–2.

  10. On hyperincarceration specifically, see Loïc Wacquant, “Race, Class, and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America,” Daedalus 139, no. 3 (2010): 74–90. Wacquant’s theoretical and empirical work on the expanding US penal system and its significance for American politics and race relations was a significant inspiration for this volume, and can be sampled in “The New Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377–88; “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133; Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).