nothing to do. He paid the landlady three hundred dollars a month for a room, three meals, and laundry. I could not tell if they had a romantic relationship, or if she just wanted to marry him. He described her as a good woman, extremely devout, who dragged him to church every week. He did not want to incur her wrath by not going. She sang in the choir and had, he claimed, a beautiful voice. One of his dilemmas was how far to take the relationship with his landlady. He did not live with her before his trial, even though she wanted him to, because he wasn’t ready to accept her domination and intense religiosity. She suffocated him sometimes, he said, and seemed more like his mother. But he liked her very much.
Herbert remained obsessed with his arrest, imprisonment, and trial. Over and over again he wanted to justify his action. He claimed to have liked Shorty and to have never seen him so completely wild. He could not believe Shorty went berserk over five dollars, and he attributed it to drugs. Shorty, he said, claimed he was going to kill him. Herbert thought he was going to die and began to resign himself, until the thought that it was a ridiculous way to die snapped him out of his resignation.
For Herbert, taking action proved a matter of self-respect as well as survival even though the arrest, incarceration, and trial proved a nightmare. He said he always believed in God, but that his acquittal had intensified his faith. When the verdict was announced, he recalled, he could have died at peace on the spot.
Faith, he asserted, is a central element of his life, and he does not take drugs or drink alcohol. His only vice is smoking. To save money for his fine, he had cut back to ten cigarettes a day. People in the neighborhood tell him he did what he had to do, but they are wary of him. Killing Shorty has given him a helpful reputation. He described the neighborhood as a “jungle” where people concerned only with pursuing money could earn tens of thousands of dollars a day. He wouldn’t say exactly what people did to survive, and I did not push him. I asked him if he was safe in the neighborhood. He said yes, that because of his reputation, nobody bothered him.
He was happy to talk with me. For a long time he had wanted a chance to talk about the events and his feelings. So, as useful as the interview was for me, for him it was cathartic. He proved more articulate, with a broader vocabulary, than I had anticipated. He asked about my interest, and I explained as best I could. My sense is that he understood perfectly and sympathized. He repeated over and over again that one can’t understand what it is/was like unless one has lived it. I am sure he is right about this. Yet, an implicit tension ran through our conversation. Herbert did not seem uneasy, but he was wary, willing to give information about himself, but with limits I could sense. I wanted to press him for more details or to expand on what appeared to be contradictions or improbabilities. But I knew that to press too hard would violate his boundaries and end our relationship.
After lunch—I found out that Herbert likes to eat turkey and to fish—during which he sketched his life story, we drove around the neighborhood in which Herbert had grown up. By now, he had loosened up and, I think, had begun to trust me. He enjoyed being the teacher, my shepherd through a Philadelphia I did not know. He pointed out to me where friends had lived, where local stores and bars had stood, and the former locations of small manufacturing firms. The area is a mixture of expensive gentrification and unrenovated row houses. Herbert claimed that the gentrified houses are mostly occupied by unmarried teachers, principals, and social workers. He said the neighborhood is so safe, still, that he would sleep with his windows open. He attributes the safety to the presence of the police who are responsive to the wealthy new homeowners. We encountered a street mechanic, an obviously strong man and friend, whom Herbert claims has been working at the same locale for thirty years. Herbert, like Sudhir Venkatesh in Off the Books, described an informal economy, a world in which people scratched out a living, doing whatever it took to make some money and survive.8
The tour went through the Richard Allen Homes, formerly a high-rise public housing project, now an attractive town-house development, still public housing. Herbert talked about how awful the projects were when he was growing up, with fights going on 24/7. Everyone had to join a gang to survive. Only then there were no guns; all the guys went to gyms to learn to box.
I liked Herbert a lot. I enjoyed his sly, deadpan humor. He seemed to find it increasingly easy to talk with me, and, as noted earlier, thanked me for the chance to talk. I was going to give him twenty dollars—it was in an envelope with his name on it in my pocket—but I didn’t. By the end of our time together, it felt inappropriate, as though it would turn what was almost a budding friendship into something else and might violate his sense of self-respect, which clearly remains crucial to him. Herbert did not want me to drive him within sight of his street and the crowd on the corner. So I dropped him off some blocks away.
How much could I believe Herbert? He seemed immensely credible. But, then, he wanted to give me a best impression. Why, I wondered, was he hungry and in need of five dollars for food when his lady friend lived a ten-minute walk away? Why did he not ask her for the money to repay Shorty? With so many children and grandchildren, why had he remained in prison—was he denied bail? Why was he alone at his trial? Clearly, there is a lot more to his story. But it does not take away from his special charm or the urgency of his need for exculpation.
When we sat in the restaurant, across a table in a corner booth from each other, I could not help but think, “Here we are, two sixty-eight-year-old men, residents of the same city, with life histories that could not be more different” (although in one way they weren’t different; we both married young and had our first child at age twenty). How, really, to explain why I live a comfortable, rewarding life as a university professor while he scrapes by on SSI on a dangerous block of North Philadelphia? It is not because I had two loving parents and he did not. So cancel that ste reotype. It is not because he lacks intelligence, because he doesn’t. If he is to be believed, it is not because he was unwilling to work hard. To say that he is black and I am white is not enough, although it is important. I suspect that part of the answer does lie in the barriers facing black men, especially men of his generation and older. But part, too, lies in the history of the city, whose inequalities, indifference, segregation, and economic devastation are traced in the lives of Herbert and his contemporaries. As we drove through his old neighborhood, Herbert remarked that his large circle of boyhood friends was gone. “Do you mean that they left?” I asked. “No,” he answered. “They’re dead.”
* * *
The rest of this book opens up some of the themes condensed into this one story of murder and marginalization in an old American city. It is a story that cannot be interpreted apart from the transformation of American cities in the late twentieth century and the emergence of new urban forms unlike any others in history. Nor can it be understood apart from the trajectory of African American social structure, which opened up class and gender divisions among blacks, leaving men like Herbert and Shorty outside the regular labor market, relegated to semi-licit work and the charity of the state or prison, while others, like Barack Obama, ascended to heights unimaginable only a few decades earlier. It provokes an uncomfortable confrontation with questions of authority and legitimation. Why is it that black men who are unable to leave bleak inner-city neighborhoods have turned their rage inward on one another and not, as they did forty and fifty years ago, on the agents and symbols of a politics, culture, and economy that exclude them from first-class citizenship? For centuries, American discourse about poverty has divided poor people into categories based on their assumed moral worth. Herbert and Shorty belonged to the long line of the “undeserving poor.” They epitomized the urban “underclass” that terrified Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. By the early twenty-first century, however, cutting-edge technologies of poverty were jettisoning pathological constructions of poor people. As new poverty warriors tossed the “underclass” on the trash heap of intellectual history, where were Herbert and Shorty left standing? Did they join the new world of the entrepreneurial poor, or did they find themselves in a no-man’s-land, for all practical purposes (and except for prison) abandoned by the state and philanthropy but not invited to shop in the new store stocked with market-based plans for reducing poverty? In the end, Herbert and Shorty found themselves caught in
