Listening to the evidence, I could not fathom why Herbert was on trial for first-degree murder or why he had been held for ten months. The evidence just was not there. In fact, the witnesses, all for the prosecution, introduced more and more ambiguity and doubt. The one civilian witness, Henry Fairlee, startled me. I could not believe he had been put on the stand for the prosecution. Watching his head loll and his eyes shut, hearing his contradictions and his outright misstatement about the length of the pipe, I thought he was the least credible witness imaginable.
When the jurors finally found themselves alone, the first task was choosing a foreperson. One or two suggested me, but I deferred to the woman who had volunteered. She seemed a little less certain than she was earlier. Shorty’s relatives had been watching the trial and clearly were upset and angry. But she was gutsy, and I supported her as foreperson and sat next to her in order to give her a hand if needed. We went quickly around the room to gauge opinion. Not one juror hesitated to dismiss the charge of murder one. No one found any of the evidence credible.
The next question was manslaughter. After a brief discussion, we agreed that there was no way Herbert could have avoided the confrontation. He could not have left his house through the back because the rear was blocked by trash. Because he did not have a telephone, he could not have called the police (the defense attorney probably should have brought this out). We did not believe he had used the borrowed money for food, but that was immaterial. We also thought that if he had a serious criminal record, the DA would have highlighted it at the trial. Only one juror, the sharper of the nineteen-year-olds, wanted to discuss the manslaughter possibility. But he quickly agreed that no evidence supported it. We all thought it most likely that Herbert had acted in self- defense, not intending to kill Shorty. This discussion took less than an hour and a half, which amazed the attorneys. Watching Herbert’s face relax, seeing him embrace his lawyer as the decision was read, moved me deeply. After we returned to the jury room, Judge Lockwood came in to thank us. He praised our attentiveness and said we had acted correctly.
In one way, I found the trial experience frustrating. I wanted to interrupt and ask questions. As someone who makes part of his living teaching seminars, this is something I expect to do. Obviously, I could not. But at a number of points along the way, I wanted to probe more or bring up something it seemed to me the attorneys had missed. I was also frustrated by what we did not know about Herbert and Shorty. Who were these men? Only a piece of their lives was laid in front of us. What had brought them to the streets of North Philadelphia? Why were two grown men willing to kill each other over five dollars? What had made West Oakland Street a place where freelance mechanics fixed cars on the street, aging men lived in rooms with knives stashed over the door for protection, and most residents would refuse to bear witness to the killing of a likable and familiar figure?
I suppose that the law would say these questions are irrelevant. They are immaterial to what happened, and the only intent that counted was what lay in Herbert’s mind at the moment his knife penetrated Shorty’s chest. The only geography that mattered was the detail necessary to choreograph Herbert’s and Shorty’s movements. But that was not enough for me. I wanted to understand, as fully as possible, the situation and the men about whose lives and death the state required me to decide. I think like a historian or a social scientist, not a lawyer. In my world, where the goal is to comprehend rather than to judge, context matters greatly.
For decades I have tried to write about poverty, its contexts, and the ideas and policies used to explain or ameliorate it. I also have written, read, and thought a great deal about cities, especially the transformations that have produced the North Philadelphias of America. (Even here I fall into stereotypes: North Philadelphia is a complex and varied place that belies its reputation for blight and social disorganization, just as West Philadelphia, beyond Fortieth Street, belies the image of a dangerous urban frontier so prominent in the minds of a great many Penn students and maddening to its residents.) But there is an abstraction in most of the literature and in most of what I have written. This abstraction confronted me in the early 1990s, when for about five years I served as archivist to an ex officio member of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Committee for Research on the Urban Underclass (a title originally insisted on by the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the committee’s work), later renamed, more softly, as a committee on concentrated and persistent urban poverty. The SSRC committee brought together the leading social scientists working on poverty. It focused primarily, with few exceptions, on quantitative data.
Members were serious, responsible social scientists; for the most part, they cared about poverty. But the research, of necessity, given its method, transmuted the Herberts and Shortys of America into statistics, their characteristics the variables in equations. To have talked of their lived experience, to have allowed hearts to show on sleeves, would have been seen as violating objectivity. To have sat down with them for an evening’s talk would have been unscientific and useless. There is, of course, a long history of social scientists and observers who have tried to find and reveal the lives beyond the abstractions. Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth in England come immediately to mind. In the United States, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives remained an iconic text that was unmatched in its popular impact until Michael Harrington’s The Other America in the 1960s. Within the social sciences, anthropologists and ethnographers such as Eliot Liebow in Tally’s Corner, Robert Fairbanks, II in The Way Things Work, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg in Righteous Dopefiend have opened windows on lives never seen before by most Americans.5 Even in reading the best ethnographies, however, a layer of experience separates me from the day-to- day reality of lives spent on West Oakland Street and thousands of streets like it. This is so even though I have lived for nearly thirty years in West Philadelphia, where diversity is the only thread uniting the individuals who pass our house every day. I have tried to enter the lives of extremely poor people in the past, reconstructing histories of the poorest New Yorkers of the early twentieth century from charity records and complementary sources. By piecing together these life stories, I have unraveled the complexity and strength, as well as the pathos and sometimes disorganization, in the lives of desperately poor women. 6 But I have never done the same for their counterparts today.
Occasionally, though, an incident concretizes what I have been writing and thinking about. It braids together strands often examined separately by social science, exemplifying the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces at play in the most ordinary lives and how powerful structural forces transforming cities, social structure, and national economies play themselves out in individual experience.
One of these moments happened a year or two after my family and I moved from Toronto to Philadelphia. It was the late spring or early summer of 1979 or 1980. I was mowing our small front lawn, which is raised a few feet above the sidewalk. Brick walls, punctuated by concrete front steps, line the block. A few yards down the street, an African American man whom I guessed to be in his thirties leaned against a car, occasionally walking up and down the block and resting on a wall. He was clearly disoriented. I watched him for some time, wondering what to do. Should I call the police? No, they might beat him up (Philadelphia police were reputedly tough on black men). Should I go in the house and get my dog and then go talk to him? After about half an hour, I was disgusted with myself. This was a fellow human being in trouble on a bright, warm afternoon. Why was I so hesitant—even afraid?
I approached and asked if he needed help. He asked for a glass of water, which I fetched. Then he said he was trying to reach his brother’s apartment; the address belonged to a building around the corner. He was a Vietnam vet. He had been to the nearby VA Hospital, where he had been given either the wrong amount of medication or the wrong medication, which had left him disoriented. He had stopped in the bathroom of a church but forgot to retrieve his bag, which held his wallet. He did not know where he was. I took him to his brother’s apartment; later