My first victim was a white woman, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came
upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent
neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the
avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not
so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man – a broad six feet two
inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky
military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up
her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross
street.
That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly
arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls
that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into – the ability to alter public
space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or
worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless
wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold
one to a person’s throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight
made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was
indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the
surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast,
unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And soon
I gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer
somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and
weapons meet – and they often do in urban America – there is always the possibility of
death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar
with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car
stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male,
or female – hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew
accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street
rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen,
bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals
before there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago, and I have remained an avid night walker. In
central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-one-one street
encounters.
Elsewhere, in Soho, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings
shut out the sky – things can get very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear
the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps
strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves
against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a
hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black men
are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are
no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome
entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being
conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in
Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960’s, I
was scarcely noticeable against the backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I
grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist fights. In retrospect, my shyness
of combat has clear sources.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several too. There
were babies, really – a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his
mid-twenties – all gone down in episodes of bravado played out on the streets. I came to
doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a
shadow – timid, but a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor.
The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when
I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was
writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken as a burglar. The office manager
called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly
to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward
the company of someone who knew me.
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I
entered a jewelry store on a city’s affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself
and returned with an enormous red Doberman Pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She
stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of
her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her goodnight.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He
went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a
murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled
him from his car at gunpointe and but for his press credentials, would probably have tried to
book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time.
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not
to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less
threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to
nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have
exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some
people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as
not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare
occasions when I’ve been pulled over by the police.
And, on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tensionreducing
measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular
classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem
to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that
a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is
my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.