He was leaning over the kitchen sink, washing dishes shirtless. “You suburbs. We ’hood,” he began, using his low, father-to-son voice he reserved for moments like this. “And you came down here, took a chance living in the ’hood with me. And that was a real honor for me, and I feel responsible for you here. I ain’t let nothing happen to you.”
A white person living in and writing about the inner city is not uniquely exposed to threats but uniquely shielded from them. And inner-city residents sometimes stiffened in my presence. People often started cleaning up and apologizing after meeting me for the first time. In my late twenties, I was called “sir” countless more times than I was told by some young tough to get a “G pass”—a “gangster pass,” essentially to account for my white self. These are nontrivial issues for someone trying to record life as it is actually lived. The only thing to do is to spend as much time on the ground as you can, transforming yourself from novelty to perpetual foreigner. People generally relax and go about their business with enough time, even if their guard can fly up again in certain circumstances.
It takes time too, to be taught how to notice things by people like Keisha, who have learned when to listen and what to look for. The people I met in Milwaukee trained my vision by modeling how to see and showing me how to make sense of what I saw. Still, I know I missed a lot, especially in the beginning, not only because I was an outsider but also because I was constantly overanalyzing things. A buzzing inner monologue would often draw me inward, hindering my ability to remain alert to the heat of life at play right in front of me. It’s safer that way. Our ideas allow us to tame social life, to order it according to typologies and theories. As Susan Sontag has warned, this comfort can “deplete the world” and get in the way of seeing.3
—
Researching this book involved spending long stretches of time with women, often in their homes, which raised suspicions. In two incidents, men accused me of sleeping with their girlfriends. The first occurred during a drunken argument between Ned and Pam, when Ned snapped: “You’re the one talking to Matt, like he’s a fucking psychologist….Why don’t you go fuck him.” After Ned stormed off, Pam said to me, “He thinks we’re fucking. How pathetic is that?” The fight died down, and Ned backed off from the accusation. But several weeks after that happened, I kept my distance from Pam and tried spending as much time with Ned as I could. On another occasion, I stopped by to see Vanetta the month before she was sentenced to prison and found her with Earl, an older man she had met at the Lodge. Earl had taken a strong romantic interest in Vanetta, an interest she entertained, and he was not happy to see me. Said Earl, “You see, this is my woman. And I should know what my woman is doing.” I took my time explaining my job to Earl and showed him my previous work. I thought he was capable of hurting Vanetta—his rap sheet contained domestic-abuse charges—or at least of leaving her and taking his VA check with him. Earl eventually apologized to me, but the exchange was deeply unsettling. When I left, I asked Vanetta’s sister, Ebony, to check on Vanetta, which she did. And the next morning, I called to make sure everything was okay. “He don’t scare me, though,” Vanetta told me. He should have. After Vanetta got out of prison and broke it off with Earl, someone shot up Ebony’s apartment, where Vanetta and her children were staying. Everyone suspected Earl.
I’ve always felt that my first duty as an ethnographer was to make sure my work did not harm those who invited me into their lives. But this can be a complicated and delicate matter because it is not always obvious at first what does harm.4 Especially in poor neighborhoods, nothing is free. People get compensated for favors one way or another. Ned and Earl figured that if I was giving their girlfriends rides as they looked for housing and went about their business, I must be getting something in return. I was, of course: stories. That was the strange thing. Their accusations were perfectly valid, and I took them seriously.
Gender influenced how people behaved and talked in my presence in other ways too. After prison, Vanetta found a job running tables at a George Webb restaurant and met a new man, Ben, who aspired to be a truck driver. One night in their apartment, Ben left abruptly. “Are you guys okay?” I asked.
“Not really.” Vanetta sighed. “He thinks I act too much like a man.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“It’s like I know too much….He’s always like, ‘You acting like a man. Like, you always have to have an answer to everything.’?”
“You ever pretend not to know stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
Right then I wondered how often Vanetta had played dumb with me, how often she had faked ignorance to appear more ladylike.
Everything about you—your race and gender, where and how you were raised, your temperament and disposition—can influence whom you meet, what is confided to you, what you are shown, and how you interpret what you see. My identity opened some doors and closed others. In the end, we can only do the best we can with who we are, paying close attention to the ways pieces of ourselves matter to the work while never losing sight of the most important questions.5
—
While living in Milwaukee, I was a full-time fieldworker. Most days, I carried a digital recorder and just let it run. This allowed me to capture people’s words verbatim. I also carried a small notepad and wrote down observations and conversations, usually as they were happening. I never hid the fact that I was a writer trying to record as much as I could. In the evenings and early mornings, I would spend hours typing up the jottings from my notebooks and writing about the day’s events. I took thousands of photographs. I conducted more than one hundred interviews with people not featured in this book, including thirty landlords. I spoke with and observed court officers, social workers, building inspectors, property managers, and other people who lived in the trailer park or inner city.
When I left the field, I began a long process of transcribing the recorded material. Some people helped me with this, but I did a significant amount myself. After everything was down on paper, my notes spanned over five thousand single-spaced pages. I began poring over the words, calling up the photographs, and listening to recordings on my way to work or when rocking my newborn to sleep. I read and reread everything several times before I felt ready to begin writing.6 I wanted to be as close to the material as possible, to experience a kind of second immersion in the words and scenes. And I missed everyone. Moving from the North Side of Milwaukee to Cambridge, Massachusetts—a rich, rarefied community—was profoundly disorienting. At first, all I wanted was to be back in the trailer park or the inner city. I returned as often as I could.