Just Walk On By
Brent Staples
Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the
University of Chicago and went on to become a journalist. The
following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in
September 1986. I am not sure of the page numbers of the
article.
The occasion for Staples's reflections is an incident that
occurred for the first time in the mid-1970s, when he discovered
that his mere presence on the street late at night was enough to
frighten a young white woman. Recalling this incident leads him
to reflect on issues of race, gender, and class in the US.
1:
My first victim was a woman – white, 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.
2:
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 I soon 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.
3:
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.
4:
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-on-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.
5:
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 males 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.
6:
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 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and
murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my
shyness of combat has clear sources.
7:
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too.
They 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 in the streets. I came to doubt
the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow-timid,
but a survivor.
8:
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a
perilous flavor. The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early
1980s, 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 for 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.
9:
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an
interview. I entered a jewelry store on the 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 good night.
10:
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 gunpoint 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.
11:
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.
12:
And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent
tension-reducing 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.
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