While just about every hustler I interviewed told me that he was hoping for a legit job and a better life, I rarely saw anyone get out of the hustling racket unless he died or went to jail.
Hustling is mentioned or referred to or spoken about or commented upon so often throughout the narrative that it actually rises to the level of thematic material. As Ms. Bailey observes with a heart laugh, “we’re all hustlers. So when we see another one of us, we gravitate toward them. Because we need other hustlers to survive.” The difficult part of this aspect of the book is that the term is used to refer to a number of different and varied things that many people may not typically associated with the word. In this case, it is the connotation that most people are aware of and the definition that is blurry.
“I’m giving him an education.”
Michael operates a pop-up car washing enterprise along with his brother Kris and that enterprise is an example of hustling. One that may not immediately come to mind when one hears the word. Michael delivers this retort when T-Bone finds the author hustling around with rags to help out Michael. T-Bone asks what he’s paying “the professor” and Michael answers jokingly, but honestly. Another thematic element of the book is the difference between various types of education: he is getting one type from the world of academia and another from the streetwise inhabitants of the projects.
For a time I thought that J.T. and I might remain close even as our worlds were growing apart. “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I’ll be coming back all the time.” But the deeper I got into my Harvard fellowship, the more time passed between my visits to Chicago, and the more time passed between visits, the more awkward J.T. and I found it to carry on our conversations.
While there is an admitted sense of nostalgia to this quote and the period under discussion near the end of the narrative, lying beneath that patina of fond memories of good fellowship is a hard, cruel truth. That truth is not delivered directly or with the expenditure of prose to describe the emotions attending to it. The truth is found between the lines and is almost certainly the better off for it. The author chooses—wisely—to pour forth his closing thoughts on the nostalgic recollection of fellowship. For the most part he leaves unaddressed the inescapable reality that has been lying just below the surface of the narrative all along: while the author may have become friends with those in the projects and learned from them and helped them, he was never truly one of them and, even more importantly, he never could be. The book is a sociological study and not a memoir and any full understanding and appreciation of what the author is attempting to convey through experience has to accept that. In the end—lying deep down beneath that nostalgic patina—he was a scientist looking through a microscope. The very fact that the relationships forged in the projects cannot withstand the pressure of his returning to his rightful place in his real world attests to that unpleasant reality.
“Go back to where you came from and be more careful when you walk around the city.”
This advice is offered by the J.T. very early on in the story. It is his advice to the man who is clearly out of place in his world. The man who has been asking “silly questions” with a clipboard in his hand as a means of finding sociological answers to problems that affect people who couldn’t be less bothered with sociology. His advice continues:
“No one is going to answer questions like that. You need to understand how young people live on the streets.”
Within the context of the linear progression of the narrative, this can be fairly be pinpointed as the moment when the author commits to rejecting the conventions of academia and scholarly research and commit to actual learning. In a non-linear fashion, however, this quote when he and J.T. have just barely met connects powerfully to the above misplaced confidence that the relationship which subsequently developed would be strong enough for him to be “coming back all the time.”
The message by the end is clear: the author can understand how the people of the projects live, but because of the world he comes from, he can never really belong to that world, no matter how much time he may spend studying it up close and personal. J.T. was prescient; he knew from the beginning that “the professor” would have to go back to where he came from.
