Introduction

URBAN FOLKLORE AND THE
NARRATIVES OF CRIME VICTIMS

Thirteen-year-old Bernadette raced home from school on a chilly autumn afternoon across the busy Brooklyn streets. She knew that she would find her mother with her cronies at a neighbor’s apartment, sitting and drinking around a table covered with nearly empty liquor bottles. Bernadette greeted her mother, got from her the key to their own heavily locked apartment, ran back home, changed her clothes, and was ready to join her friends in the building backyard. But first, she needed to return the key to her mother in the adjacent building. Instead of waiting for the elevator, she decided to take the stairs, two at a time, up to the sixth floor. She never made it.

I was raped at thirteen. You didn’t know that? This is what happened. When I was thirteen, November 13, 1962, I lived at 417 Maple Street, fourteenth floor. My mother was drinking very heavily at that time. My mother was hanging around with these drinking buddies at 414 across the street. So I had to do something: I had to go home. I picked up the key from my mother at 414. I went home, changed my clothes, did whatever I had to do, and was on my way back. It was getting late; I decided to walk up the stairs to the sixth floor. There were only six floors. So I ran up, and as I was putting my hand on the stairway door to open it, to go into the hallway where all the apartments were, when this voice from behind me said, “DON’T TOUCH THAT DOOR!” So of course you’re taught to obey authority, right? So I just froze. And he put a knife to my throat. A butcher knife, like, with a blade about that long [approximately ten inches]. And he said, “If anybody comes, don’t say anything,” right? So we walked up to the top floor, which was above the roof landing. And then we walked to the other side, because it had two landings. Then I took off all my clothes. And all this and, uhm, [pause] he had his fun. . . . I knew, and even now I still know, that he didn’t want to hurt me. He wanted sex, and that was it. But I was the third victim. Well, I know one of the girls he attacked before. A girl named Loretta. And then he had tried to attack another woman, but she screamed and she scared him away. So I was the third victim. So what happened was, when he was really getting into what he was doing, his hands were in my hair and all that. He had put down the knife. And that’s when I grabbed it. I just grabbed the first thing, and I grabbed the blade. And I grabbed it with both hands. And he started to try to pull it away. And he tried to kick me, and I started to scream. . . .¹

In a Manhattan delicatessen during a busy midday hour in June, 1976, Bernadette Potter, a heavyset twenty-eight-year-old black woman, told me her crime-victim story. Although the incident had happened fifteen years earlier, her voice quivered and her hands moved wildly as she spoke. I noticed her curled fingers, and a long, meandering scar on her left hand. The scar is a reminder of Bernadette’s struggle with the rapist, as she grabbed his knife by the blade and slashed his heel, marking him for capture by the police minutes after the rape.

At the restaurant, office workers and shoppers wolfed down sandwiches, gulped down coffee, and shared loud conversations with other customers and waiters. In this common urban setting, our conversation lasted nearly three hours. We were two native New Yorkers, friends for years, catching up on news and talking about life in the city. Despite having worked together in an office years before, and our resulting friendship, I had not known until that afternoon that Bernadette had been raped. Like many New Yorkers to whom I would speak about urban crime during the next four years, Bernadette told me one story after another:

This happened to a distant cousin of mine. This is really weird. They had moved into a building, and the son was fifteen years old. He met these two guys who befriended him. You live in the neighborhood, so why not? Something like a month later, these two guys knocked on the door, and of course, the woman . . . the mother . . . came in. . . . They ripped her off, tried to kill them, killed the mother. They took her son, slashed him several times, and hung him upside down in the closet for him to die. That’s sick, yes?²

Bernadette told her stories in a straightforward, dramatic style, sprinkling them with traces of wit and sarcasm. It is a style of narrative performance used by many New Yorkers to tell these gruesome tales of city life. This type of story is often embedded into conversations and is a part of the city’s oral tradition.

These stories about crime victimization would prompt folklorists to explore those aspects of urban existence that pertain to an urban folklore: the customs and traditions indigenous to city life. Urban folklore involves a pattern of responses between people that depends on a shared set of culturally determined traits, assumptions, and expectations. These traits reflect the well-known characteristics of this world: population density, heterogeneity, alienation, anonymity, bystander apathy, and invasion of privacy, among others. These are the traits common to these stories.³ The following account is typical:

I was going to a concert in the city with my friends and saw this guy being mugged, but we didn’t stop. We would have been late for the concert. I can’t say that. But we didn’t stop, and that’s the truth. I don’t know if we would have stopped if we hadn’t been late or that’s just a good excuse. Maybe we wouldn’t have stopped. Just a guy getting beat up on the street corner. But it’s kind of scary to stop and help when there are so many people who are armed.⁴

One of the most popular traditions among New Yorkers is telling stories about significant events in their daily lives. The specific content of these urban tales may vary, but they often share common characteristics and themes. Many New Yorkers, for example, recount their experiences with power blackouts, transit or garbage strikes, battles at traffic court, or eccentric characters. As storytellers, they select their accounts from an extensive repertory of narratives that includes other stories, perhaps more personal or intimate. Yet, whether intimate or commonplace, many of these tales deal with some aspect of crime vicitimization or some feature of urban life:

A friend of mine bought a newspaper one evening. And as he was walking home—as he was just ready to come into the house—there were a few boys waiting in the lobby. He didn’t see them. But once he got into the elevator, they pounced on him. And they beat him up very badly. They didn’t want anything. They just wanted to beat him up.(M-11)⁵

Everyone has such stories to tell, whether about crime-victim situations, urban foul-ups, or some other, equally dramatic, aspect of city life.

Today, most folklorists agree that the scope and content of their field of study are the traditional materials transmitted either by oral face-to-face interaction, such as sharing a joke, or in a partially verbal or nonverbal way, as when a master craftsperson teaches an apprentice a traditional skill. These products of human creativity (jokes, family stories, folk songs, quilts, etc.) appear in patterned recurrent forms, which are always in flux because of the nature of oral transmission. The recurrence of form and the variation within the replicated form of a traditional item are two characteristic qualities of folklore. Understanding how folklore functions within a culture is an important concern of the folklorist, as is the relationship between these products of human interaction and the people who create, perform, use, and pass them on to others.⁶ Regardless of the environment in which it flourishes, rural or urban, folklore reflects its cultural milieu. Thereby, it serves as an effective data base for research and analysis.

To earlier folklorists who studied mainly rural communities, tradition often meant those expressive materials or documents appearing in culture that were passed on transgenerationally; that is, from father to son or mother to daughter. This “tradition,” they claimed, had to pass the “test of time.” Folktales survived because they engendered significant cultural values, and as such were “carried on” or “passed down” like family heirlooms. This limited view of folklore transmission has given way to a larger, more complex picture. It has been fully demonstrated, for example, that traditions are constantly supplanted and that mass media and technology actively create and disseminate both old and new traditions. Through the media, news is received almost as soon as it occurs. And almost as quickly, listeners fashion impressions, thoughts, and stories about these events.⁷ In our technological age, one criterion in the former traditional process of transmitting folklore—that is, “the test of time”—has been eroded. At the same time, the media have become a significant force in the rapid dissemination of folklore.

Folklorists do not assign greater value to studying one folk culture or form of lore over another. Though they may often disagree as to appropriate theoretical approaches, such differences merely reflect the healthy vitality of the discipline. Contemporary folklorists do agree, however, that they study the role of tradition in culture. As this study makes clear, my interest lies in a specific tradition of the urban world—the crime-victim narrative.

Folklore offers explanations and solutions that serve as a mediating force for some of humankind’s most difficult dilemmas. In fact, today’s folklorist would claim that the traditional folk wisdom embodied in lore offers solutions to cultural enigmas, or provides vehicles that folk groups can use to reflect upon, rationalize, or solve everyday problems. As an important body of knowledge used for stockpiling traditional solutions to common problems, folklore “provides guidelines for behavior” and creates mechanisms by which the group can psychologically handle the unexpected once it happens.⁸ Crime-victim stories include such mechanisms.

One out of every three Americans has had some experience with crime victimization.⁹ Americans in general have become increasingly fearful of crime in their homes, neighborhoods, and cities. Few venture casually into the streets after dark; many stay home regardless of the hour. Others will not leave for vacation before they have stored their money in the refrigerator, put valuable jewelry in a safe-deposit box, or made sure the daily newspapers do not pile up outside the door. Sometimes these methods do not work:

My apartment was robbed . . . when I was in Puerto Rico having a good time. . . . And my neighbor was keeping an eye out, and my neighbors were informed as well. And P.S. they came in through the fire escape. I got a message at the place I was staying. It was a guest house. My sister was pregnant at the time. So, I said if she had the baby to let me know. Well, P.S. there was a message, “By the way, your apartment was robbed.”¹⁰

During 1977, when I started conducting the fieldwork for this study, nationwide crime-victim statistics were shocking. The Uniform Crime Report for 1977 reported that a murder took place every twenty-seven minutes in the United States. A forcible and violent rape occurred every eight seconds. Someone was robbed every seventy-eight seconds, or burglarized every ten seconds; there was a larceny-theft every five seconds. Most astonishing, one aggravated assault occurred each minute.¹¹ Stephen Schaefer, in his book The Victim and His Criminal, notes that, as impressive as these statistics are, they do not present an accurate nationwide picture of the crime victim’s situation. “Official crime statistics,” he writes, “seem unable to cope with the difficulties of drawing an accurate picture of the amount of crime and the number of criminals; and victim statistics to the extent that they present a numerical analysis of crime and criminals are sources of error, and even less reliable knowledge is obtainable if they concern the victim.”¹² Statistics, then, seem to be neither accurate nor reliable in providing a clear picture about crime victimization: it is in their stories that victims’ voices are heard.

What happens? Either I’m carrying a pocketbook or they come up and snatch a pocketbook and keep on running. Some of them are on bicycles. So, you’re gonna run after them on a bicycle? You can’t do it! There’s so much crime in the city! What’s the point of calling the cops?¹³

Our society is undergoing a change in how people regard the criminal justice system. Many of the senior citizens I spoke to, like the one who gave the above commentary, view the justice system as an impersonal bureaucracy. They claim that juvenile offenders who commit “adult” crimes plea bargain with the help of their court-appointed lawyers; they are quickly released and then return to the streets to commit more crimes. The often-heard saying that “a judge is liberal until he is mugged” reflects the notion that the criminal-justice system is becoming increasingly lenient because prisons are dangerously overcrowded. The “Miranda” decision, which assures offenders’ civil rights, has had a widespread impact, affecting not only the arrest methods of the police but also the public’s attitude toward crime. Many people I spoke with believed that the crime victim, unlike the criminal, has few if any rights, or even any sound recourse to compensation and restitution. This attitude prevails despite the fact that several states have passed victims’-rights legislation.¹⁴

In this confuson, victims and their families and friends often resort to the “traditional” activity of storytelling to cope with the persistent problem of urban crime. In general, Americans are fearful of violent crime; by talking about it and telling stories to one another, victims are able to express this common fear.

The urban lifestyle breeds alienation, as sociologist Louis Wirth and others detailed decades ago.¹⁵ No longer do neighbors watch out for neighbors. Good Samaritans are exceptional. The rare do-gooder is the one who makes the evening headlines, hailed as an instant folk hero. Another traditional feature of city life is bystander apathy, as exemplified in the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. In this widely publicized incident, neighbors watched and listened to the woman’s cries for help as she was brutally stabbed outside the door of her Queens apartment. No one offered aid.¹⁶ A rising crime rate, fear for one’s own safety, and lack of concern for the welfare of others are the byproducts of our urban crimeinfested lives.

Like most New Yorkers, I had often thought about crime and how my awareness of it affected my daily experiences. The horror of the Kitty Genovese affair had affected many New Yorkers, me among them. Most wondered why no one came to her rescue.

In 1977, when I began collecting the majority of the crime-victim stories presented here, David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” was stalking several neighborhoods, mostly in Queens, searching for the dark-haired women he would soon murder. He was the talk of the town. But the dramatic events concerning the “Son of Sam” were not the only ones spoken about. Informants told of street muggings, local store holdups, apartment breakins, and more. Unlike the unusual Berkowitz case, which captured the city’s attention for several months, these crimes that I heard about were everyday events.¹⁷ It was this ordinary element of the narrative that appealed to me as a subject of research, rather than the bizarre mass murderer.

As a folklorist, I was intrigued by the urban oral tradition of crime-victim stories. I became interested in how people talk about crime-victim events and what they imply when they do. The more I became aware of their prominence, the more I became fascinated by the world view storytellers would project when relating these tales. How often did Bernadette tell of her escape on the roof? What did her story reveal about city life and its dangers? Was her story idiosyncratic? Did others have similar stories to share, and would they follow similar or different patterns? Thinking about these questions, I narrowed my focus to four concerns: (1) How do urbanites, New Yorkers in this case, fashion reports about the social reality of crime and crime victimization? (2) How do these stories relate to other narratives common to folklore? (3) How do these stories incorporate urban folkways? and (4) How do these stories reflect the world view of the urban community?

An important area of investigation lay in the apparent traditions inherent in the attitudes and behavior of the victims. Why did the New Yorkers I spoke with find life there so attractive despite the high occurrence of crime within their workplaces and neighborhoods? Why were they willing to tolerate the city’s high cost of living, the polluted environment, the failed transportation system, the increases in street crime? City life offers an abundance of goods and services, cultural events, exotic restaurants, multicultural neighborhoods, and a variety of groups and diversity of peoples. Many of the people I spoke with insisted upon calling New York City the “capital of the country.” The crime-victim stories they related supplied some of the answers.

I purposely distinguish the crime-victim narrative from the crime narrative. My informants, as crime victims, provided stories with the victim as hero/heroine, or as a character related in a third-person account. Crime victims were usually presented as central to the action. A few stories were rehashed newspaper accounts, but rarely was the offender featured as the main character. According to studies, the crime stories recounted by offenders focus on the crime itself; the victims are outside the offenders’ range of thought and concern. The difference between offender and victim lore, then, is significant. It neatly parallels the difference in content between crime-victim stories and crime stories.¹⁸ Crime-victim narratives are stylized and structured formulaic stories that recapitulate incidents between a victim and an offender. The crime narrative describes an event about the offender, who is often the storyteller. For example, an incarcerated criminal’s boasting about a successful “hit,” or a prisoner’s recounting of exploits outside of the prison would qualify as crime narratives but not as crime-victim narratives.

The following narrative exemplifies the differences between the two types of stories. A young man had just stopped off at the dry cleaner’s. He had his receipt, name and address included, pinned onto his garment. In an impulsive moment on the way home, he broke into an apartment and helped himself to the owner’s possessions. Since he left his ticketed garment behind, he was quickly arrested. This brief narrative is representative of the crime story. The victim—as person—is insignificant. He or she is just a means to an end, an instrument for obtaining the goods or money the offender demands, or a convenient object for the criminal’s hostility or rage. Little, if any, moralizing appears in the crime narrative. In the crime-victim narrative, however, the narrator often empathizes with the victim’s plight, and narrators and audience are relieved when an account includes the possibility that the offender might be apprehended.

By the end of the first stage of my fieldwork (1976–1977), I had reached many tentative conclusions that would shape subsequent observations (1979, 1981, 1984, 1985). I found that informants who recounted their crime-related experiences did not categorize crimes or use labels to distinguish different types of crimes. They merely told one story of victimization after another. Many times in their stories, they included generalizations about crime and city life. For example, one woman related an incident that had occurred in her apartment building. She interlaced her narrative with personal opinions concerning the victim, the owning of jewelry, and the urbanite’s fear of crime:

There was an incident here during the summer in Building Three. There was a man. He was a widower. He was in his seventies. He was an antiques dealer. Evidently his neighbors knew that his apartment was a very expensive apartment. How it happened I don’t really know. But one day, the neighbors saw that his door was off its hinges. So when they went to investigate, they found the man bloodied on the floor, and he was completely robbed of all the antiques. . . . They never found out who did it. . . . You just have to keep quiet if you have any valuables. And you’re very foolish if you keep valuables in the house, because in this day and age you just can’t advertise what you’ve got. You don’t wear what you have, and it’s very unfortunate, because you wear jewelry out of sentimental value and certainly for pleasure. But . . . what’s the sense of buying beautiful things . . . if you can’t enjoy them? Or if you invite people into your home to enjoy it with you? You’re afraid to invite them in for fear of who’s gonna tell the next one what you have. It’s a very bad situation.¹⁹

Initially, I suspected that the street mugging story would be the modern counterpart to the nineteenth-century tall tale, filled with boasts and exaggerations. “How big was that bear?” would be replaced with “Yeah, you were mugged? How big was the knife?” I expected that the details of the crime-victim incident would become aggrandized, embellished, and more fantastic at each retelling. I anticipated that the tall tale of American folklore had evolved into the new and unbelievable story of the urban street.

After fieldwork in the winter of 1976, my hypothesis changed. In selecting only the mugging story as a subtype of crime-victim lore, I had overlooked a variety of other experiences that city dwellers were eager to share. “No, I wasn’t mugged”—a common reply to my question about this type of incident—frequently was followed by the further comment, “but I’ve been robbed!” Although the dramatic stories about crime victims eventually surpassed my earlier expectations, not all informants touched on the areas I finally chose to collect: mugging, rape, and murder. The street mugging story remained the largest and richest category for collecting. As my data base increased, the mugging-story-as-tall-tale hypothesis fell apart. The stories were not fabrications of events but were, rather, realistic, straightforward accounts. I collected over 150 narratives, 120 of which are included in the Appendix.

For convenience, I have divided the narratives into the following general categories: the mugging story (M); the murder story (MR); and the rape story (R). In addition, each is numbered sequentially; a letter/number designation follows each narrative embodied in the discussion that follows. Thus, M-9 refers to the ninth mugging story in the Appendix.

Conducting fieldwork involves making contacts with people, establishing rapport, and conducting interviews. Much of the work that a field-worker does takes place after the interview, when tapes are transcribed word for word, field notes are recorded, and the material is reviewed. I collected the crime-victim stories by tape-recording interviews, and I often used an interview guide, kept in view during the sessions, to make certain that major topics were discussed. The interview guide was connected to the major goals of my interest: the collection of crime-related incidents narrated as true accounts, and a discussion of the effects of the incidents—in particular, the protective behavioral changes my informants made as a result of being victimized or of having heard accounts of such incidents. I interviewed fifty people and talked with many others. While I transcribed all interviews, I present here only a portion of the narratives and commentary of my informants. I draw, as well, on notations from my fieldwork journal.

The city dweller’s cognitive map determined my selection of informants. Each urbanite has a complex mental image of the city world, the neighborhoods, the subway system, and even the best routes to take crosstown. All informants were familiar with the centrally located areas of Manhattan, and knew their neighborhoods well.²⁰ Many people I spoke with had little knowledge of other boroughs or other neighborhoods. For example, some Brooklynites knew little of the Bronx, and stated they had never been there despite its relative proximity. Recognizing that some boundary had to be established, and because of my own knowledge of Brooklyn and Manhattan, I spoke mostly with residents of those areas.

A technique of conducting fieldwork, including urban fieldwork, is to establish bridges between people, who then lead to others they assume will be helpful. In seeking informants, I needed to discover the crime-victim network. Lines of association began to develop through contacts with friends, relatives, and acquaintances, many of whom did direct me to additional informants. A network began to develop. I met informants in groups or through group associations. For example, through the aid of a social worker employed by a Brooklyn agency devoted to serving the elderly, I volunteered my time to organize a couple of weekly discussion groups. Crime was a daily reality to these people, since they lived in a high-crime area and were constantly fearful of being victimized or already had been victimized. They often talked about their experiences. The social worker told me the following story about one of the agency’s clients:

A client who I knew very well . . . was raped and killed right on Ocean Avenue and Church [Avenue]. Oh, such a lovely lady. . . . Little lady, very frail. . . . Maybe weighed ninety pounds. . . . She would do anything for anyone. And this guy followed her into her apartment. He tied her up. He raped and he killed her. He bashed her head in. . . . You know what I think about when I think of her? How scared she must have been. . . .²¹

The group-discussion format served an important function: it gave the victims an opportunity to share their experiences with a sympathetic audience to whom they could vent their anger. I was a willing listener.

Others began to hear about me, and I became known as the person interested in “crime stuff.” Informants frequently introduced me by this description to their friends, who in turn had their own stories to tell. Often, I met them in their homes, after working hours, or during lunch hours near their workplaces. Many interviews took place in coffee shops, and before too long I knew the ones with the most conducive atmosphere for collecting.

Informants were not particularly difficult to secure. As in most field-work, some serendipitous experiences occurred. For example, one afternoon I was waiting to interview a woman whom I had met at a party some weeks earlier. We planned to rendezvous in the lobby of a large university building in Manhattan, and then to go to a nearby coffee shop for our interview. While waiting for her, I began to chat with a middle-aged man who was sitting next to me on a bench. Before long, I found out he was a college professor. He was quick to tell me several of his urban horror escapades. One story he told included being held up at gunpoint on the subway.

Informants differed in racial and ethnic background, occupation, and social class, reflecting the cultural diversity of New York City. The majority were middle- or lower-middle-class. Three-fourths of the informants were college-educated. I spoke with office workers, salespeople, actors, schoolteachers, college students, nurses, and many others. Crime victimization seems to be a great leveler. I was concerned here not with which groups were more victimized than others, but with how informants captured their experiences and told them as stories about urban life.

As expected, a majority of informants questioned me about the purpose of my research. When I replied that I was interested in the urban folkways of New York City, and said that crime and victimization played a significant role in the city’s oral tradition, they seemed puzzled. Of course, to many of my informants, folklore was something difficult to identify or to explain; many thought it was not a part of their daily lives. This is a common fieldwork experience for folklorists.

As I became involved in gathering these narratives, I became increasingly more interested in women informants, because they were so open in their discussions. For example, rape, a subject which was more or less taboo a few years earlier, was now being discussed. Recent cultural changes brought about by the women’s movement have substantially increased the accessibility of such formerly suppressed personal experiences. (Bernadette’s rape story is one such example.)²² During the period of this investigation, the influence of the women’s movement became widespread. Women’s rape and crisis centers opened. Consciousness-raising centers and women’s self-defense courses became common, especially in New York City. Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking feminist study about rape, Against Our Will, published in 1975, made its impact.²³ This increased awareness of women’s issues made it inevitable that these stories would surface. And they did.

In studying New Yorkers, I was on familiar ground. The knowledge of my home terrain made working in the city easier for me than for someone new to the area. I made my way through the city streets and the complex transporation system to each fieldwork appointment without difficulty; yet, I could never anticipate an interview’s outcome. People I spoke with shared personal experiences that for some had produced severe emotional scars. Some New Yorkers I interviewed had recently been crime victims and were still suffering from the aftershock. Some became emotionally upset when describing the details of their experience. Others expressed outrage. The discussion of intimate details and the expression of strong emotion demanded strict confidentiality, and each individual was assured of his or her anonymity. In this study, I have given all informants pseudonyms appropriate to their personalities, particular interests, or ethnic backgrounds.

By listening to these crime-victim experiences almost daily for several months, I started to understand the anxiety and vulnerability my informants expressed. After hearing about one woman’s return home one night, I wondered what I would do if faced with the same situation:

My friend Emily was robbed at knifepoint. She saw these black guys. They were a few blocks away from her house. They were about eighteen. They looked suspicious to her. She was a little afraid, but she passed them, and they didn’t look as though they were following her. So she figured it was just her imagination. Then when she got to her house, as she goes and as she presses the elevator [button] and she gets in there, and the door opens rather than remaining closed to go up. And these guys are right outside the elevator. And she was right! There was something to worry about. And they took out a knife. And they asked for money. So she gave them her money. (M-3)²⁴

Fortunately, I did not share Emily’s fate. People continually asked me whether I had been victimized, but I had no incidents to report to them.

After a promise of confidentiality and an explanation of my intentions, most informants seemed enthusiastic about my work and flattered to contribute to the study. However, some became anxious, even distraught, when telling their stories. A lull in the conversation, lasting from a few brief seconds to a few minutes, always punctuated the telling. It became clear that each person needed some restorative psychological space during the sensitive moments of the interview. They, as tellers, needed to regain self-control. They expressed this need through their silence. Sometimes during the liveliest of discussions, informants became quiet, passive, reflective. Watching their expressions, I sat with them and waited. I assumed that they were recalling the crime scenes just narrated to me. Usually, after a few moments, we went on with the interview; but if someone was unusually distraught, he or she became withdrawn after the anticipated silence. I either dropped the topic at that point or returned to it later, when my informant seemed more composed. If necessary, I would quickly complete the interview. Only once did an informant request terminating an interview. In general, I found the people I spoke with willing to share their crime-victim stories with me, and I appreciated their efforts.