The Hallway Hangers

When I spoke with Boo-Boo in the summer of 1991, he was grieving for one daughter and contemplating the deaths of his second daughter and his girlfriend. He didn’t say so, but it was clear that Boo-Boo was also facing up to his own fate. Boo-Boo died in 1994, having first buried Natasha, Connie, and Ginger. During the early days of my 2006 fieldwork, nearly every street-corner conversation alluded to Boo-Boo’s deathbed courage and to his extraordinary funeral (which featured heavy metal music, songs written by friends, tributes from his family, and a graveside party, which moved to his sister’s home and was still going strong thirty-six hours later). Several people on the fringes of the Hallway Hangers have also died, some of them violently, but the rest of the Hallway Hangers survive. Here are their edited interviews, offered without a theoretical framework to conceptualize the external forces that constrain the men. I’ve been completely out of professional sociology for well over a decade, but that doesn’t mean I could return to Clarendon Heights without theoretical baggage. Indeed, some of my questions introduce clunky sociological categories into the interviews. This didn’t always make for great conversation, but sometimes it induced the men to articulate their own sociology. Rather than being absolutely raw data, these stories are lightly toasted in the telling but retain, I hope, a freshness for the reader.

American Sports and Literature · Computer Science