New York Folklore: Volume 6, No. 1-2—Women's Crime-Victim Narratives from the Urban Setting

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NEW YORK FOLKLORE
Vol. 6, No. 1-2, Summer, 1980

“WITH MY HEART IN MY THROAT AND MY WHISTLE IN MY HAND”: WOMEN’S CRIME-VICTIM NARRATIVES FROM THE URBAN SETTING
by Eleanor Wachs

THE CRIME-VICTIM NARRATIVE

Arriving home from school on a chilly mid-November afternoon in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York, a thirteen-year-old girl raced quickly across the car-filled street from one grey project building to another. She knew almost intuitively that she would find her mother in a neighbor’s sixth-floor apartment sitting in the company of her buddies around a table filled with nearly empty liquor bottles. Finding her mother as she had anticipated, she picked up the apartment key, ran back to the family home, changed her clothes and recrossed the busy street to return the key to her mother. Eager to join her friends in the project building backyard, she decided to take the stairs two at a time up to the sixth floor rather than wait for the elevator. She never got there:

This voice from behind me said, “Don’t touch that door!“ So I just froze ... and he held out a knife to my throat. A butcher knife about that long. He said, “If anybody comes, don’t say anything, right?” So we walked up to the fourteenth floor above the roof landing. Then I took off my clothes, and, uhm, he had his fun... He was only a kid himself... I was like the third victim. See, I know one of the girls he had attacked before. A girl named Loretta... So I was like the third victim... When he was really getting into what he was doing his hands were in my hair and all. And that’s when I grabbed it. I just grabbed the first thing. And I grabbed the blade. And I grabbed it with two hands.

Nearly seventeen years later from the time of the actual incident, the above narrative was related to me by the victim, Bernadette Potter, twenty-eight, of New York City. The narrative stands for one of the many narratives concerning criminogenic incidents that I have collected over a three-year period (1976–1979) from New York City residents. The following discussion concerns a group of New York City women who utilize crime-victim narratives as a warning device to develop crime skills and prevention techniques necessary for an urban design for living, and how the rhetorical narrative strategies and strategies within the narratives are used to achieve these ends.
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