Who was stopping Negroes from winning at American capitalism? Dickerson surmised, themselves, of course. Dickerson, and even more conservative black thinkers such as the economists Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury, toed this line in prose I found startlingly persuasive at the time. The linguist John McWhorter, author of Losing the Race, an equally polemical work that gained much more “mainstream” traction than Dickerson’s book, made an argument that both the nascent and long-standing Negro middle classes wanted to believe; they could look at their Caucasian friends and coworkers and say, “Naw, it’s those niggas’ fault. We ain’t like that.” Negroes weren’t victims, even if the playing field wasn’t completely fair, these books argued.
While Dickerson’s book points out the delusion inherent in the white citizenry’s general know-nothingism concerning the despoiling of black American life, past and present, in most of these works, especially those by the serious academics, the weight of the past was cherry-picked, and the policies of the present underexamined. When Losing the Race connects the black educational and economic achievement gap to black anti-intellectualism in the aftermath of the Black Power movement’s cultural ascendency and political failure, McWhorter leaves out school funding, tied to property taxes, that disproportionately keeps droves of black kids in the most ill-equipped schools. Where he upbraids the thought and speech within black cultural life that cordons off some uncomfortable truths about black accountability or deems benign words such as “niggardly” to be off-limits to a D.C. politician in a budget meeting, he also stymies other lines of salient structural critique lodged at the white power structure as empty “rabble-rousing.”
Not that any of this was of particular consequence to me that summer. I was just looking for cheap pot and a good time most nights. My upbringing had shown me how to talk like any common ghetto street kid when I had to make someone on the street respect me, but I bottled up that side of myself during most hours, and certainly on the rooftops and at the bookstore or wherever I was the only black person in the room. I had internalized, through careful instruction, that this was the way to proceed in life, learning, somewhere along the line, to be a “cultural mulatto,” as Trey Ellis would have it, to swim with niggas and Negroes and mulattos and gringos, of varied classes, at ease.
I navigate American apartheid. It isn’t without breaking a sweat.
227–241 Taaffe Place
The lineage of Brooklyn hip-hop Tony and I had grown up listening to in our Ohio bedrooms had prepared me, in some small degree, to expect a rough-and-tumble “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere” New York. In fact, although I didn’t know it at the time, many of the genre’s most salient and outlandish voices came from the streets we suddenly found ourselves living among; beyond Jay-Z, Mos Def and Lil’ Kim, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Foxy Brown are all from Bed-Stuy, where we unwittingly were. Carter’s vision of the space didn’t seem, at first glance, to leave much room for ambiguity. “Cough up a lung / where I’m from / Marcy son / ain’t nothing nice.” But ambiguity was everywhere in the Bed-Stuy of my youth.
My mother had taught me to keep aware of my surroundings, to not trust strangers, to run from trouble, to speak the king’s English to police officers, to feel comfortable saying “nigger” in the company of black folks who carried and transcended the past with me, and, perhaps most important, to distinguish between a Negro who seemed a threat and one who didn’t, which is largely the same as making that distinction with everyone else on God’s green earth. This is a skill that, however commonsensical, is more difficult than it should be for most of our country’s law enforcement apparatus, as illustrated by one risible spectacle after another of black men being jailed or beaten or killed under the flimsiest of pretexts by their sworn public servants on camera, but back then streaming video hadn’t really gone viral and Twitter wouldn’t exist for a few years to come; white folks mostly just didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Certainly this was the case for my roommate, who was likely encountering his first majority-black space, a place of great mystery and dread, a place that listening to all the soul records in the world couldn’t teach him to navigate comfortably at first. In some recess of his mind, I reckon, my roommate couldn’t stomach telling his parents he lived in Bed-Stuy in the first place. He imagined his blonde, Park Slope–dwelling girlfriend, who did social work for brown people all day, not being particularly fond of walking the streets of his imagined Bed-Stuy for a late-night tryst, one I’d inevitably hear through the tiny window that linked our rooms in uncomfortable intimacy, even if it was ten feet off the ground.
Rarely venturing too far east down DeKalb Avenue from a place we didn’t live, Clinton Hill, into a place one didn’t want to go that we actually did live in, Bedford-Stuyvesant, was just as easy. This is how we both behaved, the treading lightly, the assumption of menace, the casual avoidance of corridors where one felt unwelcome at worst and uneasy at best. Is this the general know-nothingism that guilt-free cultural colonialism requires, or the savvy self-preserving instincts of a sophisticated urbanite in a “transitional” neighborhood? While no longer as dangerous as it was during Carter’s coming of age, the streets I inhabited were not without reminders of the past.
The night after I broke my assailant’s arm with the door leading into my building, I watched as armed black patriots climbed onto their Bushwick roof and started firing assault weapons in the air as the July 4 fireworks commenced. A pair of white jeans I wore that day were ruined when I dived for cover into a murky puddle one rooftop away. That wasn’t as demeaning as getting rear-ended and being called a nigger for my trouble by some drunk Caucasian lady as I drove Ray and another friend back to the subway. Getting into my car later in the summer, I watched a homeless man get savagely beaten by a group of young men in Alphabet City and, for fear of my safety, declined to help him, feeling no small amount of shame in the aftermath. I drove back around the block to see if he was still there and in need of assistance, but he had gone, or had been taken, somewhere else entirely.
We lived in a black Bed-Stuy that, while more peaceful than in the crack era and the years that followed, was still less secure than the black Bed-Stuy of the postwar era, one that oddly offered less opportunity for someone like Tony, a musical savant with a real passion for a variety of forms. Although you wouldn’t know it from Carter’s work, hip-hop wasn’t the first musical genre that had Bed-Stuy gangsters and hustlers out starting musical acts. “The Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood is an under-documented anomaly in the history of jazz music,” Vincent Ramal Gardner writes in his survey of Brooklyn’s jazz scene past and present, “We Were Surrounded by Giants.” “It comprises an area of just over 31/2 square miles, but the amount of concentrated jazz activity within its borders throughout the years is nothing short of extraordinary.” In a short time after the form’s mass popularization, bars and nightclubs that catered to gangsters and good-time girls were as likely to have jazz as the more genteel social clubs and ballrooms patronized by college-educated, well-to-do blacks occupying the gorgeous Italianate town houses north of the Fulton Street strip.
Tony, a gifted bassist with a great love of and appreciation for jazz, was suspicious of hip-hop as a form of musical artistry. “It’s really simple music, man, not that sophisticated at all,” Tony would tell me concerning the difficulty of constructing the average hip-hop track, earnest music student that he was. As I would look at him blankly, he’d add a “just saying,” an apology of sorts from the part of him that was squarely a white liberal.
Tony surely would have much preferred the Bed-Stuy of Gardner’s research to the one we were living in then. It was a time when “even the neighborhood gangs had jazz bands.” The previous order of black music had arisen out of a Bedford-Stuyvesant milieu equally as segregated, and as quick to change, as that in which Shawn Carter came of age. Bed-Stuy during the Depression, at the dawn of jazz’s ascendancy to the height of American popular culture, was a neighborhood in the midst of
transformation yet again.
The Great Migration wave of southern blacks, seeking opportunity and the rule of law, fled north into its Victorian and Italianate brownstones not knowing the extent to which the forces of polite white society would go to keep them from earning their share of the American plunder. Despite this, idylls of black self-determination were carved out in cities across the North and Midwest. Bed-Stuy was, in many ways, among the most significant of them.
Bedford-Stuyvesant’s black character benefited from the overcrowding of Harlem as well as the Great Migration; as the completion of the A train subway line, which connected Harlem to Bed-Stuy, eased travel between the city’s two most significant African-American outposts, Bed-Stuy’s black population swelled. It became a welcoming place for many journeying south from Harlem or north from Dixie, a place where black lives could flourish amid the economic boundaries that fenced its prospects inward. Large row houses and brownstones were subdivided for renters, often by blockbusting landlords who exploited the fact that many of the transplants couldn’t acquire Federal Housing Administration–backed housing loans in non-redlined, whites-only neighborhoods. In Harlem, a significant amount of the housing stock during the twentieth century’s first half had passed into black ownership, but Bedford-Stuyvesant’s legacy of black home ownership dated to the 1830s.
A century ago, the Weeksville settlement first brought black home ownership and self-determination to Brooklyn. The community of Weeksville, still one of four distinct segments of Bedford-Stuyvesant, was at its height in the 1860s, home to about seven hundred families. They collectively erected enduring and sophisticated institutions, forming schools, a hospital, an orphanage, and several old folks’ homes. The Weeksville Unknowns were among the country’s earliest black baseball teams (Weeksville’s women founded their own team in the 1880s), while the community was also home to one of the country’s first black newspapers, The Freedman’s Torchlight. Several churches, such as Berean Baptist, St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal, and Bethel A.M.E., were founded during Weeksville’s heyday, places of worship that exist to this day.
The speculators who sought to create an African-American refuge there in the 1830s had the same goals as the blacks who traveled there to escape southern tyranny in the 1930s. They were, consciously and ambitiously, attempting to create a place that was safe and welcoming for people like themselves, marketing the settlement to potential black home owners all over the country. Through landownership, black men, both those born free and those who had to seize their freedom from others, hoped to gain a foothold on the engine of American prosperity. For $250, a black man could own a piece of land in a place like Weeksville and be enfranchised; for the southern black man of a century later, the hope of securing factory jobs and the ability to avoid discriminatory poll taxes or literacy tests in order to vote were equally alluring motivators. This hope, of a place where they wouldn’t have to explain themselves or look over their shoulders or act with cowed deference, united the small coterie of cosmopolitan blacks from across the African diaspora who found themselves drawn to the rural hills and valleys of central Kings County since before the Civil War. Free or slave, northern or southern, American or not, Bed-Stuy has long been a place where blacks, across lines of class and region, could aspire to the same dream of safety and opportunity.
And, even if it weren’t, housing options were limited. The FHA mandated that developers receiving its financial support must enact restrictive covenants in the deeds signed by home owners, which frequently prohibited the sale of property to Negroes. According to an Economic Policy Institute study of the three hundred largest private subdivisions built in Queens, Long Island’s Nassau County, and the suburbs of Westchester from the height of the Depression until just after the end of World War II, “83 percent had racially restrictive deeds.” Preambles like “whereas the Federal Housing Administration requires that the existing mortgages on the said premises be subject and subordinated to the said [racial] restrictions . . . [except for] domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant . . .” were common. Because of this, Bed-Stuy was, and still is, a place of remarkable class dexterity within the black community. Due to the inability of blacks, during those immediate postwar years, to self-segregate along the lines of class, the young Lena Horne, a scion of the upper middle class who grew up on Macon Street in the heart of the neighborhood, got her start in many of the same clubs as her contemporary Billie Holiday, the daughter of a prostitute who had been imprisoned for sex work by the time she turned fourteen. Being black, even as high yellow as Lena, was a class unto itself.
Despite all this discrimination, despite the routine experience of having had the rights of citizenry tarnished and the most humble decencies denied being near universal, a pervasive nihilistic hopelessness of the type that colors the accounts of urban Negro life in Carter’s generation of mass incarceration and deindustrialization did not take hold. The people who were moving to Bed-Stuy were hopeful, bent on improving their lot. The inevitable consequences of widespread disenfranchisement, nonexistent employment opportunities, cheap drugs, and a surplus of guns were in an unimaginable near future. Deadly street violence would seem as foreign to the members of the more than 115 social clubs that existed in Bed-Stuy from the 1930s to the 1960s as to freckled girls born to Exeter Academy and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. Competing over who could put together the most impressive big band for a dance until the wee hours, in one of the neighborhood’s many ornate theaters or ballrooms, wasn’t routinely lethal.
Bed-Stuy’s youth culture in this era was, as in Carter’s time, centered on music. Dance-oriented big bands were crucial to the fabric of the community, performing for “social clubs,” organizations of young blacks that existed primarily, despite the roots many of the groups had in the influential black churches, to throw raucous dance parties. Venues such as Fulton Street’s Brooklyn Palace and Atlantic Avenue’s Bedford Ballroom held more than 2,500 people for dances, while others such as the Sonia Ballroom, which once took up the entire block of Bedford Avenue between Madison and Putnam, housed 1,500 revelers at a time and was thought of as intimate. Black fraternal orders, such as the police union the Centurions, would meet there, while the Order of the Elks had their own local lodge, the Elks Ballroom. When the Elks first began renting it out for public use in 1932, it was the largest public hall owned by Brooklyn Negroes.
Legends of the big band and swing format, from Count Basie to Duke Ellington, performed regularly at social-club-sponsored dances. Charlie Parker, the great pioneer of bebop, had early bands made up largely of central Brooklynites, either recent transplants like Miles Davis or natives such as Max Roach. Before becoming acknowledged masters of the form, key figures such as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, and Charles Mingus cut their teeth at those Bed-Stuy ballroom dances in the years before bebop pushed aside swing and ushered in a revolution in the development of American music.
This pervasive scene, one that supported at least sixty-five jazz venues in the neighborhood roughly from 1930 to 1970, grew as Bed-Stuy became a predominantly African-American neighborhood. Bars like Farmer John, at Fulton Street and Bedford Avenue, or dedicated jazz clubs such as the Putnam Central at Putnam and Classon Avenues, employed schools of session musicians and sidemen, promoters and barkeeps, creating a dynamic economy around the performance and recording of jazz music in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The latter club was the headquarters of Debut Records, an independent label started by Mingus and Roach in 1952 that was among many that shot up in the neighborhood during the era. Most crucially, perhaps, the Bed-Stuy clubs allowed some of the great jazz musicians, from Davis to Monk to Blakey, a place to work in an era when a musician’s cabaret card, a license to work in a New York City establishment that served alcohol, from Prohibition until 1967, could be taken at the slightest pretense by the police, as was the case with each of them.
Jazz created a community of venues and performers in Bed-Stuy, and an economy al
l its own; live hip-hop performance and studio recording, on a granular level, hasn’t had nearly as much significance in the infrastructural life of the place, on the topography or the economy of Bed-Stuy, in the form’s thirty-five-year history. By the time hip-hop began to cross over into the pop-cultural mainstream in the 1980s, much of urban black America had become a place with much larger concentrations of intense poverty, where senseless spasms of violence carried on the winds of desperation were commonplace. Regardless of how many rappers came from those streets, aboveboard venues to showcase the emerging form they helped innovate didn’t employ nearly the amount of people as jazz clubs once had—large or moderate-sized bands of instrumentalists are unnecessary in hip-hop.
Tony, a well-schooled, out-of-work Bed-Stuy transplant with dreams of playing in professional bands, had picked the wrong era to be alive. In our era, my jazz-loving roommate was out of luck. Bed-Stuy was no longer a neighborhood where you could make a living as a sideman with a few weekly residencies. Unless, of course, you didn’t have to earn money to survive.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 5
