PJ had two younger brothers, Roger and Pierre, and they became regulars in our home as well. Neither of them could have been older than twelve. In the absence of their father, who by all accounts was still in Haiti, PJ, at nineteen unemployed and with a child of his own, was the only male authority figure those boys had. One day early that fall, PJ was nowhere to be seen. Even his younger brothers, who idolized him, had no idea where he was. Several days later, the rumors had been confirmed true: PJ was in lockup.
A whisper campaign of who-knew-what began concerning PJ. Word spread that he and another boy had mugged a white man, tasing him while he was on the ground. Many said PJ had been put up to the mugging by his friend Grimy, slightly older, to whom the police Taser “belonged.” When Liam visited him in lockup, PJ claimed he hadn’t tased anyone; his friend was the sole assailant of a drunk kid, one who didn’t have any money on him when they accosted him. Feeling threatened, he agreed to go to a laundromat on Broadway between Kosciuszko and Lafayette and fetch some money from the ATM. PJ, in the altercation, had lost his cell phone. After getting the money, the man was kind or scared enough, likely both, to walk back to where they had tased him and call PJ’s phone. The young Haitian hadn’t played out the consequences of that request in his mind beforehand, but was still given an opportunity to weasel out of his comeuppance. “He was like, if you get me some weed, I’ll forget all about this,” PJ said. PJ and Grimy took the money and promised to bring him back a nickel bag, but they never did. The man gave PJ’s number to the cops and the rest was history.
Two years of his life snatched away, for forty dollars. When he went to jail after assaulting the drunk white kid, a pall came over our section of Kosciuszko Street. Kevin took it upon himself to babysit PJ’s two younger brothers, and a new responsibility fell on our decrepit bachelor pad. Roger and Pierre’s mother—a short, stout woman who spoke little English, and would often leave her sons out in the freezing cold while she prayed at the nearby French-language church—refused to give them keys to their building. They needed someone to look after them. By the end of 2009, the boys became a seemingly inextricable part of our lives. Kevin, from a prominent grocery family from Chappaqua, who smoked rolled cigarettes and wore the same uniform of blue cardigans and wingtips every day, had settled into the life of the mostly poor West Indians in the neighborhood with a grace among the lowly I rarely glimpsed in white people who came from means. He took a special interest in the boys, spending inordinate amounts of time with them. I would return home from work to find the tiny Haitians watching television with Kevin or standing around one of M&M’s frequent low-stakes poker games. If no one was home, they would wait patiently on the stoop across the street for either one of us or their mother to arrive. This occurred through a sort of osmosis, as little by little they began to rely on Kevin and me for after-school care and meals, help with their homework, and late-night shelter during the evenings when their mother wouldn’t return until after midnight from the storefront church up the street. I never spoke to her more than two or three times during that whole year and change while her boys were such fixtures at our place. She never said “thank you,” and I never asked her why she raised them the way she did. It was clear that she had had an experience of poverty, and a desire to transcend it through the Lord, if not through responsibility to her children, that I couldn’t grasp with my all-too-finite empathy.
Foreclosures popped up all over our end of the neighborhood during the first full winter of the Obama presidency. In the stretches of Bed-Stuy where I lived, it didn’t so much matter that we were already more than a year into a recession. The economy was already wrecked before. What’s the point of a recession if there is little economy to recess? The bodega and Dominican food joints and hair salons were all still going to make their money. People held no illusions—the rich would recover and the already vulnerable wouldn’t. The conniving speculators who bet against the very financial products they created—instruments that had driven so many people, especially in our neighborhood, into subprime mortgages that they didn’t require—would not go to jail.
The majority of black home owners steered into subprime loans in the Bush years qualified for better loans, but weren’t offered them by predatory banks. The ongoing American legislative and commercial impulse to keep Negroes poor and lumped together had inspired redlining, the practice by which investors in these same black postwar neighborhoods were ineligible for FHA-secured loans. This new tactic, where banks use fancy marketing campaigns to seek out low-information home investors, in neighborhoods where it had previously been impossible to get a loan from a major financial institution, and offer them loans with high-baseline interest rates that shoot up even higher with just one missed repayment deadline, is referred to as reverse redlining. This is what Bush’s “ownership society” wrought in our corner of Brooklyn, a generation of aspiring black home owners whose dreams were left in tatters. Our home was not immune.
The rapper Lil’ Kim’s younger brother Bo was my third Bed-Stuy landlord. I was always meeting Bos and Gs back then. By 2010, this Bo found himself significantly underwater. We were served with eviction papers somewhat routinely starting in the fall of 2009, always accompanied by Bo’s easygoing assurances that his lawyers were “handling it.” I noticed the mid-six-figure number the bank claimed he owed them and thought there was no surer sign the country had lost its collective mind than the idea that this crumbling home was worth that much to anyone. Especially, I’d think (in bad faith, I knew), in this neighborhood.
Shortly after we received yet another eviction notice, early in the spring of 2010, the calamities at 551 Kosciuszko started to pile up. I was constantly ill in those last few months; at one point, I spent an entire month and a half thinking I had Lou Gehrig’s disease. My neurologist bills piled up in short order. When Lena won South by Southwest with her second feature, Tiny Furniture, I texted her congrats from my room, in between trips to the bathroom with an irritable bowel brought on by a ten-day cleanse I had been on, hoping to rid myself of ALS; the saltwater colon flush portion of it wasn’t going so hot. “Thanks, Brandon!” she texted late that night, from the first few hours of her new life as a darling of the indie film world, and soon-to-be New York celebrity the likes of which our generation had yet to produce. It was the last text she ever sent me.
A few weeks later the entire basement flooded, allegedly because our upstairs neighbor had fallen asleep while trying to thaw a frozen piece of meat in hot running water. The rugs my mother had given me, in much more hopeful times when I first moved to Taaffe Place, were destroyed, as were the fabric-bound sofa chairs and my printer, which rested on the floor near my desk. This happened just after the house had been robbed while I was away at a festival in Poland. When I returned, dozens of my DVDs had been taken, along with several hundred dollars belonging to Amelia, the redhead punk rock chick from across the street who was now crashing in M&M’s room while he was away on a film shoot. She had left the door unlocked, disobeying house protocol, and a band of kids, likely led by Roger and Pierre, had left the place in shambles.
We were devastated. Very quickly the children stopped coming around, disappearing from our lives in short order. They’d avoid me when I saw them on the street. When approached by Kevin about what happened, Roger grew taciturn and claimed he didn’t know anything. Before their brother PJ was released from jail, the family moved out of the dilapidated building across the street. I have not seen or heard from them since.
M&M planned to move Amelia in permanently when Milton decided to move in with his girlfriend. After spending the better part of the year in New Orleans, she was looking for a fresh start. Amelia’s boyfriend had recently blown his head off with a shotgun. In light of this, it was tough to reprimand her for not locking the door. Especially when, even if she didn’t officially live with us, it was mostly her belongings that had been taken. Still, I objected to her joining our home; I didn’t find her trustworthy and thought M&M wanted her to move
in simply so that he could crawl into her bed himself.
We got into a long, accusatory argument, fueled by different visions of what the place should be. I knew if she moved in, M&M’s crust punk friends were sure to follow. After alluding to this in a way that was less than generous, suggesting that no sane woman would want to live surrounded by the filth M&M cultivated, he told me to move out. He had no authority, legal or otherwise, to do this. But I didn’t want a fight and within a few months I complied.
In my last days at 551 Kosciuszko, I had wanted, very badly, to ask Bo about Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious B.I.G., aka Christopher Wallace, but I couldn’t figure out how. Bo had grown up in the neighborhood, knew Biggie personally, and, like many a young man I got to know in my time there, was from a broken home. Along with his more famous sister, he had come of age on those unforgiving north Bed-Stuy corners, but Bo had long since decamped for Queens by the time I met him. Early each month he’d sail by in his Lexus SUV, one with rims that spin on their own, to collect our rent. It was kind of a shock when I first met him—he’s diminutive, like his sister, but with a warm manner, speaking New Yorkese with a velocity that rivals Korean. He counted cash, which is how we paid for the place, faster than any human being I’d ever seen.
Never once did he replace or fix anything in our crumbling Brooklyn digs; we’d simply do it ourselves and take money out of the rent for it. Still, I thought it was neat having a black landlord in our mostly black neighborhood. I was beginning to think that by law you had to be a Hasidic Jew to own a piece of property in this part of town. In general he was a very open guy, but I knew he was guarded about (a) the status of our ever-impending eviction and (b) his family. His sister Lil’ Kim had a rocky relationship with Wallace, and had been involved in a well-publicized love triangle involving Wallace and the singer Faith Evans, whom he’d married in 1994. All this was dramatized in Notorious, a 2009 biopic about Biggie, and I had to content myself with watching that, several times, while living under Bo’s roof.
It’s not a great movie, or even a good one. Keeping a biopic of a tragic public figure hopeful and reverent, especially one about a hip-hop musician who met with such a swift rise and violent end, is a troubling proposition. In the case of the largely compromised but never less than fascinating Notorious, it’s one that pretty much sinks the entire enterprise. Still, before the phony redemption tale, there are some good scenes of life in Bed-Stuy circa 1990. We see a young Biggie rocking headphones as he sits listlessly on his building’s stairwell, consuming the jams of DJ Marley Marl and Slick Rick. As he gets older, as with so many youth in my zip code, the lure of easy money proves too much, too quickly. Wallace begins dealing crack (in front of the Fat Albert’s on Broadway, under the elevated tracks, no less!), but after a brief stint in jail and the birth of his first child, he tries his hand at rapping. Pretty soon his demo draws the attention of an ambitious young producer and promoter (Derek Luke gets the dubious honor of portraying Sean “Puffy” Combs, the film’s executive producer and the picture’s voice of personal growth/moral reasoning, in a truly astounding, sickening performance: “We gonna change the world, Big, but first, we gotta change ourselves”) and the rest is history.
As the film draws to a close, Biggie, in “generating cinematic tragedy 101” fashion, proves what a stand-up guy he is, realizing the faults of his ways and making amends with everyone he’s fucked over. This includes his first girlfriend: overweight and dark brown with nappy hair, she’s the jilted mother of his largely ignored child. That he left her for a thinner, lighter-skinned woman (my landlord’s sister!), whom he then left for a prettier, even lighter-skinned woman, whom he then cheated on with a blond white woman (who, in the film’s only legitimately gruesome scene of violence, is beaten up by Faith Evans after she catches Biggie in the act), is never explored as a symptom of the sexual neurosis probably suffered by the darker-than-midnight Wallace. Then, on a March night in Los Angeles, Biggie is shot. Suge Knight, as in Nick Broomfield’s documentary Biggie and Tupac (2002), makes an easy fall guy, while Puffy gets to be a mentor and executive producer of this film. The winners do get to write history.
But does Notorious do any injustice to Biggie’s memory? Yes . . . and no. Because it was, unfortunately, exactly how Biggie would have wanted it. Have a look, if you can, at some old rap videos from the ’90s online. It was the golden age of the genre, with real auteurs emerging in the format, and lavish production values, totally unimaginable in our era of austerity, being put to use in their making. Watching them again, it’s clear how governed by a type of repression, a persistent need to deny social reality, Wallace and his handlers were—much more so than their counterparts on the West Coast in the early ’90s, who were much more interested in displaying that social reality in their own three-minute MTV fever dreams. The music videos for Wallace’s tracks from that era, the ones that also introduced young teenagers like me to more enduring, unmartyred, now remarkably wealthy rap icons like Shawn Carter and Sean Combs, never dwell on the realities of the streets from which these men came. They’re always too busy depicting themselves throwing money around some impossibly well-lit island nightclub stuffed with beautiful barely dressed women or lip synching on a yacht while some well-dressed but clearly overmatched goons on Kawasaki Jet Skis chase Mariah Carey to no avail.
It was Biggie’s great achievement in his remarkably dexterous lyrics to express this other kind of double consciousness. The songs are rife with tales of Bed-Stuy’s violence and social decay, even as Biggie clearly yearns for a different kind of world—one that he claims to have reached already by robbing and drug dealing, but actually hopes to reach through his art.
It wasn’t just the Craigslist hustlers and neighborhood-inventing real estate brokers who had an agenda of obfuscation. Come to think of it, Biggie was from Clinton Hill.
158 Buffalo Avenue
In the first months that I lived at 551 Kosciuszko, in a bout of wanderlust, I strolled south and east for miles, wanting, as I often desired back then, to know not where I was. On the endless concrete I passed derelict town houses and ragamuffin storefront churches, deli-less bodegas and nascent wood-fire pizza joints, crossing Atlantic as the LIRR shuttled Montauk-bound overhead. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had entered Crown Heights. I continued south, past projects and parks, until I came across a large green field that led to four elegant nineteenth-century houses, which sat at the end of the clearing, an unlikely beacon from a past I couldn’t have fathomed. At first I thought they were an apparition, so out of sync were they with their surroundings, but walking along Bergen Street to see them closer, I discovered that they were in fact a real and true thing, resting along what no longer appeared to be a street, but certainly in a pattern that suggested one.
These days the Weeksville Heritage Center, dedicated to the memory of what was likely the most significant free black community in the pre–Civil War era, takes up that half a city block where I, on a hot summer day in 2008, first pondered those strange, anomalous houses. Just three blocks from the neighborhood’s northern border with Bedford-Stuyvesant, the WHC is hard to miss. The new building’s exterior, of patterned slate tile and golden-hued ipe wood, couldn’t stand in starker contrast to the World War II–era NYCHA housing projects it sits next to; on cloudless mornings, the six-story buildings that make up the Kingsborough Houses, across the street, cast a shadow on the center’s immaculate lawn. Self-consciously stylish architecture is an oddity in these parts, where housing projects of red brick and faded row houses of cheap beige vinyl dominate the topography.
A two-story, 23,000-square-foot modernist structure that makes elegant use of African design motifs, it houses about 10,000 artifacts from the Weeksville settlement. At present, however, only a fraction of the collection is on display.
Opened in December 2013, the new building is “Brooklyn’s largest African-American cultural institution,” according to its website. It was built, for $34 million, by the City of New York
’s Department of Cultural Affairs in collaboration with the city council and the Brooklyn Borough president’s office; the city owns the building, and the Weeksville Center is its tenant.
The center takes its name from the nineteenth-century African-American community that flourished in this part of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant; it is widely believed to have been the only free black community of its size and renown in the country at the time. Along with Stuyvesant Heights, Ocean Hill, and Bedford, contemporary Weeksville is one of the four distinctive parts of Bed-Stuy, bordered by Atlantic Avenue to the north, Ralph Avenue to the east, and East New York Avenue to the south, but the new Weeksville Center is on the same property as four homes built sometime between 1830 and 1883 in what was then known as Crow Hill. They are the only houses that remain from the Weeksville era, sitting on the site of a former colonial road named Hunterfly; before the construction of the new building, the center was run out of these former homes.
Three of them are restored originals; the other is a replica built after the original caught fire. They once belonged to Frederick Volckening, a German immigrant who acquired the land at the height of the Civil War in 1863, from Samuel Bouton, a local Democratic politician who had bought them from the estate of the Dutch farmer Samuel Garrittsen. Volckening, a carpenter himself, likely moved the four houses onto the property from other segments of the neighborhood. They may have been built as early as 1830, perhaps by James LeGrant, a nephew of the Denmark Vesey rebellion conspirator and prosperous Weeksville landowner Francis Graham. As of 1850, he was the only carpenter, white or black, to appear in the area’s census records, while the style of the homes themselves—two-story wood-frame structures with gable roofs on the hall, and a parlor plan with a chimney at the high, split end—recalls the houses along the Eastern Seaboard where a South Carolina–bred carpenter such as LeGrant would have learned his trade.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 10
