Barry features an affecting and affected performance by Devon Terrell, and in their electric scenes together, Terrell and Nash are two men of color who are comfortable with their sardonic pose of mild disaffection from the elite pale faces. But Saleem is all ironic hard edges where Barry still has some vulnerability. Informing Barry of how nonthreatening he’ll have to sound to bed the rich white girls who are his only options for love in this rarified Ivy League environment, Saleem takes on a mocking “safe white dude” tone, a voice not dissimilar to the one a generation of black comics, aping Richard Pryor, have used to describe the absurdity of being black in white America. The film almost suggests that Saleem has a more salient understanding of the crisis of the young black intellectual, but despite his brown skin, Saleem retains privileges of legacy Barry never will—his rich daddy with Wall Street connections can always bail him out. By the movie’s end, Obama’s father is dead.
Terrell, a young Australian actor, looks and sounds like Obama well enough, but he also shows us shades of the man we’ve never glimpsed in public before. He deftly introduces us to a college student who is still trying to figure out what he believes, what he wants to do, and what he’ll have to compromise to get there. At twenty, Barry has yet to figure out how to navigate the country’s great racial divide and—as we now know all too tragically in these stratified times—never will, despite great hope to the contrary.
Barry senses this and makes it plain. His romantic entanglement with Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy), a porcelain-faced Barnard brunette who comes from a well-heeled Connecticut family tied deeply to the Democratic Party, draws out Barry’s budding realization that America is not designed for them to be together; no matter how hard he tries—despite a bloodline that links him to several of America’s earliest WASP clans—the good-natured ignorance with which he’s treated in their environs, despite their best intentions, will never result in real solidarity.
“Pretty uptight people here, huh?” a bow-tie-wearing white guy remarks to Barry at a wedding, which is held in a massive country mansion where Barry once again finds himself, other than the servants, the only black person in the room. “I’m an uptight kind of guy,” he replies, half-serious, half-empty, just as I had thought to myself dozens of times over, ruminating on how to make it all work with Anne. He knows he’ll never fully belong in these environs, but he finds it equally hard, no matter how “down” Charlotte is, to take her into black spaces. Buying books on the streets of Harlem, eating soul food at Sylvia’s, they are hounded with looks from stoic, stately black women, giving rise to Pryor’s contemporaneous observation of sistas watching you with white women. Seeing bellicose Black Hebrew Israelites in their outlandish costumes pontificate on a street corner wouldn’t normally be a point of concern for Barry, but he deftly steers Charlotte away in order to avoid a verbal scolding.
The costs of assimilation are high, and Barry begins to pay. He arrives on campus wanting to be a poet, as quaint as that sounds, but soon realizes the privilege of his situation beyond the iron gates of Morningside Heights. Playing basketball in a Harlem park, he befriends PJ (Jason Mitchell), a student from the Graham Projects who is finishing a master’s degree in business at Columbia. PJ has no illusions about what his degree is for: he is there to make money, to get the credentials America requires of Negroes who want to advance into the middle class. Mitchell is every bit as terrific as he was in Straight Outta Compton, and often steals his scenes, including one where he invites Barry to a party in the projects. In a deft single-tracking shot, we are introduced to the world of “pissy stairwells” and elevators that don’t work. “Don’t forget that this is how your country does your people,” Mitchell tells him. Barry is as foreign in this environment as he is later in the Yale Club with Charlotte’s parents. Here we see the political skills start to form as he charms them, emphasizing not his father’s drunkenness but his Harvard pedigree. Barry neglects to mention that Charlotte’s dad slipped him some money while in the men’s room before being introduced, thinking he was the washroom attendant.
Despite his ability to code-switch, Barry is haunted by confusion and pain; unable to cope with a father who abandoned him, and an inability—despite his insidious emotional intelligence—to feel at ease in all-black or all-white milieus. This costs him more than his fair share of acquaintances, friends, and, most painfully, lovers. When Barry’s mother (Ashley Judd) arrives, he is embarrassed by her rah-rah liberalism and admits, in an unvarnished way he normally keeps buttoned up, how out of place he feels. Columbia’s classrooms are dominated by the kind of privileged blowhards who ask during a discussion of Plato’s Republic, “Why does everything have to be about slavery?” It’s a question the rest of the film answers by simply showing us how this black boy, no matter how yellow his skin, is treated by both working-class white cops and rich, well-meaning white ladies alike. In the end, code-switching simply gets tiresome, no matter how talented you are, when white people seem to have no idea black people have to do it at all.
One lonely night earlier that fall, just before Anne moved into 485, I ventured east, up Kosciuszko Street from Nostrand Avenue to Malcolm X Boulevard. Signs of the invasion were omnipresent. Construction rang out in at least one building on each block well into the evening, with the evidence of more to come, in old schoolhouses and barren tenements, everywhere you looked. A man said, “We live here too,” his tone of voice piercing the night from a forlorn-looking canopied flop as I walked along Kosciuszko. Another brother standing near him, in a do-rag and white warm-ups, whispered back as I strode past, more construction quickly drowning them out, a new, hashtagable, and de-Negrofied #BedStuy being erected all around us.
I was jittery. When an SUV slow-crawled not far away and then abruptly stopped in front of me, I crossed the street and walked a block down to DeKalb, having briefly feared a jacking. After a stroll past the Marcy Projects, I wound back over to Kosciuszko on the next block, walking where once were mere warehouses, ones now adorned with signs of the modern-looking renovations in store for them, stamped with the logos of various developers and city agencies, the true authors of this blood-sodden land’s next evolution, the words “Residential” or “Commercial” emblazoned atop each sign.
M&M wasn’t around when I reached 551 Kosciuszko, and neither were the photos I had taken in high school, many of them surely of Tony and me and our many shared friends, ones M&M had found cleaning up and organizing the place in preparation for the move to come. He thought it wouldn’t be right to throw them out, whatever animosity still existed between us, and texted to see if he could send them to me. I told him I’d pick them up that Tuesday night, but when I arrived, a wild-haired gentleman with face tattoos showed me into my old living room.
Much of the artwork that had been in Goodbye Blue Monday had been salvaged by M&M, including a memorable Impressionist-inspired painting of a black church service in wide shot and a gorgeous photographic portrait of Billie Holiday. The place was as cluttered and dirty as ever. No sign of my photos was found. Across the street, the building where Roger and Pierre had lived with their mother was being renovated. Haitian boys would never sit there dreaming of fathers ever again, it seemed.
Walking back down DeKalb near the intersection with Throop, I encountered a pair of obese black women in their late teens or early twenties. One had a stroller with a young child in it. The other had two children of her own, buzzing with halfhearted play at her knees. “We don’t want your money,” one of them said as I was on the quick draw to give her ten dollars. “We want you to buy us food,” she said, pointing to the Kennedy Fried Chicken across the street. They were living in a shelter nearby after losing their apartments. As we walked into the chicken joint, a hobbled homeless man asked me for change, telling me he was a vet. I told him I’d get him on the way out. Without enough money on me to snag an eighteen-piece and a half dozen sodas for the women and children, I clumsily used the ATM, yellow Negro hands quickly passing across the three-dollar fee, fres
h currency exchanged across the bulletproof glass of the ghetto chicken outlet before the long wait. Then you have to decide what to say.
“Thank you, mister,” one of the children uttered, her mother too timid to chat amid my attempts to find out where they had lived (“Down on Quincy”), how long they had been homeless (“Eight months”), and how hard it was to get into Marcy (long and bureaucratized). I handed the heavyset women chicken boxes with which to feed their brood, wishing in shame that I could buy them kale, knowing that calories are all that keeps some broken hearts going. On the way out I handed the vet a ten spot, brought to him by my State of New York salary, and walked back down DeKalb, only streets from 730.
As I passed the old walk-up I was spotted by Rudy, sitting on a crate across the street, his tall cap backward and pushed low as his friend, a black, baseball-capped teen of few words, rolled a blunt. Clearly his efforts to squat at 730, which I had passively facilitated, were abandoned. “Yo, Brandon,” he bellowed, my attention suddenly diverted from my old dwelling. I offered him a nip of the bourbon I had meant to bring M&M, an olive branch for a drunkard, symptom of a sanguine gloom; I suddenly didn’t mind drinking on the street with a recently laid-off janitor and his blunt-rolling friend. I took a perch on one of the crates near him as we drank and smoked, staring out at 730. The rent he supplemented with his odd jobs had gone up, and with his mother struggling, Rudy needed more work. He occasionally dealt weed out of the barbershop a few storefronts away from where we sat, but not enough to get by amid the bombardment of higher rents and ever-more-expensive goods.
My paranoia grew after a half dozen sips of bourbon from the tiny plastic cups Rudy invested in for the occasion, and I took leave of them, staring out at 730 DeKalb. It, too, had undergone a rent increase, one I’d known was inevitable since Neftali and his Hasid enforcer the previous March. One night earlier that summer, after a Biz Markie concert in Herbert Von King Park, I passed 730, seeing from the street that the door leading into my former apartment was open. The gate door was closed, but peering in, it was clear someone was home. Without realizing quite what I was doing, suddenly I found myself on the landing, looking down into the long hallway. A Radiohead poster from the Hail to the Thief era hung, in an elegant frame, near what had been the door to my room. At the end of the long hallway a young man with Asian features and a bright purple NYU sweatshirt sat at a table. I rapped on the gate door, startling him. “Sorry to bother you, I, uh, live in the neighborhood and I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”
The young man shot out of his chair and sauntered down the hallway. He was tall and young and clearly new to the area. “What do you need?” he asked, looking at me uneasily, as if I posed a threat.
I lied and told him I lived on the block. He nodded. “If it’s too invasive then feel free to tell me so, but I was just wondering if you mind telling me what you’re being charged in rent?”
I explained I was writing about the area and it was strictly for research purposes, in cadences that were meant to soothe; I knew how to use my black voice to make white and assimilated Asian people feel comfortable, slowing down and raising it a register. It rarely failed. He smiled a bit, hearing in my voice the rhythms of someone who did not mean him harm, who was one of his kind instead of, well, an other. As long as these streets were full of brown people, America had taught me to reckon, this would remain a common concern for those that had been taught to see them through a skewed lens of fear and ignorance.
“Yeah, no problem. We pay $4,200.”
Looking past the gangly kid, my jaw melting toward the hallway floor, I regained my senses after a couple seconds of oblivion. I could see that Neftali had done hardly anything to the place. Once we left, with the market as it was, he must have realized all he had to do was raise the rent. Sure, he had taken Al’s cat-infested rug from the stairwell and likely repaired the hole in my wall. I imagine he must have fixed the stairwell leading to the garden and insulated the pipes, a privilege we had requested and been denied as our $2,800 a month in rent was sabotaged in order to give this young man a home in a land he found strange and new. But by and large, the place remained more or less the same as it had been when I moved in a year before.
“Thanks,” I said, standing in something resembling awe, my heart racing, summer heat beading on my face. He nodded and walked back down the hall, the gate door shutting behind him. I turned away and cowered back down the stairs, toward the orange halogen-lit summer darkness where everything I saw was slipping through my fingers.
On the phone, as I mumbled through my plans a few years before, my mother asked if Tony would cut me a deal on an apartment in his building, one that rests in what no one would now ever question was Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the forgetting was planned and the remembering never ended. I told her I didn’t want him to. After all, I was finally living within my means.
Acknowledgments
Although he once threatened to attack me with a hockey stick if I didn’t stick with him during our time working together, Keith Gessen deserves special recognition for editing early versions of the material that inspired this book and convincing me to write about Bed-Stuy in the first place. That collaboration provided the kernel for a mode of self-exploration this work relies on. Astra Taylor, the great filmmaker, writer, and activist, first introduced me to Keith and edited my earliest work for n+1, which Keith helped found and where I’ve encountered a remarkable community of writers over the years.
I am forever indebted to teachers and mentors such as Chuck Rybak, Greg Taylor, and the late Robin O'Hara, who, respectively, exposed me to works of literature, motion pictures, and the realities of a career in independent filmmaking that bore tremendous effect on the narratives and perspectives contained herein.
Thanks to a wide array of friends, ones who are also talented magazine and Web editors, for thoughtfully editing much of this material as it appeared in other places: Scott Macaulay (long a mentor and dear friend), Dayna Tortorici, Nikil Saval, Malcolm Harris, Leo Goldsmith, Rachael Rakes, Carla Blumenkranz, David Wolf, Moira Donegan, James Yeh, and Jesse Barron.
Thanks are also due to Barry Harbaugh, who believed in this book from the start and acquired it when few others would, as well as to my editor, Tracy Sherrod, whose remarkable patience, insight, and good humor were perhaps more important than any other factor in this text’s evolution over the years I worked on it. The thoughtful opinions and unyielding encouragement of early readers of this manuscript, people such as Paul Felten, Michael Barron, Michael Lipschultz, Kaleem Aftab, and my agent, Matt McGowan, were invaluable. Of course, this book would not be possible without the enduring love of my mother, for which I am so eternally grateful. And for the years I spent in the presence of the people depicted in this text, for many of whom I still hold such tremendous affection and unending love, I wish to express my appreciation. You know who you are.
Lastly, this book would simply not be possible without the music of the following acts, played loudly on a variety of sound systems in the myriad contexts in which I wrote this book: Stereolab, Portishead, Hole (especially “Doll Parts”), Flying Lotus (“Getting There” and “Phantasm” were crucial for this text), and Sonic Youth (their entire oeuvre, but especially “Massage the History”) were key at various early stages, while albums as disparate as Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, Broadcast’s Tender Buttons, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, and Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man allowed me to get through the doldrums of the final months of this process more or less intact.
About the Author
Brandon Harris, originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, lives for the time being in Brooklyn, New York. Currently a visiting assistant professor of film at the State University of New York at Purchase, he is the director of Redlegs (2012) and has published reporting and criticism in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, VICE, and Filmmaker magazine, where he is a contributing editor. Making Rent in Bed-Stuy is his first book.
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Copyright
This is a work of nonfiction. The events, experiences, and perspectives I have detailed herein have been faithfully rendered as I remembered them and as they have been told to me. In some places, I’ve changed the names, identities, and other specifics of individuals who have played a role in my life in order to protect their privacy.
making rent in bed-stuy. Copyright © 2017 by Brandon Harris. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Acknowledgment is made to the following publications in whose pages, both paper and electronic, these essays first appeared: n+1 for “2500 Rhode Island Avenue,” “227–241 Taaffe Place,” “551 Kosciuszko Street,” parts of each appeared in the essay “On Bed-Stuy” (n+1 #18, Winter 2014); newyorker.com for “158 Buffalo Avenue,” expanded from “Recovering Weeksville” (November 7, 2014); The Brooklyn Rail for “730 DeKalb Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “Change You Can Believe In” (October 3, 2013); n+1 for “75 South Elliott Place,” parts of which appeared in the essay “Blood Couple” (n+1 #22, Spring 2015); The Brooklyn Rail for “75 South Elliott Place,” parts of which appeared in the essay “The Black Liberation Kool-Aid Acid Test” (March 4, 2016); n+1 for “200 Gholson Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “Dwight and Paul Have Left the Building” (June 1, 2015); vice.com for “5920 Rhode Island Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “Ta-Nehisi Coates ‘Between the World and Me’ Is as Important and Necessary as Everyone Says It Is” (July 24, 2015); Filmmaker magazine for “5920 Rhode Island Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “Microcinema Blues” (September 3, 2015); newyorker.com for “5920 Rhode Island Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “One Week in Cincinnati” (August 10, 2015); The New Republic for “485 Lexington Avenue,” parts of which appeared in the essay “The Life and Loves of a Young Obama” (September 21, 2016).
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