The place Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter speaks of when he says “Bed-Stuy was my country, Brooklyn my planet” in the second paragraph of his autobiography, Decoded, may well have passed into history by the time I knowingly set foot in the neighborhood, but in the early aughts its specter had not completely passed through history—Myrtle Avenue was no longer Murder Avenue in 2004, but it also wasn’t a place to buy million-dollar apartments, as it has now become. The violent, crack-riddled streets and project corridors, the ones conservative journals such as The Weekly Standard foolishly claimed were full of “Super-Predators” during Carter’s youth, had become, if not universally prosperous, much less riven by shootings and robberies as crime, all over the city and the industrialized Western world, dropped.
But at 452 Marcy, on roughly thirty acres that were once the site of an old Dutch windmill, just two blocks west of where I lived at 166 Throop that summer, the projects where Carter grew up remain. Whenever I would walk by them then, unaware of their significance in the narrative of America’s most famous rapper at the time, they would serve as a reminder of the clichés that bind the national imagination when it comes to how the urban black poor get on and get over. Carter calls the twenty-seven six-story buildings that make up the majority of the property “huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives,” spaces that kept the struggles of the urban poor “invisible to the larger country.” So much of Carter’s career, and those of other rappers who came to prominence in the era of the genre’s global ascendance, has hinged upon building an audience for stories of the black urban poor in the conscience of the mainstream, which is usually another way of saying among middle-class whites.
In his own testimony, the Bed-Stuy of Carter’s preteen years consisted mostly of the inner workings of the Marcy Houses and the streets surrounding the complex. Constructed in 1949, the Marcy Houses are named after former New York governor, U.S. senator, and secretary of state William Marcy. Despite presiding over the Empire State during its first full decade of abolition in the 1830s, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, one who sympathized with southern slavery, a “doughface” in the parlance of the times. The projects bearing his name are a fitting tribute to his sentiments.
The intentional, state-mandated segregation that greeted the construction of New York’s public housing stock, enacted a century after Marcy’s time, has borne many strange fruit. Surely no system has arisen since the end of the “peculiar institution” to ensure black bondage with more effectiveness than the low-income, exclusively black urban housing project. Decoded recounts the bildungsroman of the rapper-entrepreneur who escaped those streets and what they still mean to him. Carter recalls having to dodge the glass shards that lined the “grassy patches that passed for a park” while playing touch football, and tipping a benched, unresponsive heroin addict as you would a cow sleeping in a pasture. He discovered rapping as a preteen, walking those same corridors after coming upon a circle of young ashy kids spitting rhymes in a cipher. He began writing his own verses that very night.
As the ’80s wore on, hip-hop, an invention of the Bronx, was transforming the youth culture of the country Carter lived in. Speakers and subwoofers eight feet in height would be set up in the courtyards of the Marcy Houses for epic MC battles that would “rattle” the windows of the families, new and old, desperately poor or solidly working class yet unable to get out, that lived in the projects above. Yet hip-hop wasn’t the most profound thing altering the landscape of the Marcy Houses and the surrounding area in the 1980s. When the crack epidemic reached Bed-Stuy, or at least the clutch of buildings that dominated Carter’s vision of it, “what had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever.”
Unlike cocaine users, crackheads would use publicly, in those very Marcy corridors and playgrounds, inside apartment hallways and on the stairs leading to the Myrtle-Willoughby G train stop perched on the southeastern end of the complex. People whom Carter had known as authority figures were suddenly part of a new zombie class, “worse than prostitutes and almost as bad as snitches.” Aunts and uncles, neighbors and older relatives, members of his parents’ generation, many of whom had come of age during the heyday of the civil rights movement, were lost to addiction. It wasn’t long until a teenage Carter began to sell crack himself.
“Fuck waiting for the city to pass out summer jobs. I wasn’t even a teenager yet and suddenly everyone I knew had pocket money,” he explains in the first of many rationalizations for the allure of being a drug-pushing hustler, a life he claims not to have given up until the eve of the release of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt (1996). “Guys my age, fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling,” Carter continues, before acknowledging that, as the money from the crack game exploded with the epidemic itself, the courtyards of Marcy were soon populated by kids his age who “wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers.” Carter claims to have been on the streets hustling over half the time during his thirteenth year.
There is a political element to this recollection; Carter, a major Obama supporter, comes across as a reformed criminal who has grown into a doctrinaire Obama-era liberal, a thoughtful elder statesman of the genre’s dangerous years who has earned the right to be the hero of his own wide-ranging tale; he can inhabit the boardroom while maintaining his street cred. He can absolve Bill Clinton—who greatly expanded the carceral state and drove hundreds of Marcy residents further into poverty due to welfare reform while Carter was still slingin’ rocks—for his Sister Souljah reprimand during the ’92 campaign, largely seen as a way to assure white swing voters he would put a core Democratic constituency in its place. Acknowledging that Clinton, with whom Carter now dines in West Village restaurants the rapper owns, “knew that demonizing young black people, their politics, and their art was always a winning move in American politics,” Carter still shrugs it off. “Everyone needs a chance to evolve,” he suggests. In a country where self-invention is supposed to be a birthright, he would know better than most of us.
Having become famous well enough into adulthood to recall a time when a lifestyle that included feeding presidents in a restaurant you owned would have seemed absurd, Carter admits to frequently not believing his own good fortune. “Inside, there’s a part of me that expects to wake up tomorrow in my bedroom in apartment 5C in Marcy, slide on my gear, run down the pissy stairway, and hit the block, one eye over my shoulder.” Like many kids who grow up in dense concentrations of poverty, Carter didn’t know he had little. It wasn’t until a sixth-grade field trip to a Caucasian teacher’s Manhattan brownstone, one that provided a view of nearby Central Park, that he realized he came from humble beginnings. For this kid reared in what he describes as a modern killing field, trappings of success became doubly powerful once the realization of his own unfortunate circumstances took hold. “We talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could,” Carter recalls of himself and his school peers. “And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.”
I would go to parties on rooftops that summer of color-coded terror alerts, endless ones, in large expansive, forbidden places, fireworks going off on top of a gargantuan Bushwick factory at close range that sounded like the terrorist bombs I was told would cut the Manhattan Bridge in two at any minute. The men who ran the country told us this was a certainty unless we kept Dick Cheney in charge. I sensed this was as big a lie as when people would say we lived in “East” Williamsburg on those rooftops, as we looked out at “East” Williamsburg, which existed, sort of, farther west than where we were. These people on the rooftops were always Caucasians, and always new to the area. Even in this predominantly Latin and Negro part of town, I’d be the only person of color on most of these rooftops; Caucasians, who were only 1 percent of the neighborhood’s population just four years previous as the ne
w millennium dawned, were moving here in drips and drabs in those years, and I lived among them.
They were disturbing times, and it seemed as if I wouldn’t have the privilege of living in any other way, that the world, in the few years during which I ascended to the personal and societal responsibilities of adulthood, was going through a great unwinding, one that left global order and the promise of American virtue in tatters. Not that I had ever really believed in that virtue anyway. Just look at the way we were indulging a color-coded class war of our own. For most of the Caucasians on its rooftops, Brooklyn was vast and new, a foreign geography easy to mythologize, to understand as a place to be changed, to be “settled” and “colonized.” These terms fall uneasily on the ears of liberal progress, but out there, in high-rises and on corners, black bodies were very much available to project one’s white fears and fantasies on. That wouldn’t change anytime soon, but the affordability of their apartments would.
White people on rooftops that summer told me I wouldn’t want to visit Woodhull Medical Center, which towers over the elevated train for four city blocks along Broadway’s southern side, and in whose mammoth parking lot, across the street from our apartment at 166 Throop, one of my roommates would park production trucks overnight. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s northernmost hospital had been described by The New York Times as “a rust-colored machine of steel and glass that rises out of the urban jumble of Flushing Avenue with immense self-assurance and power.” The hulking, ten-story, four-block modernist structure opened in the fall of 1982, billed as a state-of-the-art public hospital for many of the city’s poorest residents. It had been a troubled project from the start. Planned in 1968 at a cost of $85 million, when it opened fourteen years later its construction budget had ballooned to $308 million. Despite its ambitions to quickly service the needy, the space wasn’t really designed to be a community hospital. Less than a year and a half after it opened, the Times reported that “unlike any other public hospital in the city, it was built to give every patient a private room. But the hospital staff soon discovered that there was virtually no space for nurses’ stations, doctors’ conference rooms or medicine storage cabinets.”
In short order, Woodhull became something of a carnival of mismanagement and desperation. Theft was common. Carlos Loran, who ran the hospital from its inception until being forced out in the mid-’90s as the city was considering selling the decaying structure, told the Times in the same story that “microscopes, typewriters, and up to 20 percent of the hospital’s sheets had disappeared.” What one sees in the reporting about the space over time is how the can-do technocratic optimism with which it was planned in the late ’60s gave way to the malaise-ridden, anti-commons ethos of the early ’80s in which it opened and floundered. Surrounded by blight, by the mid-’90s it was a hangout for prostitutes, who would hunt for johns in its football-field-length corridors. Junkies, and the dealers that exploited them, haunted the place. Its security chief Gene D’Arpe would be forced to resign in September 1994 amid allegations that the hospital’s employees were running a drug sideline in heroin and cocaine.
By the time I arrived in these environs, a great fear of Woodhull was taken as an article of faith among the small coterie of mostly white people I knew in this historic black neighborhood that I didn’t know. Long waits for admittance, for sterilized medical instruments, for your phone call to get picked up: these were common according to legend, as were contracting infections that turned your hand gray. These were the prevailing sentiments, urban lore passed down over cheap Mexican beer as the J train rattled by outside. Someone always knew someone who knew someone. Ride a bike down Broadway, sideswiped, broken hip, botched Woodhull ER surgery, crippled for life.
And how else would it be? The unspoken logic of those conversations I would have on rooftops, a logic I, the token Negro, would solemnly accede to in my frailty and ignorance, was that it couldn’t be any other way; this is a “black” ghetto, hurry up and expect the worst. “Until they make it better,” I recall one Caucasian friend telling me, “as the neighborhood changes.” Which begs the question, for whom?
My fears were not immune to projection. Walking to the G train stop at Flushing Avenue, I kept my head down so as not to draw eye contact with any young Negroes my age, darker and poorer than I, who seemed agitated or baleful, standing alongside the Marcy Houses next to crying babies and fat women bursting out of brassieres too small for their girth, screaming profanities into the night over spilled fried chicken containers. Was I to assume, given the cumulative force of the American news media, the disillusionment in my mother’s eye and the insidiously dismissive attitudes of so many whites, that we were naturally that way, broken and shamed, bound to subjugation, unable to shake the tremors of bondage and systematic ruin? America is so strange that way. It’ll try to convince you that it’s you who’s lost your mind, not Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan.
My friends who made their way to the rooftop of 166 Throop during the first summer of my Brooklyn semi-adulthood lived all over the city; I knew no one who had grown up in my neighborhood, in the massive projects to the south and west of my third-floor walk-up. I had no reason, so I thought, to seek them out, to learn what the place meant to them. In fact, I didn’t know that we shared a neighborhood, because I didn’t know where I was. Of course, where I was was Bed-Stuy, where I didn’t live.
The proliferation of guns and gun violence in the inner cities during the ’80s, a trend Carter describes firsthand in Decoded’s most salient passages (“Kids were as well armed as a paramilitary outfit in a small country”), is no accident of history. “There are no white people in Marcy Projects,” Carter acknowledges, before pointing fingers at a government he calls “almost genocidally hostile” for the “crack explosion” and the increased presence of lethal weaponry that sullied the environment of his childhood and adolescence. But the antecedents of the great rearming of America, and the disastrous consequences this bore for black urban spaces, contain many strange bedfellows, reverberations of failed attempts at black economic sovereignty and political dignity a generation before.
Decoded is littered with photographs of prominent late-twentieth-century political and cultural figures, rappers and singers mostly, but also basketball players and statesmen, filmmakers and the occasional rock star, most, if not all, African Americans. Carter, an epitome of capitalist promise, both illicit and aboveboard, includes images of left-wing revolutionaries: Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense are all pictured. The Black Panthers, an organization made up at its inception largely of young black men, barely of legal drinking age, who had promoted the public display of weaponry as a means of liberating themselves from the threat of police intimidation and violence, are “heroes” in Carter’s eyes, even if he clearly doesn’t jive with their socialism. A dozen years after the party’s federally orchestrated demise, a new generation of black men, of which Jay-Z was once part, came of age with the misguided intention—fed at the trough of an American nightmare—to arm and kill themselves just as fast as they could, often over what scraps of a poorly paying illicit drug market they could dominate. Despite their free breakfasts and laudable ten-point program, the legacy of the Panthers could be felt in the era of Jay-Z’s adolescence in this way most of all. The political arguments of the Panthers were more effectively used by the reactionary forces of the American gun lobby than on behalf of the following generation of imperiled black men, a third of whom would wind up in prison or worse.
The Mulford Act, signed by Ronald Reagan, then California governor, in 1967, disarmed the Panthers, an organization that, despite their guns and revolutionary rhetoric, was doing identifiable good within various black communities in the areas of health care, food service, and political organizing. No such gun restriction was ever imposed on disillusioned black criminals, whose actions in economically disenfranchised black urban spaces from Oakland to Bed-Stuy had organizations across the spectrum of black advocacy groups, from the N
AACP to the Nation of Islam, denouncing “black-on-black crime.” Carrying guns was a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of goodwill,” Reagan said upon passage of the Mulford Act. Implicit in that comment is that the “problems” the Panthers were confronting by being publicly armed were with antagonists who were acting with goodwill. In cooperation with local police departments around the country, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO program surveilled, harassed, and in some instances, such as that of the Illinois chapter president Fred Hampton, killed Black Panther members. Goodwill was clearly in short supply.
A resurgent and increasingly belligerent NRA of the late 1970s, once an organization that had spearheaded sensible gun-control efforts, was inspired in its lobbying to combat new gun-control laws by the Panthers’ argument for firearms as a means of personal, and public, self-defense in an era of increasing crime and untrustworthy law enforcement. In 1980, the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in the organization’s hundred years of existence. That candidate was Ronald Reagan. His ideas about guns since signing Don Mulford’s anti–Black Panther gun legislation had changed considerably. The Second Amendment “leaves little, if any, leeway for the gun-control advocate,” Reagan suggested after becoming president. “The right of the citizen to keep and bear arms must not be infringed if liberty in America is to survive.” Unless you agitated for the end of military service and the beginning of reparations for African-American bondage, at least.
Meanwhile, a lucrative drug market thrived in spaces where little other economic opportunity was being encouraged, not by the state, not by private individuals of means. The “nunchucks, clackers, and kitchen knives” that young men engaging in street disputes once relied on, the strife-ridden black street kids you find in the early ’60s Harlem of Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1963) or the Cabrini Green of Michael Schultz’s cult classic Cooley High (1975), were replaced by tools of the utmost lethality all over the country in the deregulation-crazed ’80s. The stakes were high and most careers ended unsuccessfully. Dee Dee, the dealer who had initially put a young Carter on as a dope pusher, was murdered, shot in the back of the head before or after having his balls cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Page 3