Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  Such grisly violence wasn’t enough to keep Carter’s fifteen-year-old self out of “the Game.” Crack led him as far south as Virginia and as far west as Trenton, New Jersey. Even while still just a boy, untapped new markets—in front of grocery stores and nightclubs, on dead-end streets and within tattered urban parks—were there for the taking, all in pursuit of the glory that comes with a fly ride and some new Patrick Ewing sneakers.

  In the first of a series of close calls, Carter was arrested for trespassing at a local high school with crack on him, but it was his first arrest and, being a minor, he was released with a record that was sealed until his eighteenth birthday. Around this time, Carter’s musical interest was simultaneously intensifying. He recalls writing rap lyrics on the backs of brown paper bags and occasionally appearing on a friend’s mixtape, but he wouldn’t see hip-hop as a potentially lucrative career until later. Carter was still too busy getting into turf wars in Trenton with other crack dealers who felt he and an associate were crowding in on their sales by undercutting their price. In his story of the criminal mainline that became a sideline and then fodder for his continuing street cred as a wildly popular rap artist and global brand, guns were often drawn but rarely fired, near misses piling upon one another.

  Whenever Jigga returned to Marcy to score more dope for his Trenton exploits, he would link up with Jaz, another MC from Marcy who had first begun to push a young Carter to explore his musical proclivities. They would while away afternoons working on tracks, an activity that began to take up all of Carter’s spare time as he’d cut rhymes while subsisting on little more than sugary breakfast cereals and ice cream. Jaz got a record deal before Carter did, with EMI, and invited his protégé to London with him to record. That album tanked after a poorly chosen first single and, given how his mentor had been treated, Carter temporarily gave up his dreams of rap superstardom and rededicated himself to hustling, expanding his crack game farther south, to new territories in Maryland. But his first big break wasn’t far.

  The future Jay-Z got the chance to tour with Big Daddy Kane in the early ’90s after Kane heard Carter’s rhymes on a mixtape he had completed with Jaz. A few years later, “J.Z.,” as he was then known, had become a full-blown protégé of Kane’s and appeared on the single “Show & Prove” from Kane’s 1994 album Daddy’s Home. The only ex–Marcy resident to dine with multiple presidents was, simultaneously, still dealing crack and still living in Marcy.

  Crack made it a lot harder to get by in a place where all the weak and poor had to prey on were, for the most part, other weak and poor people. “No one’s going to help us,” Carter suggests his generation of black people felt, “so we went for self, for family, for block, for crew,” before suggesting that the criticism of rappers as “hyper-capitalists” conceals a “rational response” by most imperiled young men who went into hip-hop to the culture within which they were being bred. “People who looked just like us were gunning for us,” Carter writes. “Weakness and dependence made you a mark, like a dope fiend. Success could only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss, not a dependent. The competition wasn’t about greed—or not just about greed. It was about survival.”

  Here you see how hip-hop’s prevailing ethos is in line with the perverse economic conservatism of the Reagan years, how the underlying dog-eat-dog mentality of the “me generation” was adopted by society’s most vulnerable citizens. The myth of intrinsic black criminality didn’t begin here, having been provided as the empty, bigoted excuse for white intransigence toward blacks since time immemorial, but it gained a television-fueled currency in the ’80s, one whose ramifications we’re all still struggling with. There is an irony to unlock here, about how imperiled inner-city black men in spaces with few job prospects, ones that capital investment was largely averse to, created their own bustling, illicit underground economy around a product (crack) that had a growing market and loyal customers at the same time that they were pilloried by pro-business conservatives as lazy, the product of a handout culture. The aspirational, materialist iconography of the good life, from Cristal to fur coats, is the currency upon which so much of Jay-Z’s catalog, and the music videos, album covers, and public personas of a million imitators, trades. Capitalism, the only faith America seems to have a fealty toward anymore, is hip-hop’s reigning shibboleth. In contemporary hip-hop, there is no such thing as selling out.

  At the Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, where I worked during that first Bed-Stuy summer of dread, it was hard not to spot the glamorous and the destitute, often right on top of each other—it was people-watching heaven! Just after you might have to shoo away one of the homeless people who would consistently come in from the street to camp out in the bathroom for two hours, Tim Robbins would saunter by, towering and hard-faced, looking around morosely before asking vaguely about a Tom LeClair novel we obviously didn’t have, Susan Sarandon walking around apologetically in his wake. I once sold Spike Lee, director of the best film ever shot in the neighborhood I didn’t know I was living in at the time, a dozen copies of his wife’s first novel, Gotham Diaries. Having fielded his brusque call asking if they were in stock (“Give me fit-teen of ’em,” he said) in awe, I set them aside and awaited his arrival with breathless anticipation, cinematic idol that he was in those days. When he appeared, in a white New York Yankees polo and red, black, and green wristbands, eyes like daggers behind his round glasses, I froze for a second, before wordlessly handing him the books. “Here you are, Mr. Lee.” He didn’t say “thank you.”

  The election loomed, one that was quickly developing into farce (“swiftboating” is a term that actually entered the political lexicon, “ratfucking” having grown too coarse, I suppose), and amid it I stumbled, among the fiction paperbacks one lazy July afternoon, upon Joe Klein’s Clinton campaign novel Primary Colors. It had been all the rage two presidential election cycles previous. I was an angry and spurned Howard Dean supporter, one who had watched in horror as his campaign was torpedoed by the American liberal media establishment following his rambunctious, allegedly “unpresidential” Iowa concession speech, but I tried to read Primary Colors with some distance from my anger. It helped focus it, a bit, but also left me with questions I wasn’t prepared to answer at the time.

  The protagonist of Klein’s book, and the Mike Nichols movie it spawned, is Henry Burton, the scion of good civil rights Negro stock. In the book he’s mixed race, but Adrian Lester, the British actor who plays him in the movie, has Sidney Poitier’s complexion. Lester plays him as a damn near effeminate cultural mulatto who spends the whole movie trying to prove his mettle and staring with googly eyes at a southern governor no “woke” black man in his right mind would ever think could save America. He begins the narrative as a political “true believer” who wants to “change” this country for the better, although in the book and the film’s unimaginative politics it remains unclear just what he and his liberal candidate actually believe in. The movie never gives our Slick Willy the chance to Sister Souljah anyone, or its protagonist anything that resembles a youthful black consciousness circa 1992; this brother seems to be all Kenny G and no Eric B., a Seinfeld watcher who somehow never heard of Martin, someone who would feel right at home with Fran Ross’s Oreo.

  But the movie doesn’t have the wisdom to let him be the tragic mulatto its author was unable to fathom. Sure, he ends up disillusioned by the superficiality and vacuous campaign horse race, and ultimately watches from afar, having rebuffed the novel/film’s Bill Clinton surrogate (“You got to be with me, Henry!” John Travolta’s Clinton unsuccessfully intones in the movie’s penultimate scene) by not following the campaign all the way to the White House. But you know, deep down, this guy ends up on K Street somewhere, shilling for some other charlatan stiff of the American empire.

  Henry’s blackness is made unimportant in Klein’s book yet is the source of revealing humor in the great Elaine May’s script, which takes Klein’s cluelessness about how a black man’s public identity is often bound up in th
e falsehoods of white sexual anxiety and makes punch lines out of it. Billy Bob Thorton’s character, a thinly veiled James Carville, gets to be the film’s ethnic essentialist id, calling out our Negrofied George Stephanopoulos as a silent player who is really a white boy in brown drag. After claiming that Henry works that “voodoo sexual shit on white girls” that is the Negro man’s stock and trade, he alludes to Henry’s Hotchkiss education and claims, “I’m blacker than you are. I got some slave in me. I can feel it.”

  One imagines that Henry, coming into his own as a late-twenty-something product of the vineyard-summering, Jack and Jill–reared Negro elite, may indeed have wanted to work that “voodoo sexual shit” on white girls and would have been bold enough to offer a word in his own defense; in the novel he sleeps with both a Clinton aide and Hillary herself. But Klein can’t burrow his way into Henry’s head. Henry, a veritable Spook Who Sat by the Door, remains a cipher, a maudlin and unimaginative rumination on the modern bourgeois Negro; his journey, as depicted here, runs from the multitudes it could contain, the insights of double consciousness a young, smart Negro man at the beginning of the ’90s must have carried, being the sole staffer of his hue on a presidential campaign in the era of Willie Horton and crack babies, a Carlton from Fresh Prince suddenly playing in the political big leagues. Klein didn’t have the confidence to explore this circumstance, however, this Negro among white elites, with the gusto that writers such as Ishmael Reed or Colson Whitehead would have, or that the subject deserved. He was afraid, or he just didn’t know what he didn’t know.

  Klein fails to imagine what double consciousness sounds like in a Negro’s mind, except as a tool to castigate niggas. A political reporter who himself was wearing masks while writing this anonymously published book, Klein can offer only this when he finds his political operative waiting for a plane, observing other black people crossing an airport terminal: Henry sees

  a group of large black kids—college kids, I could tell, enthusiastic, not sullen, but dressed sort of streety, cutting a wide, noisy swath through the terminal. (Even at our hopeful best, we could still seem awkward, inappropriate, too emotive for these white folks, I feared.)

  The phrase “for these white folks” escapes, unexamined in the next passage or anywhere else. The specter of white supremacy at play in the mind of the protagonist remains outside the writer’s conscious grasp. The modifiers “streety,” “noisy,” and “enthusiastic” could describe a “blackness” Henry Burton would prefer to run from, seeing as he was doing just fine being Carlton. Lacking collectivism was healthy, and staying respectable to white people was a lifelong pursuit, Klein seems to be suggesting, but the novel refuses to probe this cancer in Henry’s own life—where is his black community? His black family, the great civil rights Negroes with whom the Clintons would ingratiate themselves and whose community they would silently stab in the back, remains behind the curtains; Klein didn’t feel the need to give his Hotchkiss Negro a family shibboleth to slay; he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

  In my weaker moments, I felt a turn in the gut on many an ebony night that summer striding past the hopped-up Marcy boys on the northeastern end of the houses, by the Flushing Avenue G, as our youthful glances met, one not unlike Henry’s when gazing at the wild boys in the airport; the expectation that they’d pop off and try to provoke me never faded. Their rueful glances, confirming within me some latent sense that ourselves, Negroes, were the problem, those without vision or dignity, a doomed and longing people, kept me on edge as I passed stoops and park margins full of boisterous dope boys, cutting their “wide swaths,” as Klein would have it. I had, in my young life, encountered many lies; this one proved central, our inherent fallenness, but the backwardness of our national mythos was evident in other ways that summer too.

  The Republican National Convention came to town and the New York City Police Department, at the behest of the feds, made a mess of suppressing the outrage sparked by a president who had needlessly entered us in two wars, one of which was being fought on false pretenses and in extremely bad faith, the other smelling mostly of mirthless resource theft. I had scheduled the day off work from Barnes & Noble weeks in advance, and the following day too, in case I got arrested. Marching north on Sixth Avenue on day one of the convention, as New York’s finest did their best to unconstitutionally silence the dissenters, took what felt like an entire afternoon. Herded as we were into bullpens of dissent, the Americans who had taken to the streets in protest of the senseless war and arrogant know-nothingism were bound with a miserable sense of hopelessness. This was a war we would not stop.

  One march a few days into the convention, initially approved by the NYPD, would go from the World Trade Center to Madison Square Garden on sidewalks only. When the arrests came, as people tried to peaceably remove themselves from the “free speech” zones, they came swiftly and violently. Sometimes they even came preemptively. Members of the War Resisters League planned to stage a “die-in” upon reaching the arena, but that never happened, as two hundred of them were arbitrarily arrested after one officer claimed a banner being held aloft on the sidewalk was taking up too much space.

  This didn’t surprise me much. For a black man, in the city of Giuliani, in the country of Bush, in a time of war, in the Bed-Stuy of our collective nightmares, safety seemed a silly concept, a quaint thing from the past, a myth as far reaching and hard to touch as the divinity of kings and the sacredness of our Constitution, which, before being amended, had sought to make me property. The city fathers and the men who served them, as they have always done in the New York where I came of age, resorted to the most sickening of tactics to quell the expression of unpopular truths on those Manhattan streets.

  Almost a full decade went by before these tactics were found illegal in a court of law. The NYPD detained and fingerprinted people in direct violation of their constitutional rights, disregarding whether individuals were in fact providing probable cause for arrest during those desperate late-summer days. More than 1,800 people were arrested in protests during the convention’s four days, passing the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for the most protesters ever held captive at such an affair. Yet in our time the antiwar effort was ineffective, direct action ultimately fruitless. The war continued apace as “Mission Accomplished” floated above the suited-and-booted president, freshly landed on a carrier of doom.

  Before anyone called it “respectability politics,” I knew how to code-switch. I knew not to act like those boisterous black boys in Primary Colors, at least in white company. It was another type of shame entirely, but the experience of code-switching can also be exhilarating and is perhaps, in every essential way, no different than jumping from Portuguese to Gaelic. I talked to Rolanda differently than I did my mother, to whom I spoke differently than my drug buddies from high school, to whom I spoke differently than I did my film professors in college. Cynicism and self-flagellation were easy in those years. It was the season of Bill Cosby’s “Pound Cake” speech at the Urban League gala celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, after all.

  Fuck code-switching, Cosby was telling us, even if he didn’t know it. The way niggas behave is unacceptable. Good Negroes shouldn’t tolerate it. It was a logic popular at the middle-class black dinner tables where I often found myself when I went home to Ohio; Cosby called on his audience to recognize the depth of the civil rights movement’s failure to secure enduring prosperity for all but a sliver of the country’s black citizens, and to see it as the fault of those who remain impoverished.

  I confess, I was somewhat in thrall to self-vilifying blacks like this at the time, afraid as we had been told to be of those who wouldn’t pull their pants up, who’d shoot you down on the street for nothing; a friend from film school and I would listen to .wav files of Cosby’s speech over and over, giggling at his hysterical paternalism, unaware of the promise of grim hypocrisy. As far as Cosby was concerned, along with much of the respec
table black establishment, Allen Iverson may as well have joined Al-Qaeda.

  Cosby defended police officers shooting young Negro thieves from behind. “These people, the ones up here in the balcony, fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals,” he’d said, just weeks before I moved to Bed-Stuy, unknowingly, for the first time. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged. ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?”

  In Bring the Pain, his landmark comedy special from a decade earlier that landed just as crime crested across the nation in black neighborhoods, where women of some means like my mother invested in guns and alarm systems, Chris Rock suggested that the only people who hated niggas more than Caucasians did were Negroes. He’d forgotten that Bill Cosby hated niggas more than Negroes did. Unless they were female and unconscious.

  As a child, my sense of what it meant to be part of a people I would have then referred to only as “black,” despite the frequent usage within my household of the earlier, more rarified and now shamed term, was informed by the underlying logic I detected within these simple explanations for the ever-enduring sense that black America was awry, unable to right itself after being privy to so much civic ransacking. You could find those sentiments in the books I was picking off the shelves late that summer, the air-conditioning in the corporate bookseller where I was trapped eight hours a day whirring overhead, sneaking time to read the hard stuff whenever I wasn’t helping someone find a James Patterson novel. Debra Dickerson’s The End of Blackness, which had come out the previous winter, was typical, in some ways, among this set of “what went wrong?” polemics; it sought to point out that while the United States was far from a racial utopia, it had become, long after the primary legislative goals of the civil rights movement had been met, a space where racism was no longer the effective driver of Negro misery or lack of opportunity. Negroes could not be prevented from “playing the game,” wrote Dickerson, and that game was American capitalism. “No one can stop the American, black or blind, who is determined to succeed.”