Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  Of course not. But in the absurd version of the South Side Lee has conjured, magical realist solutions for black America’s burdens are a dime a dozen. A place where 411 murders took place in 2015 and the median income (as John Cusack’s Michael Pfleger–inspired preacher didactically reminds us, mid-eulogy, in one of the film’s oddest scenes) is $12,000 a year, the South Side of Chicago deserves a more thoughtful and aesthetically honest exploration of its woes. Yet Lee abandons any sort of honest attempt at depicting how protest movements live and die, thrive or flounder, for Hollywood grandstanding—as when a group of mostly disempowered, poor black women storm the Illinois State Armory and find they have no problem subduing its guards, who all end up stripped and bound, before the movie forgets about them. Run by a conspicuously southern-sounding white codger (played by David Patrick Kelly from The Warriors) who, at the mere hint of sex with an attractive black woman, strips down to his Confederate flag diapers and mounts an ebony cannon in his office, one is left to assume imbecilic bigots normally run state armories in the Midwest.

  The film’s profound confusion only grows from there. If it is a satire, as Mr. Lee has said, it knows not what it aims to satirize. Chi-Raq seems to take with the utmost seriousness, in its stated plea for us to “wake up,” the idea that the ongoing standoff must be settled not by a bloody SWAT team raid, but an organized “sex bout.” Staged at the site of an ongoing hostage situation and televised with the full support of the local government (the mayor, played by D. B. Sweeney, wants to get back to intercourse with his black wife, who is also striking), Chi-Raq and Lysistrata get it on in front of everyone, both in the armory and at home. Whoever reaches orgasm first in the Illinois State Armory “sex-off” is the loser. The fate of Chicago’s black community hangs in the balance. At some point toward the middle of the sequence, when we finally get the signature Spike Lee dolly shot, I’m pretty sure all the head-scratching I’d done had resulted in a rash.

  When defending himself, whether on Meet the Press or black radio, Lee has made much of the nonactors from Chicago, including many victims of gun violence, who are in the film. Why would they be in a film, he angrily intones, that doesn’t treat their pain with the utmost care and seriousness? Probably because no one but Spike Lee can convince white billionaires and the blinkered indie film execs who represent them to finance an eight-figure, star-laden movie about gun violence in black Chicago. But just because one has the privilege to speak to a major national crisis with expensive public art doesn’t mean that it is any good. The one memorable nonactor in the film, a wheelchair-bound ex–gang member who talks to Cannon’s title character while he sulks over some purple drink, offers the only moment of gravity and genuine feeling in the whole phony thing, talking about the perils of gang life from what you know is clearly firsthand experience; it makes Lee’s actors look even worse. Before the moment can really breathe, though, Lee cuts awkwardly away from it. In its place? A montage of the elevated train circling into the loop that, beyond being a cinematic non sequitur if I’ve ever seen one, could come straight out of a promotional ad for the chic intra-loop Chicago that no one ever thinks of as “Chi-Raq.”

  It’s a moment that illustrates how Chi-Raq is afraid of the power it contains, how it never transcends the infantilized, opportunistic, and irresponsible measure it takes of Chicago’s ongoing nightmare. It represents the profound disconnect between the black leadership class, one Lee is very much a part of, and the people living in America’s most dangerous urban districts. Topical but not wise, Chi-Raq is the moment where Lee, recent recipient of an honorary lifetime-achievement Oscar, has gone the full Kanye: maximum spectacle, minimum coherence.

  Fuck George Jefferson, it’s Spike Lee who has moved on up. He didn’t want to be like Melvin Van Peebles, trumpeting the accomplishments of one movie he made forty-five years ago in some tattered sweatshirt he wore around the apartment—a nice one in Columbus Circle, bought with Wall Street speculation money. He didn’t want to spend thirty years trying to get his first movie distributed and bumming around Africa, as Charles Burnett has, asking dictators and strongmen for funding. And he didn’t want to be like Bill Gunn, thumbing his nose at the genres he was expected to make. He wanted to be noticed, to make a lasting impact on a broader cultural stage. He wanted to gentrify black Brooklyn himself. He didn’t want slumming, Sundance-hungry white filmmakers—like the Oscar nominee Benh Zeitlin, or Slamdance winner Keith Miller, or filmmaker brand Quentin Tarantino, or any other white liberal making inauthentic stories about black poverty or bondage or struggle—to do it for him. Then Lee gave up. He moved to the Upper East Side, the story goes, and got citizenship in the Republic of Jaguar commercials, the brand of “Brooklyn” emblazoned on limited-edition Absolut Vodka bottles with his name underneath.

  But these days Lee—minus the fame, fortune, and ritzy address—is just like the rest of us. In mid-January, a full month before its “theatrical release,” Da Sweet Blood of Jesus was released through Vimeo On Demand for a fraction of what a new videocassette of Clockers would have cost in 1995. The film graced a few coastal theaters and faded into oblivion along with most of the other movies given weeklong runs in New York City in 2015, a number that exceeded the 950 the Times reviewed the previous year.

  It might not feel this way because of the recent successes of Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay, Barry Jenkins, and Ryan Coogler, interesting black directorial voices all, but black movies by black people who are not beholden to the desires of white imaginations—black films in which the characters are, you know, alive, as opposed to symbolic stand-ins—have always been exceedingly rare. “Black cinema” is truly no better off than it was in 1984, just after Lee debuted his senior thesis film and Gunn finally gave up directing for good just before his novel Rhinestone Sharecropping—about how nearly impossible it is for Negroes to make nondegrading work in Hollywood—began gathering dust on bookstore shelves. “I want to say that it is a terrible thing to be a black artist in this country,” Gunn wrote in the Times in 1973, “for reasons too private to expose to the arrogance of white criticism.” How is it possible that this still rings true? How likely is it that Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, Wendell B. Harris Jr., Tina Mabry, Dee Rees, Dennis Dortch, Frances Bodomo, Billy Woodberry, Larry Clark (the black one), Leslie Harris, Darnell Martin, Rashaad Ernesto Green, Michael Schultz, Kasi Lemmons, Shaka King, Damon Russell, or Moon Molson will get a directing job on the kind of topical, studio-financed film that Lee, for more than a decade, made seem commonplace?

  Without the monumental career of Spike Lee, I am quite certain I would have never taken the idea of becoming a filmmaker seriously. His turn toward hack demagoguery, and the revelation of certain unsavory aspects of his character, at a time when the entire profession is becoming increasingly unsustainable for people who are nonwealthy, regardless of whether they already have the commercial and industrial stain of being black, is on some days almost too much to bear—why should I even try? Your heroes always disappoint you, someone said once. “I can’t lie to your students,” Charles Burnett told me over lunch in Westchester County a few months after I interviewed Lee. He had flown all the way from Los Angeles to screen The Glass Shield for my students. “I can’t look them in the eye and tell them they should become filmmakers.” This from perhaps the greatest black American director, a man who can’t get a feature financed and doesn’t think, even though he has made just as many masterpieces as Lee has, that he has had a great career. Heartbreak doesn’t even do it justice.

  But for those of us with the addiction, we wait. We wait for a black public to find ways to pay for its own media. We wait for wealthy Negroes you and I have never heard of to provide a more muscular financial backing for specialty films with content that speaks to the concerns of the African diaspora, and indie-film prognosticators to stop doubting the ability of films with black characters to perform overseas. We wait for young white studio heads with a love of hip-hop but no middle-class black friends to stop t
elling seasoned Negro filmmakers something is or isn’t “black” enough for their studio to produce, market, and distribute. We wait for dignity we’ve never been granted and have yet to find the means to take for ourselves.

  “When I first came into the ‘theatre,’ black women who were actresses were referred to as ‘great gals’ by white directors and critics,” recalled Gunn in that same letter he wrote to the Times about its review of Ganja & Hess. “Marlene Clark, one of the most beautiful women and actresses I have ever known, was referred to as a ‘brown-skinned looker’ (New York Post). That kind of disrespect could not have been cultivated in 110 minutes. It must have taken a good 250 years.”

  200 Gholson Avenue

  A few months after I moved into 730 DeKalb in the fall of 2013, while on assignment writing about a film festival in Memphis, one where Redlegs had won a prize the year before, I journeyed to Holly Springs, Mississippi, an antebellum town forty-five miles southeast of the historic and troubled city where Elvis Presley lived, to meet a man named Paul MacLeod. Perhaps the most famous Elvis memorabilia collector of all time, he was certainly the stuff of regional legend, a gun-toting, mile-a-minute talker with a questionable relationship with the truth. The film festival staffers I knew insisted I go to his home and take a tour. So late one Sunday night, in a van full of festival attendees, I found myself in front of Graceland Too, an 1853 antebellum house at the corner of Gholson Avenue and Randolph Street.

  On the morning of July 17, 2014, about a month after I moved out of 730 DeKalb, Paul MacLeod was found dead, slumped in a rocking chair on the porch of Graceland Too, the door locked behind him. An air of mystery immediately surrounded his death. No foul play was detected. The local coroner, who suggested initially it might take up to six months to get autopsy results due to a backlog of bodies, claimed Paul had died of natural causes. Some people came and took pictures of his dead body before officials were notified. A picture of his fresh corpse, taken early that Thursday morning, circulated through the town in the weeks to follow, peeked at on smartphones in bars and on street corners. There would have been nothing too mysterious about all this had it not been for the fact that two nights prior, on the same premises, Paul MacLeod had shot and killed a man named Dwight Taylor.

  Graceland Too resembled an outpost at the end of the world; it looked like the last refuge of a bygone southern gentry waiting out an apocalyptic siege, one they would call the “War of Northern Aggression” for generations after. It had been a white frame house entirely at one point, but now the sides were undergoing a pale rust repainting that was yet unfinished. A seemingly unused green ticket booth, decked out with Christmas ornamentation and photos of Elvis plastered on its back wall, sat near the street just ahead of a gated driveway, both reinforced with barbed wire, not far from two statues of lions, also wrapped loosely in barbed wire and adorned with neck bows that seemed to be made of police crime scene tape. They were perched in protection on either side of his low-slung portico.

  When I first arrived there, I walked around the house, mostly looking for a dark place to urinate before entering—I had just gotten half-drunk on Tennessee whiskey at the Indie Memphis closing-night reception. This proved prescient since MacLeod didn’t, I would learn the following summer, have a working toilet. He used the facilities down the street at the local library for number twos, and his backyard for number ones. While pissing out some of the liquor I’d consumed several hours before along the eastern side of his property, I noticed a Confederate flag hanging from a post reinforced with rocks. It mingled with several American and state of Mississippi flags. Chuck D was right: Elvis was a hero to most, perhaps, but he had never meant shit to me. Here I was, a northern Negro in a southern town I knew nothing about other than that it had been developed as a site for cotton plantations, about to enter the home of a man whose antebellum space I was pissing on and who purportedly brandished guns frequently, some of which he claimed had once belonged to Elvis Presley.

  Amy Hoyt, a stocky and square-jawed Tennessee native, sandy blond hair and groovy specs adorning a face that kept one guessing what was on her mind, was the volunteer transportation coordinator for the festival and a “lifetime” member of Graceland Too—she had a card to prove it. Hoyt was the first to walk up onto the porch. It was silent and still on the street, but the house was lit up along the front. The names Elvis Albert, Brenda, Helen, and Mary were emblazoned in raised yellow block letters on the underside of the pediment above, along with a collection of letters that read “TCB.”

  In his early seventies MacLeod was still an imposing man, with slicked-back white hair and a gleam in his blue eyes that let you know he had long ago lost his mind, or at least wanted you to think he had. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he offered tours of his home. He did not have the vintage Elvis memorabilia necessary to be taken seriously by other collectors, whose circuit of conventions he shunned. MacLeod claimed to have more than 300,000 photos of Presley along with every conceivable type of memorabilia one could imagine on display in the first floor and backyard of his home. Rugs, mugs, calendars, full-size framed portraits, paintings, dolls, curtains, fabrics, towels, videos, news clippings, trading cards—you name it, he had it—laid out across the six rooms and in an overgrown lot behind them. Like Elvis’s home, Graceland, currently a remarkably lucrative international tourist attraction, the upstairs was off-limits; Paul had erected a chain-link fence around the stairwell. But the real draw of Graceland Too was not the immaculately constructed simulacra, the Southern Gothic meltdown vibe of the place that had long ago become the life’s work of Paul MacLeod. It was Paul MacLeod himself.

  MacLeod wore several dense rings on his large hands as he gave the five-dollar tours, and left the impression that he was not above using them in a dustup. His charm melted away at the edges of a subtle menace he exuded. If he caught a visitor staring off into space as he was talking, he would often grab their shoulder forcefully or pound on it twice with a backhanded closed fist, saying, “Yo, yo!” until he was confident that he had regained their attention.

  Paul often told stories about his famed patrons. Muhammad Ali had been there, he said. So had Bill Clinton. Clinton was always visiting Graceland Too. He had always been there just two weeks ago. Paul kept a seemingly comprehensive set of visitor pictures in the “guest room,” a hallway decked floor to ceiling with photographs. Neither Ali nor Clinton could be found. In the pictures, people stood in front of the Elvis shrine in the “shrine room” or posed wearing a jacket that Paul claimed Elvis once owned. He claimed he had a lot of things Elvis once owned. Rugs and guns especially.

  He used the term “half-nigra president” in the most neutral of ways. MacLeod openly referred to women’s cunts, basking in the glow of what he’d have his young Elvis Albert do to a particular woman’s private parts, often right to her partner’s face, a gun by his side most of the time. MacLeod was not bashful about brandishing guns among the unsuspecting. “If by taking my own life I could bring back Elvis Presley for his millions of fans across God’s green earth, I would shoot myself right now in front of all of you here tonight,” he exclaimed about halfway through my initial tour. The muzzle of a gun was pressed to his temple. I didn’t know if the weapon was loaded, but MacLeod didn’t look like he was lying.

  I didn’t glimpse any famous faces among the visitor pictures, no ex-presidents or heavyweight champions, mostly just college kids, red-faced with booze, smiling. In the “record room,” which had once been the room of Paul’s mother, Helen, before she passed away, he serenaded us with his own version of one of Elvis’s songs, the walls covered with exposed Elvis records and their covers, a microphone and stereo system at the ready. MacLeod was a surprisingly effective crooner, issuing a more than passable series of Elvis tunes at the microphone for his rapt guests toward the beginning of the tour.

  In the “portrait room” Paul kept photos of himself as a younger man, sometimes with a female companion, sometimes in the back of a limousine, and
sometimes with large assault rifles. Smaller portraits of Elvis lived throughout the space. They were pink framed and occasionally adorned with mistletoe. It’s easy to lose track of time in Graceland Too, amid that remarkable volume of detritus, stuffed in closets and bins, often covered in dust. Dolls of aliens or blond angels sat among poster boards covered with photos of Lisa Marie Presley, Britain’s royal family, light erotica. MacLeod was, unbeknownst to himself, a postmodernist.

  Intermixed with photos of himself as a younger man, Paul kept pictures of his son, Elvis Albert, whom he mentioned frequently but who, along with a wife he also referenced, was nowhere to be found. Legend has it Elvis Albert resides in New Jersey, having left his father, with whom he oversaw Graceland Too for much of the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, due to the love of a woman he met while giving a tour of the space. Almost everyone who recounted that story in the community of Holly Springs, except for Paul, of course, had their doubts as to its veracity.

  After pushing through, visitors stood around Paul on all sides, doors leading to other parts of the home behind them, the room’s red walls covered in cutout photos of Elvis from periodicals and laminated copies of a front-page news story with the headline “Elvis Presley: He Excites Girls, Terrifies Critics.” I kept my eyes on the floor now, exposed, unfinished wood, cluttered with political placards and yard signs, having lost track of the amount of “niggers” Paul had tossed off during the tour. I stood for a while by a placard that was for a mayoral candidate named Kelvin Buck before I finally walked out in the middle of one of Paul’s diatribes. I had little doubt that Mr. MacLeod, a man of unmistakable charisma despite his subway loon vibe, was an unparalleled pastiche artist. I wasn’t sure if he was genuinely dangerous or not. I didn’t want to stick around to find out. Eliza Hittman, a filmmaker who had been the target of some of Paul’s sexual innuendo, followed not far behind.