Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

  485 Lexington Avenue

  The first season of Steven Soderbergh’s turn-of-the-century hospital drama The Knick shot its exteriors mostly in and around Bed-Stuy during the fall of 2013, right around the time I first began dating Anne with some earnestness. I was living at 730 DeKalb and recall, upon several long daytime strolls south, past Herbert Von King Park and into the heart of the neighborhood, watching large swathes of people, all decked in early-twentieth-century garb, shuffle from a nearby holding area to a stretch of Putnam Avenue that had been blocked off for filming. They walked past the production trucks, along a series of long white craft tables nearby, where underneath makeshift tents sweet and savory food items were laid out. Nearby, men and women stood snacking on Kind bars and sipping cans of San Pellegrino Limonata while wearing corsets and bowler hats, a video village for the producers set up just past them near the street corner, the towering old Bedford-Stuyvesant school building that plays the Knick on TV looming above them all. I followed along the street until I encountered a knit-cap-wearing PA, about the age of the film students I teach in Westchester County, chewing gum loudly. His walkie beeped as he gently asked me to cross the street to the other side of the intersection.

  Soderbergh had the type of career I, in my magical-thinking years, had once dreamed of for myself, oscillating between studio and independent films, shooting and cutting his own work, remaining defiantly intellectual and a remarkable manager of people at once. I had met him years before, at a screening at Warner Brothers of his unfairly maligned World War II film The Good German. He had been a good sport when I chased after him and told him he should make good on a promise he made in an interview with The Believer to remake Alphaville for $10,000. “They’d pillory me,” he said with a smile, before getting into the back of a black Lincoln. “They’d have me for lunch,” he said out the window before being driven away.

  The ten-hour first season of the show revolves around the brilliant, cocaine-addicted Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), a whirling dervish of a man who takes over as chief of surgery at a beleaguered Lower East Side hospital after his mentor shoots himself in the head following one too many childbirths gone awry. The futility of so much modern medicine, and the slow march of progress toward alleviating ailments we now routinely diagnose and cure, is a dominant theme of the hour-long episodic, but this is a sprawling ensemble drama that has more than hospital administration and doctoring on its mind.

  The kaleidoscopic canvas Soderbergh and his writers paint is one teeming with latent tensions between native and foreigner, faith and reason, old traditions and new ways of seeing. It takes stock of the city’s immigrant landscape of the early twentieth century, visiting Negro SROs and roach-infested convents, Irish tenements and Upper East Side country homes, as no television show has ever done. The hidden world of Manhattan municipal planning, often in cigar-smoke-filled private university clubs instead of the corridors of City Hall, is glimpsed alongside the world of banquet-sized Negro dance halls and Chinese opium dens. The Knick introduces us to a bygone New York that, at first glance, seems far removed from our own. But unlike Mad Men, which delivers us to an elegantly rendered 1960s nostalgia factory while reminding us of how far we’ve progressed since those bad old days of patriarchy and racism, The Knick reminds us that, in our own time, the latent tensions between cultures and races and classes persist. We are no better than these people.

  In line with the liberal sensibilities of the Robertsons, the prominent Manhattan shipping family that dominates the Knick’s board of directors, the hospital serves the city’s lowliest new American families. When few other hospitals cater to them, the Knick serves the white ethnic commoners who are crowding into Lower Manhattan looking for a better way. The only people they don’t serve are Negroes, of course.

  The staff’s sole black doctor, Algernon Edwards (André Holland), the son of the Robertsons’ servants, trained in France because of America’s peculiar aversion to educating Negroes. His hiring, at the behest of the Robertsons, draws the ire of some other doctors, notably Dr. Everett Gallinger (Eric Johnson), by Season Two a noted eugenics enthusiast whose trust and respect Algernon will never earn, even as he works twice as hard to gain everyone else’s. Not considered for advancement despite his medical pedigree and troubled by the hospital turning away black patients, he turns to fighting in back alleys or barroom brawls as a means of releasing his anxiety, and treats black patients in the Knickerbocker Hospital’s basement, where he sets up, with the help of a black nurse, a makeshift infirmary of sorts, unbeknownst to any of the other staff.

  Juliet Rylance plays Cornelia Robertson, an administrator at the underfunded hospital. Beautiful and serious, she is an upper-class WASP who, as a woman taking managerial employment (or any employment at all), is violating the ethic of her tribe. The oldest of Mr. Robertson’s children, she grew up with Algernon, their servants’ child, and clearly has a fondness for him the rest of the staff at the Knick do not. Although she shows an acumen for the work, making the best of a difficult budget as the hospital seeks to modernize in the midst of an age of great technological advancement and boardroom hand-wringing over its stated mission to serve the immigrant lowly, her time as a hospital exec is seen as a temporary arrangement, something to do until she gets to the real business of being a wife to the scion of an appropriately rich WASP family that has something to offer her father and brother.

  After his hiring, she protects Algernon from slander when she can, trying to assure the other doctors of his competence and somewhat forcefully suggesting to them that he is at the Knick to stay. Their interactions are cordially professional at first; the attraction is there immediately, of course, but the flirting comes only gradually and with great caution, as it must have for any black man intrigued by the body of a white woman in 1902. It is in his secret basement infirmary for Negroes that she makes the first move, after a particularly valiant display of heroism on his part following a full-scale riot by an Irish mob outside the hospital.

  They begin a delicate dance of attraction, Algernon and Cornelia, one that culminates in a torrid affair, all clandestine midnight carriage rides to the wrong side of town, a corseted white woman slipping out of a Negro tenement at dawn to escape unnoticed. They take comfort in sarcasm together, making fun of all the cultural events Cornelia is allegedly attending when she’s at work late, as opposed to sitting in a chair, opposite his bed, smoking a cigarette in the nude. “I’m not sure a woman like you should have any business in a place like that,” a stage driver says to Cornelia when she requests a ride to Dick’s Hotel at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, where Algernon awaits her early in their affair. “And I’m quite sure you have no business questioning me” is her reply.

  Things go awry, predictably so. They never discuss the discrimination he faces at every turn; not only is there so much else to talk about, but somehow he tricks himself into thinking she can empathize, a common delusion integrated blacks hold concerning their white friends and lovers—people want to think the best of one another, and besides, isn’t it obvious, this shit we go through? Then Cornelia gets pregnant and everything changes. She demands he abort his own child.

  Hunched over his lover in his makeshift basement infirmary, Algernon cannot bring himself to do it, to kill the baby he had been foolish enough to think Cornelia might bear for him in Liberia, a place “where attitudes are different.” She must go to the Catholics instead! When she marries, at the end of Season One, against her desires but in line with the expectations of her family and class, it is to a boorish, wellborn San Francisco heir with a leering father. Meanwhile, filled with despair, Algernon gets himself knocked out, in self-destructive lunacy, by starting a fight with a much bigger barroom Negro he must surely know will beat his ass. Cornelia’s insistence of fealty to her family’s expectations leaves him on no less of a suicide mission than Dwight David Taylor may have been on during his last dance with Paul MacLeod.

  A desperate reckoning with deep-seated Amer
ican truths becomes unavoidable; she cannot possibly carry on with this Negro, as this country did not mean them, the daughter of a white shipping magnate and the son of a black chauffeur, to be together. The pain in Ms. Rylance’s bright blue eyes at her inability, despite her intelligence and awareness, to truly say this plainly, staring into the barely contained rage and stoic sorrow writ ever so carefully on Mr. Holland’s features as he casts aside their affair, is one I was familiar with—I thought I had seen something similar in Anne’s eyes, too.

  Anne moved to Bed-Stuy just as my time at 434 Greene was up; she took a room in a ground-floor apartment that a production manager friend of hers was leasing. You could have cut the air with a knife when she told me, during one of our rare phone conversations just weeks before I was set to leave an apartment I had begun to dream of gentrifying with her, after we had decided to give our on-again, off-again romance another try. The place she was moving into was recently renovated and complete with garden access on the ground floor of a walk-up just west of Throop on Lexington Avenue, eight blocks from where I had first lived in Bed-Stuy and only a scant few blocks from the building that plays the Knickerbocker Hospital on television.

  It was quite the departure for her. When I moved to Bed-Stuy for the first time, a girl like Anne would have never thought to live there. When we met, in 2011, she was living in the Upper East Side. Despite the tony zip code, she lived in a place her mother, whom I never met despite three years of dating her daughter, allegedly found wanting—it lacked a doorman. At the time we became acquainted, I was dating a niche film marketing specialist named Andrea with class hang-ups of her own; like me, she had grown up in proximity to the wealthy and the well-to-do, was more or less surrounded by them, but had a decidedly petit bourgeois household compared with theirs.

  Andrea’s mother, formerly a progressive rabbi, worked at a Home Depot in Hartford and raised a black child, the daughter of her stepsister, as her own. Her father, a professor of Middle Eastern studies, made a habit of pissing his pants when he got drunk and had a ringing desire to have his daughter tell him how large my cock was (was it true!?). He asked her to promise she’d marry a Jewish man if he voted for Barack Obama, but she opted for a Jewish woman instead; I was her last boyfriend.

  Like the flag her family has long bled for in reverence, the prominent colors of Anne’s body are her deep red hair, pale, freckled skin, and swimming-pool-blue eyes. She had been a movie publicist for a prominent film festival when I met her, yet I could see from the start her ambition was to make her own films. She has a reserved, almost inquisitive disposition she likes to refer to as “uptight,” but eventually I got her to warm up, plying her with gregarious, encouraging e-mails about her film, sharing just the details about me I thought she’d find alluring. We had both directed small first features about grief and seemed to have, despite the obvious differences between us, something resembling a genuine connection from the start. I was with someone else, unhappily so, and couldn’t stop myself from trying to woo her. The night before her predecessor broke up with me, Anne and I had our first seemingly innocent drink together, after a press screening leading up to the festival. She traveled with me to a party at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where I was headed to meet my girlfriend, knowing somewhere that the relationship I remained in wasn’t long for this world.

  It took me a year and a half from the time I met her to the moment, in a Lower East Side bar, when I said, “I just don’t understand why we haven’t made out yet.” I knew how to seduce Anne, to be palpably black in ways that were exotic and yet familiar simultaneously. She knew how to seduce me right back, admitting straightaway, but in an indirect, joking manner, to having a thing for black guys. I had been taken with redheads for as long as I could remember, but it wasn’t simply fetishistic; there was a mutual respect in each other’s talents, intelligence, and calm. I couldn’t get enough of her. I wanted to bottle Anne and take her with me everywhere I went, but I also felt an immediate trepidation.

  On Facebook I saw photos of her father and her brothers in oxfords and sweaters next to a house that looked like a southern slave plantation. She occasionally found herself at impossibly lavish weddings, the brothers in military garb, or perched next to some handsomely trimmed hedges while her siblings, sitting on either side of her, both wore white button-ups and jackets. This was a girl who knew her way around formal wear. The dogs and the hedges, all the trappings of WASP privilege, oozed off the pixels on my screen. They were almost a parody of such privilege, this family, so much so that my best friend from Cincinnati, the one who had had his own cotillion and had grown up in Hyde Park despite his father’s working-class Bond Hill origins, immediately called foul when I suggested, while surveying her Facebook profile during Christmas 2011, that he pursue Anne instead of I.

  “I can’t marry into that,” he insisted, waving his hand at the petite blonde mother and the pinstripe-wearing father, a financial industry executive and wealth-management specialist who once managed an $18 billion family fund for one of America’s richest clans. He thought these people were too stodgy and conservative for him. If that was the case for my friend, who had a high-priced education and a pair of high-powered lawyer parents, then certainly to “marry into that” wasn’t in the cards for me either, a black man educated among east side wealth with social-climbing “philanthropist” grandparents who nonetheless remained the son of a black janitor.

  Years later, my friend admitted to me that his sister and father were likely to be unhappy if he didn’t ultimately commit to an upper-middle-class blonde white woman, like the one he was currently dating. It was an act of great peril, to love people for whom America means something entirely different than yourself, but this was present-day New York, not 1902. A dashing child of miscegenation was presiding over the country, felling the myth of the tragic mulatto forever. What good did fear ever do?

  Before she began dating me, Anne told me she struggled in her relationship with her parents, whom she very much reveres publicly, because they were still sore that she didn’t go into finance. She drove a Mercedes her father gave her, one she was weary of, seeing how it signified her family’s wealth. Anne claimed she would never receive any money from her family. Her father, who was a “self-made man,” would not allow her or her brothers an inheritance. I didn’t believe her, but let it slide; I lied to people I loved too, out of solidarity with whomever they wanted me to be.

  I never had a problem code-switching in front of white girls until I met Anne. It never made me self-conscious, being a Negro who liked chicken wings, watermelon, and Martin reruns who could nonetheless talk with great affection for European slow cinema, Portishead albums, and Toms shoes. Yet, whenever I would hang out with her, something in her gaze made me feel like I had something to prove. Despite the Do the Right Thing poster on her wall and the ease with which I wrote long, hauntingly personal e-mails to her in which I hinted at my class incoherence and the vulnerability I felt surrounding the management of my parents’ declining fortunes, I struggled to find ways to reveal myself to her without feeling judged. We always struggled to find an easy, consistent mode of communication in person beyond flirting, and never were good at speaking to each other on the phone about anything of importance, even as a profound affection flourished between us such as I had never felt before. She made me laugh, and I found her prim style to be both alluring and also a ruse; she has, despite the stereotypes, a more voracious sexual appetite than I, is a far better dancer, and, despite her coastal rearing, maintains a far more colloquial, if not down-homey, way of speaking.

  We struck a balance, my abrasive, emotional, oversharing qualities and her straitlaced but quick-witted vibe, that was magical at times, fun and sexy and freewheeling; I found, as I grew closer to her, an emotional satisfaction my other relationships lacked, and when I felt distance from her, an alienation I had never previously experienced, it, oddly, made me want to solve the puzzle that was Anne even more.

  In random
moments, sitting on the subway or standing at a urinal, I would worry that we were simply playing characters for each other, as people do at the beginning of a relationship. Had these characters allowed us to trick ourselves into thinking we could create a solidarity that would hold? I’m still not quite sure. I’d frame my relationships with friends I knew she wouldn’t approve of in the long run, like Frank White, for instance, as being paternal, spaces where I was a do-gooder shepherding a lost friend. I hid the extent of my marijuana addiction, at least at the beginning, and emphasized, in our flirtatious correspondence, my private education and bourgeois sensibility; when I was tempted, I would code-switch and slip a “mothafucka” into an exclamatory comment or refer to black people as Negroes, but I’d feel her recoil a bit. I knew to pull back around certain kinds of white people. We were entering realms of experience outside her purview.

  She played a character for me, too, talking up her father’s up-by-the-bootstraps, son-of-Polish-immigrants story, and her love of ’90s R&B. She’d hit a blunt and play pool with you; she had a tomboy’s way about her that girls with brothers almost always have, despite the girlish charm she could turn on at a moment’s notice. But get her around the darker corners of black experience, the ones that keep us perpetually frustrated, the ones I have spent much of my young career discussing in film journals and fancy national magazines, and a blankness sets in just underneath those azure irises, one that never fails to chill my blood, the palpable sense of disconnection and lack of understanding that crosses her features.