Making Rent in Bed-Stuy

by Brandon Harris

In the fall of 2014 I traveled to a film festival in which Anne had taken a managerial role, one that brought many of the country’s best documentaries to coastal Maine. We had only been dating for a few months, but had been fucking for the better part of a year and had known each other for three times as long. Friends from our New York circles, many of whom were at her festival that weekend, wondered aloud if I had met her parents yet.

  They were in attendance that weekend, standing not far away at the opening cocktail party for the event, at an upscale seafood restaurant not far from the ocean. Later, and at the party following the opening screening, in an impossibly posh barn nearby, they were closer still.

  Anne never thought to introduce them to me. I nervously looked at them over my drinks. Whenever Anne would come by and smile, I’d only ask how she was holding up, offering what support I could with a hug or a peck, as she went about her business of hosting without thinking to have me shake her father’s hand or impress her mother with whatever stolid gentleness I could muster.

  By the fall of 2015, Anne had broken up with me several times, but had always come back. Despite my personal reservations, and ongoing dalliances with other women, I refused to give up completely; I always welcomed her return, hoping we could grow into people with each other who could transcend all that stood between us. But this last time, it was me who pursued reconciliation. On the advice of a mutual friend, I went to Maine, where she lived during the summers, running the festival, to win her back, telling her I wanted her to plan a life with me. She cried, mostly in fear but also in genuine love for me, and suggested she would. I didn’t know what that meant for her, or for me, exactly, but I had never felt for anyone else the way I felt about her. Any day of mine that didn’t begin and end with her felt like a lost one.

  We had discovered, in fits and starts of earnest reckoning and sharing, that we were an even odder couple than Andrea and I had been. Whereas I was not one to shirk a challenge, at the first hint of discord, either mine or hers, Anne would grow cold and then break up with me, giving up on the thing with little communication as to why. She had never dated anyone seriously before, so such communication was entirely new to her. In the years since we met, Anne had grown into a budding film producer and film festival organizer; she knew how to talk to people clearly, efficiently, and eloquently. But with me, she always relied on clichés and diversions. Even while I yearned to put all the cards on the table, my mouth was always full of her half-truths at the decisive moment.

  An employee of Anne’s at her festival, a woman at least ten years her senior, moved to Bed-Stuy shortly before Anne did. The woman showed great trepidation about it. She asked me, in person and in increasingly desperate Facebook messages, if she had done the wrong thing. People in the neighborhood had mostly been very nice to her, she wrote, but she was filled with guilt when people weren’t. Anne and I made light of all this, caustically joking, but deep down, I wondered if Anne thought about such things, the displacement and price inflation our mutual presence in the area was fueling. If she did, she certainly never mentioned it. Was she capable of guilt in this way? It didn’t seem so.

  Sharing ourselves, however far we had come, remained difficult. It was awkward to discuss cohabitation and my parents’ increasingly shaky finances with her, the daughter of a man who invests the money and files the taxes of billionaires, taking a hefty cut for his trouble, assuredly. And whenever I was in a mostly black space with her, which was more common now that she lived in Bed-Stuy, I would feel not unlike Richard Pryor, who on That Nigger’s Crazy observed that certain “black women would look at you like you killed your mama when you out with a white woman.”

  Anne maintained that I was her first serious boyfriend, although I personally knew several of the men she had slept with more casually over the years. During our flight after what had been a charming, romantic getaway at a film festival in Savannah, she confided that she had brought another boy home once, a very charming East Asian guy of remarkable wealth. Then she began to cry before continuing. I knew trouble brewed. In between tears and gentle sobs, she revealed her past fears that her mother was a racist. I stiffened; surely she understood I had heard it all before? Apparently the mother had said some less-than-generous things about the young man in private, but was more than charming in person. Anne wondered whether the boy would have received the same courtesy had he not been wealthy.

  She had been taught to hide her emotions, to recoil from help in moments of vulnerability. When her mother’s health grew poor, on top of her grandmother’s imminent death, my overtures of affection turned her cold. She struggled to tell me she loved me and often simply referred to me as her “friend.” She wasn’t alone in this; it was always my own family’s newfound financial frailty that kept me from being direct about my own circumstances, increasingly stewarding my father’s housing prospects and supporting him financially on occasion. Even though I knew she’d be empathetic and loving in the face of it, I feared her judgment of him and, by extension, of me. Her father had shown some compassion about my parents’ living situation—“Is Brandon okay?” he allegedly would ask upon her visits to his home in suburban Boston, one that used to belong to Abraham Lincoln’s best friend—but whereas familial frailty only made me want to build something of our own that would last, it also made me a poor communicator, turning away from connection instead of toward it. I’d walk past the Knickerbocker Hospital on my way to her place and project our entire relationship onto Algernon and Cornelia, hoping we could find some way to bridge the gaps they had been unable to, despite, as Tony had drunkenly pointed out years before, how little things had changed.

  My attempt to radically alter course, after we had a miserable Thanksgiving apart from each other at our families’ homes, was the beginning of the end. I asked her if I could move in with her. I imagined no better place than Bed-Stuy. I had put the sweat equity in. A pall came over her pink face, but she took some time to respond. “I don’t think I’m ready for that,” she told me, with maximum chilliness, while she lay in my arms. I’m sure I covered the silence with something like “that’s understandable,” but inside, I knew we’d never recover.

  I learned only late in our relationship that Anne traces her ancestry back to one of America’s first settler families. Her father’s surname, given his Polish immigrant ancestry, is strangely Germanized and comes equipped with a term of nobility, but her mother’s lineage is where the real “America is ours” story resides. Her line began its American journey on one of the earliest boats over from England, part of an already distinguished family that had ruled over Nottingham and Yorkshire before the Magna Carta was drafted, and had been among the English nobility for over a thousand years by the time I asked her daughter for a cigarette in front of the film festival press office where she worked against her parents’ wishes.

  The day before Anne and I broke up for the last time, I played myself in a scene about a third of the way through my friend Russ Harbaugh’s film Love After Love. In it, I’m a young author writing a book about Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Irish comedian Chris O’Dowd plays a character that is the likely author surrogate, while Juliet Rylance, Cornelia on The Knick, plays his ex-girlfriend. In the scene, the first in the second act, I pitch Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, going on and on about the loss of the neighborhood’s black character. The ex-lovers who get most of the screen time are the focus, however; now you realize, after seeing them struggle through a terrible family illness and their own feeble understanding of themselves as a couple, that they have to bear the indignity of working together.

  Anne and I just have the indignity of still being Facebook friends, of the 400-odd people we share, of our mutual thwarted ambitions to push past the bigoted expectations of both of our tribes; my mother, always respectful of the few women I have brought to Cincinnati, told me never to bring Courtney Love home. Although Anne doesn’t have any tattoos and I’ve listened to “Doll Parts” at least two hundred times while writing this book, I have thus fa
r heeded her call.

  The last time I saw Anne in my Bronx apartment, after twelve desperate hours of crying and fucking and eating and crying and fucking and eating a few weeks after our fourth breakup, which we performed via Skype on the penultimate night of 2015, I told her, “America is not designed for us to be together.” After a long pause, she told me she didn’t believe that. Since the year of our birth, black households in the United States have accumulated, on average, seven times less wealth than their white counterparts, I wanted to say, showing her the evidence of the divide that had been an unspoken chasm between us, but it was time to stow away the journalist in myself. I was still trying to win her back!

  To no avail. When I would press her a bit more as to why she felt we had to part, she would speak in vague ways about how we had “different ideas about what kindness was,” and that perhaps I was too “edgy” and “controversial” for her. “I can’t make a case for us breaking up,” she said a bit later, only to suggest that one day, when she could finally articulate why she wanted to leave again, “it will be so painful to tell you.”

  This was code, of course—the increasingly strident tenor of black radicalism had found its way into much of my film and political writing over the ensuing years since we met, and this was something that, despite how passionate I was about it, Anne was just unable to discuss with any authority. Perhaps she was afraid of saying “the wrong thing,” or felt no authority in such conversations. Perhaps the specter of beliefs so different than those she had been raised around made her nervous, or ashamed, but it also probably pushed her to ask questions about herself that she simply wasn’t willing to answer in front of me.

  Anne counts, among her forebears, Quaker abolitionists and Mississippi slavers, Revolutionary War heroes and New Jersey governors and the former owners of the land upon which Princeton University was built. The legacy she carries in her blood is not something she could easily acknowledge to her, depending on the hour, upper-middle- to working-class boyfriend. She casually mentioned being courted by an organization her mother belonged to, the Daughters of the Mayflower, or some such thing, as she entered my Bronx hovel one night during our last fall together. And she did discuss how her brothers, both of whom have served in the armed forces, were invited to join the elite secret society Skull and Bones, a group that includes several ex-presidents among its legion. But her family’s closest link to the White House was Barack Obama, a distant cousin of Anne’s. They are descended from the same man who reached these shores on one of the first English voyages to the New World, long before the prospect of a United States was a glimmer in any white man’s imagination.

  She didn’t know this until I told her about it. This was months after we broke up, seven years into the Obama presidency. I deduced the connection following an encounter with her grandmother’s obituary and ten minutes of googling. Anne was flabbergasted. “We thought you knew . . . that’s why we thought you were a supporter!” her mother allegedly responded when asked if she was privy to their presidential relations.

  Surely this was not the type of thing that was brought up at family dinner, being related to America’s first black president, no matter how much love of country they have. It was also not the type of thing discussed at the New Hampshire Republican Party fund-raisers she and Anne’s father, a man who without irony wears his collar popped on Sunday mornings and generously gives to the Republican-leaning super PAC of one of Boston’s most significant financial firms, host at their home on occasion. In this family, which has sacrificed for America and to whom America has given so much, to be related to the first black president seems to be anathema, but potentially hosting a party for Jeb Bush, a man who holds a special admiration for Charles Murray’s two-bit neo-eugenics tome The Bell Curve, is not.

  Sometimes, when I think back on it and want to believe the best about her love for me, I imagine, in the worst faith, her navigating a patrician dinner scene not unlike that memorable one about a quarter of the way through Hal Ashby and Bill Gunn’s The Landlord, the grandest filmic text of Brooklyn class warfare.

  Having decamped from the opulence of his parents’ leafy mansion for a Park Slope walk-up full of Negroes he hopes to displace in the years before that type of class warfare became the raison d’être of bourgeois bohemians, Beau Bridges’s Elgar Enders returns for dinner at his parents’ manor in a scene that betrays Gunn’s screenwriting brilliance. While his sister’s out-of-place suitor, a burly Jew played by a young Robert Klein, watches on, Elgar’s older brother William Jr. complains about investment in “a Negro neighborhood” and William Sr. laments his younger son’s racialized liberalism (“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lincoln, if you march into this house with an arm full of pickaninnies of yours . . .”). The scene reaches its apex when Elgar flees, reminding his bigoted family that “NAACP” can also stand for “Niggers Aren’t Always Colored People.”

  Sometimes I wondered if Anne’s distant cousin could relate to my consternation. Being not quite at home with whites in black spaces and feeling unmoored as The Head Negro in Charge of a country built on white supremacy are not completely unrelated I imagined. In the aftermath of our breakup, the movies began to provide a clue.

  Until recently, it was rare anyone had the gumption to make a fictional film about a sitting president. Primary Colors was lucky enough to arrive just in time for peak Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Oliver Stone’s tepid and underwhelming W. opened in late October 2008, weeks before Barack Obama defeated John McCain to succeed George W. Bush. But 2016 is proving to be the year that breaks all the rules, so here we are, in the final months of the Obama administration, presented with two different major motion pictures that dramatize opposite ends of the young Barack’s journey through the Reagan years: Vikram Gandhi’s Barry, which was recently released by Netflix, and Richard Tanne’s Southside with You.

  Both films revolve around romantic developments in the young Obama’s life: while Southside meditates on a mixed-race youth’s bliss with his future wife, Barry is about romantic failure, the inability for love to bridge racial and class differences. To ask which film veers from the historical record in its rendering of the life and loves of young Mr. Obama is beside the point. But verisimilitude remains a lingering concern: while Tanne’s film presents two young people who will become the world’s most recognizable couple, Gandhi’s film invents a composite female foil for Obama who comes to represent the forces in American life that Obama will never quite win over, largely because of race.

  Together, the two films form a bildungsroman unlike anything in American movies since John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, an elegant and oddly terrifying presidential hagiography—Cahiers du Cinéma once argued that it was produced by Darryl Zanuck on behalf of “American Big Business” to mythologize the country’s most famous Republican and produce an election year defeat of FDR in 1940—that premiered seventy-five years after Lincoln’s death. No one has bothered to make a persuasive movie that focuses uniquely on the early life of Dwight Eisenhower or Gerald Ford, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush. Most presidential biopics—like Spielberg’s Lincoln, HBO’s Truman, and Rob Reiner’s LBJ—are firmly set during their subjects’ respective presidencies, premiering long after the men in question are dead and buried. Barry and Southside with You are a curiosity in this context, positively rogue ventures with few precedents, acts of mass mythology that provide vastly different quasi-historical windows into the formation of Obama’s value system, presidential persona, and basic understanding of the American promise through his attempts at coupledom.

  Southside with You stakes out a charming inoffensiveness as its safe haven. Thirty-year-old Obama is working as a community organizer in Chicago in 1989. A legal intern with holes in the bottom of his car, he picks up Michelle Robinson, an associate at the firm, for a date: they go to a museum, for a walk in the park, and a screening of Do the Right Thing; in between he shows off his burgeoning political skills at a community eve
nt. Plenty of “wink wink, nod nod” moments unfurl. The tone is triumphant; we know the Obamas will work out, that their love will endure, and that Barack, the son of a white, single mother, who never fit in much of anywhere, will find a union with a black woman that will prove both emotionally satisfying for the characters and appropriate to his future constituents. Southside with You could have been written into the Democratic Party platform itself.

  The more melancholic, searching, and insightful of the two films, Barry is the film we’re more likely to remember when the afterglow of the Obama presidency has long receded. While no less predictable in its conclusion than Southside with You, Barry proves to be a far richer and sobering experience, one that paints a portrait of a young Obama who painfully learns that regardless of what he says or how he says it, he’ll never truly win over the elite who run this country.

  Set in 1981, it focuses on an afroed, dope-smoking, poetry-obsessed twenty-year-old Obama, who has just transferred to Columbia University. With Adam Newport-Berra’s impressive lensing and Miles Michael’s spot-on art direction, Barry inhabits a grimy, post-1970s New York City much mythologized in our more sanitized era, from HBO’s Vinyl to Netflix’s celebrated The Get Down. Gandhi, a correspondent for HBO’s Vice News, is also a filmmaker of great versatility. A Columbia graduate himself—as an undergrad he lived next to the row house on 109th Street that Obama once resided in—he burst onto the scene with Kumaré, a fake documentary in which he tricked various expanded-consciousness-seeking whites into thinking he was an Indian guru.

  Barry arrives in a grim, bottomed-out Manhattan during Reagan’s first year in the White House. Cigarette in hand, he reads a letter from his estranged father as he arrives on a flight from Hawaii during the opening credits. By the end of the sequence, he’s kicked off the campus for not having a student ID, locked out of his apartment, and is sleeping on the street. This is only the first of several rude awakenings for the future president. He and his roommate don’t have campus housing, so he settles into a crime-infested area south of the campus. His friend Saleem (Avi Nash) is the only person he knows in New York; Saleem is a drug-addled, well-off-but-hiding-it Pakistani student who speaks directly to Barry’s radicalized malaise; that is, when he’s not shouting drunkenly out toward the street at Negroes who are pillaging his garbage cans.