Four days in. I venture across the block to a community room at the Gowanus Houses, where piles of diapers and formula and bottled water are being sorted and stacked by residents. Facebook and Twitter are buzzing with needs in the neighborhood and how to fill them. “Diapers at the Gowanus Houses!” “Coats and blankets at Wyckoff Gardens!” Donations are coming in from people a few blocks away, or residents in the houses themselves. Volunteers line up and are handed clipboards and pens and dispatched.
I learn that when the basements of the houses flooded with water, it shorted out the electricity, which means no heat, no elevators, and no running water. A lot of the city’s public housing units are in this situation. Their equipment is so out of date, left unmaintained, that the repairs are taking forever. The effort is entirely led by residents, supported by a Brooklyn organizing group called FUREE (Families United for Racial and Economic Equality). In the community room, a grandmother presides over the din from behind a folding table, shouting instructions. I can smell spaghetti and meatballs wafting through from the kitchen next door. I’ve heard the community room has been closed for years, caught up in bureaucratic red tape, but apparently the residents have taken charge, and it’s open now, sanctioned or not. New infrastructure is designed based on necessity.
The woman behind a folding table pairs me with a lanky white guy with an earnest expression, gives us a handful of water bottles, and sends us to canvas the towers. We push tentatively through the front doors, unlocked because the electricity’s out, and into a darkened, tiled lobby. Passing the silent elevators, we climb the stairs a flight at a time. It’s daytime, but the windows are narrow and the hallways are dim. They smell like abandonment. Many people have left to stay in hotels or with family, but those who can’t are still here. We knock on the doors one at a time and wait for answers. The sound of shuffling inside. The door opens, chain still drawn across the gap. A father stands with a child at his feet.
“I’m fine,” he tells us, “but check on Ms. Turner in 265. She needs diabetes medication every day.” We mark this all down on our clipboard. It seems unbelievable that no one else has taken charge of these efforts—just residents struggling along. But residents are the only ones here.
At the end of my shift I pick up groceries for dinner at the corner store, just like it’s an ordinary day. Commuters are perusing the vegetable section, deciding on a head of broccoli or a bag of snap peas. But a few blocks away at the houses, an elderly resident is sitting in the dark and the cold, in danger. The dissonance is impossible to reconcile; it short-circuits something in my heart. I go home, put water on to boil for dinner, start crying as I’m chopping carrots. The storm has revealed something I didn’t want to see.
* * *
Days later and the subways still aren’t up. People wait in hours-long lines for gasoline. There is desperation in our eyes. Are we okay? Is this okay? Still, my apartment is warm and dry. I spend an entire day trying to figure out how to get a can of gas to a Lutheran church member in Howard Beach whose generator has gone out. I can stand in line for gas, and my colleague Ben has someone who can drive it to her, but we can’t find a gas can to carry it in. They’re backordered for days. Simple things have become impossible now.
The Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew has been commandeered by a group of activists who cut their teeth at Occupy Wall Street. They’ve reconfigured as Occupy Sandy and set up shop in the Clinton Hill sanctuary. I lock my bike outside and push through the heavy church doors to a hive of activity. Someone has taped a torn scrap of paper to the baptismal font that reads, simply, “Donations.” There’s a coms unit in the balcony where scruffy kids in knit caps sit in the glow of laptops populating Google spreadsheets. Down below, the pews are filled with cardboard boxes coming in by delivery from around the county, sorted and sent out to affected areas. Everyone has a Sharpie in their pocket and a roll of duct tape on hand.
It is beautiful to see, this spontaneous organism of organization, lurching forward and developing systems and processes on the spot. Its goal: to bring relief to people who are alone. I hear things I’m not sure I believe: our volunteers are getting to people who haven’t been reached by the cops or emergency response teams. Someone found a dead body in a tower in Coney Island.
* * *
—
I’m not the only one feeling overwhelmed. At church on Sunday night my congregants report feeling shaken. At the end of service, we gather around the Christ Candle, sleeves rolled up from doing dishes. I make announcements as the offering plate goes around.
“There’s volunteers needed every day at the Gowanus Houses,” I tell them, “and over at St. Luke and St. Matthew with the Occupy Sandy folks. But listen. Be gentle with yourselves. This…has us all shaken up. Just take things one step at a time.”
“Thanks,” Hannah says after church, flipping her long hair behind her shoulders. “I’ve been feeling so strange and it’s so surreal. I feel like I should always be helping, but I’m also really tired. Every day is so up in the air.”
Congregants volunteer around the city, after work and on weekends. The days are patchy and episodic. We’re playing each day by ear, plans changing at the last minute based on which trains are running. Jake and I both pitch in at Occupy Sandy, but he’s out canvassing while I’m at the church doing trainings. Everything feels fragmented. Every day is piled with contingencies. If the F is on a limited schedule, Hannah will go to work, but only if the A is running below Fourteenth Street, and if it isn’t she’ll try to meet me to volunteer.
On Sunday, we come back together to the strong tables at church and affirm that God is still in the heavens, even if our world feels upside down.
* * *
When I was a kid, my mom told me that if I was in trouble, all I had to do was call 911, and everything would be fine. I believed her: that if someone just knew you were at risk, the benevolent forces of the world would conspire to keep you safe. To a child like me, that seemed like the end of the story.
Then, in my twenties, I watched as we abandoned the city of New Orleans to Hurricane Katrina, elders and poor folk, mostly African American, crammed into the Superdome without dignity or basic living conditions. I saw for the first time that being rescued depended on being valued by the powers that be, and being valued had a strong correlation with being wealthy or white.
With Sandy I saw it again, but this time, uncomfortably close up. It was the poor neighborhoods where the power remained off for weeks and seniors languished without medication. The projects had been built in the forgotten places, on the edges of canals like the Gowanus or out in Red Hook, where the subways don’t reach. We put them there because it was cheap, left them unmaintained because it was cheaper. When the storm finally came, the folks who lived there didn’t have the cash to shell out for a hotel room or miss work for a week, so they stayed. We couldn’t fix things fast enough because everything was too broken to begin with.
Power was out at the Gowanus Houses for eleven days. Living that long without power might have been sustainable in a house or a suburban neighborhood, but fifteen flights of stairs and no elevator made those dangerous days for the elderly and disabled. After Halloween, a snowstorm blew in. With the heat still out, residents were left with no sources of warmth but their gas ovens. Parents (already negotiating ten flights of stairs with babies and toddlers in tow) kept their kids home from school, embarrassed they couldn’t bathe. The power came back on November 9—then, two days later, a water main broke, and eight of the fourteen towers were again without running water. Right across the street in my row house apartment, I had heat, electricity, and all the water I would ever need.
One hundred seventeen people died because of that hurricane. Forty of them drowned in their homes, deaths which the CDC noted, in their report of 2013, should have been preventable. Red Cross volunteers collected reasons why the deceased who lived in evacuation zones did not leave their
homes, presumably from living relatives. The reasons included “afraid of looters,” “thought Hurricane Irene was mild,” and “unable to leave because did not have transportation.”
* * *
—
In those weeks, I see things that leave me shaken. Children in New York City without drinking water. Volunteers who discovered dead bodies. Walls imbued with black mold, and elevators left dangling on the fourteenth floor. Like Noah after the flood, I can see something I couldn’t see before. My eyes are wide open. Now it is impossible to close them, and my heart feels like it’s tearing in two.
* * *
We’ve been shattered. But there are moments of communion.
With the power still off in Red Hook, a local church starts hosting a spaghetti supper every evening so residents can come and get a hot meal. One of those evenings, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra is invited to come and play dinner music. Someone thought it might cheer things up. We arrive at the church with our padded cases slung over our shoulders and make our way to a basement fellowship hall, where big pots of sauce are simmering on the eight-burner stove.
As residents trickle in, we play a few tunes, picking out the least aggressive of our protest songs. After a while we run out and slide into old hymns. “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” “Amazing Grace,” and “This Little Light of Mine.” The residents seem suspicious of us young newcomers but after a few bars decide to reluctantly tap their feet or nod their heads as they wait in line.
After playing a set or two, we sit down to our own spaghetti supper. The line for dinner has tapered off, but it’s still early, and we’ve only played for an hour or so.
“Let’s go out on the streets,” someone suggests. We’re a marching band, after all. And so we hoist our horns and plunge out into the night toward the Red Hook towers. The streets are wide and empty; without power, there is no comforting glow of streetlights to mark the way. The neighborhood is still and silent as a tomb, and the towers loom in front of us, every window dark. We process onto the pavement courtyard at the base of the apartments. It’s like standing at the bottom of a canyon.
It’s deathly quiet. I wonder if we should really pierce the night with the sounds of brass and drums. We don’t live here. Is it an intrusion?
But the bandleader is already counting us in on a tune and I take a raking breath, pushing out a ragged line with the tubas that rips open the night. The drums snap in, laying down a beat, and the trumpets blare out a reply to our low brass call. We’re off and running, playing a version of the “Internationale,” tricked out with a beat. It’s a song that’s been sung for workers’ rights for a hundred years, by the French Workers’ Party Choir in 1888 and the protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Our rendition smacks off the brick buildings, ricocheting back, as if we’re entirely alone. Fingers dance on valves. We hit the chorus and loop back into the verse.
And then.
High above us at a window, a flashlight appears. A lone circle of light shines down. Then the flashlight begins to bounce. It’s moving, I realize, in time to the music. Soon another light blinks on, followed closely by another, illuminating in each window like lightning bugs on a summer night. Behind each flashlight is an unseen face. Kids and parents, grandmas and uncles. Windows slide open, and claps and hollers come cascading down to us.
There in the Red Hook Houses, an impromptu dance party takes place, spanning four buildings and fourteen floors. Down in the courtyard, our band plays and dances, in joyful communion with the souls above us. We’re belting out the melody and it rebounds off the brick, reverberating its way to the top of the towers, launching toward the sky above. Our multi-building dance party is pure joy in the face of destruction. I think that we are reminding one another of something we can’t forget: that even in the face of injustice, the floodwaters will subside, the night will not last forever, the days will grow longer, even if the worst is yet to come.
With each line of harmony, I’m trying to say something to my neighbors. The message, encoded in bass line and drumbeat, is sent out like Morse-code dots and dashes shot through the expanse of space.
You’ve been abandoned. It was wrong, I want to say. No one should weather the storm alone.
Kneeling, I unroll a sheet of brown wrapping paper on the floor and weight the corners down with a couple of Bibles. With a pencil, I sketch out the words “Black Lives Matter” across the top in big block letters. Then I start googling.
Two weeks ago Michael Brown was shot by the police on a hot August day in Ferguson, Missouri. I watched an interview with his mother and couldn’t bear it. That Sunday after Dinner Church, our little congregation filed out onto the sidewalk in front of 304 Bond Street holding lit candles and signs for Michael Brown. Singing, we walked in procession up to Smith Street, met by the stares of diners at sidewalk cafés, forks suspended mid-bite. Then we curled around the corner past the Gowanus Houses. One resident lifted his fist in solidarity as he crossed the street. Others ignored us.
Our small act of remembrance didn’t feel like much in the face of an overwhelming problem. A dozen of us, walking along, singing. But I needed to do something. I needed to say no with my body, and I guessed that my congregants needed it too. For four weeks, after Sunday night Dinner Church, we sang and walked, knowing that more work was coming.
I want to connect young Michael’s death to our own city’s legacy of police violence—to show that this is a systemic problem, not an isolated incident. So, my computer in my lap, I research Black and brown people in New York City killed by the police. It’s a harrowing exercise. Some names I recognize. I write down “Amadou Diallo,” and his age, twenty-three, shot in 1999, on my length of brown paper. I was in college that year and only vaguely aware of his story. I read about the forty-one shots fired and the nineteen that hit. About the square wallet Diallo took from his pocket the police assumed (or later claimed they thought) was a gun. One of the officers involved, Kenneth Boss, had shot and killed an unarmed Black man two years earlier. But thirteen years after Diallo died, the same officer earned his firearms rights back. In 2015, he was granted a promotion.
I inscribe “Ramarley Graham” on the brown paper; he was the eighteen-year-old whom police sighted leaving a bodega in the Bronx in 2012, adjusting the waistband of his pants. Later, after they followed him home (they said he ran, but video footage shows him walking), Graham’s grandmother let the cops right into the apartment when they knocked on the door. They tore through the place and found Graham in the bathroom. There, Officer Richard Haste shot him once in the chest and killed him. They later said he was trying to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet.
I write down the name of Kimani Gray, who was only sixteen. I write down the name of Sean Bell, killed with fifty shots fired at him and his friends at his bachelor party. He was supposed to get married the next day.
I write down every name in pencil on my sheet of brown paper, the corners fighting to curl up. One of the names is Nicholas. A boy who was only thirteen when he was shot by police in 1994, I read. And then I frown. Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr., was killed in the Gowanus Houses, just yards away from where I sit in my apartment.
I remember a mural I’ve seen on a wall, somewhere in the neighborhood. A smiling young boy beams out at the viewer, wearing a graduation cap. Doves hover on either side of him, and he holds a scroll: In Loving Memory.
When I type Nicholas’s name into the search field, the site for a memorial foundation pops up. There in the center of the front page is Nicholas, smiling brightly in a red graduation gown and tie, proudly holding his certificate of graduation from junior high, this look in his eyes that says, “I did it.”
Nicholas, I read, was playing with a friend in the stairwell of the Gowanus Houses. The two were playing cops and robbers with an orange-capped toy gun when a cop came across him there and lifted his gun—a real one. Nicholas’s friends reported that the chil
d raised his hands. “We were only playing,” they heard him call out. The police officer, Brian George, shot him in the stomach. Taken to a Manhattan hospital rather than a closer one in Brooklyn, Nicholas died eight hours later.
I write Nicholas’s name on my sign. His age, thirteen. The year, 1994. I am careful to space the letters evenly. The sign begins to feel like a prayer, every name inscribed in pencil and then carefully traced again in black marker. I finish tracing the last date and then sit down in an armchair and start to cry.
* * *
—
The next day, Julia and I hang the sign on the inside of St. Lydia’s storefront window.
“I hope no one throws a brick at it,” I tell her.
It feels presumptuous to place these names in our window. The phrase “Black Lives Matter” feels uncomfortable on my lips, not because I don’t believe it to be true, but because I know how terribly far I am from my life not mattering. My life has always mattered: to my teachers, my principal, to the cop who smiled at me as I jaywalked across the street with friends. I could have been holding a real gun, and he would have coaxed it out of my hands.
Sitting at a desk at St. Lydia’s, I watch passersby slow down to read the sign. Some of them pause their conversations mid-stride, while others stop to read carefully. One afternoon, a family hovers there for more than the usual few moments. I pop my head outside, and they say, “Nicholas Naquan. We knew him. We remember him.”
I don’t remember Nicholas. But the people who do—who read his name at the window—seem to walk away just a tiny bit lighter. Maybe it feels good to know that someone else is trying to remember too. His community made a mural to remember him, and someone who’s not part of his community, but who cares, took a permanent marker and wrote down his name, and hung it in the window.
For All Who Hunger Page 11