* * *
The first time I preach about race at St. Lydia’s, I tell a story from third grade, when my father came to visit my classroom. My teacher, a plump, smiling white woman who favored lacy blouses and calf-length floral skirts, stood with her back to us, writing up multiplication tables on the blackboard. She led us through them one by one, calling on students for the answers.
Some, like me, sat with our hands raised high, confident that two times two equaled four. Others slumped at their desks with their heads propped up on a fist. She called on them too. But my dad noticed that she never called on the Black students, who made up a third of our class. With each equation, kids’ hands would shoot up in the air, but my teacher would point to only me or Shawn or one of the Jennifers. It wasn’t that the Black students received no attention at all—she’d chastise them to sit up straighter and stop fidgeting. I don’t remember at what point in the year they stopped raising their hands, but I’m sure it didn’t take long.
By the time I reached sixth grade, I looked around my honors English class and wondered why, when so many Black kids attended our school, there were only two in my honors classes. One of them was Lamar Franklin. With round reading glasses, a bright smile, and an endearing gap between his front teeth, he was a charming kid, well liked by everyone. Lamar persevered through teachers who wouldn’t call on him and principals who spoke to him only to tell him to pull up his pants. But many others didn’t. My public school was enacting the school-to-prison pipeline. I saw it play out right in front of me, but never knew it had a name.
I tell the congregation this story.
“What kinds of lessons do you think I learned?” I ask them. What assumptions did I inherit about who was smart and who wasn’t, who was good and who wasn’t, who was of value and who wasn’t?
All those lessons, never explicitly taught but implicitly enforced, were engraved in my subconscious. Sitting at my desk with my pencil box and blue-lined paper in front of me, I learned an unspoken curriculum. I memorized the order of the planets and the life cycle of the butterfly that year, and soaked up the quotidian qualities of ordinary, small-town, run-of-the-mill racism.
I am shaking as I speak.
The Lydians sit, nodding and wide eyed. Perhaps they are sifting through stories of their own—remembering the advantages or disadvantages they received.
After church, I go home and basically curl into a ball, feeling vulnerable and exposed. Words and I have never exactly gotten along. When I was a kid, talking to grown-ups or teachers, my words always seemed to get tangled up. I felt as if I was fighting a battle against chaos, trying to get them to line up the same way, always ending up tripping over them and blushing in class.
When I reached divinity school, words had me convinced I could never be a pastor. I showed no promise in public speaking; my professor remarked in my evaluation that I seemed “constantly surprised to find myself preaching.” Things did not improve as St. Lydia’s was getting started. Each Sunday night those first few years I would offer my sermon, rigidly reading from the pages I had written, never improvising.
Standing up to preach has meant acquainting myself with a certain feeling of dread. Now, wading into preaching about racial injustice means acquainting myself with the suffering of the world and allowing it to do its work on me. My words aren’t always graceful or eloquent. They lack the practiced flourishes of my divinity school colleagues. Instead, I figure the best thing I can do is just point to what I see, and hope others see it too. Just uncover the truth we’ve all been avoiding.
I have learned to wrestle with words. Some things are too important not to name.
* * *
A month later, I attend a community meeting about rezoning in our neighborhood. I notice that while the public housing residents, almost all of darker skin, are given a chance to speak at the microphone, their comments never seem to catch hold. The conversation just slides back to the concerns of the wealthier, whiter neighbors, armed with Ivy League vocabularies and a sheen of entitlement. I watch what amounts to a small uprising of housing residents who live in the flood zone of the canal, complaining that after a storm their tap water turns brown. Their council member thanks them for their comments and moves on.
“How do you think this process is going?” I ask him after the meeting. I’m wearing my clergy collar, and it lends me a kind of moral authority.
“I’m very pleased,” he says. “There’s always a diversity of opinion, but we’re moving forward together.”
“These people don’t feel heard,” I tell him.
That same summer, I watch grainy cellphone footage of a two-hundred-pound cop throwing a fifteen-year-old Black girl to the ground and kneeling on top of her. Her name is Dajerria Becton, and this video of her assault at a Texas pool party has gone viral. The officer, Eric Casebolt, is twice her size and armed with a nightstick and a gun. Her body, lanky and insubstantial, clothed only in a bikini, seems so slight and exposed under his weight. He sits down hard on her back and shoves her face into the ground with his hand, shouting, “On your face, on your face.”
It is difficult to imagine that this slip of a girl could possibly be a threat. All she can say is “Call my mama,” over and over again.
The video of Dajerria Becton is not the only grainy cellphone footage we see in that season. I listen to the cries of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, placed in the back of a van requesting medical aid he never receives. Then he dies. In June, Dylann Roof walks into a church in Charleston and sits with the Rev. Clementa Pinckney as he leads Wednesday night Bible study.
Roof waits for them to begin praying before opening fire. In my third-grade classroom, the little girl next to me holds her hand as high as mine, smiles, and waits to hear her name. I have the answer, she’s thinking, but no one calls on her. “I can’t breathe,” he’s saying, but no one listens. “Don’t shoot,” he tells them, and holds up his hands: they are empty.
* * *
Church folk often say that God “uses your weakness, not your strength.” I never really understood that idea. It doesn’t seem like an effective strategy.
But I learn the hard way that those church folk are on the mark. Each time I stand up to preach on race, I am flooded with a spectrum of unpleasant emotions, from low-grade dread to full-fledged terror, a tangled disaster of raw nerves and vulnerability. My biggest fear is that I will fail to get this right, and let down the few Black folks who are part of our congregation.
“Well, she tried,” I imagine them saying to themselves after service, “but she really doesn’t get it.” Shame and humiliation are high on the list of how this can all pan out. Addressing racism in my preaching asks me to lay down the notion that I am some kind of an expert.
“Learning in public,” Jake says to me over glasses of iced tea in a corner café in Brooklyn. Ever the big brother to me, Jake has been a conversation partner as the church has embarked on racial justice work. “You’re not going to get it all right. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. The congregation’s going to watch you learn. And they’ll learn too.”
Walking home, I turn over his words. If the biggest thing I have to risk is being embarrassed, I need to get over it, because at risk for Black folks are their lives. I really don’t want to get this wrong. Not because I need to be perfect, but because I’m a liability.1 White folks trying to do justice work tend to be filled with need—to be one of the “good ones,” to be praised by the people we say we’re showing up for, to take the lead when we should be following. It’s not just annoying, it’s damaging. And I don’t want to do damage.
There is this uneasy feeling that I can so easily drift away: recede into the soft cavern of safety that is available to me at any time. I can step into the fight for justice, but just as easily step out, while the people across the street have no such option. I will never experience their particular set of harsh realities
.
My granddad didn’t graduate from high school, but he worked his way to the engineering department at Memphis Light, Gas and Water—a position unavailable to his Black compatriots. The red lines drawn on city maps kept him in, not out,2 so with his higher earnings, he was able to buy a house that gained value. When my father was born, my granddad could count on him attending decent (fully segregated) public schools. Their family was poor, but my father was able to excel and earn a full-ride scholarship to Yale. Only a hint of a southern accent and the lack of cash in his pocket kept him from camouflaging himself alongside the kids from Park Avenue and the legacy students.
The forces that lined up to bring my family from subsistence farming in rural Mississippi to the middle class were myriad. In two generations we accrued education, property, and wealth, never available to the Black kids who grew up in Memphis. And now here I am, always with an exit.
But I want to “dismantle the legacy of my forefathers,” as my friend Lenny, an author and activist, once told me.3 I want to know the stories of my past and our neighborhood. I want to know our neighbors, to see St. Lydia’s become a part of these blocks. After the hurricane, I can’t just stay on my side of the street. It hurts to think of how alone we were.
* * *
A flyer changes everything. Just one sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper stapled to a telephone pole.
For years I’ve been steadily trying to build relationships in our neighborhood, but they seem to slip through my fingers like sand. I’ve attended community meetings, asked for one-on-ones with leaders of local organizations. There are emails back and forth, cancellations and rescheduling. One organization is going through a change in executive directors; another’s leaders are all chronically overworked. Some don’t work with religious groups.
The Gowanus Houses seem like an impenetrable fortress. I know there have to be community leaders who live there, but I’m flummoxed when it comes to connecting. I’ve made sheepish phone calls to the Gowanus Houses Residents’ Council and left messages, but never heard back. Phone calls themselves are bad enough—waiting with anxiety for someone to pick up, breathing a sigh of relief when no one does, and then fumbling my way through a message. But I also feel the pressure of being misread: another white girl who thinks she can “make a difference,” dripping with privilege, deigning to stoop for a moment toward a neighborhood she’ll abandon when things got too hard. I’m different from that girl, I think. But then I wonder how.
Then: the flyer. Walking home from St. Lydia’s to eat dinner between meetings, I notice a colorful sheet on a telephone pole. “Gowanus Houses Arts Collective,” it says. Kids can come this summer to learn about photography, make films, mix music. There’s no website, but there is a Facebook page. At home I study the page like a scholar examining ancient runes. Excavating my way through the links, I dig up a video posted on YouTube by a kid who lives in the houses. He’s walking around the neighborhood, talking about growing up there and all the ways it’s changing. I type out a message and hit return. This time, I hear back—from Tracey.
* * *
—
A week later, I’m sitting across from Ms. Tracey Pinkard in the residents’ council meeting room in the basement of the houses. We’re in wheeled chairs situated around a board table. At the back of the room there’s a metal desk scattered with papers. A phone blinks with messages, its spiral cord curled up in knots.
Tracey has a demurring manner and a kind smile, but a sharp, discerning eye. Steady and gracious, she tells me about the arts collective she and Chris (the filmmaker behind the lens of the video I saw) are starting up. I can see she’s assessing my intentions. If people are coming in, she tells me years later, are they saying we need to be fixed or saved?
Tracey leads me down the hall to a room she and Chris have transformed into an art and music studio. Kids’ paintings are pinned up on clotheslines to dry, with their splotches and swipes of primary colors. Yogurt containers are packed with paintbrushes, bristles pointed to the ceiling.
“You may remember in last year’s participatory budget process, the Gowanus Houses won money to reopen our community center,” she tells me. I nod. I had followed the residents’ efforts. The community center had been closed for years—residents made unsanctioned use of it during the hurricane.
“The money still hasn’t been released,” Tracey tells me. “But I want the kids to have a space. So we’re down here for now.” She casts her gaze across the room. Coils of hair falling around her face, she has a broad, smooth forehead and soft eyes. “I don’t want them to lose their faith,” she says.
* * *
—
I invite Tracey to speak at St. Lydia’s. I ask her to tell us stories of the neighborhood she grew up in, and where she sees God at work. She stands under the gaze of attentive Lydians and holds up a picture of her grandmother Ms. Hazel Tyre.
Tracey’s grandmother (or Mrs. Thelma, as many of her neighbors called her) moved into the Gowanus Houses in 1947 and lived there for twenty-one years. She always kept her door open. She knew every kid’s name. She grabbed them by the elbow and asked them how school was going, kept an eye on them.
“I just try to wake up and do God’s will,” Tracey says. “I’m in a unique position because of the way my grandmother raised us.”
Tracey grew up in the houses and moved out, never planning on coming back. But when her grandmother died, the apartment in the Gowanus Houses was open to her. She had her own children now, and a job working with high schoolers at Brooklyn Collaborative school. When she moved back, she felt her grandmother’s presence inviting her to step into her role.
“My neighbors are proud, skillful, and talented people,” she tells us at Dinner Church. “And we are all exposed to repeated trauma. Poor housing conditions, police brutality, gentrification. Because of this, our resiliency coexists with apathy. But take Hurricane Sandy. Our community comes together to make things happen for one another.”
Tracey serves as vice president of the residents’ council and cofounded the Gowanus Houses Arts Collective. She’s always working to connect the houses to resources and bring residents together. She shows up at meetings. All while raising her own children and working at a local school. I see Tracey as an educator and activist, a fighter and a matriarch. I see her as a spiritual guide: someone who sees the truth and lives life from a deep well of down-to-earth integrity. But when I ask Tracey to describe who she is, she says she’s not any of those things. She says, “I’m just…being a vessel. Just someone who really cares.”
* * *
—
Over at the arts collective, a group of Lydian congregants join the residents who volunteer, helping the kids make potato stamps or batik fabric. Charlotte goofs off with the kids, joking around as they dip their stamps in paint, letting them draw a blue stripe down her nose.
Every fall there’s an Open Studios weekend in Gowanus, when working art studios across the neighborhood open their doors to the public. The event draws visitors from all around the city, and Tracey and Chris and I start thinking it would be incredible for the kids from the arts collective to show their work. We ask if we can host a community exhibit—photographs of the neighborhood by the kids who live here, taken as part of a class Chris ran in the spring. We call it Perspectives: Youth Reflections of Gowanus.
Chris picks out the best photographs, and I bike to IKEA and return with fourteen white frames stuffed in my saddlebags. A congregant who’s a curator gets everything hung on the walls in our narrow storefront. Each photographer writes a short statement about their work.
On the day of the show, a cadre of grandmas arrive, pulling grocery carts packed with big tin trays of rice and beans and chicken wings and jugs of juice. They sit at our tables fanning themselves as visitors start to trickle through the doors. Tracey, I find out later, called just about everyone she knows in the house
s.
“You have to come and see the kids’ work,” she told them. “It’s just down Bond Street.”
Parents from the houses poke their heads in tentatively.
“This is the right place!” I tell them, ushering them inside. They look around the room to find their kid’s name, and beam at the photograph on the wall.
“Our Jerome, he took this!” a father says proudly.
Weaving around the grown-ups are the artists themselves. Eight or nine or twelve years old, they’re busy handing out flyers and tying balloons outside to show where the exhibit is.
One of the younger girls, Sydney, took a photograph of her friend on a swing in motion. “I started by trying to capture my friend on the swing,” she wrote in her artist statement, “but she was swinging too high and fast and that’s when I noticed the girl waiting in the middle of all this movement. I know that feeling of having to be still when you don’t want to be.”
Sydney stands in front of her piece, chest puffed out and beaming, talking to an art student about her photograph. He asks her some questions about the lens she used and smiles at her answer. I meet a batch of new people: a sculptor with red-framed glasses whose studio is a few blocks over, a family who just moved into a brownstone down the block, a pair of community organizers, and a filmmaker. Some of them have lived here for years and didn’t know the Gowanus Houses existed.
One photograph, by fourteen-year-old Ethan, gives me a pang to look at. It shows barbed wire in the foreground, brick towers out of focus in the background.
“I live on the thirteenth floor in the middle of the Gowanus Houses,” he writes. “When I’m there I’m always surrounded by larger buildings and don’t think of it as part of a larger neighborhood. The barbed wire feels to me like how Gowanus is separated from Carroll Gardens. It’s sharp, almost cut off, despite the fact that it’s just a short walk from here.”
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