He did not know who he could tell—not his father or Foon Wah, not his daughters, and least of all his son. He sat in the lounge chair, flipping channels so quickly that the actors could not finish their first syllables.
He decided to start waiting tables at Wo Hop, on Mott Street in Chinatown. All those years, whenever his father had suggested the idea, he’d wanted to grab a sizzling pot of chicken broth and dump it on his baba’s head, but now he recognized his senselessness. Even with the properties off his hands, he needed the money.
For several weeks, he went nowhere except Mott Street.
And then one day, he knew he had to go to Brownsville. He needed confirmation that he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.
He drove on Pitkin past the shuttered glory of the Pitkin Loew’s, then past what used to be Kishke King. Everything he’d known was gone. The knish sellers, the Belmont fruit venders, the Fortunoff furniture store. He drove by Nanny Goat Park, but where were all the baseball players? Where were all the goats? He remembered theyoung, bushy-headed Alan Friedman leaning down to be eye level with him.
We’re a democracy, we make our own decisions, just like the American forefathers wrote in the Constitution. A Brownsville democracy. You want to be a member?
He drove past the projects, too many of them, the neighborhood just teeming with them, like it was turning into a graveyard,gray, cold tombs. The projects had killed Brownsville, he decided. If it weren’t for the projects, the Jews would still be around. Canton Kitchen would be open. He wondered what life would have been like if they’d kept the restaurant. As a young man, he’d been so sick and tired of Canton Kitchen, and now it seemed to be the only place where he’d felt secure.
He circled closer, still unwilling, still bracing himself. Someone was living in their old house on Amboy Street and had hung up a blue, yellow, and black flag in the yard. This habit of the new immigrants was strange to him; never in his life could he imagine hoisting a Chinese flag in his American yard.
He was not ready, but there was nowhere left to go. Livonia Avenue waited for him—a ghost town, an abandoned village, burned and stripped to its foundations, sneakers swinging from the telephone wires, incomprehensible phrases spray-painted on the handball court walls.
This was it.
There they were.
The charred husks of what was. One tenement missing its rooftop. The other, its top two floors. Rafters exposed. Windows blown out. TheCHOW MEIN HERE!sign gone. The sidewalk littered with scorched bricks. It smelled like the moratoriums on Mulberry Street, like incinerated bones, or like the musty bedroom upstairs on the day he’d found his wife on the floor and his father dangling from the ceiling.
A vandal had tagged, in orange:Murderer!
Richard felt sick. He clutched his stomach, held a hand over his mouth, and opened the car door to retch.
Lumps of half-digested beef lo mein fell in clumps to the concrete.
Wiping his mouth with his shirt, Richard got back in the car, closed the door, pressed the accelerator, and continued down the avenue. He found himself driving up Hopkinson to get a glimpse of the Betsy Head Park pool. The water looked like it had been sitting there for days, more a swamp than a pool. Leaves, twigs, and strips of bark floated on its surface, and soda bottles, plastic bags, and other trash littered the pool’s side. In one corner, someone had clipped open the wire fence.
Richard parked the car, opened the door, and put his feet on the sidewalk.
He smelled marijuana. Then human piss. He walked to the hole in the fence, lowered his head, and ducked inside, scraping his arm on the wire.
No more or less dangerous than jumping off a bridge.
Richard sat by the edge of the pool, his knees to his chest, and cried.
LINA & SADIE
The City Planning Commission hearing fell on Valentine’s Day, and Lina brought her people out in droves. They stormed the Department of City Planning in downtown Manhattan, packing the tiny hearing room and the sidewalk outside—sixty people in puffer jackets and beanies, each person holding a cardboard heart that proclaimed their love for Brownsville.
Brownsville Be Mine, one said.
I <3 CLTs!
Break Up With Bernard & Co.
Lina passed out printed copies of Sadie’s article, published one month earlier, so that everyone could quote from it when they gave their testimony. It had been completed with the assistance of some more experienced reporters atThe Public Times.
Brownsville, the South Bronx, and Corona, Queens, were the victims of a conspiracy that resulted in dozens of injuries and deaths. This criminal enterprise displaced hundreds of Black and brown New Yorkers and stymied local efforts to address poverty and build neighborhood power…
Even prior toThe Public Times’s publication of the exposé, Lina had worked with one of June’s lawyer friends to file a complaint against the Griffiths family. She’d hoped a court victory could provide funding for the Wesley Price Community Land Trust, but so far, the case wasn’t going well; the Griffiths’ lawyers had the judge on a string.
Still, when she went to speak at the podium, Lina told her story with passion. Recounting it to Sadie in private had made it easier to share in public. Her people shushed to hear it, and the dozen commissioners gave their attention.
The Freedom School. The smoke. The boys, Francis and William—Mr. William would testify next. How she’d almost lost her life. How she’d held herself responsible for so long. The victims and their families deserved reparations, she argued, and that meant returning the land to the people.
