After her speech, as she looked into the commissioners’ eyes and saw the consternation on their faces, she thought for a moment that they really had heard her and understood—that anything less than the CLT was a betrayal of the community yet again. If the commission stopped the Bernard & Co. project in its tracks, the city council would never get the chance to approve it.
Yet four weeks later, when she showed up for the vote, most of the commissioners acknowledged the CLT’s demands, but they did not agree with Lina. They believed the Bernard & Co. project deserved approval, that Bernard & Co. had demonstrated a willingness to engage with the community, and that the company had offered an exceptional financial plan. The tally was two against, one abstention, and ten in favor of the project.
Time to shoot higher, she thought.
She and Tyrell organized an even bigger crowd for the city council vote two months later. Before entering the council chambers, they gathered on the granite steps of city hall for a rally. It was May but cool and damp, the air sweet and full of pollen. Excited children pumped signs in the air while José led the crowd in two chants: “From the’Ville, never ran never will!” and “Community control now!” Seniors who had participated in the civil rights movement poured out in their Sunday best to strain their voices once again. Even Sadie Chin was there, and instead of carrying a notebook, she hoisted a sign that said,Reparations for Brownsville!
“If they vote yes,” Lina said on a megaphone to the crowd, “then we win. If they vote no, then we still win. We win no matter what they say, ’cause we’ve shown them who we are. Brownsvillemoves. Brownsville’s not a broken place with broken people. Brownsville is organized, and next time, they better watch out, ’cause we getting stronger, we getting louder, and we are powerful! We might not win this lot, we might not even win the next one, but we gonna get the one after that. And we will show the nation what community control looks like.”
The crowd let out a resounding whoop.
“That’s right! Let them hear you in Brooklyn!” Tyrell bellowed.
The group marched past the columns and ascended to the balcony of the council chambers. Below them, the fifty-one council members assembled for the stated meeting. The opening remarks took over an hour, and as the protestors in the balcony waited patiently for the vote on the Livonia project, they passed around a bag of cereal bars—until the security team heard the crunching sounds and took the food away.
When the Bernard & Co. project finally came up for a vote, the ten arrest-riskers readied themselves. Lina had brought lockboxes for six people who had already volunteered—herself, Ms. Cynthia, José, Ms. Keesha, Sadie, and Tyrell. As an official called the roll, the volunteers used plastic tubing to bind themselves to the balcony chairs and to each other; in this way, no one could be dragged off without the rest. Meanwhile, their whole group cheered for the council members who voted against, booed those who voted for, and finally halted the vote altogether, chorusing:
“Community control now! Community control now!”
“We say power! You say Brownsville!”
“Power!”
“Brownsville!”
“Power!”
“Brownsville!”
Eventually, the speaker of the council hollered up at the balcony. “Please respect your council members and let the vote proceed.”
“Community control now! Community control now!”
“This is not a school cafeteria!” the chair of the Land Use committee barked up at them. “Please maintain decorum in the council chambers, or our security staff will remove you!”
The council sent fifteen security officers to escort the protestors out of the building. While most of the community members complied, the six arrest-riskers remained seated and bound to each other. They had become one entity, a centipede in blue jeans. They would not budge until the NYPD sliced the cords. An officer tried to drag Tyrell from one end, and he yelped in pain. “This is all on camera!” Sadie snapped, pointing to the press booth downstairs where several reporters were capturing the protest on their phones. The officers then left them alone and wired to the precinct for a cord-cutter.
Twenty minutes later, a troop of NYPD officers cut them apart, packed them into a police van with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, and had them fingerprinted and photographed at the precinct. But they had expected all this, had packed their medications and scrawled the lawyer hotline on their forearms. Lina and Sadie ended up in the same cell, where they fantasized about sesame chicken and pollo guisado and roti and chocolate and LUNA Bars.
About twenty-four hours later, they were back in Brownsville, holding their goodbye party for the garden in the lot, with Trini bread pudding and currant rolls for all. A local assemblywoman had asked the precinct to stand back, giving the party her unofficial sanction.
Lina was satisfied, at least enough to get up and do the whole thing over again for another lot on Livonia Avenue. The Bernard & Co. plan had passed, their occupation was all over the news, and Brownsville had once again put itself on the map.
In August, Brooklyn felt like the island it was: mornings clean and salty, afternoons slow and thick as the ocean. Brooklyn in summer smelled like the West Indies, though in winter, it had the bite of the Russian pale, the Polish shtetl.
Sadie loved her summer mornings. Each day she woke while the streets were still tranquil, and she biked from the brownstones to Brownsville to assist with the new community garden. The city had bulldozed the original one at 78 Livonia to prepare it for Bernard & Company’s affordable housing complex, but the Parks Department had agreed to open an empty lot farther down the avenue for the community’s use.
Sometimes, when Sadie arrived in the neighborhood on those early mornings, she felt like a child rising before dawn to gape at the mysterious boxes under a Christmas tree. There were still ghosts she wished she could speak to, and still many unanswered questions.
When it had become clear the lawsuit against the Griffiths would go nowhere, Sadie had quit her job atNew Gotham. She needed to take a break from journalism—maybe for the time being, maybe forever. She was no longer sure it suited her, for she didn’t just want to be witness to the life in her borough. She wanted to be entwined in it. To be at its service.
In the days after the protest, she joined the Wesley Price Community Land Trust Action Team and dedicated herself to the CLT’s success. She shoveled compost, but she also helped launch a Kickstarter page and compile a list of vacant lots in the community. The team compensated her with Metro fare, and it meant delaying the day when she’d be able to live independently outside her parents’ brownstone, but this was a small sacrifice.
At the community land trust meetings, she often ran into Tyrell. Watching him, listening to each wise thing he said, she still had feelings for him, despite herself. And now he was no longer her source.
But while he was not cold or cruel, he kept his distance—quite literally. At the meetings, he embraced the other members but wasmindful to leave a few feet of space between the two of them. “I really appreciate what you’ve done for us,” he said to her at one of these meetings, pressing his hands together with gratitude. She was pleased to hear him say it, and yet the compliment was airtight; it left no room to segue into all the things she really wanted to convey.
One day at the garden, he placed a hand on her shoulder. When she looked up, he was beaming, and she nearly fell through the earth.
