Richard consented, if only to escape his mother.
The girl from Ng village was pretty but very quiet. He tried to make up for the awkward silences by boasting about his exploits in the navy, and he pitied her, that she had never heard of the Brooklyn Dodgers or tasted ice cream. In two days, the Ng village man offered his daughter’s hand—and what white man would ever do that for him?
The girl from Ng village did not exude sex. Having her, he knew, would lack the triumph of earlier escapades—there had been no greater victory than to have a white woman below him. Yet withouta doubt, Ng Foon Wah was the kind of girl who could save a box of chocolates for ten years. For this, he adored her and became determined to provide her everything a woman could want: all the dresses and shoes and jewelry she could dream of; more excitement, in the big city, than she could even believe possible; and above all, a house of their own, in Brooklyn.
SADIE
The night Sadie figured it out, Park Slope was celebrating its favorite holiday. All up and down the neighborhood’s streets, children pranced and skipped and made strange noises that threatened to break her concentration. Of course, back when she’d been younger and her relationship to Park Slope less complicated, she’d dressed up as Ariel, Sherlock Holmes, Mulan for several years, and Sarah Palin her senior year of high school.
Sadie had considered going to a party, but she’d bailed at the last minute because she’d come to a startling realization—one that, in hindsight, she wondered why she hadn’t landed on earlier.
The lot that Ms. Lina was trying to develop was the same one where her grandparents’ restaurant had been.
She wanted to determine when the restaurant had existed, and at what point Ms. Lina had lived there. Ms. Lina had said a fire had burned down the whole building, but Sadie could find nothing about a fire in her newspaper archive searches.
Running her fingers across a faux fur robe—she’d been planning a Macklemore-themed costume—Sadie recalled her interactions with Ms. Lina and Tyrell over the previous weeks, trying to remember what else Ms. Lina had shared. After their first encounter outside the school, Sadie had stayed up until three a.m. perfecting her articleon the community planning meeting, ensuring she included a diversity of quotes as well as an accurate summary of Ms. Lina’s vision for the lot on Livonia.
It was after this that Ms. Lina and Tyrell began sending Sadie issues to cover: a maternal health workshop at the library on Mother Gaston, a Family Day barbecue and resource fair. And Sadie was grateful; Brownsvillians increasingly approved of her reporting. Most recently, Sadie had interviewed Tyrell about his nonprofit, BYTE.
They’d met up on October 25 at a hole-in-the-wall diner on Pitkin Avenue. When he arrived, Tyrell gave fist bumps to the men at the counter, and an older white man came out from the kitchen to take their orders. Sadie asked for water, as she couldn’t eat and take notes simultaneously, but Tyrell requested eggs over easy, sausage, grits, a bagel, a full plate of banana pancakes, and a glass of orange juice. She tried to suppress her smile, but the waiter caught her eye.
“You know about this one?” he asked, his vowels stretched, a classic Italian Brooklynese. He leaned his elbows on the red granite counter and pointed at Tyrell with his pen. “This bag of sticks comes and eats all he needs for two weeks, in one go. And then he fasts. Like a bear.”
“More like a camel,” Tyrell replied, adding his own elbows to the counter. “Bears hibernate. Camels live in food deserts.” The others at the counter chuckled. “Anyway, Paul, be careful what you say. This is Sadie Chin, a reporter withNew Gotham.”
“Oh, I thought she was your new girlfriend,” Paul replied. “I thought the other one ditched you after you mowed down those chocolate chip pancakes.”
“And that’s—that’s a story for another time. Off the record,” Tyrell said, and he shooed Paul away so they could get to work.
Sadie blushed. She wanted to know about Tyrell’s dating life, but this was not relevant to the article. Swallowing her excitement, she took out her notebook.
“I’d love to know more about BYTE’s Squash the Beef campaign. What does that entail?”
“Squash the Beef is now a city-recognized Cure Violence program. The Cure Violence model comes from Chicago, but every community has an instinct for self-policing…”
As she listened to his answers, she tried to comprehend how Tyrell, only seven years older than her, had enough stories to fill many lifetimes—all the false arrests, all the lives he’d saved. She badly wanted to kiss him.
The way people fetishized Black men, she knew. Yet she found herself drifting off, thinking about how thrilling it would be to go out with someone so completely different from the guys that she’d dated earlier. Tyrell had not been driven to college by helicopter parents who visited every three months, the way Mike’s had. He was not sarcastic to mask his insecurity, like Adrian. He was surely not obsessed with the cheese graters at Stonewall Kitchen, like Alex. All three of her former boyfriends—two white, one Taiwanese American—lacked Tyrell’s sense of purpose, his clarity of vision.
“You’ve heard of Man Up in East New York?” he asked, and she nodded even though she hadn’t been listening.
She didn’t dare cross any lines. A romantic interaction would constitute a violation of the first rule of journalism: no involvement with your sources, period. Instead, she did her best to keep it professional, refusing Tyrell’s offers to buy her a coffee, and always keeping the conversation focused on him, though toward the end she couldn’t resist telling him that she, too, had read Robin Kelley’sFreedom Dreams.
“So you know what we’re fighting for isn’t new. It’s part of the long struggle for self-determination and community control. We’re talking about policing, land, the schools.” It appeared to Sadie that everyone in the diner was listening. “And I’m not saying, ‘Let’s all move back to Africa.’ All that Marcus Garvey nationalist shit. Excuse my language—don’t quote that. What I’m saying is, here in Brownsville, we’re creating a model for Black sovereignty within a diverse urban environment.”
“You make me think of the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Program,” Sadie added, despite herself. “Like, doesn’t it talk about how Black people should be able to determine the destiny of the Black community?”
“That’s right. Most white folks have never even heard of the Ten-Point Program.”
“It’s like the way people think what happened in Ferguson this summer was just a riot,” Sadie said. “A riot with no plan, no demands. But therearedemands. The mainstream media just doesn’t report them.”
“So where’d you learn all this shit?”
Tyrell looked at Sadie as if he was seeing her for the first time.
“In African American Studies.” Sadie hesitated. “At Yale.”
Tyrell nodded and sipped the last of his orange juice.
