Yet Sadie had also taken a bunch of urban policy and African American Studies courses at Yale, and she believed marginalized neighborhoods deserved thorough coverage of their many social issues, including everything from police violence to fresh produce access. And—as she’d added in the interview to demonstrate her knowledge of local politics—with the new mayor in office, it was bound to be an important year in Brownsville and neighborhoods like it, as the mayor had promised to implement a range of initiatives to meet the needs of working people.
On her first day of employment, she took the B train from her family’s brownstone in Park Slope to theNew Gothamoffice. It was in SoHo, on the second floor of a loft building that smelled like varnished wood and Windex. There was a room of desks for the reporters, along with an office for Simon Evans, the executive director, and another for the executive editor, Wendy Nilsson. It was so exciting, solegit, Sadie thought during the office tour. No more internships! She had a real staff job, a real press pass dangling from her neck.New Gothamwasn’t exactlyThe New York Times, but it still got more than eight hundred thousand digital visitors per month.
Growing up, Sadie had been unsure what vocation to pursue. She’d known early on she was not destined to write poetry and fiction like her parents; she lacked the patience to sit in a melancholic gloom for hours, coming up with metaphors to describe the intricacies of her emotions. She was, rather, an information-processor, a go-getter. Then she’d discovered journalism in college, and it seemed to incorporate her varied skills. She had good syntax—this, at least, she’d inherited from her parents. She loved research and getting lost in Wikipedia. Extroverted: she liked to ask questions. One couldsay she’d never gotten over that kindergarten phase of poking her nose into everything. At Yale, she’d attracted boys with her ability to absorb their mansplaining onWorld of Warcraft, quantum physics, renewable energy policy, or whatever else. So, she’d enrolled in as many journalism classes as possible, applied to every paid and unpaid journalism internship in New York, and updated her Twitter bio to “investigative reporter: all opinions my own.”
After her introduction to theNew Gothamoffice, Sadie was expected to be in the field for the rest of the week. Her father remained uneasy about Brownsville:How will you get home if there’s an event after dark? Have you checked which streets to avoid?It was taking great effort from her mother to calm him down and remind him that thebad old dayswere over.
For Sadie, it was the neighborhood’s bad reputation that made it a draw—that and the fact that her family had lived there and was now so afraid of it. Brownsville was the underdog, the type of place she’d read about in her coursework at Yale, and she secretly wished she could claim it as her own. After all, it was embarrassing to go to Yale and say you were from Brooklyn and then, when another student from East Flatbush or Bed-Stuy or some actual Brooklyn neighborhood overheard and piped up, “For real? Where you from?” to have to admit you were just from yuppified Park Slope.
August 4 was her first day in Brownsville, and Sadie was proud to find she was not scared—most of the time, at least. On the blocks between Howard Avenue and Thomas S Boyland Street, she passed several neat rows of two-story brick homes, some adorned with garden gnomes, others with Jamaican, Haitian, or St. Lucian flags. She visited Betsy Head Park and encountered a humongous public pool brimming with children. Pitkin Avenue, the main thoroughfare on the north side, was busy and alive, people going in and out of the salons, pharmacies, and fast-food restaurants. True, she was more nervous when walking on the east side, up and down Rockaway Avenue. She’d never seen so much public housing in one place, complexes and their courtyards sprawled block after block. It was a forest of NYCHAapartments, so dense she couldn’t see where it all ended. Growing up, her father had always instructed her to avoid “the projects.”
And then there was Livonia Avenue. That was where, according to her father, the restaurant had been—the Chinese restaurant run by her grandparents so long ago. Sadie went in search of 78 Livonia Avenue only to discover a giant empty lot. In fact, there were hardly any buildings on Livonia at all, just vast stretches of land overgrown with weeds and choked with car parts and broken appliances. There were no people around to interview, though a splotchy cat stopped its prowling in the weeds to gawk at Sadie.
Sadie goggled at the abandonment. She was amazed Brooklyn still had so much wasted space, and she wondered whether the mayor had development plans for Livonia Avenue. It was a bit disappointing; she had been hoping to find artifacts from her family’s past, ghostly remnants of the grandfather and great-grandfather she’d never met—evidence that she did, in fact, belong in Brownsville.
Sadie sent a picture of the block to her father, along with a message:
Where did all the buildings
go????
Of course, he wouldn’t know. Her father hadn’t set foot in Brownsville since he was seven years old. She thought about asking her grandmother, who had worked at the restaurant. Her dad worried Ngen Ngen would be upset to learn the location of Sadie’s new job, but at least Ngen Ngen would have stories to share.
Walking beneath the long torso of the elevated rail was like visiting the underbelly of the suspended whale at the Natural History Museum. Sadie took a picture of a station pillar that served as a bulletin board for a range of predatory advertisements:CASH 4 HOMESandBAD CREDIT? NO PROBLEM. She posted the pic on Twitter, then checked her notifications for likes and reposts from her 207 followers.
Not everyone in Brownsville was Black. There were some Latino people, and with her waist-length black hair and round, cashew-huedface, Sadie looked kind of like one and hoped she might be mistaken for a local. Yet that first week in the field, hardly anyone was fooled. She wasn’t sure what gave her away: something about her enunciation, which, like her parents’, bore the sharp consonants and meticulous diction of the Ivy League educated, or her brisk gait, or maybe the denim shortalls were a tad too hipster.
Always, the men outside bodegas would stare at her, and they would not catcall; they would squint. Occasionally she’d stop to take advantage of their interest, to ask whether police conduct had changed under the new administration and what they thought of the Eric Garner case, and she’d scribble their answers in her notebook. Yet the truth was, all the stares kind of unnerved her. Wasn’t she supposed to be the one doing the staring?
She didn’t always understand the language. When she interviewed the woman with the cat-eye sunglasses sitting on the steps of the homeless shelter, the lady explained that she had “DV issues” and had sent her kids to live with an aunt.
“DV?” Sadie repeated. “Can you spell that?”
“This is a domestic violence shelter.” The woman lowered her glasses and glared at Sadie. “You know whatthatis?”
Some people, by contrast, were too friendly—like that one guy in the red tracksuit who sat on a beach chair outside a barbershop on Mother Gaston Boulevard, hands on his long thighs. He called to Sadie every time she passed by.
“Hey miss! Miss! You need an apartment? I’ve got a good place for a young professional like you. Ocean Hill, right off the A!”
“I’m from here,” she replied each time.
As a Brooklynite whose family had once lived in Brownsville, and as someone who had spent the last year hanging out with a bunch of millennial transplants who assumed she was just another one of them, another trust fund baby, which—as she made clear whenever possible—she wasn’t, it was hard for her to accept that to Brownsville, she was just another outsider. She might not have been from Brownsville, but she’d known Brooklyn before roof gardens andthirty-dollar brunch entrées. She’d known Park Slope when Park Slope was still two-dollar pizza folded in half, motor pony rides, and Marinos Italian Ices scooped with a wooden spoon.
But there was no way to explain this to the people sitting in plastic chairs on the street. She lived for those few moments when the Dominican shopkeepers and the Puerto Rican delivery workers misidentified her as one of their own, greeting her as “mi amor.” She could speak only a little Spanish but enjoyed the misimpression for as long as she could. Her Spanish was better than her Chinese, at any rate.
Her third week on the beat, however, her Chinese heritage became strangely relevant. It was a hot day in late August, and she was interviewing store owners about the difficulties faced by small businesses. For her last interview, she entered a 99 Cents store on Rockaway Avenue that lacked air-conditioning but smelled of clean plastic. Its shelves brimmed with every possible plastic import that a household could require: shower caps and pillboxes and toilet scrubbers. The owner agreed to answer her interview questions:
“How long have you been running this store?”
“What should the new mayor do to help businesses in Brownsville?”
“What are the pros and cons of running a business near the elevated rail?”
His name was Pierre Henry, and he’d emigrated from St. Lucia thirty years prior. He sat calmly behind the cash register curling ribbons with the edge of some scissors as they discussed the commercial vacancies on the block and the shooting down the street the week before. Just as they were finishing their conversation, a woman in scrubs entered the store and pushed a middle-aged man in a wheelchair up to the cash register.
“Mr. William,” saluted Pierre Henry, leaning over the counter to greet the man. The caretaker disappeared into the toiletries aisle. “Summer long enough for you?”
“Summer,” the customer repeated, his voice like a stuttering motor. His eyes narrowed on Sadie.
