As a kid, Schmidt had chased the girls up and down Christopher Street, trying to hit their behinds with a table tennis paddle. More recently, his wife had discovered Schmidt kept a mistress on the side, and she’d run him out of the house with a hot frying pan. Still, Steeplechase could list every house for sale in the neighborhood with his eyes closed.
“Ipersonallywant you to get this steal. Just think, Richie, all this and better is going to be yours.” They mounted the stoop to the porch. Schmidt pointed to the plentiful windows, the wood-paneled floors. “I say you take it now. It’s gonna go quick.”
Richard agreed to the price of the house on the spot. It was only after they’d secured the deed that he found chipped kitchen tiles, a clogged sink, and even urine stains in the living room rug.
But Richard assured himself: he didn’t need a mansion. All he wanted was what an everyday man was entitled to: something that kept him cool in the summertime and warm in the winter, with alawn to mow and swings for children to swing on, and separate rooms for each of the activities of the American family.
Others might take that stuff for granted, but he would never. He had climbed his mountain. He’d built his life from scratch. And what makes a man an American more than that?
LINA
Halloween in Brownsville brought the two-tone moan of ambulance sirens. The taste of weak coffee in the Brookdale cafeteria. Blue scrubs. White coats. Smell of antiseptic hallways, squeak of wheels on linoleum, mothers’ screams, machines beeping. Memories.
The day the U.S. Army chaplain man told them about Lou, and their mother prayed on the floor of the Van Dyke apartment with her hands over her face. 1966.
The night at Brookdale when the nurses uncoupled Nellie’s hand from Wesley’s. 1986.
Nellie’s arm, gray and limp like a dead tree branch, dangling off the stretcher. 1987.
Or way before any of that: 1955—the day they killed her father. She, her mother, and her siblings had been in the East Harlem apartment waiting for him to come home for dinner. Then the sun dropped below the roof of the Dominican fruit market, and he still had not returned. They chalked it up to subway problems. When the police called, their mother stood by the open window with Cindy in her arms, listening to the officer speak a language that couldn’t have been Spanish or English. Then she fell to her knees and dropped the phone, which swayed back and forth on its cord.
Lina caught it and bellowed into the speaker piece.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Miss, your father’s been shot.”
“Shot! Who shot him?”
“Your old man got into a fight down at the longshoreman’s pub here on West Thirty-Fifth. He’s in the Mount Sinai ER.”
Lina had been too outraged to grieve. The next day, she went down to the docks, and a friend of her father’s pulled her aside and told her the police had done it. A white worker had disrespected her father, and her daddy had stood up for himself, and then the white worker had come at him with his fists and her father had fought back—and so the police had grabbed and shot him.
Since that night, she’d been to the hospital dozens of times, often for what the newspapers would have called “Black on Black” crime. To her, it was more of the same. When the system starved a man of hope, they made him hungry enough to kill his own brother. This year, Kesi, her former student’s grandson, had shot Andre, a member of BYTE, and then Andre’s friend T. P. had retaliated, put a bullet in Kesi’s thigh. Not enough had changed since 1955, and it broke her heart every day.
Tyrell was there all night too. He knew how much she hated hospitals, so at daybreak, he called a car and sent her home to get some rest.
Strange, then, to wake up from an hour of shut-eye and see an email from a different world.
Bewildered, she read it several times.
Dear Ms. Lina Rodriguez Armstrong,
I hope you are well. This is Jean Bernard, the CEO of Bernard and Company, and I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance at the community visioning session convened by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development on Saturday, September 27.
I am reaching out regarding your vision for the vacant property at Livonia Avenue near Saratoga Street.
We learned about your proposal fromNew Gotham’s coverage, and Olivia McIntosh was kind enough to offer me your email address. Our company, Bernard & Co., has a longstanding interest in the site, and with the city to release an RFP this month, we are eager to benefit from your insight and historical knowledge of the area.
We would like to invite you to our Water Street offices in the Financial District to discuss a potential partnership. Please let us know when might be a good time that we can sit down with you and discuss a collaboration.
My regards,
Jean Bernard
Bernard & Co., CEO
“Thank you, but no thank you,” Lina said to the screen. She had Trevor LDC, a Black-owned construction firm. She had Brownsvillians ready to establish the Wesley Price Community Land Trust tripartite board. She had dance teachers, spoken-word artists, and LGBTQ mentors. Why would she need Bernard & Co.? No—Bernard & Co. neededherto check off the “community engagement” box on the application.
