Lina stood stock-still in the empty classroom, thinking she would explode from all that she still wanted to say. She wanted to correct Mrs. Salzman—she wanted to assure her, but also to enlighten her. Or maybe she was sick of assuring and enlightening white women. Maybe she just wanted to scream.
She never had to make the choice: that was the last day Mrs. Salzman came to Brownsville.
The war began in May. The Battle of Brownsville, Lina called it. That was when Superintendent McCoy and the Brownsville Governing Board voted to transfer six administrators and thirteen teachers out of the district for their efforts to sabotage community control.
Albert Shankar, president of the UFT, slammed McCoy and the Governing Board, declaring they lacked the authority to make such transfers and that the faculty should report to work as usual. Brownsville’s parents and community leaders poured out to the streets to block the dismissed teachers from returning. It was like 271 was a citadel and they its soldiers—and besieging them, the dismissed teachers, and enclosing them all, a moat of two hundred police officers. Mayor Lindsay, afraid to act on either side’s behalf, declared 271 closed for the day.
Shankar called another citywide strike. Picket lines crisscrossed the five boroughs, inescapable as white picket fences in Levittown. The strikers were gone for the remainder of the school year, and the loyal teachers, with parent volunteers, kept Brownsville’s schools open but barely functioning. One morning, Lina found herself supervising an art class of one hundred students. They had to moveto the auditorium, with groups of six kids sharing one palette of watercolors. Almost a dozen students asked her permission to use the bathroom, none of them returning. For all of that month, she went home to her apartment after nine p.m. each night, collapsing on her mattress as soon as she walked in the door, waking only when her alarm rang at five the next morning.
Superintendent McCoy wouldn’t take back any teacher who had abandoned Brownsville, and over the summer, he hired three hundred and fifty new teachers of his own, people willing to cross the picket line and defend community control—hippies and draft evaders, Black and white and Jewish, some of whom had never taught a day in their life but were down to try.The Brownsville X-Men, Walter called them.
Lina had intended to move that summer, but then 78 Livonia became a ground base for the movement. Mr. Parson held consciousness-raising meetings for the new teachers there, and Lina cooked giant community meals on the stove that had once churned out egg rolls—if you hit the left side of the appliance with a snow shovel, all the burners came on.
On the first day of the new school year, Lina wore jeans and a black leather jacket, a Puerto Rican flag over her curls. She devoted her first lesson to the arts and culture of Puerto Rico, and down the hall, an English teacher assigned Baldwin’sGo Tell It on the Mountain. A math teacher wrote “Black-Owned Business” on the board. Instead of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the students chorused “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Over the following weeks, as the entire nation caught wind of Brownsville’s experiment, all the most distinguished Afro Americans in the nation—a linguist of African dialects, an Afro Dominican NASA mathematician—dialed McCoy and asked how they could assist. McCoy invited them to visit and speak to the students. He welcomed Ghanian drum troupes, Kenyan dancers, and Jamaican poets so the young could witness the creativity of their people. The students devoured it all.
But they remained under siege. The board of education sent the dismissed teachers back to Brownsville, escorted by a team of police who swung their clubs at any parent who stood in the way. A half dozen Brownsville parents were hospitalized for concussions and bruising. Mr. Devin strode into eighth-grade art and took a seat at Lina’s desk as if he didn’t see her roaming the classroom, assisting students with papier-mâché masks.
“Class,” he said, “clean up this mess, and each of you get a fresh sheet of paper.”
Her students looked up, at first confused, and then, with their hands still dripping with batter, they pushed back their seats and leapt to their feet in protest.
“You ain’t our teacher anymore!”
“Go find a different job!”
Later that day, Mr. Devin would lodge a complaint that the students had “assaulted” him.
Growing up, she’d always thought wars happened in jungles and mangrove swamps. But maybe when people talked about revolution,thiscounted just as much. Coke bottles and rotten groceries hurled over the cracked sidewalks of Brooklyn. Defending the streets with your hands still stained with acrylics. This was war for people who were penniless, weaponless, and wanted nothing except a fair chance for their children.
A war they would lose. It was around then that the teachers union began circulating an anonymous leaflet, supposedly written by someone in Brownsville. It called the UFT teachers the “Middle East Murderers of Colored People,” “the Money Changers,” and the “So-Called Liberal Jewish Friend.” The teachers union had it copied and printed by the thousands, and they passed it out on street corners, in subway stations, and at their massive city hall rallies, so that the people of New York could see it for themselves:
This was not a labor dispute. Not a matter of Black sovereignty, of community control. This was an attack against Jews.
A potent rallying cry. In November, the state education department announced it was taking over the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school district. The state suspended McCoy and the new principals, then offered class assignments to any UFT teacher who asked to return to Brownsville. Some did, and immediately, the students fell back on their old rituals of protest—drifting into class late, refusing to follow instructions, fighting in the hallway, throwing chairs out the window.
This was why, years later, it would irk her when the media made it sound like the ’Ville hadn’t done anything. Like they’d all been lazing around, waiting for the white people to come home to Brownsville.
No. It wasn’t that they hadn’t tried.
It was that they’d been crushed.
THE CHINS
In the beginning, in a land of vast sidewalks and flying trains, there was a little boy named Jason. Jason had a friend named Pete. The two shared a love for butterflies, pizza, and jetting through outer space, and together, they spent many hours watching the ants migrate through sidewalk cracks. They put their ears to the manhole cover on Blake Avenue and listened to the whining of the sewage alligators. Paid acorns to the fire hydrant that dispensed magic blueberries.
Brownsville smelled like the lilies his mother planted in the front yard. Like the chlorine coating his sisters’ skin when they returned from the Betsy Head Park pool. Like clouds of soy sauce-ginger-sesame oil, and the wet wood of the pushcarts on Belmont, and the pies in the windows of Sweet Carolina’s, where a woman in an apron offered him free bites of peach crumble.
Next came everything he would wish he didn’t have to remember, everything that—fifty years later—a parent to a twenty-three-year-old daughter, Jason would not be inclined to share.
Four years old. Folded in his mother’s lap. Eating pistachios on a beach blanket. Then Baba yanked him by the arm, dragged his bare feet through the scalding sand, hauled him over a brawny, red shoulder, and pitched him like a football into the surf.
Swallowed in ice water. Screaming, flapping for help. Water seared up his nostrils, salt burned his throat. With his eyes clamped shut, he imagined fanged sharks and ghoulish jellyfish. Then he sank, lungs burning, eyes open to the acidic, green, cloudy water, and through the gloom, saw… not a shark, but his father’s calves, shining like dead fish.
Of course Baba rescued him. His sisters called it silly that he cried for hours after. But he was like their mother—afraid of water. The way it separated them from the place she called home. To strive to conquer water was the worst sort of hubris. Perhaps this was why, in his adolescence, he frequently biked alone to Jamaica Bay. Robert Moses had intended to remake Jamaica Bay into a waterfront that rivaled Battery Park, but he hadn’t gotten to it, and the shores remained knotted with old fishing boats and tar pits.
To Jason, Jamaica Bay was perfect in its oily, untamed wildness.
