Bed-Stuy Is Burning Read online

  “It’s safe,” Aaron said.

  “My apologies. I don’t mean to pry, but you’re not a majority in the community?”

  “Two minutes to post,” the track announcer said.

  “What?” Aaron said.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I work with some. Real hardworking, great guys. Really great guys. I’m just asking. Because where I live—it’s like my kids—my wife. And I can see, you’ve got the nice suit. Good job. I can see you’re a family man. An upstanding man. Where I live we have a real sense of a community.”

  “They’ve taken me and my family in,” Aaron said, indignant. “They come over with food. Look after my son. They’ve been there for years, and they’re thrilled to have us on the block. It’s safe and clean. I’ve never felt a part—as much a part of a community as I do with them. I mean, as I do there.”

  “That sounds nice, then,” Oranges said.

  “Horses at the gates,” the track announcer said.

  “Good luck,” Oranges said.

  “And they’re off!” the track announcer said.

  Chapter 19

  Sara acted like she was tired of people thinking she was a boy and then being surprised when they realized she was a girl, but everyone knew she liked surprising people. Sara was eighteen and looked younger when she woke up in the morning or was just out of the shower, but when she was in her sweatpants and a big hoodie and a baseball cap and sunglasses like she was now, she looked older than eighteen, and she looked like a boy. And it wasn’t some accidental thing. She liked the way she looked. The girls she was into liked the way she looked. That was half the point of dressing that way.

  And Sara liked getting mad when people didn’t know she was a girl. Sara and her last girlfriend had fought. They never really talked about why, but they fought a lot, and they fought in public, and usually it was Sara who threw her girlfriend up against a fence, or down to the sidewalk, or against the lamppost on Fulton and Albany. Her girlfriend was dumb as shit but she looked good. She was skinny but she had a body on her. Even when it was cold outside she showed it off. People liked to stop their car and yell out, “You don’t put your hands to a woman like that!” and, “What if someone pushed your mom or your sister?” and with her girlfriend halfway down the block by then, Sara stood up straight and strong and yelled, “I am a woman, you fucking bitch! I am a woman! You want to call the cops? You call the fucking cops!” which almost always made that car drive away. Then Sara caught back up to her dumb, pretty girlfriend and apologized and kissed wherever she’d made her hurt, and took her home to either one of their moms’ places, and because neither Sara nor her girlfriend had jobs, and both of them had police records and were over eighteen so they weren’t allowed back to Boys and Girls High to finish off their degrees, they spent the afternoons getting food or smoking or in bed.

  But now it was hot out, Sara was in handcuffs, and she didn’t have a girlfriend anymore. Sara had purposely broken the law to get arrested, but now that she was arrested she wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. She was angry. Everyone sitting on that curb was angry. About Jason—even though she didn’t really know the kid, and from what she’d heard, people who did know him didn’t like him—and how there was nothing to do about him getting killed. Getting arrested had sounded like a protest, but it was fucking dumb. And now her mom was going to kick her out because she’d been arrested again, this time actually for nothing. She had, along with a couple of assholes, jumped a turnstile. Stopped, frisked, arrested, then marched upstairs to sit in Fulton Park. That was new. And fucking racist as shit. Usually they’d just stop and frisk and maybe arrest you, but the march upstairs had never happened before to her or anyone she knew.

  Though now she saw why they’d taken her to the park. Too many people were getting arrested. The police must not know what to do with all of them. There were twenty of them rounded up outside the Utica subway station right by Boys and Girls High. Another thirty or so were being brought to where the twelve of them were. The cops seemed tired of arresting them, but every ten minutes it was like another group of everyone she knew was being rounded up and brought outside Boys and Girls High, which was where she would have liked to get her degree from anyway, if she’d been allowed inside.

  Sara and close to fifty others stood around for a while, but it was too hot to keep them all there in cuffs. The cuffs themselves were heating up on her wrists and nearly cutting through. And it was embarrassing, even if they’d done it on purpose. It was all dumb: fare evasion in front of a cop, shoplifting in front of a cop, spitting at a cop, threatening a cop. Sara still knew a lot of the kids up in the classrooms who were looking down at her. She’d been in those classrooms eighteen months earlier. She’d never been a great student, but one time in eighth grade the English teacher had them act out a court scene from To Kill a Mockingbird, which was still her favorite book, and she and her friend Stace had done this whole speech about how the slave couldn’t have done it because there were no witnesses and no motive, and even though the teacher was going to rule on the other side, he said that because she and Stace did such a convincing job, he ruled on their side instead. He even said that they could be lawyers if they wanted to, and because everyone knew even back then that Stace was going to be some fat-piece-of-shit whore, the teacher must have meant Sara could be the lawyer. That was only four years ago. It made Sara want to cry right there in cuffs on the street.

  Above her, the teachers didn’t have much control of the kids in the classrooms, so the kids were looking down from the windows or wandering outside the building even though school was in. Some kids were shouting down at everyone in handcuffs on the curb. These were kids Sara had been in classes with, so she asked a black cop if she could go back into Fulton Park because of the shade. The cop told her to pipe down and behave.

  Pipe down, he said, like he was a cop from a hundred years ago. Sara could tell he was the type of cop who took the job seriously. Not like the lazy cop or the bully cop. The serious cop was like the bully cop, and sometimes there was crossover between the two types, but the serious cop had more pride and less anger. Like he was fulfilled every day he went to work keeping the streets safe. The bully cop just wanted to be in charge of people. The lazy cop just wanted an easy job. But the serious cop wanted things done right. All the time. The serious cop got mad when things weren’t done right. “We were told to keep everyone out here on the sidewalk,” he said.

  “Why?” Sara said.

  “Too many of you,” the cop said, “coming from all directions. We don’t know how many there’s going to be, so we were told to keep you in central locations until this simmers down.”

  “I bet.”

  “We’re supposed to treat you with respect.”

  “You remind me of my uncle,” Sara said. She didn’t like to talk to adults usually, but moments of confrontation brought it out of her, and this cop really did remind her of her mother’s brother who lived in Philadelphia and she saw each Christmas.

  “We arrest you,” he said, “but then we give you clemency, or some of you, those of you without a record. To show we are giving second chances. That we don’t want to arrest folks for being upset about a shot kid. This is from all the way on up. Commissioner Bratton. After this kid was killed. A shame, if you ask me. But you have a record. Almost all of you do. That’s also what’s taking so long. To run all of you through the system. So pipe down and behave. Please. This will all be over with shortly. We’ll either let you go or get you processed.”

  There were more than a hundred people now, kids mostly, in handcuffs lined up on the curb across from the Utica subway station. And there were thirty or forty cops looking after them.

  Kids from Boys and Girls High on off-periods or just cutting class gathered around outside the yellow tape the police were stringing up to form wider and wider barriers, and some of the deacons and parishioners from local churches along with all the men who usually played chess in Fulton Park were poking around
and asking questions. And the teenage dealers on their trick bikes, and the few friendly homeless. Fulton Park was sometimes closed down for autumn carnivals or a little concert or hip-hop show, so it wasn’t unusual for a couple of hundred people to gather around. But typically they were inside the park, not right in front of the school, and typically the people were milling about and not trying to get closer to see who was arrested and why.

  With such a large audience, some of the kids who’d been arrested with Sara were chanting.

  “Twelve years old ten shots! Twelve years old ten shots!” and “What do we want? Respect! When do we want it? Now!”

  They were joined by some of the parishioners of various nearby churches as well as some of the high school kids who chanted with various degrees of sincerity. At first, the chants were jokey, then mocking, making fun of the kids who joined seriously, but as soon as the high school kids saw that these chants bothered the police and that they were making the arrested kids happy—some of them now recognizable as classmates or former classmates—they started chanting loudly and with sincerity.

  Kind of dumb, Sara thought, but there were enough of them in cuffs that she could chant whatever she wanted without anyone really singling her out. Like, she would never individually chant, “No justice! No peace!” because it was totally unoriginal and nobody would care listening to it, but now that more than 150 people were chanting it outside of Boys and Girls High and they were being heard by the teachers and assistant principals and people on their way to the subway, it didn’t bother her to be chanting it as part of a group.

  Some people shifted around and Sara was now sitting next to Derek Jupiter. She knew him because he sold pot sometimes. He was a rich kid who lived in one of the nice brownstones on Stuyvesant and went to one of those charter schools where everyone’s posture was important and everyone was called by their last names.

  Derek wasn’t chanting along with the crowd. He was muttering something about how this was all bullshit. Which it was. But he was really angry. Angry about how only black people got treated like this; how, “There were no cops here ten years ago, five years ago, but now white people move in, gentrify, whatever, then the cops follow. Call it stop and frisk, broken windows, it’s the same shit. Arrests follow gentrification!”; how he’d been arrested that morning for asking questions about someone else who’d been arrested on purpose; how he wasn’t even poor and he was treated like trash.

  And then Derek was telling anyone who’d listen—“383 Stuyvesant, 422 Macon, 371a MacDonaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George-Andre”—sitting there in handcuffs on the curb listing the homes and business owned by white people in the neighborhood. He was pronouncing all the restaurants and cafés with the correct foreign accents. He’d committed a list to memory—“These are the ones I’ve staked out, the ones I know for sure; 383 Stuyvesant is right on my block. A black family that rented to black people used to live there. No more—” and he was telling everyone to put these addresses in their phones like it was Halloween and they were the best places to hit up for good candy. Derek turned his head in all directions saying—“383 Stuyvesant, 422 Macon, 371a MacDonaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George-Andre”—telling friends and strangers that these addresses belonged to outsiders, that it’d be doing our community a favor to rid us of them.

  What was strange about the way he was chanting—“383 Stuyvesant, 422 Macon, 371a MacDonaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George-Andre”—was that there was a rhythm to it, and just like “No justice! No peace!” and “Twelve years old ten shots!” were catchy when everyone said them out loud and together with one beat, Sara started to say “383 Stuyvesant, 422 Macon, 371a MacDonaugh, Celestino and Saraghina restaurants, Café George-Andre” with Derek, without even meaning to.

  Sara snapped out of it when the “No justice! No peace!” got loud enough to drown out Derek sitting next to her. There must have been hundreds of chanters, fewer than a quarter of whom were in cuffs. She recognized more than a hundred from school or the neighborhood, and then she felt something on her ear, like rain. She looked up and laughed. Guys she used to hang out with—Damien and TJ and Mike—dripping a Poland Springs bottle down on her. They were trying to offer her some water on a day that kept getting hotter. But then they were trying to pour it on her. She looked up and they motioned to her to open her mouth, but she couldn’t tell if it was nice because they knew she was thirsty in the hot street or nasty like they were being sexual. So she gave them the middle finger through the cuffs between her legs and tried to turn around, but her wrists hurt from the cuffs, and a cop came over to her and made her face forward. And Derek Jupiter laughed at them all.

  • • •

  Maybe a half hour passed under a cloudless blue sky. Sara was sitting, it was hot, she was very thirsty, the cops were standing, sometimes the chanting died down, then it started up again. Cops tried to offer a few arrestees clemency, but now close to five hundred people were looking and shouting in front of the school and in the park. More arrested kids and adults were coming over—even one white kid with dreads—followed by what seemed like everyone from the projects on Chauncey. They all watched or filmed on their phones, and a policeman started cursing because someone spat at him. Or maybe it was just the water that Mike was pouring down on Sara.

  Sara tried to stand and the cop pushed her down when suddenly her brother, Andy—who was a great guy with a job at the café at the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-sixth and Lex in Manhattan, where he was supposed to be now—jumped the cop. Andy was carrying the metal baseball bat from when he played ball in high school.

  Sara’s mom screamed “No!” and Sara didn’t know where the two of them had even come from or why Andy wasn’t at work, and then all the cops in Brooklyn were on top of Andy banging in his head with their clubs yelling, “He’s got a weapon!” and, “Get the bat!” while some of the teachers who were done for the day were shouting, “That’s Andy Hall? Is that Andy Hall?” because everyone remembered Sara’s brother as if not the best, then definitely one of the most respectful students who had come through Boys and Girls High in years. He’d always been polite to everyone.

  High school kids stormed out of the building screaming, and men from the Chauncey projects cut in to defend Andy or try to push the cops back. Sara was on the ground crying, “Momma!” and her mom was yelling, “Andy!” while the kids who didn’t know Andy were shouting and throwing bottles and books and rocks, if there were any handy, at the cops, and some of the kids in handcuffs were running away. Derek Jupiter was the first Sara saw who took the opportunity to stand up and escape.

  Cops stormed in from all angles with their clubs lashing out at whoever they thought was trying to run. Derek was long gone. Other cops drew their weapons but kept them at their sides. Sirens blared. Three boys from Boys and Girls High bled from their faces. Sara could see it from where she was lying on the pavement, protecting herself but trying to keep a view of her mom and brother to see if they were all right. She couldn’t see either. Cops had this one kid, maybe twelve years old, in a choke hold and the kid was waving his arms. There was music blaring, but it didn’t make sense. Sara didn’t know where it was coming from, and it was reggae from years ago. Someone stepped on Sara’s hand by accident, maybe, Sara wasn’t sure, but it hurt enough to take her attention away from everything else. Sara touched her wrist and it was already swelling but she couldn’t feel any blood. Everyone standing up in cuffs started banging into one another, and then all the kids leaving school joined in the different scuffles like they were at a concert. Upstairs, the students still watching from the classrooms threw water bottles and books, too.

  And then chairs and desks, slamming to the concrete, flipping around getting tangled in one another, crashed out from the high windows.

  “Take cover!” one cop shouted, and by the time another yelled, “Nigger!” chaos had spread so quickly that there was no logic separating student from teacher and cop
and arrestee and Chauncey project residents. The press wasn’t there yet, but a scared ring of neighbors were taking photos with their phones.

  Sara saw a cop grab a woman so powerfully that her hair rollers fell out. She looked pregnant because of a smock, but Sara thought she was actually just a hairstylist. She definitely wasn’t one of the people who threw anything or spit on the cops.

  Sara couldn’t do anything because of the cuffs. She lost track of her brother, but she could hear her mom screaming, “Andy? Sara?”

  “Be careful! Cameras everywhere!” Sara heard a cop yell. Someone smashed Sara’s arm again by stomping on it. She held it against her cheek. Sara could see blood on the street, and she heard sirens leave and others approach, and a few gunshots.

  Down the street at the dollar store, where the doors were always open to invite people in, students rushed in and then out with armfuls of pillows, pants, and kitchen soap.

  Sara could see them from the ground. And then all the cops except a few rushed to the dollar store.

  The kids in handcuffs were getting away. Sara hoped Andy was with them, even though she knew he was beaten to the point where that was a dream.

  Sara heard another gunshot go off, then a few in a row that sounded like firecrackers. Sara couldn’t see her brother or her mother.

  • • •

  Sara woke up and felt heat coming from the Boys and Girls School and heard an explosion from the direction of the Chauncey projects. She saw her deacon shouting, grabbing at his beard. Teachers were crying and so were some younger girls from the school who were standing by. She must have only been out for a second.

  Sometime later, Damien and TJ and Mike were helping her to her feet and Mike held her face in the other direction while Damien fired a bullet at her handcuffs to break them apart. The students burned the school, the dollar store, then the plumbing supply place next door. Everyone knew that store had three million dollars of inventory in a warehouse in East New York.