City Kid by Nelson George

“T” was silent and the street was a metaphor for selecting items, which felt apt, since it was Brownsville’s main shopping strip. The lady said “Pit-kin,” with a heavy emphasis on the “T” and “kin,” which, technically speaking, was the correct way to say it, yet it felt foreign, and, coming from her middle-aged self, sounded old-fashioned.
    It was my first inkling that my Brownsville, a place of public housing, of bodegas and brown-skinned peoples, had housed others. Until then we—blacks and Ricans—seemed to exist in our own world, in areas that were a bus ride, a long subway trek, or a goodly car ride away from the Jews and Italians who shared Brooklyn with us. I’d already figured out that my home city was a place of enclaves marked by invisible lines of ethnic demarcation, and that wrong turns carried risks.
    But what the woman hipped me to was that this geography wasn’t stable. In fact, not only was it mutable, but it was changing all around me. In my Brooklyn circa the 1970s there were the predominantly black and Latin ’hoods of Brownsville, Crown Heights, and Bedford-Stuyvesant; the Italian and Jewish areas of Flatlands, Canarsie, and Flatbush; and the rapidly growing Caribbean population of East Flatbush. Downtown Brooklyn was the land of movie theaters, the huge Abraham & Strauss department store, and Saturday afternoon Chinese food with Ma and my sister. Throughout my adolescence and teen years, blacks and Ricans and the white ethnic areas were in transition, as wealthier whites fled the borough in reaction to us angry brown hordes. Busing was definitely one of the engines of change, but not always the yellow kind.
    It took two city buses to get from Brownsville to Meyer Levin, and later Samuel J. Tilden High School. My magic carpet was my precious school bus pass, a wallet-sized card that granted free admittance to subways and buses. Public transportation meant I didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of exiting a school bus, but everyone knew where we were from anyway. After all, we came on the same city buses, knew each other, and, most noticeably, were usually all shoved into the same classes. It was possible at Meyer Levin to travel from darker Brownsville to predominantly white ethnic East Flatbush and yet have only fleeting classroom contact with your white schoolmates.
    When I entered junior high in 1969, Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatlands were overwhelmingly peopled with white Italians and Jews. By the time I graduated from high school in 1975, all that was ancient history. In fact, I believe, my senior class at Tilden was the last predominantly white one in the school’s history.
    My personal journey was a little different from that of a lot of my Brownsville peers. Back in elementary school I’d been a star, partly because I was painfully well behaved, was as well spoken as my role model, Sir Sidney Poitier, and because I could read my ass off, which was greatly valued by teachers and administrators. Unfortunately, my reading ability overshadowed my many weaknesses—I had a speech impediment (despite therapy I still mumble), and couldn’t do math to save my life. I think reading was so easy and so much fun that I didn’t apply myself to math with any seriousness.
    When I got to Meyer Levin my reading scores from elementary school landed me in class 7-14, which was an elite group. And, within a few weeks, I knew I was in over my head. A crucial part of my failure was that in the fall of 1969 there was a long, bitter teachers’ strike over community control of local school boards.
    It’s little remembered now, yet it was a seminal moment in New York’s racial history. Ground zero for the strike was about ten blocks away from the Tilden projects in an area known as Ocean Hill-Brownsville.
    â€œDecentralization” was an educational buzzword of the period, with the idea that local school boards,