Cereal and Milk

To read this city. To know what may look like some scribbles on buildings are actually markings from humans who live full lives, when they’re not cut short. These deliberately bootlegged pronunciations, though stuttering, though maybe muddily articulated, are a kind of record-keeping. Like a stunning melody coming through bad Wi-Fi in the crib. Those markings could’ve been made this morning by someone watching you admire their work right now from across the street or they could’ve been made by someone decades ago. Maybe someone dead and celebrated now. Or just dead and forgotten. People do disappear around here. Jail bids are interesting ‘cause it could take a three-to-five just to realize you haven’t seen someone in a while.

I’m not from Bed-Stuy but have lived here for five years now; my girl has been here eight. We moved in together during the pandemic, and it’s about the longest I’ve lived somewhere since moving out of my mom’s apartment in Astoria, Queens when I was 17. Not knowing how long we’ll eventually get to have here, I can’t ever front on how special and formative this time and place has been. In the beginning it took some getting used to, I felt out of place walking around, hanging out on the block. Are Bed-Stuy secrets for me to know and keep? When we think about gentrification and people being displaced, how do poor Black and brown people moving from one inner-city neighborhood to another factor in? Am I part of the problem, too? Does it change because we pay some relatively decent rent, while others on the same block paid millions to be in the mix? I felt uncomfortable not being able to tell you with any certainty who or what was here, what was lost, what left an impression. There were times early on I wondered what I’d say if anyone stopped me in the street asking where I was from. I don’t have a cousin from two streets over or an opinion on what your man is up to now. I live on this map of all I’ll never see or be privy to. But maps are always redrawn.

“draw me a map of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be bigger . . .”
– Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, 2014

Walks are really our new shit. I rap, “sometimes walking feels like I’m driving my body.” “Free Palestine” and “Black Lives Matter” written on infrastructure the concepts themselves lack. I don’t care what dumb viral tweets tell me about these strings of words together, I know what they mean and know what they represent. Walking and mapping is how we stumbled onto the makeshift koi fish pond in the street last summer, before it went viral. It’s how we know the sun setting bends these long shadows down the block through the trees and over our favorite cars: the brown pick-up truck with the flower logo on the license plate, the sick Toyota Prado or blue Benz from the other night, the blue and silver Montero Sport. “Love is you” is spray-painted on the side of the building over there. Walking around is how I found the guy with a printing shop and notary public he operates out of the window of his living room. One sunset, we came upon a basketball game with guys silhouetted, playing in the dark; the Elements of Life song Balance In All Things wafting out of someone’s big speakers from across the park.

My man Coop and I took a walk to my favorite Lester’s Fabric store some weeks ago. Visiting from LA by way of the Nati, Jerald “Coop” Cooper teaches an evolving course on Black Modernism and runs the Instagram account @HoodMidCenturyModern. He might not even call it “modernism” — that’s y’all word. While on the surface it feels like his IG centers our built environment, the design of our surroundings, it’s just as much or more about designing ourselves. SelfhoodMidCenturyModern. The structures we live and work in and the personas we build are reflecting and refracting each other all the time. “Us and architecture as iconography, (a fake case study)” as Coop puts it in a recent post. Or on another: “Something bout the scale of the city in our aesthetic . . . Or how we bigger than the city. You know how tha dogg pound did in the New York New York music video?” Rendering oneself in art, as big or bigger than the buildings. Because the landscape isn’t what it is without us.

I think about what it means to know the ins and outs of a world never really designed with us in mind. What if I could identify the structures and institutions built up around me with the same precision I give to how my sneaker meets the pant? What if all this shit is my style? I know it may be dangerous to think of the projects — or the Section 8 housing I grew up in — as my style. But I’m saying whether my people owned it, designed and built it, or not, once you get a hold of this shit it’s yours to take with you. Making something your own has little to do with any piece of paper saying it’s yours. What if, like the style and presence we craft for ourselves, we saw the ways our vision shapes these neighborhoods too? Not only with hands but with lore. In years of people playing the block, holding court. Years mapping. Years plotting. (We use the same words for cultivating land as we do for professional development.) Every rap video framed just so, every iconic photo stamped into our collective memory. Every block party in streets made the people’s own, every nook and cranny co-authored a thousand times. It’s ours or can be, everywhere that meets the eye. Originally, and iteratively as time goes on.

Walking to the train one day through the park, I noticed there were these indents in the ground every ten feet or so — animal shapes, stars, etc. I started to think about these drawings I could do by pressing paper on top of these indents and going over it with charcoal. Another kind of impression made. This rendering of some of the actual ground covered. I thought about it and watched the ground for months before going to do it.

I’ve been thinking about how every day, our next-door neighbor Mr. Rick, himself dying, asks me how my dad’s health is, because one day years ago I mentioned my old man had a bad heart. I know for a fact that architecture in our lives is more than rows of homes. I think about soft infrastructure. The quiet systems of care housed in gestures, where love can look like someone checking in again, just to make sure.

One day, sitting outside down from the crib some, I watch someone walk up the stairs of our place, sit on the stoop nonchalantly, and start putting packages from outside our building’s door into their big bag. I immediately walk up to confront them and see that it’s a frail woman with bad teeth. She starts to cry, saying “I’m just trying to feed my baby,” and I say something like, “I understand but you can’t steal our packages,” and start taking the packages out of her bag. She’s backing down the stairs, crying, whispering she’s sorry, and disappears down the block. Writing it now, I hate the memory if this is really how it happened. I’m haunted by the interaction, it happened too fast. My gut reaction was to not let someone steal our packages, which had happened before. Still, what did we even get from Amazon that day?

More days out the week than not, Mr. Rick sits in his car and just plays song after song you know and love for hours — loud — on what sounds like a surprisingly decent sound system in a shitty car. Of course, one never just hears the music, but the environment the music soundtracks. Some nights we get to listen to Stevie Wonder reverberating off 100-year-old brownstones.

Coop and I walked the long way to Lester’s that day, probably talking Ma$e songs. I told him I had in mind to buy some yellow fabric for a work I wanted to make, that referenced a photo of the late artist Pope.L. In Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece (1978), the artist crawled on his hands and knees through Times Square wearing a suit and tie. While there is no mention of why exactly Pope.L sewed the yellow square onto the back of his jacket, the artist has described how his professional attire aimed to “underscore the deep rift between aspirations of upward mobility and the absence of opportunity for many dispossessed communities in America.” In otherwise normal circumstances, this yellow fabric then becomes a signal for something awry. For something is awry here.

I think about who has time and energy to think about the history of a place, while passing through that place. Maybe I should ask, What sort of power is possible to tap into when people have the space to think about the history of a place, while they are passing through that place? In real time. How to slow down? We don’t have to subscribe to this timeline others invented.

Let’s stay on this place for a minute. There’s a man who sits on the corner day in and day out — rain, snow, or shine. He wears layers of large clothing and sits still for what seems like hours at a time, presiding over the sidewalk. There’s a rumor he’s not houseless he just likes to be there. There’s a rumor of this and that. I think the truth is you can die in a place and stay alive. My man is a fixture on the corner like the light post, illuminating what’s around him.

I feel like it’s the Billy Joel song I don’t remember the name of. I feel like the man at the end of Sinners playing music for a couple of people in a club somewhere. I play the keys on my MacBook here like a piano. Hands guided. The tap-tapping from my fingers on the keyboard a music. Maybe I can make the music fixed in a way. Like forever playing on a loop when you visit. We did the neighborhood history map thing and looked at our block. The store on the corner has been a store on the corner for 115 years. Someone could’ve bought some cereal there, come back the following century and bought the milk.