A Memoir about Being a Black Gentrifier in Bed-Stuy

Occasionally , a local news story reduces the mess of New York City gentrification to its essential boorishness. Earlier this year, a Torontonian opened a “boozy sandwich shop,” according to the eatery’s Web site, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a neighborhood built on a gentle slope. One might speculate that it was this topography that inspired Becca Brennan, a former attorney and the business’s owner, to name her new establishment Summerhill. One might also surmise that Brennan had reached a bogeyman’s conclusion about the recent demographics of Crown Heights. Last month, Gothamist reported that Brennan had issued a press release featuring a photo of a radioactive-looking cocktail against a dented green wall. “Yes, that bullet hole-ridden wall was originally there, and yes, we’re keeping it,” the release boasted. Brennan’s belief—that the previous renters, bodega proprietors, had operated a clandestine weapons ring in the back of the store—was quickly debunked on social media; on Summerhill’s Instagram, critical comments were deleted quickly after being posted. Soon after, dozens crowded the Summerhill storefront. Several residents, black and white, delivered speeches against the chic colonization of the neighborhood and against the typical defense of the gentrifier—one that conflates ignorance and innocence. One woman, whose eyes bulged with drama, held a sign that read “Bye, Becky!”—a taunt for the thoughtless white woman.

I thought of the Summerhill fiasco while reading “Making Rent in Bed-Stuy,” a melancholic, lyrical new memoir by the filmmaker and critic Brandon Harris. The son of “cashew-colored lower midwestern Negro” stock, Harris officially moved to Brooklyn in 2006, as a debt- and dream-addled film-school graduate; in the book, he responds to the cultural incuriosity of the gentrifying class of which he is undeniably a member. When he and his rich white roommate, Tony, first moved in together, he recalls, they believed that they lived in Clinton Hill, a neighborhood adjacent to Bedford-Stuyvesant with a desegregated chichi that Tony, who shared Harris’s concerns about crime statistics, would have found reassuring. In the book’s hectic opening encounter, a would-be mugger corrects Harris: “Fuck you, fuck you, yella-ass nigga, I’m gonna get y’all mothafucking shit, this is Bed-Stuy bitch.”

Harris’s memoir has a pleasing specificity; you could use it as a gentrification tour guide. Each chapter of “Making Rent” corresponds to an apartment that he occupied from the mid-two-thousands to 2016. The rent for the first, a seventh-floor loft, at 226-41 Taaffe Place, was subsidized by Tony’s parents. (Spoiler: They ended up buying their son the apartment.) In a passage set in 2008, the bar Goodbye Blue Monday (now closed) has a ceiling “busy with trinkets, scavenged streetlights, and paintings of gospel choirs in mid-performance,” and entices all sorts of characters, “from random crusts to Steve Buscemi, who once broke up a fight there while catching a set by his son’s band.” A later wave of gentrification, in 2015, brings with it Citi Bike racks and a “Citi-sponsored ad on Facebook that suggested I use the #Bedstuy hashtag when documenting my Bed-Stuy adventures on Instagram and Twitter!”

Tellingly, Harris describes himself as a “cultural mulatto”—a term coined by Trey Ellis in his manifesto “The New Black Aesthetic,” from 1989, in which Ellis celebrates the “black bourgeoisie boom” that he and his artist friends enjoyed in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties. (As Ellis observes, whereas “hiphop b-boys” would wear “complete Gucci or Louis Vuitton leathers outfits,” his group of “young, black intellectuals, on the other hand, wear little, round glasses, Ghanaian kinte-cloth scarves, and increasingly, tiny, neat dreadlocks.”) Harris, who was raised in a black middle-class embankment in Cincinnati, on Brandonburg Lane—a street that his mother, a demolition-and-construction specialist, named after him—similarly knows how to “swim with niggas and Negroes and mulattos and gringos of varied classes, at ease.” But in “Making Rent,” which sometimes reads like an extended rejoinder to Ellis, Harris suggests that being able to slink between the kinds of activities people regard as “white” or “black” is not always liberating; in fact, the black creative’s experience is often one of dislocation and guilt.

As a Brooklyn native, I’ve noticed that a kind of automatic, civic shame distinguishes the gentrifiers of the aughts from more recent newcomers. Harris, too, has a self-lacerating tendency: “Back then I didn’t give two shits about Bed-Stuy, the community where I was actually living,” he writes. “I did not care to know that Bed-Stuy contained one of the nation’s first free Negro communities in the first half of the nineteenth century, that parts of it had been Harlem before Harlem.” This shame fuels the wry comedy in Harris’s descriptions of what he calls “chic poverty”—including his own past habit of using his welfare payments to buy “D’artagnan duck” and kale for a motley crew of artists, directors, and actors, some struggling, some famous. While his new neighbors in Bed-Stuy are, he perceives, mostly poor and vulnerable, Harris works a litany of sub-minimum-wage jobs—but at film agencies in downtown Manhattan, where rumors fly that someone has “preserved the underwear of Harmony Korine” in a cardboard box.

In his complicated relationship to class, Harris articulates the ache of a certain swath of black millennials—the worry that one’s social life will warp one’s radicalism, or one’s ability to connect with one’s “people.” In his neighborhood, Harris often seems to be reeling from a kind of social vertigo. When he meets Little G., a young teen-ager who becomes his marijuana dealer, he writes, “I couldn’t stop looking at him, probably in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable; he looked so much like me.” While living in an apartment on Kosciuszko Street, Harris and his roommates invite two Haitian teen-agers on the block, Roger and Pierre, to hang out at their apartment. One day, the place is robbed. Among his few valuables, a beloved stack of DVDs is stolen. Later, when Roger and Pierre see Harris on the street, they don’t make eye contact. They know he knows. At moments like this, Bed-Stuy becomes a canvas for Harris’s conscience. Sometimes, Harris’s tendency to see himself at the center of the neighborhood’s machinations is gauche. At one point, toward the end of the book, he describes walking on DeKalb Avenue and encountering a “pair of obese black women in their late teens or early twenties” and their children, all of whom he learns are homeless. “I handed the heavyset women chicken boxes with which to feed their brood,” he writes, “wishing in shame that I could buy them kale, knowing that calories are all that keeps some broken hearts going.”

Harris, a charismatic critic whose prose boasts an appealing, sullen machismo, is perhaps most comfortable when channelling his malaise into research. His colloquial history is welcome at a time when the notion of a historical Bed-Stuy is everywhere threatened. Before the war on drugs and the depressive economic and psychic disorders it wrought, he learns, Bed-Stuy was founded as an “idyll of self-determination.” In 1838, a black dockworker named James Weeks settled a patch of land on what would become the border of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights; seven hundred families of free blacks had their own schools, their own hospitals, and their own baseball team—one of the nation’s first, dolefully called the Weeksville Unknowns. A century later, Lena Horne and Billie Holiday headlined at jazz clubs a stone’s throw from a then-dissolved village. And then there are Bed-Stuy’s modern bards: the Notorious B.I.G., Lil’ Kim, and Jay-Z, whose memoir “Decoded” offers Harris a clue to the nihilism that he perceives in the young men around him: “you see how hip-hop’s prevailing ethos is in line with the perverse economic conservatism of the Reagan years,” he writes, “how the underlying dog-eat-dog mentality of the ‘me generation’ was adopted by society’s most vulnerable citizens.”

For Harris, the young artist, gentrification is not just a historical or social phenomenon; it can be a moral failing. Of all the figures he encounters, he is perhaps unsurprisingly the toughest on Spike Lee—a friend of Ellis who features in “The New Black Aesthetic” and who, with his film “Do the Right Thing,” defined the rambunctious image of Bed-Stuy to the outside world. Lee was once a hero to Harris, and a conduit to an idea of success. In “Making Rent,” Harris describes speaking to Lee twice over the course of nearly a decade. The gap between the idol and the man widens each time, as Harris becomes disillusioned by Lee’s passive liberalism. “What Lee’s remake handles most clumsily is class,” Harris writes, of Lee’s “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus,” a remake of Bill Gunn’s horror masterpiece “Ganja and Hess,” from 1973. “It is as if Lee’s own astronomical wealth has blinded him to its essential meaning.” “Do the Right Thing” is still a great movie, Harris concludes, but its vision of Bed-Stuy was “more like the liberal, middle-class neighborhood where Lee himself grew up: Fort Greene.”