Chapter 11 Lina
LINA
Halloween in Brownsville brought the two-tone moan of ambulance sirens. The taste of weak coffee in the Brookdale cafeteria. Blue scrubs. White coats. Smell of antiseptic hallways, squeak of wheels on linoleum, mothers’ screams, machines beeping. Memories.
Lina caught it and bellowed into the speaker piece.
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Miss, your father’s been shot.”
“Shot! Who shot him?”
“Your old man got into a fight down at the longshoreman’s pub here on West Thirty-Fifth. He’s in the Mount Sinai ER.”
Lina had been too outraged to grieve. The next day, she went down to the docks, and a friend of her father’s pulled her aside and told her the police had done it.
A white worker had disrespected her father, and her daddy had stood up for himself, and then the white worker had come at him with his fists and her father had fought back—and so the police had grabbed and shot him.
Since that night, she’d been to the hospital dozens of times, often for what the newspapers would have called “Black on Black” crime.
To her, it was more of the same. When the system starved a man of hope, they made him hungry enough to kill his own brother.
This year, Kesi, her former student’s grandson, had shot Andre, a member of BYTE, and then Andre’s friend T.
P. had retaliated, put a bullet in Kesi’s thigh.
Not enough had changed since 1955, and it broke her heart every day.
Tyrell was there all night too. He knew how much she hated hospitals, so at daybreak, he called a car and sent her home to get some rest.
Strange, then, to wake up from an hour of shut-eye and see an email from a different world.
Bewildered, she read it several times.
Dear Ms. Lina Rodriguez Armstrong,
I hope you are well. This is Jean Bernard, the CEO of Bernard and Company, and I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance at the community visioning session convened by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development on Saturday, September 27.
I am reaching out regarding your vision for the vacant property at Livonia Avenue near Saratoga Street.
We learned about your proposal from New Gotham’s coverage, and Olivia McIntosh was kind enough to offer me your email address.
Our company, Bernard & Co., has a longstanding interest in the site, and with the city to release an RFP this month, we are eager to benefit from your insight and historical knowledge of the area.
We would like to invite you to our Water Street offices in the Financial District to discuss a potential partnership. Please let us know when might be a good time that we can sit down with you and discuss a collaboration.
My regards,
Jean Bernard
Bernard & Co., CEO
“Thank you, but no thank you,” Lina said to the screen.
She had Trevor LDC, a Black-owned construction firm.
She had Brownsvillians ready to establish the Wesley Price Community Land Trust tripartite board.
She had dance teachers, spoken-word artists, and LGBTQ mentors.
Why would she need Bernard & Co.? No—Bernard & Co.
needed her to check off the “community engagement” box on the application.
But Lina stopped herself from writing back. With age, she’d become less impulsive. Less decisive. What would HPD say if she turned down a partnership with one of the city’s favorite developers?
She knocked on the Scott family door, then wondered if Tyrell was still at the hospital, or if he’d finally returned and conked out. By four a.m., the doctors had pronounced Andre dead, while Kesi was expected to spend three days in the ICU.
But Tyrell reached the front door before his cousin or his aunt. With his bleary eyes and concave cheeks, he looked ten years older than he should have.
“Papi, you burning yourself out. Again. Don’t you got that shift at Best Buy this afternoon?”
He shrugged.
“What time you got home?”
“Like an hour ago.”
Irritably, he tore down the witch decal that his cousin had taped to the door.
“Can we get rid of Halloween?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe. “Just give the kids candy on Thanksgiving.”
Lina sighed. “Come over, I’ll make you breakfast. You got to look at something for me.”
He followed her, sat down at her computer, and read the email while she scrambled eggs.
“You ever thought about a joint venture?”
“Young man, what’s a joint venture?”
“A partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit. Maybe you could partner with this Bernard guy and get your plan done.”
“We working with Trevor’s construction company.”
“Yeah… last time I checked, Trevor’s company don’t got the balance sheet for a winning deal. Sometimes there’s got to be compromises.”
“Give the project to a real estate tycoon? That’s not the right compromise, Ty.”
“Well, at least we go meet with them.”
Lina frowned, but she considered his point.
“You’re a practical kid.” She handed him a plate of eggs and sausage. “Let’s ask the CLT steering committee during Sunday’s meeting.”
“Oh, Ms. Lina—you know Sadie, the reporter? She wants to write a piece about the history of the lot.”
Lina lowered herself into her favorite chair and shook her head. “That reporter don’t look a day over fifteen. I want to know how a child like her gets a job writing about the ’Ville.”
“I thought you liked the piece about Family Day.”
“She did good. That article she wrote about you was nice too. I’m just saying. We got our young adults in the high-security hamster wheel, and we got children like her deciding our reputations and our futures. I’m talking about who gets to tell our stories.”
“She all right, though, Ms. Lina.” His mouth was full of egg. “She grew up in Park Slope but she did her homework. She actually cares about Brownsville.”
Lina looked over at Ty, and she noticed an unusual brightness to his eyes.
“What’s that smile on your face?”
“Huh?”
“That smile? We talking about that reporter and suddenly, you smiling.”
“Yo.” Ty smushed his face with his hands as if he was wiping it clean, then raised his arms into the air. “I ain’t smiling.”
“What happened to you and Katrina? You ain’t mentioned her name in a while.”
“Katrina probably thinks I don’t make enough green.”
“And so you’re going after the reporter who thinks you’re a big shot.”
“Ms. Lina!” he yelped, and to his own advantage he was too dark to blush, but she could still make out the embarrassment in the bulge of his eyes. “Ms. Lina, I ain’t going after…”
“You better be careful what you say to Miss Sadie,” she warned.
The CLT steering committee was divided on the matter.
Ms. Dorothy Peters and Ms. Keesha Jones were on Lina’s side, skeptical of a partnership with Bernard & Co.
, but Mr. Alvin Banks and Ms. Cynthia Garcia thought a Bernard & Co.
joint venture might be the only path forward.
It was Ms. Freda Simmons, like usual, who nimbly brokered a compromise: Lina and Tyrell would agree to the meeting, with the intention to report back to the committee what they’d learned.
In addition, under no circumstances would they accept a deal that significantly diverged from the CLT’s vision.
The following week, Lina and Tyrell took an Access-A-Ride to Manhattan. Lina hated Access-A-Ride. Car rides made her sick, and Access-A-Ride was always late. She loved the subway, but it had become difficult to climb the stairs of the El.
They moved like a tortoise through the traffic, Lina sucking on a ginger candy and Tyrell cracking his knuckles.
They passed that new spaceship–roller coaster of a basketball stadium and all the construction sites downtown, and also that hipster bakery on Flatbush where her former student June—now a lawyer at the New York State Attorney General’s office—had treated her to a blueberry muffin.
What a difference this was from the old days when city hall wanted to wipe half of Brooklyn off the map.
Now rent was sky-high, and all the Black folks were moving to Atlanta.
It made sense: What’s the point of paying two thousand dollars for a two-bedroom when the kids still get shot on the street?
Nellie, had she been alive, would have said something like that.
Nellie had possessed none of Lina’s loyalty to place.
Lina’s loyalty to place had ruined Nellie’s life—at least this was the thought that still haunted her, some thirty years later.
Maybe it had all started with her mother’s prayers.
It had seemed a miracle when, less than a year after their father’s death, they’d won the lottery for Van Dyke Houses.
At the time, Van Dyke had new appliances and not a single piece of litter in the courtyard.
Lina still remembered their first Sunday service at Our Lady of the Presentation, her mother whispering, Gracias Dios, gracias por responder mis oraciones.
Even years after Lina had left the church, she would still believe Brownsville was God’s answer.
And then, how quickly Brownsville had made Lina its beloved.
In her teenage years, as soon as she’d step outside, all the younger kids would run across the concrete to fling their arms around her waist and press their gap-toothed faces into her stomach.
Sometimes she’d walk around with those children clinging to her like one big octopus in blue jeans.
They’d loved her because she was not afraid to stand up to bullies or to fight for the boys who the others called maricones, and also, because of the art activities.
In the winters, she’d taught them to make ice spaceships, and in the summers, go-carts with wood planks from the lumberyard on Livonia.
Later, she’d become an art teacher at J.H.S.
271, which had led to Mr. Parson, which had led to the Freedom School and everything that followed—everything that, decades later, had her now stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge, trying not to vomit that morning’s oatmeal.