Chapter 13 Sadie & Lina
SADIE & LINA
With the ribs of her umbrella cracked inside-out, Sadie hurried from the Rockaway Avenue station to Ms. Lina’s apartment in Brownsville Houses.
There were few people on the street other than herself, just one guy dashing home, clutching a box of Tony’s Pizza in one hand and using a newspaper to shield his hair with the other.
She thought of Ngen Ngen’s fear of rain—how even if it was only mildly drizzling, her grandmother would call and urge them to cancel all their plans and stay home.
Sadie had always brushed off Ngen Ngen’s paranoia, but now, in her unpadded jacket, she felt like she just might go home ill.
A woman pushing a baby in a stroller rolled up the wheelchair ramp and, without bothering to pull out a key or buzz the intercom, pushed through the door into the building, the lock apparently broken.
“Is this for real?” the woman groaned, poking a dull elevator button. “I thought they fixed it.” She hoisted her toddler onto her hip and looked at Sadie pleadingly, who obliged by carrying the stroller to the fifth floor.
It was only one more floor to Ms. Lina’s. She heard trash falling down the shoot, smelled cat litter. Most of the doors on floor six were missing their apartment letters, but one door looked different from the others—painted green, with pink polka dots and frog silhouettes. Sadie rang the bell.
“That’s our girl,” she heard Tyrell say.
She blushed.
When she’d proposed writing an article about the history of the lot, Tyrell had settled the time, date, and place of the meeting with Ms. Lina, inviting himself.
She liked to imagine that, once the interview was over, he’d insist on walking her to the station.
Or maybe he’d invite her back to his apartment, urge her to break the first rule of journalism.
Tyrell opened the door, the left side of his mouth curling into a half smile. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt, and she found herself aroused by the sight of the fabric clinging to his lean frame.
“Sadie, what’s up.”
“Thanks so much for having me over. I’m sorry I’m late, I was—”
She stopped mid-speech.
A mural spanned from one end of the living room to the other. It brimmed with human faces, iguanas, hibiscus flowers, and avocados, all popping with color. On the wall next to the mural, there were posters of Black and brown heroines: Mother Gaston. Shirley Chisholm. Sylvia Rivera.
“Ms. Lina was an art teacher,” Tyrell said as Sadie marveled.
“I always tell this to the young people: when you can’t do anything about the outside, you care for the inside.”
Prior to this, Sadie had only seen her on the street, hobbling with a cane, but here in her own home, her own chair, she looked like commander in chief.
“Put that wet coat on the radiator and sit down,” Ms. Lina added. “They’ve got the heat on.”
Sadie nodded and took a seat on the couch, and Tyrell sat down beside her. She withdrew a notebook with a list of questions she’d prepared. Yet before she could ask one, Ms. Lina folded her hands on her lap and began speaking.
“Miss Sadie, if you’re going to write a feature about 78 Livonia, I have some things you need to understand.
” She nodded at the mural. “It took ten years, but I fought until I got NYCHA to okay that mural. I designed and supervised it, but it’s my former students who painted it. I want you to look closer.”
Sadie turned around and peered at it.
“These are my ancestors,” Ms. Lina said, nodding at the figures on the left.
“My people are Taíno and Yoruba. The enslavers, the conquistadores, displaced them from their homelands. And even when that ended, the cycle continued.” Ms. Lina stood slowly, grabbed her cane, and crossed over to the mural.
She touched its surface with her pointer finger.
“Uncle Sam forced my mother’s people from their farms to San Juan, then from San Juan to Nueva York.
My father’s people, from Nigeria to Carolina to Harlem.
And I’m not only talking about my family, I’m talking about millions of families, Black and Boricua families.
We’re healing from generations of root shock. ”
Sadie nodded, hoping some of this related back to the history of the Livonia Avenue lot.
“Oh, so you heard that term before, Miss Sadie? Root shock?”
“Not… not really.”
“There’s root shock in both the Native community and the Black community.”
“And these new families, they got root shock on steroids.” Tyrell sighed, leaning his head back on the palms of his hands.
“Brownsville is the last neighborhood people can actually afford. And hundreds of families are coming here every month ’cause they been pushed out of Bed-Stuy, Fort Greene, Crown Heights. ”
“And now folks are getting gentrified out of Brownsville,” said Ms. Lina. “We made Brownsville livable again and now they want to take it back.”
Sadie was surprised. People usually referred to Brownsville as the one part of Brooklyn immune to gentrification. That, after all, was why she’d been so interested in the job.
“Have you seen any white people living in Brownsville?” Sadie asked Ms. Lina, trying to say “white people” as casually as possible.
“Oh, all the time. I don’t have a problem with them.
” Ms. Lina shrugged. “The problem is, people look around and they think, ‘Oh, Brooklyn has changed,’ but nothing’s changed.
Land is still money. Fifty years ago, they made money by keeping our people trapped in the cities, and now they make money by forcing us out.
An investment game, same as always. They say the city is more integrated, but I don’t see Black people, Puerto Ricans moving to Brooklyn Heights. ”
Sadie once again turned to the questions in her notebook. Ms. Lina had another appointment at six o’clock, and they had agreed upon an hour-long meeting. With ten minutes wasted in the courtyard and another ten discussing the mural, Sadie was anxious.
“Ms. Lina, the proposal mentions there was a fire that burned down the building at 78 Livonia Avenue. Would you be willing…”
“We’ll get to the fire, Miss Sadie. Look, there’s a reason I’m telling you this. This is why we don’t need mega-developers building up Livonia. This land should belong to the survivors of root shock. It’s not much we’re asking for.”
“How… uh,” Sadie hesitated. “How would you counter the argument that larger developers have better access to financing for complex projects than grassroots groups? The city gets more bang for the buck working with big developers, don’t they?”
This was the question that her editor, Wendy, had asked Sadie earlier that fall when she’d first written about Ms. Lina’s plan.
Tyrell nodded and sat up, his hands on his knees, his eyebrows rising with sudden seriousness. Ms. Lina prodded the inside of her cheek with her tongue and sighed.
“Where are your people from, Miss Sadie?” Ms. Lina looked at her intently.
Sadie was caught off guard.
“She’s half Chinese and half Jewish,” Tyrell volunteered. “Her family used to live in Brownsville. Didn’t you say they ran—”
“A laundromat, yes.”
Ms. Lina’s eyes lingered on her. Sadie didn’t know why she had lied.
Ms. Lina nodded slowly. “Well, you need to know your ancestors. Because you’re the product of their dreams. And that’s my answer to your question—I know it won’t make sense to you now.”
Sadie wasn’t sure what to say. It was true she didn’t know much about her ancestors. She’d always wanted to know more. And that’s why she’d come to Ms. Lina, but what if the truth was shameful?
“Does NYCHA want to bake us to death? Let me crack the window,” Ms. Lina said, rising to her feet. “Y’all want anything to drink?”
Rule number two: don’t accept gifts from sources, not even beverages. Tyrell, however, insisted that Lina pour them each a glass of “that Spanish drink.”
“Papi! Don’t say ‘that Spanish drink,’ ” Ms. Lina replied as she shuffled away. “Horchata de ajonjolí!”
“Horchata! My bad.” He held his hands up in a gesture of surrender.
Tyrell and Sadie were alone then, the radiator gurgling, an old Smokey Robinson tape playing softly on the boom box. She could smell the mint gum in Tyrell’s cheek, his natural sweat, and a layering of cucumber-scented detergent.
“Everyone in the ’Ville loves Ms. Lina’s horchata,” Tyrell said, turning to face her with his elbow resting on the back of the couch.
“I guess I should try it.”
“I was at this leadership training last week and this white professor was trying to get me to say Latinx,” he said, one eyebrow raised. “Said I was being disrespectful saying ‘Spanish people.’ That’s what you say, Latinx? That’s what they teach the kids at Yale?”
His voice sounded different from before—so fast and light on the consonants that she wanted to slip into the stream of it.
“Oh,” she stuttered. “I… I guess my professors would say Latino, Latina. I feel like it’s more recently that I hear Latinx. Like so we don’t have to gender everything and everyone, you know?”
“I was talking to Ricky—Ricky’s Dominican. And he was like, ‘Don’t come around me with those new fancy words, telling me I’m Latinx. Ain’t no ‘x’ sound in Espanol, and I ain’t never been Latinx until today.’ ”
“What does Ms. Lina say?”
“I guess she likes me to be specific. Boricua. But the thing that gets me is when these academics make it sound like Ricky is stupid for preferring the thing he always used. I’ve thought about going back, but then I’m like, what can they teach me that I don’t already know about my people?”
She nodded. Was he telling her all this because he wanted her to see him as her equal? Mostly she agreed with him, but a part of her resisted this reduction of her hard work in school. She was embarrassed of this part.
Tyrell bent over and picked something up from the floor. Her hat, she realized. Placed it on her thigh. The soft crochet touched her like a hand.