Chapter 17 Lina
LINA
Lina Rodriguez Armstrong had decided to turn Canton Kitchen into a Freedom School.
Every leader and lover of Brownsville who the newspapers had labeled a radical extremist or an anti-Semite, or who’d been fired or quit at the end of the Brownsville decentralization experiment, ended up teaching in the Freedom School.
There was the Decolonize Your Mind evening history class and Music of the People on Saturdays, the arts enrichment after-school program and the Altogether Now Day Care.
Her school gave out Little Red Books and copies of The People’s Voice, along with hot meals, fresh lemonade, toilet paper, and sanitary supplies.
Presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm dropped by one night to offer her blessings.
And so, community control was back in the house—unfunded, unrestricted, off-the-grid: a sweat-equity project.
Her people had so much knowledge they didn’t know they had. They had been told all their lives that their experiences represented nothing but deviations from the true story of American greatness, when in fact they were America, the very foundation of it.
The building still had problems, but her team took maintenance into its own hands: repairing leaky sinks and toilets, sweeping the sidewalk, clearing leaves out of the roof drain.
Her former student June was especially devoted to the school’s success.
She designed a big orange banner that said, brOWNSVILLE FREEDOM SCHOOL, which they hung out the window, though Lina also kept the restaurant’s CHOW MEIN HERE!
sign. It was a good landmark, a way to help people remember her school’s location.
Some people even started calling it the Chow Mein School.
And Lina insisted every visitor touch the red silk knot on the back of the front door—it was the Freedom School’s official good luck charm.
Lina was the founder and organizer, but she was also one of the students.
It was during Mr. Parson’s Decolonize Your Mind seminars that Lina realized the struggle was no longer Black against white.
Now in Brooklyn, you could find Black and Puerto Rican cops and Black and Puerto Rican politicians willing to terrorize their own people.
Community control in Brownsville had devolved into one Black politician’s fiefdom, a quid-pro-quo machine to sugar up a few and disenfranchise the rest, negating everything they’d been trying to do—and all this while the pangs of hunger sharpened, the young men roamed the streets, and the city offered nothing but broken promises.
It had promised to fix the crumbling homes and abandoned buildings, to build new homes and recreation centers and schools, but instead it let the structures rot, bulldozing what remained.
Brownsville residents were tired of the neglect, tired of the fly-swarmed, trash-bag mountains.
A few residents had taken that garbage into their own hands, and how could anyone blame them?
The papers had called it a riot, but it was only after Brownsvillians had made the news for setting fire to their trash that the city had ramped up the garbage collection schedule.
So, the solution wasn’t Black faces in high places: it was time to knock down the whole system. They could look toward Cuba, toward China—proof that the oppressed people of the world could carve their own path.
One Saturday in autumn, after the babies went home from Altogether Now Day Care, a woman and her son hiked up the stairs. Lina was happy to hear shoes tapping on the fresh wood; she and Walter had recently replaced several steps that had sunk like hammocks from age.
“Good afternoon, someone said y’all giving away free meals for the kids?” the woman said with a Midwestern lilt.
Lina had not seen them before. The boy’s crown was no higher than his mother’s waist. When he saw Lina, his lower lip protruded, his eyes narrowed, and he tightened his grip on his mother’s arm as if she was the child.
“I’m Nellie Price and this is Wesley,” she said, her voice high and pineapple sweet. On her curvaceous body, she wore a pink jumpsuit, a cotton sweater, and wide hoop earrings. A crucifix hung from her neck, and her hair blossomed like a black hyacinth, rising nearly a foot into the air.
Here was probably the world’s most beautiful woman, Lina thought to herself—and there, the little boy at her side, the bittersweet evidence that she was already claimed by a man.
“You’ve come to the right place!” Lina said, waving them in. When it turned out there was nothing but a pot of plain rice in the fridge, she returned to the main room and, crouching beside the boy, asked him what he’d like her to cook. Both mother and son seemed embarrassed.
“How about some egg fried rice?” Lina suggested.
“We good with anything—we don’t mean to cause trouble,” Nellie said, tickling the crook of Wesley’s neck.
Lina returned to the kitchen. Inspired by the various pots and sauces that the Wongs had left behind, she’d taken out a book from the public library called The Easy Way to Chinese Cooking.
She was surprised when, a few minutes later, Nellie and Wesley appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Where you buy them sauces? Those are Chinese ingredients?”
“In the city. Got a store on Canal with all this stuff.”
“All right now,” Nellie said. “And I saw the sign that says this is a school. You the principal?”
“This is an alternative school. But you’re the first to call me a principal.” Lina smiled, certain Nellie was not from New York.
“And the books and art supplies out there—it’s nice.”
“Your son can use them! This space belongs to everyone in the community.”
“You hear that, Wesley?” Nellie nudged her son. “Go and look at the books.”
He wouldn’t leave her side, and so she held him and fiddled with his ears. “I’d sure love to put Wesley in your school. I don’t know if you’d accept a new student? They got him at P.S. 183 right now.”
“Our Freedom School’s not a government-sanctioned school. I wish it was. But he can come here after school and on weekends.”
Amused by Nellie’s curiosity, Lina dished the fried rice into two bowls, took them back to the table in the main room, and explained the school’s origin story.
Wesley ate tentatively at first, then rapidly, and Nellie replenished his bowl with spoonfuls from her own.
Instead of eating, she looked around, absorbing the artwork on the walls and the charts outlining the Freedom School’s values and principles.
Then she pushed her bowl toward her son—and, giving his mother a woeful glance, he took it and mowed down the remainder.
Nellie touched Lina’s naked ring finger. “You ain’t married?”
Before Lina had a chance to respond, she continued. “My son has trouble with men who remind him of his dad. That’s why we drove all the way here from Detroit.”
They had been in Brooklyn for nine days, staying with a cousin who lived in Tilden Houses. Nellie didn’t have any skills, or so she claimed, and didn’t have a clue what she’d do about a job. “Well, I can do hair, but that’s about it.”
They stayed for the Decolonize Your Mind seminar that evening.
The multigenerational group of students sat on chairs rescued from dumpsters, discussing The Black Woman.
To Lina’s surprise, it was the boldest ideas that captivated Nellie the most, that prompted her to hum in agreement, as if beneath her pretty exterior, her girlish sweetness, there was already a militant guerrilla ready to deploy for battle.
“I get what this lady Miss Kay Lindsey is writing,” Nellie said at one point. “I used to be like most girls, thinking I needed a man to come save me, you know, ‘a woman ain’t nothing without her man.’ But I don’t think I need men no more.”
Nellie had barely finished speaking when they all heard a loud clatter from down the hall. Lina ran to the bathroom and found that half the ceiling had collapsed, raining chunks of plaster on the toilet and on the sink counter. “Shit shit shit.” The others hurried over to survey the damage.
Mr. Eugene shook his head. “The hell with paying rent for these conditions.”
After the seminar finished, Nellie and her son lingered, helping Lina sweep up the plaster and tape bags to the ceiling.
“I hope all this craziness tonight don’t keep y’all from coming back.”
“Oh Lord, we love craziness. We fit right in,” Nellie replied.
Lina laughed. Watching that long-limbed woman crouch on the floor with the dustpan in one hand and the splintering floor brush in the other, Lina wanted nothing more than to pull Nellie’s body against her own and kiss her with a passion that no man on earth had ever felt or offered.
Instead, she saw them off to the door, handing Nellie her only umbrella and a container with the remaining fried rice.
Lina came up with the idea of designating a corner of the Freedom School as Nellie’s salon.
The services would have to be free of charge, but it would be a way for Nellie to build her name in the neighborhood.
Nellie called it Mother Natural Salon, and she did hair, but also skin and nails.
As she was always discovering coats and skirts laid out on the fences in other Brooklyn neighborhoods, she also built up an attractive rack of clothes that she shared with any visitor in need of a new outfit.
She groomed mailwomen, bus drivers, and men living on the streets, and soon she had a steady crop of visitors, all of them drawn as much by her sense of style as by the tenderness of her nimble fingers.