PHOTOS: Racial Realities and Bed Stuy Memories

Four weeks into teaching the CBBG class Racial Realities: Writing About Race in the First Person, which explored what I call the “originality of origin” through fiction, memoir, oral history, and essays that reflect experiences of race and identity, I had writer and radio DJ Ed German come and speak to the students. As it turned out, it was not Mr. German’s first invitation to the Brooklyn Historical Society as a storyteller; he had been a featured narrator in BHS's exhibition In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans back in 2007.

This time around, I’d invited him to discuss his self-published memoir, Deep Down in Brooklyn, about growing up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant in the 1950s, which I had discovered at Greenlight Bookstore about a year ago and loved. I’d included excerpts from the memoir in the section of the syllabus called "Race and Place: Cities, Streets and Neighborhoods," where students read and wrote about the way racial dynamics can tell the story of a place, using Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a theoretical backdrop. Like the other writers included in this section (Anna Deveare Smith, Joseph Mitchell, and Fay Chiang to name a few), Mr. German’s memoir is concerned with what Benjamin calls the “projection of the historical into the intimate,” and is a work of both history and literature.

When Mr. German came to speak to our class, I noticed he had the book selections he wanted to read listed on a track list sheet from his radio show on 88.3 FM "Friday Night Soul.” Mr. German's stories very specifically document a time and place, and, like songs, they have a way of sticking in your head once you've heard them, as if his memories of Bed Stuy in the Fifties were your own:

I'm four years old and Dad's watching Charlie Chan on the dim black and white television but I don't understand Charlie Chan's moustache and goatee, so I think he's got chocolate all over his mouth, the way the white kids upstairs have when they're eating Fudgsicles.

We're the first Black kids on the block and most of our friends are Jewish. My brother Ronnie, born in 1945, is the oldest. His friends are Jackie Levine, Stewie Schwartz, a red-haired kid named Sidney, a tall kid named Michael Peltz, who wears huge, black, wing-tip Cordovans, and stands at the front of 660 Willoughby, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. They all wear yarmulkes. I'm friends with Hashie, Little Stewie, Howie, Lois and Susan Roth, and Betty Kivens, whose older brother Robbie is also a friend of Ronnie's.

There are five candy stores within one-block walking distance, and Doc's drugstore on the corner also has a soda fountain with ice cream and candy, Sussman's on Throop Avenue, Ida's on the corner of Hart Street and Throop where the teenagers hang out, Buddy's on Throop, which sometimes has roaches in it so you only buy comics and tops and yo-yos, Sonny's on Willoughby near Sumner Avenue, also where teenagers hang out, and Phil's on Sumner near Hart Street. They all serve seltzer and make chocolate and vanilla egg creams. There's a commercial on TV about Bonomo's Turkish Taffy that goes: “B-O, M-O, Bono-mo, Oh, Oh, Oh/ It's Bonomo's . . . Candy!”

We get our Bonomo's Turkish Taffy from Sussman's. When we walk into Sussman's, he or his wife says, “Vaddah ya vont?” Not "May I help you" or “Can I help you?” Always, Vaddah ya vont? Mr. Sussman's first name is Isidore and his wife, Mrs. Sussman, has numbers tattooed on her arm. We see Jewish people with numbers tattooed on their arms often while growing up in Brooklyn.

There's a man for everything. The milkman, the garbage man, the rag man, the junk man, the White Horse bleach man, the ice cream man, the ices man, the knife-sharpening man, the watermelon man, the peanut man, the knish man, the seltzer man and the soda man... The watermelon man is Black and drives a horse-drawn cart and hollers, “Wardee meh, wardee meh, wardee meh-lone.” When the bleach man comes through, he only yells one word: Bleach! And that's all. We have the same bleach man for over 25 years. He goes all over Brooklyn... The seltzer man is Jewish and when he comes through the block he just yells one word really loud from his truck, “SELTZER!” And that's all. He doesn't ever say anything else.

The cellar smells like piles of black coal and the red-hot coal that's burning in the furnace. It smells like warm asbestos and heat and steam that comes from a huge boiler, and stuff that's old and not wanted anymore. It smells like iron and copper and puddles of dark, dusty water. Sometimes it smells like the hair of a dirty, wet dog, except when you get closer to our apartment in the back, when you can smell Ma's cooking and Dad's cigarettes. When you open the door to our place, the bathroom is directly in front and Dad might be finishing up shaving, and rinsing out his shaving brush, and putting it back in its cup, and you can smell his soapy warm face. If it's early evening, Ma might be cooking tripe, and you can smell the crushed red pepper in it. Or maybe boiling freshly killed chickens and you can smell their feathers loosen up in the hot water. Or she might have big fish heads simmering under salt and pepper and onions and gravy. Ma and Dad and Grandma get discarded fish heads from the fish market on Dekalb Avenue for little or sometimes nothing, and eat them with rice and they suck the eyes out of the fish head sockets and chew all the juice and spices from the fish skulls. On an early Saturday afternoon you can smell peanuts being roasted in a pan. Dad buys them raw and roasts them in the oven and eats them while he’s watching television. Sometimes he buys green peanuts and boils them in salted water. Dad is from Savannah, where on a Friday or Saturday night you see men standing on the corners after work, eating peanuts and drinking liquor.

Students read selections from the memoir before Mr. German came to speak to them; but, of course, hearing these stories told live was an entirely different experience. As he read from the pages listed on the track list, he’d frequently interrupt himself to imitate the voices or get up and act out the scene or tell another story that he was suddenly reminded of. We were all mesmerized by his ability to vividly recall the smallest details from his childhood; one student pointed out that beyond the visual memory was the musical memory—many of the reminiscences came with a song. One such story, from when Mr. German was ten, had the students particularly interested:

One day in 1960, I’m sitting in Aiken’s Barbershop waiting my turn in the chair and the jukebox is playing. There’s a man singing in a West Indian accent: Oh my friend it’s easy to tell/ A white man's heaven is a Black man's hell. I'd never heard anything like that and I start looking around and feel relieved that there’s no white people in here to hear this song, because I would be embarrassed for them and ashamed for myself.

But when Mr. German told us this story, he sang the lyric. Twice:

Oh my friend it’s easy to tell/ A white man's heaven is a Black man's hell

Oh my friend it’s easy to tell/ A white man's heaven is a Black man's hell

Going on to say: “As it turns out, that song was actually by Louis Farrakhan, who a lot of people don't know used to be a Calypso singer.”

Students wanted to know, why would he be embarrassed or ashamed, what did he mean by that?

“I understood what the song meant and why it would say that, that in a white man's heaven white men would have everything and Black men would have nothing, but I had never heard anything like that before. Don’t forget, it was only 1960!” Which leads him to a story, also featured in the book, about when he got a little older and began to embrace the Sixties:

When Afro styles come out there are times when Dad reaches into his wallet without saying a word, and extends out his hand holding a $5 bill.

Here, Mr. German reached into his back pocket and mimed pulling out his wallet and from it, a thin bill, which he waved between his fingers,

“What's this for, Dad?”

He waved the imaginary bill again bellowing out in the loud, chiding voice of his father:

“Go over to Blue's and get a haircut!” The class broke out into laughter.

Mr. German went onto describe for us the experience of going back to his old block in Bed Stuy to take photos for the memoir. The feeling of going down to the apartment at the back of the cellar at 671 Willoughby Avenue, where his family lived in the 1950s, and seeing the poles he and his siblings would grab onto while they rollerskated around the house. The strangeness of being there in that cellar, now without his brothers and sisters, as he recalled a moment in the apartment when his father told him he was 39, and here Ed German was, 60, and the only one of his family still living in New York, now visiting a present-day Brooklyn with many of the same buildings, yes, but not one familiar face or business. How could it be?

We held our last Racial Realities class May 4, and this past Sunday we had a class picnic in Prospect Park. I kept calling it our “macabre picnic” as thunder and dark clouds rolled in over Prospect Park West, forcing us to gather our things and dart over Grand Army Plaza as the rain came down in buckets. In a coffee shop on Vanderbilt, I got to talking to one of the students about Ed German again. We agreed that his book could be seen as a sort-of how-to-write guide, not just for its excavational approach to writing, leaving no detail unturned, but for the urgent emotion those details capture. It's from that felt sense of loss, necessity, and love that Mr. German wrote the astounding Deep Down in Brooklyn. So goes the book’s dedication:

This story is about people and times and places that meant a lot to a lot of people, who aren’t here to tell it today.

Stay tuned for writing from Racial Realities students on the CBBG site in the coming weeks!