The crisp wind seeped through our jackets. It was a cold night—the type of cold that paralyzes your fingers and numbs your body. With our heads to the ground, hiding from the wind, the nine of us tugged along our cakes—the product of Sibella’s birthday celebration—and began the walk to my house. Sibella had turned eighteen and being Sibella, she didn’t want to celebrate her deliverance to adulthood in a normal way. She had invited us all to a place in Williamsburg where we layered and decorated cakes, an activity popular amongst the elderly and moms. We said goodbye to the girls, who left Williamsburg and went back to Dobbs, and we were beginning to miss their warmth. But it wasn’t long before the cold had erased the memory of the night and became our only thought.
We began our walk after I went into some hippy bar to pee. Cian was going on about how much Williamsburg had changed since his parents lived there in the ‘80s. Of course, he wasn’t alive then—none of us were—he was relaying only what his parents had told him. However, from what I have seen, in my lifetime, there is truth to this. Williamsburg has changed along with the rest of Brooklyn. In some ways Brooklyn has morphed into the New World— a place for ambitious youth searching for opportunity, believers in an American Dream, displacing natives at their leisure. I have said that I don’t have many friends in my neighborhood. What I mean is, I don’t have many friends in my neighborhood, anymore. They’ve all sold their homes or have been forced out of them and have moved deeper into Brooklyn, mostly Brownsville, the twenty-first century reservation, or have moved south, retracing their ancestors’ footsteps.
Gavin noticed there were many restaurants with awnings that had no names. He also wondered why there were so many shoes hanging from the telephone cables, suspended above the street. A bus pulled up and stopped directly under a pair of Jordan’s. “Someone really threw a pair of Jordan’s away! That’s so wasteful, we could actually climb up on the bus and get them down, if only it wasn’t so cold.” He made a good point; his fingers would never get a good grip in this weather.
Throughout the walk it became hard to text and everyone kept asking how far away my house was. But this was all my fault. Earlier, I had lied to my friends and told them the walk would only take around twenty-five minutes, knowing full well it would be over an hour. The trains in Williamsburg suck and I like walking; I didn’t see another option. Every time they asked how much farther, I would say, “Just a few more blocks.”
The cold affected us in different ways. It motivated some of us to walk faster, leaving behind those who felt compelled to walk slower. Cian, Shomari, and I walked in the front. Wesley, Khyle, and Sherman were somewhat in the middle. And Josh, Gavin, and Jasandeep trailed in the back. Women with shaved heads, men with long hair, people dressed like it was the middle of summer, dogs wearing superhero-themed clothing—this was a vibrant place. It was nighttime but the streets were colorful, radiating a soft glow of life.
We approached a section of Williamsburg I recognized by the contrasting cultural bubble surrounding it. I had told my friends that this part of Williamsburg was inhabited entirely by Hasidic Jews. But I had only driven through these parts—I’d never walked. “Yo, guys this is it. This is the Jewish neighborhood.” We arranged ourselves into one jumbled pack and crossed the street. As we crossed the street, we were greeted with an unfamiliar taste in the air. It was like waking up to an unknown smell; we weren't lost but we weren’t sure where we were, either.
Sherman, being a Jew, talked about how Jews were a religious minority but how living here would make that fact irrelevant. I confessed that I had been in private schools my whole life, surrounded by many Jews. My preschool was in a synagogue; I even had my first kiss at my best friend’s bar mitzvah. I knew what a Tallit was and knew all the Jewish holidays that warranted a day off. My neighborhood even had its own Jewish community. As I walked down these streets, I was amazed by how secluded this community was, but also how familiar.
Everyone was dressed in black and white. It was still Brooklyn, cars drove by and traffic flowed, but the streets had been carved out of the city’s possession and wore a sign that might as well have said, “Jews only.” The buses, the stores, the ambulances, the people, everything was immersed in Judaism and transcribed in Hebrew. Everyone wore the same thing and from a distance they were all indistinguishable. Men strolled the streets with their Tallits concealed under their long coats. Jewish women accompanied by their many children filled the streets with joy and laughter. It was almost midnight, yet the kids ran down the street—some on scooters. “This is really crazy, do these kids not have bedtimes?” Shomari asked. Their willingness to stay up was ironic; all we wanted was sleep. We walked peacefully, admiring the Jewish people who clenched their belongings and tightened their jaws as they passed us. By our clothes, by some of our skin tones, by all standards—really—we were outsiders, invading an ideology beyond our comprehension.
“You know man, us black people don’t do things like this,” Josh said. He continued, “We don’t help out black businesses. These Jews really came here or maybe were forced here, but made their own kingdom, by supporting one another.”
“Why can’t black people do the same? Is it institutional?” Cian asked. It wasn’t a question any of us could clearly answer. We had ideas and things we imagined that could make sense but nothing concise that we could articulate. In a way we felt cheated. Our parents had all spent a lot of money on our education but that all seemed useless, now. There was nothing we learned in our math classes or even in our history classes that could tell us why black people couldn’t create their own thriving community. For a while, we were all sad. Sad that we didn’t know but more sad that we had never been told.
After a while Shomari broke the silence, “What if we did something like this? What if we managed to all get good jobs, make a lot of money, and create our own community?” he asked. His tone sounded hopeful as if it intended to remove the pall above us. Regardless, it was a sentiment we could all feel, the passage of time traveling with the brisk wind and our inability to slow it down. Time didn’t mean much to these people; they always had each other; they always helped each other.
As the blocks went on, more brown faces appeared on the street. We welcomed our assimilation back into the city and fell back into our roles. We stopped looking around and narrowed in on the thought of reaching home. We’d all been in boarding school for too long; going to a home was special. We spread ourselves back into clusters stretching along the block. Every now and then a few of us would find ourselves more than a block away from the rest of the group and run up to the rest of them. The cold still led us with a growing sense of urgency.
By the time we finally reached my house, we held our cakes loosely above the ground. To our surprise, my parents were wide awake, awaiting our arrival. They greeted my friends and listened to our stories in amazement. They had both walked through this neighborhood countless times but pretended they hadn’t. They even had pasta, already made, that we ate graciously. We played video games for a little bit and eventually went to sleep.
In bed, I tried to organize my thoughts. I wanted to explore the notion of blacks’ inability to foster self-sustaining communities. After a while I gave up and opened my computer. I googled Why can Jews circulate money in their community better than blacks can? I scrolled through the results which mostly had nothing to do with what I needed, some crap about five-hundred years of persecution and more crap about blacks’ net worth. Eventually I came across something called “The Crown Heights Riots.”
I was instantly intrigued; I live in Crown Heights—how did I not know there were riots? Why didn’t anyone tell me? I clicked on the link, which directed me to the event’s Wikipedia page. Crown Heights had its own Hasidic population, something I knew, and over the years they created their own community as well. In 1991 a local Jewish leader unintentionally ran over two seven-year-olds, both black. The two kids, the son of a Guyanese immigrant and his cousin, were playing on the sidewalk. It was rumored that the Jewish man was on his phone when he lost control of his vehicle and slammed into the sidewalk. Immediately after the accident, approximately four men, whose races weren’t mentioned, removed the man from his vehicle and began to beat him up, while others tried to free the kids who were pinned down. Moments later, a private Jewish ambulance came and rushed the Jewish man to the hospital. He was taken away from the scene before the two children were freed, one of whom was later proclaimed dead. The blacks in the community were enraged and blamed the private ambulance’s unwillingness to help a non-Jew for the death of the boy, a seven-year-old. There were no answers. I closed my computer and tried to sleep.