As David K. is bringing me into his apartment building, the key sticks in the front door lock, and no amount of shaking or jiggling will get it open. “Oh man, stuck again? This be happening,” he sighs. “Hold on, I'm going to get somebody to buzz us.” When he pushes a neighbor's intercom button, they immediately let us in. It's these kinds of long-term (though not always particularly close) relationships built on trust that help us succeed in an imperfect environment and that also sometimes let us change that environment thorough collective action. To build these kinds of relationships, places that allow us enduring conversations are critical; these conversations happen within our ordinary spaces but also transcend them—and transform the way we think of a donut shop or the back room of an electronics store.
Neville's Brooklyn neighborhood tour was made up of men's friendships and the sites of men's rituals that have sustained him over time; yet when we walked, these places and what they fostered were beginning to fade. Tewolde's long-term relationships helped him build a stable Eritrean community in Oakland—a community that formed the basis for his long-term political organizing for Eritrean independence as well as the customer base for the restaurant his sister and he later opened. Enduring talk in places where people met over time fostered a rich social capital for many of my tour guides, offering both a social support that allows them to get by and sometimes also the social leverage that helps them get ahead—such as when Mike offers a local kid a job and starts training him how to cook.
The enduring talk not only serves the creation of community trying to grow in a new place but also can be particularly potent for navigating a diaspora, and creating something new. It's a way to acknowledge that place is never simple, no matter what pseudohistories of homogeneity people like to invent; as geographer Doreen Massey writes, a global sense is central to the essence of place.1 Almost every place has at some point had a global migration story that has shaped it.
Migration changes place and changes the people and cultures that migrate to a place, creating something new, culturally distinct. As Stuart Hall writes, “The diaspora is a place where traditions operate but are not closed, where the Black experience is historically and culturally distinctive but not the same as it was before.” 2 Marty, who'd grown up in Mosswood in the 1940s and 1950s, remembered that Oakland's Thirty-Third Street was once called “Shreveport” because, as he said, “there was a lot of Shreveport northern Louisiana Black folks there”—echoing historian of the Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson, who describes Oakland of the early 1950s as “a satellite of colored Louisiana.” 3
One of the many things those folks had brought with them on that two-thousand-mile journey was barbeque—and once in Oakland, that tradition was very clearly “not the same as it was before.” In her eloquent blog posts about her family business, Everett and Jones Barbeque, Shirley Everett-Dicko explains Oakland-style barbeque's “secret recipe”: “Take a southern, restaurant-owning pastor, a preacher's wife, some traditional African-American southern soul food, add some West Coast Blues, mix in a Black Power Movement, season it with the scars from urban removal, mix it all together, smoke it over oak wood inside a mason-built brick pit; add a sweet, spicy tomato-base barbeque sauce and there you have it. It's Hella Bay!” 4
This new creation, this infinitely creative reinvention, also made its own special places, and Marty showed me one. With windows plastered with hand-painted signs advertising Southern-style meat cuts, Fair Deal Meat Company was the main butcher supplying the barbeque joints of Oakland and their highly defended barbeque style, but it also did some other crucial work. Everett-Dicko and Yvette Jones-Hawkins described Fair Deal as the place where in the early morning, barbeque business owners would “gather inside the back of the store. . . . A family of butchers in starched white smocks greeted you on those cold mornings with free coffee . . . lots of smiles and bad jokes. Like men in a barbershop—laughin’, gaggin’ and raggin’ on one another, Fair Deal Meat Market was the barbershop for BBQ joints.” 5 This talk sustained a complex community, and the people of Fair Deal who helped it do this work further enriched this narrative. The shop was started in 1934, and in 1937 Harry Mock began working there. Born in China in 1919, Mock would go on to run the store for the rest of his life. Mr. Mock and Baptist minister Reverend Memphis Jenkins were the first inductees into the “BBQ hall of fame” because, in the words of Dorothy Everett and her family of Black women barbeque experts, it was Mock and Jenkins who “worked together to create Oakland-style barbeque.” 6 When Mr. Mock passed away in 1995, his son-in-law Ron Sato and Ron's brother Gary, both born and raised in Oakland and of Asian descent, took over the shop and ran it until it closed after eighty-four years, when they retired in 2018. Traditions operated, but were not closed—making something unique to this place, something not the same as it was before.
Sometimes placework that creates community comes from the places built through the process of organizing to make change. Susan Saegert's work on tenant organizing in the Bronx offers a way to understand the means by which place connection, place attachment, place identity, sense of community, and territoriality are “resources” for neighborhoods “to withstand social and economic forces that can lead to displacement through property abandonment or gentrification.” 7 For example, when Mike and David W. talk about the park that gave young David K. a sense of freedom they focus on the park as a community effort that brought people together, that in David W.'s words “shows you what people working together can do.” Mike talks passionately about how this park was full of drug paraphernalia and how, with a lot of work and the effort of “a whole lot of people,” it improved to be the shining example he saw it as when we walked.
In Oakland, a nondescript fast food joint reminds Marty of what used to be on that site and evokes the struggles for civil rights that are embedded in Oakland: “There was a restaurant here, called Hy's, that wouldn't hire Black folks . . . [so] right here on the corner of the MacArthur and Telegraph we had picket lines.” 8 In front of another small storefront, which was once his uncle's shoe repair shop, Marty's pride surfaces when he tells me that his uncle was “the first Black man to get out of Laney College with a shoe repair trade.” On Telegraph Avenue and Thirtieth Street, surrounded by funeral homes and what were at one time white-only hospitals, he tells me, “My boys’ godfather, Kenny, was the first Black boy to be born in Providence Hospital.” The lessons learned by Marty at a young age—of struggle, of navigating in-between—exemplify what Stuart Hall calls “black subjects,” creating an identification (or identity) of “reworking” which “transmits the capacity to be both the same and different, both located in a tradition and yet not constrained by it.” Hall writes, “That reworking is almost musical and it has to be. What else is any successful blues, any successful jazz standard, or any gospel song but the given ground and the performance that translates it? But you couldn't listen to it if all there was was just the same damn thing once over again.” 9
One block away from Providence Hospital, at St. Augustine's Episcopal Church on Twenty-Ninth Street near Telegraph, sits the heritage of some of Oakland's most famous reworking—the Black Panther Party's Survival Programs. In the church basement one Monday morning in late January 1969, when this congregation was located three blocks away on Twenty-Seventh and West Street, Reverend Earl A. Neil and renowned dancer and St. Augustine's parishioner Ruth Beckford (who had grown up on Thirty-Eighth Street and gone to Oakland Tech) served breakfast to eleven children before school. By the end of the week, they were feeding 135 children, and the Black Panther Party's first Free Breakfast for School Children Program was born.10 Each morning in the Free Breakfast Program, children would get a range of food including “bacon, eggs, grits, milk, and hot chocolate. . . . Fruit twice a week as donations allowed.” And on special occasions, half a donut from Neldam's, Marty's favorite bakery and where Lois worked when she took me on her tour.11 By the end of that year, there was a Free Breakfast Program in every city with a Black Panther Party chapter, including Philadelphia, Seattle, and New York City—from Harlem to the Bronx to Brooklyn.12
With the breakfast program, breakfast was more than food; it supported Black children's ability to focus at school and to have a sense of themselves—and was akin to the ideas Beckford had instilled in her work founding the modern dance program at the Oakland Department of Parks and Recreation (the first in the country), not for professionalism or perfection, but to “teach the whole little girl.” 13 The breakfast program insisted on a reworking of Black children's well-being, a thinking about education and nutrition together. Perhaps inspired in part by, or even fearful of, the Free Breakfast Program's success, the federal government instituted its own permanent school breakfast program in 1975.
In Prospect Heights, in 2020, reworking was in full effect in a different way, transforming the place, and the placework, of a space that had been the catalyst for substantial displacement into a site of protest and racial justice organizing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The plaza in front of the Barclays Center basketball stadium, the centerpiece of the Atlantic Yards boondoggle, the home of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, was radically reworked to become the place where the many racial justice protests of the Black Lives Matter movement would meet, would occupy, and would go out into the city from. It was, in the words of protest photographer Gabriel Hernández Solano, “totally appropriated for the protests.” 14 And this wasn't a reworking that was amicably supported; the first protests there met with brutal responses from the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Local reporter Jake Offenhartz described it this way: “In both the level of rage from demonstrators and total lack of restraint from NYPD, last night's protest was unlike anything I've seen in NYC.” 15
The plaza, formally known as Resorts World Casino NYC Plaza, was made as a replacement for a building that would be moved elsewhere in the development. This space, wrote long-time watchdog critic of the Atlantic Yards project Norman Oder, had “accidentally” fulfilled the big talk of its owners and architects to become something “civic.” Until 2020 it had done nothing of the kind, sitting as an empty corporate space in front of a stadium and a subway station. It is not public, nor has it ever been; at the time of this book's writing, it is owned by the billionaire cofounder of the online shopping site Alibaba, Joseph Tsai, who bought the Brooklyn Nets and the arena operations from Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov in 2019.16 It remains contradictory in doing this work—both an “accidental town square” and a driver of displacement, a space powerfully and strategically located at the crossroads of two of Brooklyn's biggest streets, Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, and a space itself the subject of protests about the whole development.
Neville had an electronics repair shop on the ground floor of the building in which I lived on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. A gentleman in his early seventies with a gentle and slightly distracted manner, he had come to New York from Guyana and had run a series of small shops in Brooklyn. This one, on Vanderbilt, was no ordinary shop, but one that overflowed onto the street with radios and record turntables never picked up by their owners, wires sprouting from every nook and cranny. You could barely see into the dark space, let alone go far inside, as it was packed to the ceiling with metal shelves, cardboard boxes, and unruly electronics parts.
I got to know Neville one day in 2000, as I stood on the sidewalk outside that building where we rented the fourth-floor apartment and in which he had his shop downstairs. I was holding my old-fashioned twin-lens reflex camera, the kind with a viewfinder into which you look down, and Neville started talking with me about photography. He told me that he loved photography and that years ago he'd had a portrait business in the building. Later that day, Neville dug out a box of camera equipment and some old photographs of friends and neighbors—brides and grooms with wedding cakes, a young woman with an electric smile, several families having dinner together in one of the apartments of that Vanderbilt Avenue building.
At that time, I only knew Neville had lived in Prospect Heights a long time and knew that he was also selling his store, but I didn't know why. About a year after we first met, I asked him if he'd give me his tour of the place. He agreed and speaking softly, stuttering every now and then, he took me across Flatbush Avenue into Park Slope—to Dixon's Bike Shop on Union Street. This storefront with a large picture window featuring a Victorian “big wheel” penny-farthing bicycle had once been the center of his world. Pushing open the door to the large, cool, dim space filled with bicycles and parts, we were greeted from behind the counter by a tall young man with a lilt to his voice, welcoming, “Come on in Neville!” Neville's face relaxed, his voice became warmer: “Hello, hello, hello, hello!” he called out. Neville and Dixon's son Dave engaged in the banter of long time no see, and Neville explained that he was giving me his tour of his “old neighborhood.” Dixon's son nodded that Neville had been there a long time indeed, while Neville recalled that he had taken some “fat-cheeked!” pictures of this tall young man as a baby, telling Dave that now he himself had grandkids, and even a great-gran.
In awe, Dave replied, “That's really beautiful. Long long time. You still on Vanderbilt?” At this question, Neville's voice became quieter, as he said he was no longer in Prospect Heights, beginning to explain that he'd sold the store, before interrupting himself and showing me the “big wheel bicycle” he'd pointed out before we came in: “And it still works!” Sensing that Neville wanted to shift the conversation, Dave pointed to another bicycle in the shop: “Remember, you had one like this!” At this, Neville's face lit up: “Yes! I still have it! I still got it! And I won't part with it.” Bursting out laughing, Dave shouted, “Oh! The green Dawes! Them guys joking all the while talking about all you guys used to ride back in the day, and Neville and him Dawes bicycle!” Laughing, but proud, Neville carried on reminiscing about his days of riding in Prospect Park. As he looked up into the high, dark ceiling, Neville remembered more of that time past: “We used to have a club upstairs, and we all formed a band! [I played] percussions. And bass guitar. We had a bass guitar, missing the strings, and we strung it with wire, and we still used to play it like that—missing a couple of strings.”
As he talked, the door jangled open and a shorter, stockier man walked in, Dave's Uncle Lester. He laughed as he spotted Neville: “That's the sprinter! With the Dawes!” “I still got it!” Neville exclaimed again. “No one could mess with Neville's Dawes! Nobody could touch it! So, how's everybody?” Lester asked.
In answer to this, Neville began to answer in earnest, “Yes, everybody's OK. You know I'm out of Vanderbilt Avenue now.” Shocked, Lester asked if he had sold it, and Neville carried on hesitantly, and with careful use of the passive and active tenses: “Yes . . . the building sold, and I sold the store and everything. I don't have a business anymore. I am just . . .”
“Cruising,” Lester suggested kindly. Noticing me, Lester introduced himself: “I'm the best-looking brother!” he laughed. As they posed for a picture, Dave looked around and stated for the record, “I'm the best looking one here! A new generation of good-looking Dixons!” To which Lester replied, “You can take over from me!”
Drifting out of the scene, Neville walked around the shop, touching things. “You can see where my collecting comes from—we like old stuff. See, he's got a lot of old pot-bellied stoves, and antique things. Old bikes. Old collection.” Neville drifted toward the door, all the reliving having been done. With a forceful but melancholic “Alright!” he began an exchange of nice seeing yous and pointed out a few last pieces, before he reluctantly pulled open the door and we walked back out into the bright sunlight.
Across the country, Tewolde's place that fostered his long-term relationships had little to do with Oakland itself. Having emigrated from Eritrea in the 1980s, Tewolde made diasporic meaning of the physical environment of Oakland by overlaying it with the reality of another place: “All the things that I remember about this area relate to what stage the struggle was at with Eritrea.” The places that had meaning for him across the neighborhood were the disparate sites—“bases,” Tewolde called them, quasi-militarily—where Eritreans in Oakland had met to organize, raise money, and support the thirty-year fight for independence thousands of miles away. Continuity, exchange, and a sustaining kind of long-time men's talk were the reasons he took me to the local donut shop.
Gesturing at the corner restaurant, lit from within by a yellowish-green light and empty but for one or two people in its mottled Formica booths, he says: “Golden Gate Donut café—we used to just sit there all day.” Noting the donut shop's current emptiness, he begins to remember that when he and other members of the Eritrean diaspora community in Oakland used to meet there, they took it over completely. They were drawn there to meet other people who hoped for Eritrean independence, and the donut shop get-togethers were a first step toward later political organizing. But before that could happen, the donut shop did even more essential work: it was where a dispersed community of Eritrean immigrants met regularly over weeks and then years and, Tewolde explained, “just got to be friends.”
When I later show him several photographs I've made of this place, he recognizes the pink of the donut shop wall and exclaims: “Now you're talking! This one! Those of us who didn't work on weekends, we'd get in in the mornings, we'd have donuts, and just sit there. Smoke and sit, until it's time for the meeting. . . . Was just the same way, hardly anyone else in there! The guys didn't mind us sitting there all day! And you know, filling the place up with smoke. This—we sat here, and this is what we saw. . . . Actually, people still frequented this long after independence, too. But I haven't been there since then.”
“Different buildings,” he continues, “have different emotions and different memories”—and I think of Fullilove's phrasing, that buildings “insinuate” themselves into us. One building, which housed the rented rooms where they met for the bulk of planning for independence, where they had celebrated the achievement of their final goal in 1993, and that later came to house his sister's restaurant, had “more happy feelings—because it's independence after thirty years.” He exclaims that even though it “looks very different from then . . . still, there's that old feeling!”
Tewolde pulls out a last photograph, one I made by peering through the plate glass of the empty storefront where they met during the 1998 border conflict war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. There was physical labor embedded in this place: “We did some of the finishes here. . . . We prepared food, fundraising you know.” Yet more important was the political labor, and what this kind of labor cost the people who took part. It was clear that this empty spot still made him deeply sad when he explained, “After independence, people were, ‘OK, we got independence,’ everybody went about their own business. But in 1998, when the war with Ethiopia started, everybody came to that place. . . . What do we do? How do we help? So, that has bad memories . . . because nobody likes war—especially after you experience peace.” The meanings inscribed in Tewolde's everyday geography synthesize the complexity of time and diaspora—the politics of here and the politics of there—as well as the intersection, or even clash, of individual life goals with those of a larger national and political nature.
Tewolde's latest base was the light-filled corner café that his sister started. It stems directly from all those prior spaces; even its name links it to the independence movement. The café is called dejena, which Tewolde explains means “meeting place” in the Eritrean language of Tigrinya. “Meeting place,” he says, “but also it's a meeting place behind the trench.”
Walking again with Neville in Brooklyn, he takes me to a hidden spot that was his neighborhood anchor just up the street from Mike's diner on Vanderbilt Avenue. As we pass a boarded-up shop with images of electronics painted on its yellow plywood front, Neville gestures to it, explaining, “My friend, who was in the same electronics business like me, died. And they closed the store with all his stuff inside. . . . He was a cricketer in the West Indies, and his friends, who were his old cricketers, they always used to meet every Thursday, around that table—have their drink. Two years ago, he passed away—they still meet every Thursday afternoon—still the same way.” Looking up at the storefront with Zenith painted across its face, and then down again at his watch, he says, “And in fact, they meet at two.” Neville rings the bell outside, and a man who recognizes Neville lets us in. Walking through the dimly lit aisles to the back of the shop and calling, “Hello, hello,” Neville greets a group of men gathered at a table in the back of a fully intact electronics parts store. Everyone looks up from the plates and aluminum foil trays of homemade food. Slightly perplexed by my presence, they greet Neville, who in turn explains, “This is a friend of mine, we're doing a tour of the neighborhood. Gentlemen!”
Neville promises to return in a little while, and he and I head out of the store. Walking back through the dusty aisles, pointing to the rows of tall metal shelves, filled with neat boxes of electrical parts, Neville says quietly, almost reverently, “See, everything's still here. The store hasn't been touched. If I need anything, I'm short of anything, instead of buying it, I get it from him.” This regular gathering of men of about the same age and a shared Caribbean background created a stable place within the context of neighborhood change—a gathering so essential even death couldn't displace it.
Sometimes the most unlikely locales do the work of fostering the enduring talk, the long-term relationships, and the reworking that allow people to get by, help someone get ahead, help change a neighborhood, organize for racial justice, or even help people organize a movement for national independence thousands of miles away.