The first season of Steven Soderbergh’s turn-of-the-century hospital drama The Knick shot its exteriors mostly in and around Bed-Stuy during the fall of 2013, right around the time I first began dating Anne with some earnestness. I was living at 730 DeKalb and recall, upon several long daytime strolls south, past Herbert Von King Park and into the heart of the neighborhood, watching large swathes of people, all decked in early-twentieth-century garb, shuffle from a nearby holding area to a stretch of Putnam Avenue that had been blocked off for filming. They walked past the production trucks, along a series of long white craft tables nearby, where underneath makeshift tents sweet and savory food items were laid out. Nearby, men and women stood snacking on Kind bars and sipping cans of San Pellegrino Limonata while wearing corsets and bowler hats, a video village for the producers set up just past them near the street corner, the towering old Bedford-Stuyvesant school building that plays the Knick on TV looming above them all. I followed along the street until I encountered a knit-cap-wearing PA, about the age of the film students I teach in Westchester County, chewing gum loudly. His walkie beeped as he gently asked me to cross the street to the other side of the intersection.
Soderbergh had the type of career I, in my magical-thinking years, had once dreamed of for myself, oscillating between studio and independent films, shooting and cutting his own work, remaining defiantly intellectual and a remarkable manager of people at once. I had met him years before, at a screening at Warner Brothers of his unfairly maligned World War II film The Good German. He had been a good sport when I chased after him and told him he should make good on a promise he made in an interview with The Believer to remake Alphaville for $10,000. “They’d pillory me,” he said with a smile, before getting into the back of a black Lincoln. “They’d have me for lunch,” he said out the window before being driven away.
The ten-hour first season of the show revolves around the brilliant, cocaine-addicted Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), a whirling dervish of a man who takes over as chief of surgery at a beleaguered Lower East Side hospital after his mentor shoots himself in the head following one too many childbirths gone awry. The futility of so much modern medicine, and the slow march of progress toward alleviating ailments we now routinely diagnose and cure, is a dominant theme of the hour-long episodic, but this is a sprawling ensemble drama that has more than hospital administration and doctoring on its mind.
The kaleidoscopic canvas Soderbergh and his writers paint is one teeming with latent tensions between native and foreigner, faith and reason, old traditions and new ways of seeing. It takes stock of the city’s immigrant landscape of the early twentieth century, visiting Negro SROs and roach-infested convents, Irish tenements and Upper East Side country homes, as no television show has ever done. The hidden world of Manhattan municipal planning, often in cigar-smoke-filled private university clubs instead of the corridors of City Hall, is glimpsed alongside the world of banquet-sized Negro dance halls and Chinese opium dens. The Knick introduces us to a bygone New York that, at first glance, seems far removed from our own. But unlike Mad Men, which delivers us to an elegantly rendered 1960s nostalgia factory while reminding us of how far we’ve progressed since those bad old days of patriarchy and racism, The Knick reminds us that, in our own time, the latent tensions between cultures and races and classes persist. We are no better than these people.
In line with the liberal sensibilities of the Robertsons, the prominent Manhattan shipping family that dominates the Knick’s board of directors, the hospital serves the city’s lowliest new American families. When few other hospitals cater to them, the Knick serves the white ethnic commoners who are crowding into Lower Manhattan looking for a better way. The only people they don’t serve are Negroes, of course.
The staff’s sole black doctor, Algernon Edwards (André Holland), the son of the Robertsons’ servants, trained in France because of America’s peculiar aversion to educating Negroes. His hiring, at the behest of the Robertsons, draws the ire of some other doctors, notably Dr. Everett Gallinger (Eric Johnson), by Season Two a noted eugenics enthusiast whose trust and respect Algernon will never earn, even as he works twice as hard to gain everyone else’s. Not considered for advancement despite his medical pedigree and troubled by the hospital turning away black patients, he turns to fighting in back alleys or barroom brawls as a means of releasing his anxiety, and treats black patients in the Knickerbocker Hospital’s basement, where he sets up, with the help of a black nurse, a makeshift infirmary of sorts, unbeknownst to any of the other staff.
Juliet Rylance plays Cornelia Robertson, an administrator at the underfunded hospital. Beautiful and serious, she is an upper-class WASP who, as a woman taking managerial employment (or any employment at all), is violating the ethic of her tribe. The oldest of Mr. Robertson’s children, she grew up with Algernon, their servants’ child, and clearly has a fondness for him the rest of the staff at the Knick do not. Although she shows an acumen for the work, making the best of a difficult budget as the hospital seeks to modernize in the midst of an age of great technological advancement and boardroom hand-wringing over its stated mission to serve the immigrant lowly, her time as a hospital exec is seen as a temporary arrangement, something to do until she gets to the real business of being a wife to the scion of an appropriately rich WASP family that has something to offer her father and brother.
After his hiring, she protects Algernon from slander when she can, trying to assure the other doctors of his competence and somewhat forcefully suggesting to them that he is at the Knick to stay. Their interactions are cordially professional at first; the attraction is there immediately, of course, but the flirting comes only gradually and with great caution, as it must have for any black man intrigued by the body of a white woman in 1902. It is in his secret basement infirmary for Negroes that she makes the first move, after a particularly valiant display of heroism on his part following a full-scale riot by an Irish mob outside the hospital.
They begin a delicate dance of attraction, Algernon and Cornelia, one that culminates in a torrid affair, all clandestine midnight carriage rides to the wrong side of town, a corseted white woman slipping out of a Negro tenement at dawn to escape unnoticed. They take comfort in sarcasm together, making fun of all the cultural events Cornelia is allegedly attending when she’s at work late, as opposed to sitting in a chair, opposite his bed, smoking a cigarette in the nude. “I’m not sure a woman like you should have any business in a place like that,” a stage driver says to Cornelia when she requests a ride to Dick’s Hotel at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street, where Algernon awaits her early in their affair. “And I’m quite sure you have no business questioning me” is her reply.
Things go awry, predictably so. They never discuss the discrimination he faces at every turn; not only is there so much else to talk about, but somehow he tricks himself into thinking she can empathize, a common delusion integrated blacks hold concerning their white friends and lovers—people want to think the best of one another, and besides, isn’t it obvious, this shit we go through? Then Cornelia gets pregnant and everything changes. She demands he abort his own child.
Hunched over his lover in his makeshift basement infirmary, Algernon cannot bring himself to do it, to kill the baby he had been foolish enough to think Cornelia might bear for him in Liberia, a place “where attitudes are different.” She must go to the Catholics instead! When she marries, at the end of Season One, against her desires but in line with the expectations of her family and class, it is to a boorish, wellborn San Francisco heir with a leering father. Meanwhile, filled with despair, Algernon gets himself knocked out, in self-destructive lunacy, by starting a fight with a much bigger barroom Negro he must surely know will beat his ass. Cornelia’s insistence of fealty to her family’s expectations leaves him on no less of a suicide mission than Dwight David Taylor may have been on during his last dance with Paul MacLeod.
A desperate reckoning with deep-seated American truths becomes unavoidable; she cannot possibly carry on with this Negro, as this country did not mean them, the daughter of a white shipping magnate and the son of a black chauffeur, to be together. The pain in Ms. Rylance’s bright blue eyes at her inability, despite her intelligence and awareness, to truly say this plainly, staring into the barely contained rage and stoic sorrow writ ever so carefully on Mr. Holland’s features as he casts aside their affair, is one I was familiar with—I thought I had seen something similar in Anne’s eyes, too.
Anne moved to Bed-Stuy just as my time at 434 Greene was up; she took a room in a ground-floor apartment that a production manager friend of hers was leasing. You could have cut the air with a knife when she told me, during one of our rare phone conversations just weeks before I was set to leave an apartment I had begun to dream of gentrifying with her, after we had decided to give our on-again, off-again romance another try. The place she was moving into was recently renovated and complete with garden access on the ground floor of a walk-up just west of Throop on Lexington Avenue, eight blocks from where I had first lived in Bed-Stuy and only a scant few blocks from the building that plays the Knickerbocker Hospital on television.
It was quite the departure for her. When I moved to Bed-Stuy for the first time, a girl like Anne would have never thought to live there. When we met, in 2011, she was living in the Upper East Side. Despite the tony zip code, she lived in a place her mother, whom I never met despite three years of dating her daughter, allegedly found wanting—it lacked a doorman. At the time we became acquainted, I was dating a niche film marketing specialist named Andrea with class hang-ups of her own; like me, she had grown up in proximity to the wealthy and the well-to-do, was more or less surrounded by them, but had a decidedly petit bourgeois household compared with theirs.
Andrea’s mother, formerly a progressive rabbi, worked at a Home Depot in Hartford and raised a black child, the daughter of her stepsister, as her own. Her father, a professor of Middle Eastern studies, made a habit of pissing his pants when he got drunk and had a ringing desire to have his daughter tell him how large my cock was (was it true!?). He asked her to promise she’d marry a Jewish man if he voted for Barack Obama, but she opted for a Jewish woman instead; I was her last boyfriend.
Like the flag her family has long bled for in reverence, the prominent colors of Anne’s body are her deep red hair, pale, freckled skin, and swimming-pool-blue eyes. She had been a movie publicist for a prominent film festival when I met her, yet I could see from the start her ambition was to make her own films. She has a reserved, almost inquisitive disposition she likes to refer to as “uptight,” but eventually I got her to warm up, plying her with gregarious, encouraging e-mails about her film, sharing just the details about me I thought she’d find alluring. We had both directed small first features about grief and seemed to have, despite the obvious differences between us, something resembling a genuine connection from the start. I was with someone else, unhappily so, and couldn’t stop myself from trying to woo her. The night before her predecessor broke up with me, Anne and I had our first seemingly innocent drink together, after a press screening leading up to the festival. She traveled with me to a party at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where I was headed to meet my girlfriend, knowing somewhere that the relationship I remained in wasn’t long for this world.
It took me a year and a half from the time I met her to the moment, in a Lower East Side bar, when I said, “I just don’t understand why we haven’t made out yet.” I knew how to seduce Anne, to be palpably black in ways that were exotic and yet familiar simultaneously. She knew how to seduce me right back, admitting straightaway, but in an indirect, joking manner, to having a thing for black guys. I had been taken with redheads for as long as I could remember, but it wasn’t simply fetishistic; there was a mutual respect in each other’s talents, intelligence, and calm. I couldn’t get enough of her. I wanted to bottle Anne and take her with me everywhere I went, but I also felt an immediate trepidation.
On Facebook I saw photos of her father and her brothers in oxfords and sweaters next to a house that looked like a southern slave plantation. She occasionally found herself at impossibly lavish weddings, the brothers in military garb, or perched next to some handsomely trimmed hedges while her siblings, sitting on either side of her, both wore white button-ups and jackets. This was a girl who knew her way around formal wear. The dogs and the hedges, all the trappings of WASP privilege, oozed off the pixels on my screen. They were almost a parody of such privilege, this family, so much so that my best friend from Cincinnati, the one who had had his own cotillion and had grown up in Hyde Park despite his father’s working-class Bond Hill origins, immediately called foul when I suggested, while surveying her Facebook profile during Christmas 2011, that he pursue Anne instead of I.
“I can’t marry into that,” he insisted, waving his hand at the petite blonde mother and the pinstripe-wearing father, a financial industry executive and wealth-management specialist who once managed an $18 billion family fund for one of America’s richest clans. He thought these people were too stodgy and conservative for him. If that was the case for my friend, who had a high-priced education and a pair of high-powered lawyer parents, then certainly to “marry into that” wasn’t in the cards for me either, a black man educated among east side wealth with social-climbing “philanthropist” grandparents who nonetheless remained the son of a black janitor.
Years later, my friend admitted to me that his sister and father were likely to be unhappy if he didn’t ultimately commit to an upper-middle-class blonde white woman, like the one he was currently dating. It was an act of great peril, to love people for whom America means something entirely different than yourself, but this was present-day New York, not 1902. A dashing child of miscegenation was presiding over the country, felling the myth of the tragic mulatto forever. What good did fear ever do?
Before she began dating me, Anne told me she struggled in her relationship with her parents, whom she very much reveres publicly, because they were still sore that she didn’t go into finance. She drove a Mercedes her father gave her, one she was weary of, seeing how it signified her family’s wealth. Anne claimed she would never receive any money from her family. Her father, who was a “self-made man,” would not allow her or her brothers an inheritance. I didn’t believe her, but let it slide; I lied to people I loved too, out of solidarity with whomever they wanted me to be.
I never had a problem code-switching in front of white girls until I met Anne. It never made me self-conscious, being a Negro who liked chicken wings, watermelon, and Martin reruns who could nonetheless talk with great affection for European slow cinema, Portishead albums, and Toms shoes. Yet, whenever I would hang out with her, something in her gaze made me feel like I had something to prove. Despite the Do the Right Thing poster on her wall and the ease with which I wrote long, hauntingly personal e-mails to her in which I hinted at my class incoherence and the vulnerability I felt surrounding the management of my parents’ declining fortunes, I struggled to find ways to reveal myself to her without feeling judged. We always struggled to find an easy, consistent mode of communication in person beyond flirting, and never were good at speaking to each other on the phone about anything of importance, even as a profound affection flourished between us such as I had never felt before. She made me laugh, and I found her prim style to be both alluring and also a ruse; she has, despite the stereotypes, a more voracious sexual appetite than I, is a far better dancer, and, despite her coastal rearing, maintains a far more colloquial, if not down-homey, way of speaking.
We struck a balance, my abrasive, emotional, oversharing qualities and her straitlaced but quick-witted vibe, that was magical at times, fun and sexy and freewheeling; I found, as I grew closer to her, an emotional satisfaction my other relationships lacked, and when I felt distance from her, an alienation I had never previously experienced, it, oddly, made me want to solve the puzzle that was Anne even more.
In random moments, sitting on the subway or standing at a urinal, I would worry that we were simply playing characters for each other, as people do at the beginning of a relationship. Had these characters allowed us to trick ourselves into thinking we could create a solidarity that would hold? I’m still not quite sure. I’d frame my relationships with friends I knew she wouldn’t approve of in the long run, like Frank White, for instance, as being paternal, spaces where I was a do-gooder shepherding a lost friend. I hid the extent of my marijuana addiction, at least at the beginning, and emphasized, in our flirtatious correspondence, my private education and bourgeois sensibility; when I was tempted, I would code-switch and slip a “mothafucka” into an exclamatory comment or refer to black people as Negroes, but I’d feel her recoil a bit. I knew to pull back around certain kinds of white people. We were entering realms of experience outside her purview.
She played a character for me, too, talking up her father’s up-by-the-bootstraps, son-of-Polish-immigrants story, and her love of ’90s R&B. She’d hit a blunt and play pool with you; she had a tomboy’s way about her that girls with brothers almost always have, despite the girlish charm she could turn on at a moment’s notice. But get her around the darker corners of black experience, the ones that keep us perpetually frustrated, the ones I have spent much of my young career discussing in film journals and fancy national magazines, and a blankness sets in just underneath those azure irises, one that never fails to chill my blood, the palpable sense of disconnection and lack of understanding that crosses her features.
In the fall of 2014 I traveled to a film festival in which Anne had taken a managerial role, one that brought many of the country’s best documentaries to coastal Maine. We had only been dating for a few months, but had been fucking for the better part of a year and had known each other for three times as long. Friends from our New York circles, many of whom were at her festival that weekend, wondered aloud if I had met her parents yet.
They were in attendance that weekend, standing not far away at the opening cocktail party for the event, at an upscale seafood restaurant not far from the ocean. Later, and at the party following the opening screening, in an impossibly posh barn nearby, they were closer still.
Anne never thought to introduce them to me. I nervously looked at them over my drinks. Whenever Anne would come by and smile, I’d only ask how she was holding up, offering what support I could with a hug or a peck, as she went about her business of hosting without thinking to have me shake her father’s hand or impress her mother with whatever stolid gentleness I could muster.
By the fall of 2015, Anne had broken up with me several times, but had always come back. Despite my personal reservations, and ongoing dalliances with other women, I refused to give up completely; I always welcomed her return, hoping we could grow into people with each other who could transcend all that stood between us. But this last time, it was me who pursued reconciliation. On the advice of a mutual friend, I went to Maine, where she lived during the summers, running the festival, to win her back, telling her I wanted her to plan a life with me. She cried, mostly in fear but also in genuine love for me, and suggested she would. I didn’t know what that meant for her, or for me, exactly, but I had never felt for anyone else the way I felt about her. Any day of mine that didn’t begin and end with her felt like a lost one.
We had discovered, in fits and starts of earnest reckoning and sharing, that we were an even odder couple than Andrea and I had been. Whereas I was not one to shirk a challenge, at the first hint of discord, either mine or hers, Anne would grow cold and then break up with me, giving up on the thing with little communication as to why. She had never dated anyone seriously before, so such communication was entirely new to her. In the years since we met, Anne had grown into a budding film producer and film festival organizer; she knew how to talk to people clearly, efficiently, and eloquently. But with me, she always relied on clichés and diversions. Even while I yearned to put all the cards on the table, my mouth was always full of her half-truths at the decisive moment.
An employee of Anne’s at her festival, a woman at least ten years her senior, moved to Bed-Stuy shortly before Anne did. The woman showed great trepidation about it. She asked me, in person and in increasingly desperate Facebook messages, if she had done the wrong thing. People in the neighborhood had mostly been very nice to her, she wrote, but she was filled with guilt when people weren’t. Anne and I made light of all this, caustically joking, but deep down, I wondered if Anne thought about such things, the displacement and price inflation our mutual presence in the area was fueling. If she did, she certainly never mentioned it. Was she capable of guilt in this way? It didn’t seem so.
Sharing ourselves, however far we had come, remained difficult. It was awkward to discuss cohabitation and my parents’ increasingly shaky finances with her, the daughter of a man who invests the money and files the taxes of billionaires, taking a hefty cut for his trouble, assuredly. And whenever I was in a mostly black space with her, which was more common now that she lived in Bed-Stuy, I would feel not unlike Richard Pryor, who on That Nigger’s Crazy observed that certain “black women would look at you like you killed your mama when you out with a white woman.”
Anne maintained that I was her first serious boyfriend, although I personally knew several of the men she had slept with more casually over the years. During our flight after what had been a charming, romantic getaway at a film festival in Savannah, she confided that she had brought another boy home once, a very charming East Asian guy of remarkable wealth. Then she began to cry before continuing. I knew trouble brewed. In between tears and gentle sobs, she revealed her past fears that her mother was a racist. I stiffened; surely she understood I had heard it all before? Apparently the mother had said some less-than-generous things about the young man in private, but was more than charming in person. Anne wondered whether the boy would have received the same courtesy had he not been wealthy.
She had been taught to hide her emotions, to recoil from help in moments of vulnerability. When her mother’s health grew poor, on top of her grandmother’s imminent death, my overtures of affection turned her cold. She struggled to tell me she loved me and often simply referred to me as her “friend.” She wasn’t alone in this; it was always my own family’s newfound financial frailty that kept me from being direct about my own circumstances, increasingly stewarding my father’s housing prospects and supporting him financially on occasion. Even though I knew she’d be empathetic and loving in the face of it, I feared her judgment of him and, by extension, of me. Her father had shown some compassion about my parents’ living situation—“Is Brandon okay?” he allegedly would ask upon her visits to his home in suburban Boston, one that used to belong to Abraham Lincoln’s best friend—but whereas familial frailty only made me want to build something of our own that would last, it also made me a poor communicator, turning away from connection instead of toward it. I’d walk past the Knickerbocker Hospital on my way to her place and project our entire relationship onto Algernon and Cornelia, hoping we could find some way to bridge the gaps they had been unable to, despite, as Tony had drunkenly pointed out years before, how little things had changed.
My attempt to radically alter course, after we had a miserable Thanksgiving apart from each other at our families’ homes, was the beginning of the end. I asked her if I could move in with her. I imagined no better place than Bed-Stuy. I had put the sweat equity in. A pall came over her pink face, but she took some time to respond. “I don’t think I’m ready for that,” she told me, with maximum chilliness, while she lay in my arms. I’m sure I covered the silence with something like “that’s understandable,” but inside, I knew we’d never recover.
I learned only late in our relationship that Anne traces her ancestry back to one of America’s first settler families. Her father’s surname, given his Polish immigrant ancestry, is strangely Germanized and comes equipped with a term of nobility, but her mother’s lineage is where the real “America is ours” story resides. Her line began its American journey on one of the earliest boats over from England, part of an already distinguished family that had ruled over Nottingham and Yorkshire before the Magna Carta was drafted, and had been among the English nobility for over a thousand years by the time I asked her daughter for a cigarette in front of the film festival press office where she worked against her parents’ wishes.
The day before Anne and I broke up for the last time, I played myself in a scene about a third of the way through my friend Russ Harbaugh’s film Love After Love. In it, I’m a young author writing a book about Bedford-Stuyvesant. The Irish comedian Chris O’Dowd plays a character that is the likely author surrogate, while Juliet Rylance, Cornelia on The Knick, plays his ex-girlfriend. In the scene, the first in the second act, I pitch Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, going on and on about the loss of the neighborhood’s black character. The ex-lovers who get most of the screen time are the focus, however; now you realize, after seeing them struggle through a terrible family illness and their own feeble understanding of themselves as a couple, that they have to bear the indignity of working together.
Anne and I just have the indignity of still being Facebook friends, of the 400-odd people we share, of our mutual thwarted ambitions to push past the bigoted expectations of both of our tribes; my mother, always respectful of the few women I have brought to Cincinnati, told me never to bring Courtney Love home. Although Anne doesn’t have any tattoos and I’ve listened to “Doll Parts” at least two hundred times while writing this book, I have thus far heeded her call.
The last time I saw Anne in my Bronx apartment, after twelve desperate hours of crying and fucking and eating and crying and fucking and eating a few weeks after our fourth breakup, which we performed via Skype on the penultimate night of 2015, I told her, “America is not designed for us to be together.” After a long pause, she told me she didn’t believe that. Since the year of our birth, black households in the United States have accumulated, on average, seven times less wealth than their white counterparts, I wanted to say, showing her the evidence of the divide that had been an unspoken chasm between us, but it was time to stow away the journalist in myself. I was still trying to win her back!
To no avail. When I would press her a bit more as to why she felt we had to part, she would speak in vague ways about how we had “different ideas about what kindness was,” and that perhaps I was too “edgy” and “controversial” for her. “I can’t make a case for us breaking up,” she said a bit later, only to suggest that one day, when she could finally articulate why she wanted to leave again, “it will be so painful to tell you.”
This was code, of course—the increasingly strident tenor of black radicalism had found its way into much of my film and political writing over the ensuing years since we met, and this was something that, despite how passionate I was about it, Anne was just unable to discuss with any authority. Perhaps she was afraid of saying “the wrong thing,” or felt no authority in such conversations. Perhaps the specter of beliefs so different than those she had been raised around made her nervous, or ashamed, but it also probably pushed her to ask questions about herself that she simply wasn’t willing to answer in front of me.
Anne counts, among her forebears, Quaker abolitionists and Mississippi slavers, Revolutionary War heroes and New Jersey governors and the former owners of the land upon which Princeton University was built. The legacy she carries in her blood is not something she could easily acknowledge to her, depending on the hour, upper-middle- to working-class boyfriend. She casually mentioned being courted by an organization her mother belonged to, the Daughters of the Mayflower, or some such thing, as she entered my Bronx hovel one night during our last fall together. And she did discuss how her brothers, both of whom have served in the armed forces, were invited to join the elite secret society Skull and Bones, a group that includes several ex-presidents among its legion. But her family’s closest link to the White House was Barack Obama, a distant cousin of Anne’s. They are descended from the same man who reached these shores on one of the first English voyages to the New World, long before the prospect of a United States was a glimmer in any white man’s imagination.
She didn’t know this until I told her about it. This was months after we broke up, seven years into the Obama presidency. I deduced the connection following an encounter with her grandmother’s obituary and ten minutes of googling. Anne was flabbergasted. “We thought you knew . . . that’s why we thought you were a supporter!” her mother allegedly responded when asked if she was privy to their presidential relations.
Surely this was not the type of thing that was brought up at family dinner, being related to America’s first black president, no matter how much love of country they have. It was also not the type of thing discussed at the New Hampshire Republican Party fund-raisers she and Anne’s father, a man who without irony wears his collar popped on Sunday mornings and generously gives to the Republican-leaning super PAC of one of Boston’s most significant financial firms, host at their home on occasion. In this family, which has sacrificed for America and to whom America has given so much, to be related to the first black president seems to be anathema, but potentially hosting a party for Jeb Bush, a man who holds a special admiration for Charles Murray’s two-bit neo-eugenics tome The Bell Curve, is not.
Sometimes, when I think back on it and want to believe the best about her love for me, I imagine, in the worst faith, her navigating a patrician dinner scene not unlike that memorable one about a quarter of the way through Hal Ashby and Bill Gunn’s The Landlord, the grandest filmic text of Brooklyn class warfare.
Having decamped from the opulence of his parents’ leafy mansion for a Park Slope walk-up full of Negroes he hopes to displace in the years before that type of class warfare became the raison d’être of bourgeois bohemians, Beau Bridges’s Elgar Enders returns for dinner at his parents’ manor in a scene that betrays Gunn’s screenwriting brilliance. While his sister’s out-of-place suitor, a burly Jew played by a young Robert Klein, watches on, Elgar’s older brother William Jr. complains about investment in “a Negro neighborhood” and William Sr. laments his younger son’s racialized liberalism (“Let me tell you something, Mr. Lincoln, if you march into this house with an arm full of pickaninnies of yours . . .”). The scene reaches its apex when Elgar flees, reminding his bigoted family that “NAACP” can also stand for “Niggers Aren’t Always Colored People.”
Sometimes I wondered if Anne’s distant cousin could relate to my consternation. Being not quite at home with whites in black spaces and feeling unmoored as The Head Negro in Charge of a country built on white supremacy are not completely unrelated I imagined. In the aftermath of our breakup, the movies began to provide a clue.
Until recently, it was rare anyone had the gumption to make a fictional film about a sitting president. Primary Colors was lucky enough to arrive just in time for peak Monica Lewinsky in 1998. Oliver Stone’s tepid and underwhelming W. opened in late October 2008, weeks before Barack Obama defeated John McCain to succeed George W. Bush. But 2016 is proving to be the year that breaks all the rules, so here we are, in the final months of the Obama administration, presented with two different major motion pictures that dramatize opposite ends of the young Barack’s journey through the Reagan years: Vikram Gandhi’s Barry, which was recently released by Netflix, and Richard Tanne’s Southside with You.
Both films revolve around romantic developments in the young Obama’s life: while Southside meditates on a mixed-race youth’s bliss with his future wife, Barry is about romantic failure, the inability for love to bridge racial and class differences. To ask which film veers from the historical record in its rendering of the life and loves of young Mr. Obama is beside the point. But verisimilitude remains a lingering concern: while Tanne’s film presents two young people who will become the world’s most recognizable couple, Gandhi’s film invents a composite female foil for Obama who comes to represent the forces in American life that Obama will never quite win over, largely because of race.
Together, the two films form a bildungsroman unlike anything in American movies since John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln, an elegant and oddly terrifying presidential hagiography—Cahiers du Cinéma once argued that it was produced by Darryl Zanuck on behalf of “American Big Business” to mythologize the country’s most famous Republican and produce an election year defeat of FDR in 1940—that premiered seventy-five years after Lincoln’s death. No one has bothered to make a persuasive movie that focuses uniquely on the early life of Dwight Eisenhower or Gerald Ford, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush. Most presidential biopics—like Spielberg’s Lincoln, HBO’s Truman, and Rob Reiner’s LBJ—are firmly set during their subjects’ respective presidencies, premiering long after the men in question are dead and buried. Barry and Southside with You are a curiosity in this context, positively rogue ventures with few precedents, acts of mass mythology that provide vastly different quasi-historical windows into the formation of Obama’s value system, presidential persona, and basic understanding of the American promise through his attempts at coupledom.
Southside with You stakes out a charming inoffensiveness as its safe haven. Thirty-year-old Obama is working as a community organizer in Chicago in 1989. A legal intern with holes in the bottom of his car, he picks up Michelle Robinson, an associate at the firm, for a date: they go to a museum, for a walk in the park, and a screening of Do the Right Thing; in between he shows off his burgeoning political skills at a community event. Plenty of “wink wink, nod nod” moments unfurl. The tone is triumphant; we know the Obamas will work out, that their love will endure, and that Barack, the son of a white, single mother, who never fit in much of anywhere, will find a union with a black woman that will prove both emotionally satisfying for the characters and appropriate to his future constituents. Southside with You could have been written into the Democratic Party platform itself.
The more melancholic, searching, and insightful of the two films, Barry is the film we’re more likely to remember when the afterglow of the Obama presidency has long receded. While no less predictable in its conclusion than Southside with You, Barry proves to be a far richer and sobering experience, one that paints a portrait of a young Obama who painfully learns that regardless of what he says or how he says it, he’ll never truly win over the elite who run this country.
Set in 1981, it focuses on an afroed, dope-smoking, poetry-obsessed twenty-year-old Obama, who has just transferred to Columbia University. With Adam Newport-Berra’s impressive lensing and Miles Michael’s spot-on art direction, Barry inhabits a grimy, post-1970s New York City much mythologized in our more sanitized era, from HBO’s Vinyl to Netflix’s celebrated The Get Down. Gandhi, a correspondent for HBO’s Vice News, is also a filmmaker of great versatility. A Columbia graduate himself—as an undergrad he lived next to the row house on 109th Street that Obama once resided in—he burst onto the scene with Kumaré, a fake documentary in which he tricked various expanded-consciousness-seeking whites into thinking he was an Indian guru.
Barry arrives in a grim, bottomed-out Manhattan during Reagan’s first year in the White House. Cigarette in hand, he reads a letter from his estranged father as he arrives on a flight from Hawaii during the opening credits. By the end of the sequence, he’s kicked off the campus for not having a student ID, locked out of his apartment, and is sleeping on the street. This is only the first of several rude awakenings for the future president. He and his roommate don’t have campus housing, so he settles into a crime-infested area south of the campus. His friend Saleem (Avi Nash) is the only person he knows in New York; Saleem is a drug-addled, well-off-but-hiding-it Pakistani student who speaks directly to Barry’s radicalized malaise; that is, when he’s not shouting drunkenly out toward the street at Negroes who are pillaging his garbage cans.
Barry features an affecting and affected performance by Devon Terrell, and in their electric scenes together, Terrell and Nash are two men of color who are comfortable with their sardonic pose of mild disaffection from the elite pale faces. But Saleem is all ironic hard edges where Barry still has some vulnerability. Informing Barry of how nonthreatening he’ll have to sound to bed the rich white girls who are his only options for love in this rarified Ivy League environment, Saleem takes on a mocking “safe white dude” tone, a voice not dissimilar to the one a generation of black comics, aping Richard Pryor, have used to describe the absurdity of being black in white America. The film almost suggests that Saleem has a more salient understanding of the crisis of the young black intellectual, but despite his brown skin, Saleem retains privileges of legacy Barry never will—his rich daddy with Wall Street connections can always bail him out. By the movie’s end, Obama’s father is dead.
Terrell, a young Australian actor, looks and sounds like Obama well enough, but he also shows us shades of the man we’ve never glimpsed in public before. He deftly introduces us to a college student who is still trying to figure out what he believes, what he wants to do, and what he’ll have to compromise to get there. At twenty, Barry has yet to figure out how to navigate the country’s great racial divide and—as we now know all too tragically in these stratified times—never will, despite great hope to the contrary.
Barry senses this and makes it plain. His romantic entanglement with Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy), a porcelain-faced Barnard brunette who comes from a well-heeled Connecticut family tied deeply to the Democratic Party, draws out Barry’s budding realization that America is not designed for them to be together; no matter how hard he tries—despite a bloodline that links him to several of America’s earliest WASP clans—the good-natured ignorance with which he’s treated in their environs, despite their best intentions, will never result in real solidarity.
“Pretty uptight people here, huh?” a bow-tie-wearing white guy remarks to Barry at a wedding, which is held in a massive country mansion where Barry once again finds himself, other than the servants, the only black person in the room. “I’m an uptight kind of guy,” he replies, half-serious, half-empty, just as I had thought to myself dozens of times over, ruminating on how to make it all work with Anne. He knows he’ll never fully belong in these environs, but he finds it equally hard, no matter how “down” Charlotte is, to take her into black spaces. Buying books on the streets of Harlem, eating soul food at Sylvia’s, they are hounded with looks from stoic, stately black women, giving rise to Pryor’s contemporaneous observation of sistas watching you with white women. Seeing bellicose Black Hebrew Israelites in their outlandish costumes pontificate on a street corner wouldn’t normally be a point of concern for Barry, but he deftly steers Charlotte away in order to avoid a verbal scolding.
The costs of assimilation are high, and Barry begins to pay. He arrives on campus wanting to be a poet, as quaint as that sounds, but soon realizes the privilege of his situation beyond the iron gates of Morningside Heights. Playing basketball in a Harlem park, he befriends PJ (Jason Mitchell), a student from the Graham Projects who is finishing a master’s degree in business at Columbia. PJ has no illusions about what his degree is for: he is there to make money, to get the credentials America requires of Negroes who want to advance into the middle class. Mitchell is every bit as terrific as he was in Straight Outta Compton, and often steals his scenes, including one where he invites Barry to a party in the projects. In a deft single-tracking shot, we are introduced to the world of “pissy stairwells” and elevators that don’t work. “Don’t forget that this is how your country does your people,” Mitchell tells him. Barry is as foreign in this environment as he is later in the Yale Club with Charlotte’s parents. Here we see the political skills start to form as he charms them, emphasizing not his father’s drunkenness but his Harvard pedigree. Barry neglects to mention that Charlotte’s dad slipped him some money while in the men’s room before being introduced, thinking he was the washroom attendant.
Despite his ability to code-switch, Barry is haunted by confusion and pain; unable to cope with a father who abandoned him, and an inability—despite his insidious emotional intelligence—to feel at ease in all-black or all-white milieus. This costs him more than his fair share of acquaintances, friends, and, most painfully, lovers. When Barry’s mother (Ashley Judd) arrives, he is embarrassed by her rah-rah liberalism and admits, in an unvarnished way he normally keeps buttoned up, how out of place he feels. Columbia’s classrooms are dominated by the kind of privileged blowhards who ask during a discussion of Plato’s Republic, “Why does everything have to be about slavery?” It’s a question the rest of the film answers by simply showing us how this black boy, no matter how yellow his skin, is treated by both working-class white cops and rich, well-meaning white ladies alike. In the end, code-switching simply gets tiresome, no matter how talented you are, when white people seem to have no idea black people have to do it at all.
One lonely night earlier that fall, just before Anne moved into 485, I ventured east, up Kosciuszko Street from Nostrand Avenue to Malcolm X Boulevard. Signs of the invasion were omnipresent. Construction rang out in at least one building on each block well into the evening, with the evidence of more to come, in old schoolhouses and barren tenements, everywhere you looked. A man said, “We live here too,” his tone of voice piercing the night from a forlorn-looking canopied flop as I walked along Kosciuszko. Another brother standing near him, in a do-rag and white warm-ups, whispered back as I strode past, more construction quickly drowning them out, a new, hashtagable, and de-Negrofied #BedStuy being erected all around us.
I was jittery. When an SUV slow-crawled not far away and then abruptly stopped in front of me, I crossed the street and walked a block down to DeKalb, having briefly feared a jacking. After a stroll past the Marcy Projects, I wound back over to Kosciuszko on the next block, walking where once were mere warehouses, ones now adorned with signs of the modern-looking renovations in store for them, stamped with the logos of various developers and city agencies, the true authors of this blood-sodden land’s next evolution, the words “Residential” or “Commercial” emblazoned atop each sign.
M&M wasn’t around when I reached 551 Kosciuszko, and neither were the photos I had taken in high school, many of them surely of Tony and me and our many shared friends, ones M&M had found cleaning up and organizing the place in preparation for the move to come. He thought it wouldn’t be right to throw them out, whatever animosity still existed between us, and texted to see if he could send them to me. I told him I’d pick them up that Tuesday night, but when I arrived, a wild-haired gentleman with face tattoos showed me into my old living room.
Much of the artwork that had been in Goodbye Blue Monday had been salvaged by M&M, including a memorable Impressionist-inspired painting of a black church service in wide shot and a gorgeous photographic portrait of Billie Holiday. The place was as cluttered and dirty as ever. No sign of my photos was found. Across the street, the building where Roger and Pierre had lived with their mother was being renovated. Haitian boys would never sit there dreaming of fathers ever again, it seemed.
Walking back down DeKalb near the intersection with Throop, I encountered a pair of obese black women in their late teens or early twenties. One had a stroller with a young child in it. The other had two children of her own, buzzing with halfhearted play at her knees. “We don’t want your money,” one of them said as I was on the quick draw to give her ten dollars. “We want you to buy us food,” she said, pointing to the Kennedy Fried Chicken across the street. They were living in a shelter nearby after losing their apartments. As we walked into the chicken joint, a hobbled homeless man asked me for change, telling me he was a vet. I told him I’d get him on the way out. Without enough money on me to snag an eighteen-piece and a half dozen sodas for the women and children, I clumsily used the ATM, yellow Negro hands quickly passing across the three-dollar fee, fresh currency exchanged across the bulletproof glass of the ghetto chicken outlet before the long wait. Then you have to decide what to say.
“Thank you, mister,” one of the children uttered, her mother too timid to chat amid my attempts to find out where they had lived (“Down on Quincy”), how long they had been homeless (“Eight months”), and how hard it was to get into Marcy (long and bureaucratized). I handed the heavyset women chicken boxes with which to feed their brood, wishing in shame that I could buy them kale, knowing that calories are all that keeps some broken hearts going. On the way out I handed the vet a ten spot, brought to him by my State of New York salary, and walked back down DeKalb, only streets from 730.
As I passed the old walk-up I was spotted by Rudy, sitting on a crate across the street, his tall cap backward and pushed low as his friend, a black, baseball-capped teen of few words, rolled a blunt. Clearly his efforts to squat at 730, which I had passively facilitated, were abandoned. “Yo, Brandon,” he bellowed, my attention suddenly diverted from my old dwelling. I offered him a nip of the bourbon I had meant to bring M&M, an olive branch for a drunkard, symptom of a sanguine gloom; I suddenly didn’t mind drinking on the street with a recently laid-off janitor and his blunt-rolling friend. I took a perch on one of the crates near him as we drank and smoked, staring out at 730. The rent he supplemented with his odd jobs had gone up, and with his mother struggling, Rudy needed more work. He occasionally dealt weed out of the barbershop a few storefronts away from where we sat, but not enough to get by amid the bombardment of higher rents and ever-more-expensive goods.
My paranoia grew after a half dozen sips of bourbon from the tiny plastic cups Rudy invested in for the occasion, and I took leave of them, staring out at 730 DeKalb. It, too, had undergone a rent increase, one I’d known was inevitable since Neftali and his Hasid enforcer the previous March. One night earlier that summer, after a Biz Markie concert in Herbert Von King Park, I passed 730, seeing from the street that the door leading into my former apartment was open. The gate door was closed, but peering in, it was clear someone was home. Without realizing quite what I was doing, suddenly I found myself on the landing, looking down into the long hallway. A Radiohead poster from the Hail to the Thief era hung, in an elegant frame, near what had been the door to my room. At the end of the long hallway a young man with Asian features and a bright purple NYU sweatshirt sat at a table. I rapped on the gate door, startling him. “Sorry to bother you, I, uh, live in the neighborhood and I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”
The young man shot out of his chair and sauntered down the hallway. He was tall and young and clearly new to the area. “What do you need?” he asked, looking at me uneasily, as if I posed a threat.
I lied and told him I lived on the block. He nodded. “If it’s too invasive then feel free to tell me so, but I was just wondering if you mind telling me what you’re being charged in rent?”
I explained I was writing about the area and it was strictly for research purposes, in cadences that were meant to soothe; I knew how to use my black voice to make white and assimilated Asian people feel comfortable, slowing down and raising it a register. It rarely failed. He smiled a bit, hearing in my voice the rhythms of someone who did not mean him harm, who was one of his kind instead of, well, an other. As long as these streets were full of brown people, America had taught me to reckon, this would remain a common concern for those that had been taught to see them through a skewed lens of fear and ignorance.
“Yeah, no problem. We pay $4,200.”
Looking past the gangly kid, my jaw melting toward the hallway floor, I regained my senses after a couple seconds of oblivion. I could see that Neftali had done hardly anything to the place. Once we left, with the market as it was, he must have realized all he had to do was raise the rent. Sure, he had taken Al’s cat-infested rug from the stairwell and likely repaired the hole in my wall. I imagine he must have fixed the stairwell leading to the garden and insulated the pipes, a privilege we had requested and been denied as our $2,800 a month in rent was sabotaged in order to give this young man a home in a land he found strange and new. But by and large, the place remained more or less the same as it had been when I moved in a year before.
“Thanks,” I said, standing in something resembling awe, my heart racing, summer heat beading on my face. He nodded and walked back down the hall, the gate door shutting behind him. I turned away and cowered back down the stairs, toward the orange halogen-lit summer darkness where everything I saw was slipping through my fingers.
On the phone, as I mumbled through my plans a few years before, my mother asked if Tony would cut me a deal on an apartment in his building, one that rests in what no one would now ever question was Bedford-Stuyvesant, where the forgetting was planned and the remembering never ended. I told her I didn’t want him to. After all, I was finally living within my means.