Can't Stop Won't Stop (4 page)

Even the gangs who had once claimed this turf—the vicious Turbans and the fearsome Reapers—were now gone, as if they had been blown to dust by the forces of history. The president stood amidst the smashed brick and concrete, stripped cars, rotting vermin, shit and garbage—his secretary of housing and urban development Patricia Harris, Mayor Beame and a small army of reporters, photographers, and cameramen wagging behind.

The president took in the devastation. Then he turned to Secretary Harris. “See which areas can still be salvaged,” he said softly.

Here was the unreconstructed
South
—the South Bronx, a spectacular set of ruins, a mythical wasteland, an infectious disease, and, as Robert Jensen observed, “a condition of poverty and social collapse, more than a geographical place.”
²⁵
Through the 1960s, the Bronx's prefix was merely descriptive of the borough's southernmost neighborhoods, like Mott Haven and Longwood. But now most of New York City north of 110th Street was reimagined as a new kind of “South,” a global south just a subway ride away. Even Mother Teresa, patron saint of the world's poor, made an unannounced pilgrimage.

The mayor's office rushed out a report entitled
The South Bronx: A Plan For Revitalization
. “The most damaging indicators cannot be measured in numbers,” the report concluded. “They include the fear that prevails among many business people in the South Bronx over the future of the neighborhood, concern over the security and safety of investments; the waning faith and sense of hopelessness that induces many of them to give up and flee to other areas.”
²⁶

Edward Logue, an urban renewal official recruited to work in New York City after leveling some of Boston's historic neighborhoods, spun it differently for a reporter: “In a marvelous, sad way, the South Bronx is an enormous success story. Over 750,000 people have left in the past twenty years for middle-class success in the suburbs.”
²⁷

But other wonks were less disingenuous. Professor George Sternlieb, the director of the Center of Urban Policy at Rutgers University, said, “The world can
operate very well without the South Bronx. There's very little in it that anyone cares for, that can't be replicated elsewhere. I have a science-fiction vision of coming into the central city in an armored car.”
²⁸

One mayoral official, Roger Starr, following the Rand Corporation and Senator Moynihan, articulated an end-game policy of “planned shrinkage” in which health, fire, police, sanitation, and transit services would be removed from the inner-cities until all the people that remained had to leave, too—or be left behind.
²⁹
Already, schools had been closed and abandoned, after first being starved of arts and music programs, then of basic educational necessities.

Moses himself imagined a capstone befitting his career. In 1973, in retirement, at the age of eighty-four, he declared, “You must concede that this Bronx slum and others in Brooklyn and Manhattan are unreparable. They are beyond rebuilding, tinkering and restoring. They must be leveled to the ground.” He proposed moving 60,000 South Bronx residents into cheap, high-rise towers to be erected on the grounds of Ferry Point Park. The best apartments there could have a fine vista of the sparkling, trash-filled East River, the gleaming suburbs of Queens to the east, the barbed wire and brutal towers of Rikers Island to the west, and the jets leaving LaGuardia Airport for distant cities.

During the sixth game of the 1977 World Series, Reggie Jackson stepped up to the plate in Yankee Stadium. He had homered in the two previous games, bringing the Yankees to the brink of a championship, three games to two. Tonight history would call. Against three pitchers and three pitches, Jackson slammed three home runs. In dramatic fashion, the Yankees won 8 to 4.

As Yankee pitcher Mike Torrez secured the last out, thousands of fans rushed the field. They ran after Jackson, who mowed some of them down as he dashed for the dugout. They tore the seats off their moorings. They grabbed handfuls of sod and second base. They tossed flying bottles at the mounted police. Near third base, cops gave a man a concussion. Above the chaos and confusion of the mob, three words cohered: “We're number one!”
³⁰

In the locker room, the triumphant Jackson and Martin grinned ear-to-ear, wet with champagne. They gave each other a bear-hug. Jackson waved a gold medallion of Jackie Robinson at reporters, and said “What do you think this man would think of me tonight?”
³¹

Columnist Dave Anderson caught Thurman Munson and Jackson as the celebration wound down:

“Hey coon,” called the catcher, grinning. “Nice goin', coon.”

Reggie Jackson laughed and hurried over and hugged the captain.

“I'm goin' down to the party here in the ballpark,” Thurman Munson said, grinning again. “Just white people, but they'll let you in. Come on down.”

“I'll be there,” Reggie Jackson said. “Wait for me.”

. . .

Thurman Munson reappeared. “Hey, nigger, you're too slow, that party's over but I'll see you next year,” the captain said, sticking out his hand. “I'll see you next year wherever I might be.”

“You'll be back,' Reggie Jackson said.

“Not me,” said Thurman Munson. “But you know who stuck up for you, nigger, you know who stuck up for you when you needed it.”

“I know,” Reggie Jackson said.
³²

It was 1977. A new arrow of history was taking flight.

In Kingston, Jamaica, the reggae group Culture sang a vision of Babylon beset by lightning, earthquake and thunder. The two sevens had clashed, they warned. The apocalypse was upon Babylon.

But in their own way, the new generation—to whom so much had been given, from whom so much was being stolen, for whom so little would be promised—would not settle for the things previous generations had been willing to settle for. Concede them a demand and they would demand more. Give them an apocalypse, and they would dance.

Trenchtown youths, 1976 and 1995.
Photo 1976 © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos
Photo 1995 © Brian Jahn

 

 

You know how a thing and the shadow of that thing could be in almost the same place together? You know the way a shadow is a dark version of the real thing, the dub side?

—Nalo Hopkinson

In Jamaica, you drive from the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road. Rounding the hill down into Montego Bay, you hug the curves on two-lane roads. Even at rush hour, you slow for cows and goats chewing grass along the gutter side, because apparently all the animals in Jamaica are free-range.

It's dusk on Thursday, a school night, but the youths have taken over Mobay's narrow streets. Traffic is backed up along all of the roads into and out of the seaside town. Even transactions at the turnaround in Sam Sharpe Square—where unmetered taxis swoop in to drop off and pick up customers in a bewildering free-for-all—are slowed by the weight of teenage bodies.

They stream through the streets like tributaries toward the ocean, where, in a waterfront spit of dirt called Urban Development Park, ten-foot high columns of speakers rise in a half-circle around a small stage. The pouting, Tupac-shirted boys and the spandexed, braided girls ripple through the 6:30
P.M
. commute—concrete mixers, oil trucks, and family vans caught bumper to bumper on the Bottom Road—and in through a small gap in a low barbed-wire fence. On the field, they pass dice games played by kerosene lamp, higglers selling Red Stripe and Ting. The air smells faintly of ash from mountain fires. Smoke from dozens of portable roast-peanut and jerk-chicken carts hazes the half moon rising.

The rest of the countryside follows. Uniformed schoolchildren swinging
their book bags, young denim-skirted mothers with toddlers on arm, the barmaids and working boys stride off their shift and into the dance. The elder locksmen and the gray-haired grannys sway to the music. In the front of an earbleed-inducing bassbin tower, a turbaned Boboshanti gives an inscrutable grin, his fingers touching finger-to-finger, thumb-to-thumb in the sign of the Trinity.

Through modern Jamaican history, much more than musical vibes could be at stake in settings like these. In the dance, political fortunes might rise or fall, society made or undone. If political parties controlled jobs and turf, wealth and despair, they rarely exerted much control here. This was the people's space, an autonomous zone presided over by music men and women, a shelter of collective memory.

Tonight, while the band sets up onstage for a star-studded bill of twenty-first-century dancehall stars, the sound-system operators, housed in a series of special tents that enclose the circle of speakers, drink up and play music. Candle Sound System, the local “foundation sound,” is spinning the classics. An old Bob Marley song, “Chances Are,” inspires a resounding wheel-up and cries of “Big tune!” It is a thirty-year-old ballad, not danceable, but something more—a sweet echo of the post-independence years, before Marley was an international star, when his was a voice of a young nation bursting with hope and pride. Everyone, no matter their age, seems to know all the words. They sing, “Though my days are filled with sorrow, I see it—a bright tomorrow.”

From his turntables, Candle's selector shifts time forward, cueing a Dennis Brown bassline. Another roar of recognition goes up, and a blast of approving airhorns. This time, hundreds of lighters raise, flickering lights over a black sea. As Brown sings the opening lines—”Do you know what it takes to have a revolution?”—the country youths release their aerosol cans into the butane. At the start of a new century, they recreate an elemental, biblical sight. Against the purple sunset, bolts of flames shoot up, tongues of fire licking up the night sky like history and prophecy.

The blues had Mississippi, jazz had New Orleans. Hip-hop has Jamaica. Pioneer DJ Kool Herc spent his earliest childhood years in the same Second Street yard that had produced Bob Marley. “Them said nothing good ever come outta Trenchtown,” Herc says. “Well, hip-hop came out of Trenchtown!”

Reggae, it has often been said, is rap music's elder kin. Yet the story runs much deeper than just music. During the 1970s, Marley and the roots generation—the first to come of age after the island nation received independence from Great Britain in 1962—reacted to Jamaica's national crisis, global restructuring and imperialist posturing, and intensified street violence. Seeing politics exhausted, they channeled their energies into culture, and let it flow around the world. They pulled global popular culture into the Third World. Their story is the prelude to the hip-hop generation, felt as a portentous shudder from the dub side. “Some are leaves, some are branches,” Bob Marley had sung. “I and I a di roots.”

When the 1970s opened in Jamaica, national pride was surging.

A song contest had played a major role. In 1966, Edward Seaga, a ranking conservative in the leading Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), who had been one of the first music executives to record indigenous music, instituted the annual Jamaica Festival Song Competition. The contest supported the young island industry and fostered national identity by introducing and making stars of
patwa
-singing, ghetto-identifying artists like Toots and the Maytals and Eric Donaldson. Long before many of his contemporaries, Seaga understood that Jamaica was the kind of place where it was hard to tell where the politics ended and the music began.

But the economy, still dependent on the former colonial arrangements, sputtered. Banana farming needed price supports and protection. The bauxite and tourist industries—the kind of businesses that extracted more than they put in—were growing, but had little effect on an island where more than one in three was unemployed. Here was where the optimism of official nationalism broke down.