The Weight of the Frame

I flew into JFK on the fourteenth of March, 2019, which was a Thursday. I remember this because it was also the day after the last nor’easter of that winter, and the taxi from the airport took two hours and forty minutes to reach Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, and during that ride I ate a package of peanut butter crackers from a vending machine at the terminal and watched the wet gray city slide past the window in the particular way that cities do when you have received bad news and everything on the other side of the glass has become evidence of your irrelevance to it. The driver was playing Dominican radio. I did not ask him to turn it down.

My father had died the night before, alone, in the second-floor apartment he had rented for thirty-one years, and by the time I landed the body had already been taken to the funeral home on DeKalb Avenue, the one with the green awning that had been there since before I was born, and the apartment itself had been unlocked by the super with a key my father kept on a nail behind the radiator. This was the key I had used as a child. My father never changed it. The lock was a Medeco, brass, and it still worked, which is more than you could say for most things on that block by then.

Myrtle Avenue in 2019 was not the Myrtle Avenue I grew up on. This is a sentence that means nothing without specifics, so here are the specifics.

The bodega on the corner of Myrtle and Clermont, where my father bought Bustelo coffee in the yellow brick and a Daily News every morning, was now a place called Stonefruit that sold eight-dollar lattes and twelve-dollar toast with ricotta and honey. The hand-painted sign that once said COLD BEER GROCERY LOTTO was gone, and in its place was a sans-serif logo in millennial pink. The grocery was gone. The beer was now craft beer. The lotto was, presumably, no longer necessary — the new clientele had already won.

Three doors down, the laundromat where my mother had washed our clothes when I was small enough to sit on the folding table had been replaced by a store that sold artisanal candles. Across the street, the check-cashing place was now a coworking space. The Jamaican restaurant where you could get a plate of oxtail and rice and peas for seven dollars — this was the restaurant where my father ate lunch every Saturday for twenty years, where the woman behind the counter called him Mr. Carl and gave me extra plantains — that was gone. In its place was a restaurant that also served Caribbean food but at four times the price, with exposed brick and a cocktail menu, and it was called something like “Island” or “Root.”

Gentrification is not an event. It is not a thing that happens to a neighborhood. It is a thing that happens to particular people, in particular rooms, and my father died in one of those rooms, and when I walked into it the morning after his death, the room smelled like him — like Barbasol shaving cream and the floral air freshener he bought at the dollar store on Fulton Street and the particular staleness of a space where a man has lived alone for a long time — and that smell was more real to me than anything the neighborhood had become.

My father was not a sentimental man. He was born in 1941 in Bed-Stuy, the youngest of four children, and he grew up in the period when Bedford-Stuyvesant was the largest Black community in the United States and also one of the most systematically neglected, a place where the city’s schools and hospitals and garbage trucks stopped showing up with the regularity they showed up elsewhere, and where this absence was understood by everyone who lived there as a grammar of governance that said: you are here, and we know you are here, and we have decided that here does not matter.

He moved to the Myrtle Avenue apartment in 1988. He was forty-seven. My mother had left two years before — moved to her sister’s in Philadelphia, took me with her — and he stayed. He worked as a building superintendent for a landlord on Atlantic Avenue, then for another landlord on Flatbush, then for a third landlord whose name I never learned because by then my father and I spoke on the phone once a month and the conversations were short and had the quality of two people checking that the other one still existed. He was not a man who described his inner life. He fixed boilers. He replaced locks. He painted hallways a color the supply house called Navajo White, which was neither Navajo nor white but a beige so institutional it might have been designed to eliminate the concept of color entirely.

He liked the Mets. He drank Rheingold when you could still get it and then Budweiser when you couldn’t. He read the paper. He went to church on Easter and Christmas. He died on a Wednesday night in March with the television on and a glass of water on the nightstand, and the glass was still half full when I got there, and I stared at that glass for a long time because it was the most recent thing he had touched and it seemed impossible that it should just be sitting there, still holding its water, while he was not.

The neighborhood killed him. Not in the way that a gun kills, or a disease kills, but in the way that erasure kills — slowly, by removing the context in which a person makes sense to himself, until he is standing in a place he has lived for thirty years and the place no longer recognizes him, and he no longer recognizes the place, and the distance between those two failures of recognition is the distance across which a man can simply stop.

His rent, which had been stabilized at $847 a month since 2003, was the only reason he was still there. The landlord — the fourth landlord, a limited liability company registered in Delaware whose actual beneficiaries were as invisible as the capital that animated them — had been offering buyouts. Ten thousand dollars. Twenty thousand. Thirty. My father refused every one, not because thirty thousand dollars was not a great deal of money to a man who made forty-two thousand a year, but because he had nowhere to go, and he knew it, and the landlord knew it, and this shared knowledge was itself a form of violence, the quiet kind, the kind that does not leave a mark but leaves a man sitting in an apartment that is suddenly worth more empty than it is with him in it.

The new tenants on the first floor paid $2,400 a month. They were a couple in their early thirties — a man who did something with software and a woman who did something with branding — and they were pleasant, and they said hello to my father when they passed him on the stairs, and once they invited him to a party where people drank natural wine and talked about podcasts, and he went, and he stayed for twenty minutes, and when I asked him about it on the phone he said, “They were nice people,” and then he was quiet for a while, and then he said, “I don’t think they know where they are.”

I have thought about that sentence every day since he died. I don’t think they know where they are. It was not a complaint. It was not resentment. It was a diagnosis. Everything my father’s presence on that block represented — thirty-one years of rent paid on time, of sidewalks shoveled, of hallways painted Navajo White, of knowing which valve to turn when the boiler pressure dropped, of being known by name at the Jamaican restaurant and the bodega and the barbershop on Willoughby — all of it had become, in the economy of the new neighborhood, invisible. Not opposed. Not resented. Simply not seen.

The funeral was on a Saturday. Fourteen people came. This is not a large number, but my father was not a man with a large life. He had a specific life. The people who came were the people who had known him in the specificity of it: the woman from the barbershop, who closed early to attend. Two men from the church on Lafayette Avenue. A man named Dexter who had worked with my father on Atlantic Avenue in the nineties and who cried without making any sound, as if grief were a private mechanical failure to be managed without disturbing the machinery around it.

My mother did not come. She sent flowers. Lilies. The card said, “Rest well, Carl.” I put it in my coat pocket and forgot about it until weeks later, when I found it in my apartment in Chicago while doing laundry, and the sight of her handwriting — the same handwriting that had signed my report cards and written grocery lists on the backs of envelopes — made me sit down on the floor of my laundry room and stay there for a while, not crying, just sitting, which is the body recognizing that something has shifted in the architecture of the world and the body has not yet learned the new floor plan.

After the funeral I walked from the church back to the apartment. It was eleven blocks. I walked down Lafayette to Classon, down Classon to Myrtle, then east on Myrtle to the building. The walk took twenty-two minutes and I counted the businesses that were new. The count was seventeen. Seventeen new businesses in eleven blocks, and every one of them had been designed — the fonts, the color palettes, the reclaimed wood, the Edison bulbs — to signal the same thing, which was not a place but a price point, a demographic, an aspiration that had nothing to do with the street it sat on and everything to do with the street it was turning the street into.

There is a particular cruelty in a system that makes a neighborhood unaffordable to the people who made it a neighborhood, that takes the labor and the presence and the daily lived fact of Black and brown and working-class people and converts it into an “aesthetic” and a “vibe” and a real-estate listing that says “vibrant community” when what it means is that the community is vibrant enough to attract capital and not powerful enough to survive it. My father understood this in his body, in the way that a building superintendent understands load-bearing walls — not theoretically, not politically, but structurally — and that understanding is what I heard in his voice when he said, “I don’t think they know where they are.”

I spent three days in the apartment after the funeral. I packed his clothes into garbage bags — four bags, which is how much a life’s wardrobe comes to when a man does not shop often and wears things until they are done. I found, in the closet, a framed photograph I had never seen: my parents on their wedding day, 1970, outside the church on Gates Avenue. My mother in a white dress with a wide collar. My father in a brown suit. They are not looking at the camera. They are looking at each other, and the look on my father’s face is one I never saw in life — open, unguarded, a face that has not yet learned that the world will require it to become the face I knew, the careful face, the face that fixes boilers and says “They were nice people” when what he means is that the world has moved on without telling him.

I took the photograph. I left the frame.

The frame was heavy — wood, dark-stained, the kind of frame you buy at a five-and-dime that no longer exists in a neighborhood that no longer has five-and-dimes — and when I picked it up I felt something I cannot describe except to say it was the weight of a choice someone made, once, to put a picture in a frame and hang it in a closet where no one would see it, and that choice told me more about my father’s interior life than thirty years of monthly phone calls, and I stood there holding the frame and understood that I had failed him in the specific way that children fail their parents, which is by becoming someone who lives somewhere else and calls once a month and asks how he’s doing and accepts “fine” as an answer because accepting “fine” as an answer is so much easier than asking the next question, the real question, the question that would require you to stay on the phone long enough to hear the silence that comes after “fine,” and in that silence you might hear the sound of a man sitting alone in an apartment where the smell of Barbasol and dollar-store air freshener is the only evidence that anyone lives there at all.

I left the frame because I could not carry it. That is the truth. I could not carry the weight of what it meant, which was everything — his silence, his refusal, his thirty-one years on Myrtle Avenue, his Navajo White hallways and his Bustelo coffee and his oxtail Saturdays and his building that was worth more without him in it. I took the picture. I left the frame. And I walked down the stairs and out through the vestibule door, and I did not look back at the building because I knew, with the certainty of a person who has been away too long to pretend otherwise, that I would not be coming back, and that the next time someone stood in that apartment it would be the couple from the first floor, or someone like them, and they would pull up the carpet and expose the hardwood and repaint the walls something other than Navajo White and list the apartment on a website for $2,800 a month, and the listing would say something like “charming prewar” and “original details” and “steps from the G train,” and none of those words would be untrue, and none of them would be true either, because truth requires a witness, and the witnesses were gone — my father was gone, and the woman from the barbershop was going, and Dexter was going, and the church on Lafayette would hold on for another few years and then it too would go — and I was going, carrying a photograph and leaving behind a frame, which is, when I think about it now, the most American thing I have ever done: taking the image of something and leaving the thing itself behind to be remodeled.

A friend of mine, a historian who studies the Great Migration, once told me over dinner on Devon Avenue that the thing most people get wrong about the Migration is that they think of it as movement. What it actually was, she said, was a series of bets. Each person who left was betting that the place they were going to would be less hostile than the place they were leaving, and the bet itself was the point — the assertion that a life could be made somewhere, that a person had the right to move through the world and find a place in it.

My father’s parents made that bet. They came from South Carolina in 1936. They landed in Bed-Stuy, and they built a life that was not prosperous but was legible — it made sense, it had a shape — and my father inherited that life and lived it on Myrtle Avenue for thirty-one years, and then the terms of the bet changed. Not because a law was passed or a villain appeared. The terms changed the way weather changes — slowly, then all at once, and by the time you notice, the air is already different, and the old air is not coming back.

The new people were not hostile. The new businesses were not hostile. The new rents were not hostile. The hostility, if that is even the word, was structural — it lived in the spreadsheets of the LLC registered in Delaware, in the algorithms of the real-estate websites, in the logic of a market that assigns value to proximity and novelty and the particular aesthetic that the industry calls “up-and-coming,” which means, if you listen carefully, a neighborhood where the existing residents are on their way out and the incoming residents have not yet arrived in sufficient numbers to need their own name for the place. “Up-and-coming” is a direction. It tells you who is coming. It does not tell you who is leaving.

My father was leaving. He was leaving in the way that people leave when they stay — by becoming invisible in the place they have always been, by becoming the person the new arrivals see through on the stairs, the man the listing doesn’t mention, the body the building is worth more without.

It is February now and I am in Chicago and it is very cold and I have the photograph on my desk. My parents look at each other in 1970 on Gates Avenue. Behind them the church is visible, and behind the church the sky, and the sky is the same sky that is over Brooklyn now, over Myrtle Avenue, over the apartment that is no longer my father’s, over the Stonefruit where the bodega was and the candle store where the laundromat was and the coworking space where the check-cashing place was. The sky does not care. It is just there, above everything, the same sky my father saw from the window of the apartment, the same sky his parents saw when they stepped off the train in 1936 and looked up and thought: here. This is where we will try.

I think about the frame I left behind. I think about its weight. The old picture — the one my father was in, the one with the Bustelo and the oxtail and Dexter and the barbershop and the hallways painted Navajo White — that picture is not inside the frame anymore. That picture is in my pocket. That picture is this essay. And it is not enough, and it will have to be.