Close to the Edge (11 page)

Lily was looking embarrassed. “Please, Suyee, let's just drop it.”

But I didn't want to drop it. I couldn't let these people get away with it, and I couldn't see that this was just making Lily feel worse.

“I want to speak with a manager,” I demanded.

The manager was a middle-aged, smartly dressed white Cuban woman in a suit and pink high heels. By the time she came down, we were surrounded by three or four other security guards. I explained the situation to her, and she asked for the name of the guard. I pointed him out, but he refused to give his name. Instead, he pulled out a list of guests from the hotel and began looking for my name on the list.

“If your name is not on this list, then we will have to ask you to leave the premises,” he threatened. I looked at him incredulously.

“This is a case of racism,” I told the gathered group. “My friend here and I are being discriminated on the basis of our skin color.”

The guards and manager were outraged. “No, en Cuba no hay racismo,” they told me. In Cuba there is no racism. They repeated that refrain, against which there was no argument because it was the official line. The revolution had eradicated racism.

One guard, tanned and broad shouldered with a close buzz cut, assured me, “Maybe you have experienced racism in the United States, but that doesn't happen here in Cuba.”

And then something unexpected happened. Lily started to agree with them. “She is not from here, she's a foreigner,” Lily told them. “She will never understand how things are in this country.” It felt like a slap in the face. But I've spent years studying race relations in Cuba, I wanted to say to her. I understand how racism functions here, I wanted to tell a black woman who had spent her life under the revolution and was now just trying to bury her disappointment and discomfort. Instead, I burst into tears.

Soon Lily was crying too, and we were both crying, tears of frustration and impotence and sadness. I imagined that Lily was crying as she remembered the nights that she spent here at the Hotel Riviera with her husband for only forty pesos a night after the revolution opened up Cuba's grandest hotels to the poor, a hotel that now she couldn't even enter. I imagined she was reminded of that husband, who left her as a young bride to raise their son on her own. I was crying because Lily was right. It finally dawned on me that the reason I really
didn't
get it was because—like the foreign reporter—I was ultimately an outsider who had to be convinced of the merits of the revolution. My Cuban friends were not brainwashed or passive. Rather, it was I who had failed to see the intricate ways Cubans negotiated their revolution. So much for the grand global movement I imagined I might find. I couldn't even connect with my own friend. And we were both crying with the emotion of seeing each other after so long, and having to share the moment with some buzz-cut security guards and a manager in pink high heels.

To avoid a scene the manager took our elbows and steered us toward the bar. “What would you like,
mi corazon
, order anything you want,” she cajoled. “It's on the house. Please don't cry.” We nodded dumbly, as she gave us her public relations spiel about how the client is important above all else, the new lingo of capitalism in which a customer is a customer—black, white, or brown. The guards stood together in a corner, throwing glances over our way, confident that they would not be reprimanded for just doing their job, just carrying out the policy of the hotel.

T
hat evening I took my delegation of fifteen students to a rap concert at the Teatro America in Central Havana. “I am always a realist,” rapped Hermanos de Causa in their song “Lágrimas negras” (Black tears). “Don't say that there's no racism where there's a racist / Always and wherever I come across it / I find prejudice in some form or other.” The rap opens with a sample of the famous Cuban song “Lágrimas negras,” brassy horns punctuating the sadness of an abandoned lover: “I weep without you knowing that my crying has black tears, black tears like my life.” There was something cathartic about listening to the songs. Maybe it was the realization that the powerlessness of racism could be collectively transformed into something empowering.

After the concert, following rounds of joyous hugs and greetings from Magia, Alexey, Sekou, Adeyeme, Pablo, Randy, and others, the rappers left me and began circulating in the crowd, selling their CDs—five pesos for Cubans, five dollars for foreigners. Where did I fit now, after all these years—pesos or dollars, foreigner or Cuban? Neither. “For you, Suyee, free,” they said and thrust CDs into my hands. But I was no longer living from a stack of depleting dollar bills saved from waiting tables. I had a real income. I must have bought about fifteen CDs in all. “La profesora Fernandes, now she thinks she's a big shot,” joked the rappers, as I pulled out the dollars.

As soon as I got back to my hotel, I pulled out my Walkman and began listening to Obsesión's new album,
La Fabri-K
, a collaboration with the group Doble Filo. “Why should we wait? For who? Who's gonna do it, EGREM?” Alexey rhymed over a syncopated drum kit and deep bass, on the introduction to the album. “Independent production, listen to me / Yo, good or bad, it's ours, made with love and a few extra provisions / We're ready, the disposition of all my people / There's no manager, we ourselves are sufficient.”

There was no way of operating as a rapper in Cuban society without depending to some degree on the state. Rappers had picked this up very early on. For some, like Randy, it made their lives much more difficult, while others had greater success at navigating the cultural bureaucracy. But as the government began to usurp the space that rappers had created, rappers responded with independent production. Maybe the DIY model was the key to a truly dynamic hip hop planet. This was a model that had already found a home in several American cities, including Chicago, a hub for independent and underground hip hop.

CHAPTER 2

Down and Underground
in Chi-Town

T
he entrance to the Red Dog Club in Chicago's Wicker Park was through a set of staircases at the back of the club. Like much else hip hop in Chicago, you had to be with insiders to navigate the hidden labyrinths and tunnels to this world. It was September 1998. I had arrived just days earlier in Chi-town to start graduate school, and I was staying with my childhood friend Gautam Ramnath. I hadn't seen Gautam since we were awkward teens forced together at our parents' social gatherings, and I half-expected him to be a computer geek or an investment banker. To my happy surprise, he and his roommate, Mike Walsh, were neither geeks nor bankers; they were b-boys at heart and eager to introduce me to Chicago's hip hop scene.

The Red Dog was a mecca for House music—a bass-heavy, electronic style of dance music pioneered in Chicago that was highly popular among African American youth. But this Saturday night the club was host to the backpack rap set wearing Baby Phat, Ecko, and Adidas originals. We paid our ten-dollar cover charge and were shunted out onto an open dance floor where b-boys genuflected midpose before the religious icons and stained-glass windows that adorned the space.

I was immediately struck by the diversity of the faces. In one cypher a slim Asian woman came out of a freeze and conceded the floor to a black guy in dreads, who rocked upright for a few moments and then dropped to the floor in a characteristic six-step routine. Beyond my friend Gautam, who is Indian, and Mike, an Irish American from Chicago's South Side, I saw other Asian Americans, African Americans, whites, and Latinos. I had been strongly drawn to the multiracial nature of Chicago as a city, and this dance club seemed to be an expression of that.

Taking in the scene, I wondered if these multiracial b-boys and b-girls were a product of Chicago's underground hip hop resurgence. I had followed the rise of underground independent rap in places like the San Francisco Bay Area, where the rap artist Too Short's albums went gold and platinum without major label support. The Chicago artists Common, Twista, and Kanye West followed suit soon after. In contrast to the stereotypical and violent representations of blackness in corporate rap— consumed by mostly white suburban audiences—underground rap made room for different ethnicities, different ways of being black, and other alternatives to the standard music industry formulas.
¹
Maybe underground rap could be the vehicle for uniting the hip hop generation, bringing it together across racial and ethnic lines.

Yet how, I thought as I crossed the dance floor to the bar, could these brown and white faces find a place within the imagined black planet? In Cuba rappers were Afro-descendant; their claims to blackness were undisputed, at least within hip hop. But if hip hop was an essentially black cultural form, as scholars such as Tricia Rose and later Imani Perry argued, then on what grounds did hip hoppers of other races claim to belong?

I
t's hard to understand much about race or hip hop in Chicago without visiting the South Side—the predominantly working-class part of the city populated by large numbers of blacks and Latinos. My chance came just a week after my trans-Pacific relocation—after my initial Cuban sojourn, I had briefly returned home to Sydney to prepare for my move to Chicago. I moved into an unfurnished apartment in the university neighborhood of Hyde Park before the semester started at the University of Chicago. Mike suggested that I come by his parents' house on the South Side to pick up a mattress that I could sleep on.

I caught a bus from Hyde Park and then switched to the “L” train. As the train went on its aboveground route, I looked out of the window at the landscape. We passed burned-out carcasses of buildings, empty lots surrounded by barbed wire and overgrown with weeds, and boarded-up storefronts.

The train whizzed by scores of graffiti pieces and tags. The veteran graffiti writer William Upski Wimsatt recounts in his book
Bomb the Suburbs
that hip hop culture in Chicago had some rocky beginnings. In 1974 a crew of New York City graffiti writers had a meeting with the Chicago gang Blackstone Rangers to introduce its members to graffiti. But the gang youth were not so interested.
²
It wasn't until about 1982 that graffiti took off in Chicago, with artists such as CTA, Car Crew, Trixter, and ABC Crew.

Between 1985 and 1987 the rooftops along the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) train lines were the focus of graffiti art. In 1987 Trixter and the ABC Crew began to paint trains like their counterparts in New York City and elsewhere, bombing entire lines like the Congress Line. In 1989 the area north of Chinatown became a hot spot for graffiti with the Wall of Fame around the Eighteenth Street railroad.
³
As Wimsatt recalls, sessions at the Wall of Fame were often preceded by all-city writers' meetings attended by upward of eighty kids, in an effort to unite crews across the city.
⁴

B-boying had started in the mid- to late 1970s, with crews such as Down to Rock, Krazy Krew, and the Windy City Breakers. In 1978 Lord Cashus D started a chapter of Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation in Chicago. In 1990, together with Geoffrey Watts and Aaron Brown, Cashus D created a hip hop organization called the New World Order that flourished briefly and then died out. The political and organizational efforts of Chicago hip hop pioneers were linked to the city's history of militant units that included street gangs, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers. Hip hop meetings—with the first held in the Cabrini Green housing projects in 1985 by a high school senior named Warp—were a distinctly Chicago phenomenon and one of several efforts to organize the disparate Chicago scene.
⁵

I got off at the Ashland and Sixty-third Street stop, and Mike was waiting there in his parents' beat-up, gun-metal gray 1993 Dodge Caravan.

As we drove the few blocks along Sixty-third Street to Kedzie, Mike explained that the black population of the South Side had migrated from the rural South during the early and midtwentieth century to work in the steel mills and meatpacking plants. They were housed in tightly cramped conditions in the South Side's Black Belt and later in public housing projects such as the Trumbull Park Homes, Dearborn Homes, and the Robert Taylor Homes. But by the 1980s the industrial base of the South Side was in decline as meatpacking companies and steel factories, such as Wisconsin Steel and US Steel's South Works, closed down. Large sectors of the South Side turned to urban wasteland. Whites fled to the suburbs. Small businesses shut down. Banks foreclosed on people's homes. And through all this hardship, the city administrations cut back spending on public services and infrastructure.

“The Chicago authorities just allowed the communities to decay and die,” said Mike. “There are no good grocery stores. There are liquor stores everywhere.” He motioned around us. “Just after white people started to run like hell from the black folks, that opened up housing and Mexican people moved in to this area, too. It's unique to Chicago as well, since Chicago is extraordinarily segregated, and this is one of the few areas where you have Mexican and African American communities living together with the small remnant Irish American community.”

Chicago was segregated. The North Side of Chicago and the suburbs were very white. The South Side and West Side were mostly black and Latino. Each ethnic group had its own separate enclave. The melting pot didn't seem to extend much beyond cross-sampling of cuisines or music—blues at the Checkerboard Lounge on the South Side, kalamata olives in Greektown, Dim Sum in Chinatown, or a dosa in the South Asian neighborhood of Devon. Public spaces were also divided by race. When I went to the University of Chicago to enroll in my classes for the fall, I noticed that many of the students, professors, and visitors to the university were white. The staff serving food in the cafeterias and unloading boxes, the janitors, and security guards were almost all black. While I was at the university, a black graduate student friend was mistaken for a member of the cleaning staff in the student housing where she lived. A city could be multiracial and racially divided at the same time. But could music overcome these kinds of entrenched barriers and help people to see beyond the bubbles in which they lived?

I gazed out the window of the van. Most of the store signs along Kedzie were in Spanish: Envios de Dinero, Fotos: Bodas y Quinceaneras, Tamales. There were auto parts stores, Mexican restaurants with cartoons of cacti and men in sombreros, a dollar store with its sign half ripped off, and the ubiquitous liquor stores. A kid with a do-rag on his head cruised along the sidewalk on his bike. One sign read in bold red lettering: “Sell your property in 30 days!!” A thrift store was boarded up with a “For Sale” sign posted outside.

We pulled into Sixty-second Place and Mike parked the car outside his parents' modest brick house. His mom lay asleep on the couch, a movie blaring on the television screen. We tiptoed past her. “She works night shifts as a nurse, so most days this is how she falls asleep.”

We chatted over cans of Coke in the kitchen. Mike had grown up on the South Side. He came of age in the mid-1980s at the height of the crack epidemic.

“There wasn't a tremendous amount of jobs to be had when I was growing up,” Mike explained. “We all had our share of shit jobs at factories, and mowing people's lawns, and low-paid service work. But we also had our own alternative economies, like stealing and selling things at Maxwell Street.”
⁶

Along with other kids in the neighborhood, Mike became involved with the b-boy craze of the '80s. “It was just something we did out on the street,” said Mike. “If you were sitting on the curb, and somebody came along and you didn't have a tape or a box and they did, they'd stop, you'd run in to get your cardboard, and then soon people would gather. We never established a proper crew. It was much more fluid than that, and I think that's how most blocks were. It was like baseball—pick-up. You'd just be sitting on the curb, and people would come by and you'd start playing, same as b-boying.”

“Run-DMC was huge back then in the early eighties,” Mike reminisced. “We had a cheap-ass turntable and this really cheap tape recorder, and I would put the microphone by the speaker on the turntable and record the shit off the vinyl to the tape, just so we would have a tape for the box when we would break. By the end of the summer those tapes were just worn through.”

Jermaine was an older guy from Mike's neighborhood. “This dude had a huge box that was like the size of a coffee table,” Mike recalled, “and he was a big dude so he could carry it around all over the place. He always had the latest music and he would have it on tape. He would bring it to school. He was huge—he was like Raheem from
Do the Right Thing.
He was later run over and killed by a cop. He was a great guy and everybody loved him; he was a real part of everybody's breakin.' He was the spark that initiated hip hop and brought it to a younger generation. He was part of the community, and it was a real tremendous shock when he was killed purposefully by the police. That was never investigated. I don't think anybody was ever arrested for his death.”

The early history of hip hop culture on the South Side, like life in general, was connected to gangs and their control of the territory. Mike explained: “The two main gang alliances in Chicago were Folks and People, just like the Bloods and Crips of LA. The gangs were involved with drug trafficking and grand theft, and the gangs made it possible to unite and operate a tight system to get around the police structure. They also contributed to building the community. That doesn't mean it's rosy growing up in a neighborhood where the gang is controlling your streets, because as a kid they want you in. If you're in, it means you're protected, but you also have a tremendous responsibility to that gang. If you're not in, you can still work with them and gain some protection from rival gangs, which is what I did. I had seen friends in gangs being killed or committed to a life in prison. Despite the stability of the gang's presence, it was still very tenuous, and to commit everything to that was pretty scary. But it's also pretty scary to be on your own. Our area was controlled by the Gangster Disciples, one of Chicago's most notorious gangs, and Two Six, which comes from the name Twenty-sixth Street, a Mexican gang which came down from Pilsen and moved south. They were both part of the Folk Nation, so our area was controlled by the Folks when I was growing up.”

On Chicago's South Side graffiti art was strongly tied to gangs' establishing territory and communicating events and murders. To go over someone else's tag could have dire consequences. As Mike related, “I was not a tagger growing up because I was scared that I'd fuck around and piss somebody off and, next thing I know, I'd be getting shot. Graffiti definitely had a different context in terms of the gangs.

“The beautiful thing about hip hop was that it really gave you a sense of your own humanity in the midst of seeing and experiencing some truly horrible shit,” he concluded. “Where we grew up, it was like living in a war zone. That kind of traumatic experience. And hip hop really infused your common everyday experience with new life and even hope. For many of my friends it didn't translate into a real hope; it was fleeting. A lot of them are dead, a lot of them are in jail. I'm the only one who made it out. I had a stability that others didn't have, like two parents and step-parents who could pool their income to pay for my education and eventually get me out of there.”

We loaded the mattress into Mike's parents' van, and he drove me back to Hyde Park. With the start of the school year, and our busy lives, it would be another year or so before our paths crossed again. On that evening I had little inkling that Mike would turn out to be my future husband.

I
was keen to find out more about Chicago hip hop, especially its underground scene, but living in Hyde Park made this kind of exploration difficult. Hyde Park was an island of privilege on the South Side. During the 1950s and 1960s the University of Chicago had carried out an urban renewal project in Hyde Park in an attempt to create a middle-class white community in the heart of the Black Belt. The university used its neighborhood redevelopment corporation to evict black tenants, leading to tensions with the surrounding black community. But the results were mixed. Years later there were still large black populations residing in the areas of northwestern Hyde Park adjoining the ghetto, while the immediate vicinity of the university was owned mostly by whites.
⁷