The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

The New Noir

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies.

The New Noir

RACE, IDENTITY, AND DIASPORA IN BLACK SUBURBIA

By Orly Clergé

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2019 by Orly Clergé

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clerge, Orly, author.

Title: The new noir : race, identity, and diaspora in black suburbia / by Orly Clerge.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019014745 (print) | LCCN 2019018669 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520296763 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520296787 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520969131 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Middle class African Americans—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Middle class African Americans—New York (State)—Long Island—Social conditions. | African diaspora—Social conditions. | Queens (New York, N.Y.)—Race relations. | Long Island (N.Y.)—Race relations. | Immigrants—New York (State)—New York. | Immigrants—New York (State)—Long Island.

Classification: LCC E185.86 (ebook) | LCC E185.86 .C564 2020 (print) | DDC 305.5/50896073074721—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014745

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To my mama and parents, Marie Deesse and Antoine Sherer, whose ordinary decisions made the extraordinary possible. And to zansèt nou (our ancestors), who made a way under impossible circumstances.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface: Aperitif

1. Village Market: Encounters in Black Diasporic Suburbs

2. Children of the Yam: From Enslaved African to the Black Middle Class in the United States, Haiti, and Jamaica

3. Blood Pudding: Forbidden Neighbors on Jim Crow Long Island

4. Callaloo: Cultural Economies of our Backyards

5. Fish Soup: Class Journey across Time and Place

6. Vanilla Black: The Spectrum of Racial Consciousness

7. Green Juice Fast: Skinfolk Distinction Making

Conclusion: Mustard Seeds

Appendix: Digestif

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

1. Migrants waiting for the train north at the Union Railroad Depot in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1921.

2. Map from W. E. B. Du Bois’s report on the Great Migration for The Crisis.

3. Black patients in Ellis Island Library, circa 1920.

4. Marcus Garvey, founder of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Back to Africa Movement.

5. Universal Negro Improvement Association convention parade through Harlem, New York, 1920.

6. Glenda and Ormistan Spencer in prayer. Rosedale: The Way It Is.

7. Map of New York City metropolitan area (1842).

8. Advertisement for the sale of fifteen young enslaved Africans at a public auction in Hempstead, Long Island.

9. Advertisement for capture of a runaway slave in Newtown, Queens.

10. Advertisement in Brooklyn Life, March 5, 1910.

11. A real estate advertisement page from The Queens Borough, New York City, 1910–1920.

12. Map of the Queens Jazz Trail, 1998.

13. Louis Armstrong in front of his home in Queens with children from the neighborhood.

14. Shirley Graham Du Bois and W. E. B. Du Bois’s wedding in Queens, New York.

15. Class categories for Blacks by nationality and ancestry in the United States.

16. Educational attainment for Blacks by nationality, United States, 2012.

Acknowledgments

Men anpil, chay pa lou (many hands, the load is lighter)

Haitian proverb

The book completion process is enriched by the community writers have around them. My first expression of gratitude is to God for providing me with the strength and endurance to complete this ten year plus project. I am thankful to the many families, individuals, and organizations who allowed me to come into the interior spaces of their lives. Their extraordinary stories are imprinted in my mind and spirit, and I hope that through this book, their narratives become a part of the Black diaspora’s rich archives. Archival research for this project was made possible by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Queens Public Library, and Hofstra University’s Center for Suburban Studies and Special Collections. Fieldwork was supported by the National Science Foundation Research Grant, the Society for the Study of Social Problems Minority Fellowship, and Brown University’s Population Studies and Training Center, The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

I owe a sincere thank-you to Jose Itzigsohn for his support. Generations of scholars have benefitted from his mentorship, and I feel lucky to have been his student and advisee. I am also grateful to Hilary Silver, whose commitment to urban justice served as an important model for how one should use research to change cities and suburbs for the better. This book has benefitted immensely from the thoughtful feedback and moral support of Kara Cebulko, Cedric De Leon, Zophia Edwards, and Trina Vithayathil. I have been lucky to have them as intellectual interlocutors and friends. I reserve a special thank-you to Grey Osterud who gave the manuscript careful attention; this is a stronger book because of her insights. I am also grateful to my UC Press editor, Naomi Schneider, for her insight, and managing editor, Benjamin (Benjy) Malings, for his attention to detail. I am especially appreciative of Jody Agius Vallejo and anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Thank you to the wonderfully talented artist and friend who created the amazing cover art for this book, Nathalie Jolivert. I am very appreciative of the incredible creative insight of Nikki Terry, whose support helped me assemble this book in its final stages and get it out into the digital world.

I feel a deep sense of gratitude toward my undergraduate mentor, advisor, and friend, Michelle Harris. Her generosity was a turning point for me as a college freshman, and she and Harvey Charles have been a continued source of love and support throughout my career. I am also grateful to our collaborators, Sherrill Sellers and Frederick Gooding, with whom I met frequently to complete our coedited book as I wrote this book. Working with them was a reminder that transformative and liberatory sociology is possible. Thank you to Megan Reid and Amanda Reid, who both provided great academic and publishing advice. I am also grateful to several scholars for their guidance, mentorship, and support from the conception of this book to its completion: Karyn Lacy, Juan Battle, Alford A. Young, Marcus Hunter, Andrew Deener, Joyce Bell, Phil Kasinitz, Ranita Ray, Koritha Mitchell, Joyce Bell, Sherie Randolph, Shawn Christian, Kijan Bloomfied, Rachel Heiman, and Sylvia Dominguez. Thank you to my amazing academic teammate, Nalo Hamilton, with whom I met weekly while writing this book. Nalo shared very helpful insights throughout the ebbs and flows of work and life’s circumstances that helped me tremendously.

I am also deeply grateful to my Brown University/Providence community. Graduate school is a rigorous process; however, some of my most cherished memories and friendships formed during this period. Thank you to Paget Henry, Barrymore Bogues, Michael Kennedy, Nancy Luke, Susan Shorts, Ebony Bridwell Mitchell, Nitsan Chorev, Greg Elliot, Michael White, Marion Orr, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Ann Dill, Dennis Hogan, and Evelyn Hu Dehart for faculty support. To the friends I gained: Monique Brown, Jessica Chery, Kathy, Bernard Onyango, Jing Song, Sukriti Issar, Roland Pongou, Gabriella Sanchez-Soto, Holly Reed, Kasahun Admasson, Besenia Rodriguez, Erica J. Mullen, Kathy Cooper, Blessing Mberu, Maya Mesola, Salome Wawire, Rachel Goldberg, Julia Drew, Jennifer Darrah, Karida Brown, Marcelo Bohrt, Tina Park, Yara Jarallah, Thandi Hlabana, and Michael Rodriguez, thank you. I owe a special thank-you to Noelle Hutchins Kelso, with whom I started and finished graduate school and who has been a source of boundless sisterhood on this academic journey. I am also grateful to Gayatri Singh, Bernadette Ludwig, and Irvin Hunt who read early articles that informed the book. They showed me the importance of writing in a supportive community, and I am very appreciative of our writing meetings in New York coffeeshops.

Thank you to the organizations where I conducted my earliest scholarly and pedagogical work: the Leadership Alliance and the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers: Medeva Ghee, Barbara Khan, Sharon Gamble, Luisa N. Borrell, Chera Reid, Reginald A. Wilburn, and Alexandra Cornelius. I am also thankful to the scholars whom I met in graduate school and have supported my career development: Tiffany Joseph, Saida Grundy, L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, Maria Johnson, Keith Robinson and, Abigail A. Sewell. They each taught me the strength of graduate student support networks when I did not quite know my way around the academic world. I had the good fortune of working at the Russell Sage Foundation, and benefitted from working with various visiting scholars. I am especially thankful to Pyong Gap Min for his mentorship and Galo Falchetorre for taking me on as his student.

I’ve written this book in many cities and institutions. The early drafts of this book were written during my postdoctoral position at Yale University. I’ve benefitted greatly from working with Elijah Anderson. Anderson’s Urban Ethnography Workshop was a critical intellectual space for me to present my work and be exposed to exciting ethnographic research in addition to his intellectual generosity. A special thank you to Fred Wherry, who after I shared the findings of my research helped me brainstorm an early chapter outline for this book—which marked the moment that my dissertation became a book project.

The bulk of this book was written at Tufts University. I am grateful to Tisch Library for providing the space and the resources needed to complete this book. I am thankful for the support of my colleagues and staff from across the university: Pawan Dhingra, Helen Marrow, Freeden Oeur, Ryan Centner, Paula Aymer, Sarah Sobieraj, John Libassi, and Victoria Dorward. The Center for Humanities at Tufts was an excellent intellectual space, and along with the Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Consortium and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, the Africana Studies Program, and the Africana Center, I was exposed to new literatures, ways of thinking, and scholars who helped me transform this project for the better. Thank you to Lisa Lowe, Adriana Zevala, Adlai Murdoch, Pearl Robinson, Modhumita Roy, Monica Ndounou, Khary Jones, Kris Manjapra, Kerri Greenridge, Sabina Vaught, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Julian Agyeman, and Katrina Moore. Thank you to Yolanda King for providing me with the unique opportunity to be a scholar in residence and share my research and activism with the broader Tufts community. I am especially appreciative of Natalie Masuoka, who has been a wonderful mentor and friend.

A writing residency at Tufts in Talloires, France, gave me a memorable space to think about transnational problems of colonialism, exile, and diaspora. I owe a special thank you to Kendra Field, with whom I started at Tufts as a colleague and, at my departure, felt I was leaving a dear friend. To the vibrant community of intellectuals in the Boston area who became friends, thank you to Sarah Jackson, Saher Selod, Sylvia Dominguez, Derron Wallace, Regine Jean Charles, Ohene Asare, Fox Harrell, Vincent Brown, Ajantha Subramanian, Vivek Bald, Sneha Veeragoudar, Patrick Sylvain, Francis Sullivan, Elizabeth Hinton, Ashley Farmer, and Rashauna Johnson. A sincere thank you to Patrick Sylvain, who provided important insights on English-Haitian Kreyol excerpts in the text. I completed this book at the University of California–Davis. I am grateful for the interest and engagement of scholars in the Department of Sociology, Department of Education and African American and African Studies. Thank you to Maisha Winn and Lawrence Winn of the Transformative Justice in Education Center who have been especially helpful. I am also grateful for a University of California–Davis publishing grant that supported the completion of the book.

I am also thankful to Wheaton College professors and administrators, particularly Hyun Kim, Javier Trevino. Thank you to Marta Elena, Leroy Foster, Debbie Bial, Rico Blancaflor, Laura Brief, and the POSSE Foundation for the opportunity of a lifetime. I am indebted to Luis Baez, with whom I learned how to do activist sociology as an undergraduate student, and has been a dear friend since. Thank you to Sierra Freeman Jerez, a loving friend and writing confidant who read many drafts of chapters in progress and reminded me how important it was to maintain the book’s New York authenticity. A heartfelt thank-you to my friends whose phone calls, prayers, and meet-ups sustained me: Vernick Smith, Alana Smith, Julie Kapur, Marsha Muschette, Jewel McGowan Watson, Jason Watson, Geraldine Aine, and Zarius Durant. A special thank-you to my dear friend Shantini Alleyne for reading early chapter drafts, visiting me during challenging periods, and providing valuable marketing advice.

I don’t think there is a truth more universal than that we strive to make our parents, biological or adopted, proud. During the moments when I did not know if I was going to be able to complete this book, I channeled my parents unconditional love and bottomless support. Our conversations enriched this project, their care helped me complete it. My parents have been my fiercest advocates, reminding me to take care of myself when the workload was heavy. We experienced life-altering and heartbreaking setbacks as I wrote this book; however, they always graciously prepared food for my soul, extended hugs, and welcomed me home when I needed to replenish. They have given me a great push, but have also reminded me of our family’s extraordinary migration journey through their beautiful storytelling. Along with my siblings, they have kept me grounded and I can never thank them enough for all that they have done for me. This book is my gift to my parents, whose sacrifices were numerous, yet often went underappreciated. To my siblings, Jens Arthaud Charles, Claudia Warrington, Samarah Ghunney, Naama Charles Allonce, and Cadiz Clergé, my early skills as a sociologist were learned by watching your every move, fascinated as I followed in your shadows, and piecing together the stories you shared and sometimes hid from my girl-child mind. My brother’s swag and singing voice taught me the importance of cultural expression. My sisters’ confidence, beauty, and intellect taught me how to stand on my own in the face of life’s challenges. Thank you for your love, protection, and encouragement despite it all. Thank you especially to Naama, who read my writing, provided incisive feedback, and helped me brainstorm new ideas. To my nieces and nephew, Felicia, Naaji, Imma, Max, Jenskito, Jennah, Jensey, and Jenny, my hope is that I can inspire you to amplify your gifts as much as you have inspired me to do so. I love you dearly. To Uncle William, and my uncles, aunts, and cousins, you are the diaspora of my heart. To my grandparents, Ada France, Marcel France, Felicia Tanis, and Andre Tanis, and the ancestors, I hope you will gather for a book club to read the translated version of this book in heaven. I miss you. Special gratitude is reserved for Darnel Degand, who expressed excitement about the possibilities of this book in its early stages, read elements of the work, and provided important insights along the way. I disappeared to my office, local cafés, and libraries at odd times, and for long durations. Coming home was a source of joy and reprieve from what at times seemed to be an endless road. For your partnership, I am grateful.

Preface

APERITIF

The rules of Black Society could not be any more complex than they are in New York.

Otis Graham, Our Kind of People

My fascination with neighborhoods and identity likely began when I was around eight years old. I was born and raised in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Occasionally, my family visited friends from the old country who lived in Queens, the Jean Baptistes. One evening we dressed up to attend a first communion party for their daughter, Fabiola. Fabiola’s mom, Guerline, and my mom grew up attending community picnics and walking through shared lakous (backyards) together in the south of Haiti. Like mother-daughter pairs sometimes do, Fabiola and I became best friends. As my family and I left our three-bedroom apartment that evening and exited the lobby, we saw red and blue lights of NYPD cars flashing and heard ambulance sirens wailing. My mom’s Chevrolet Celebrity was parked in the center of the commotion, and a crowd was forming on the sidewalk behind her car. We crossed the street, and next to our car lay the deceased body of a young man, half-covered by a white sheet.

I watched the scene as my father pulled off and swerved between the police cars. He drove to the Belt Parkway. Queens was our destination, a place where the murders, drug dealing, and theft that surrounded us in Brooklyn did not seem to happen. In our neighborhoods, my father was held up at knife- and gunpoint several times going to and from work at the mechanic shop; my mom’s car was broken into frequently, making her late for work at a nursing home. Haitian families in Queens did not seem to encounter these problems. They were well off in my girl-child eyes. Fabiola’s party was filled with the stereotypical joys of a suburban childhood. When she opened greeting cards, money fell out. A lavish amount of food was laid out in the dining room with international dishes I had never seen before. Fabiola and her brother each had their own room. They could play in their green backyard. She had the newest sneakers, her brother a Nintendo gaming system. Her parents’ cars did not stall at red lights. They were living in what seemed to be a demi-paradise. In contrast, my family of eight was living across borders; my parents and I were in Brooklyn and my siblings were in Port au Prince. My parents worked to make ends meet and to create a pathway to bring my siblings to New York. And there began my consciousness of class, migration and place and my fascination with how the other half of the Haitian diaspora lived.

My childhood impressions of Queens were of course limited and naive. Queens was a class-diverse place. Yet moving between the world of Brooklyn’s tenement buildings and the one-family homes of Queens was meaningful for the formation of my class consciousness. Queens taught me the spatial politics of class, but fault lines in Flatbush illustrated intersectionality—the overlapping systems of racial, status, spatial, gender, and ethnic oppression that reflected hidden elements of the Empire State of mind, so to speak. A walk two blocks west of our apartment building was Ocean Avenue, a physical color line that imprecisely separated Blacks and Whites. I crossed the color line into Ditmas Park regularly. Hand in hand, my parents and I often walked to Newkirk Plaza to catch the D train into the city (Manhattan). We passed grand Victorian houses with wrap-around porches. When it was time for my first communion, my parents had a celebration for me in our three-bedroom apartment, and the Soca Boys’ song One Cent, Five Cent, Ten Cent Dollar was the event’s soundtrack. Between the ceremony and the party, my father walked me over to the houses on Ocean Avenue. He snapped staged photos of me in my poofy dress, a veil coiffed over my sweated-out hair press, and awkwardly smiling in front of the manicured lawns and large homes of the monied White ethnic families who had not left with the exodus of Jewish, Italian, and Irish renters in the 1970s and 1980s. These experiences in Ditmas Park and at the Jean Baptistes’ in Queens were my earliest exposures to suburban-style places within city limits. I became acquainted with Long Island when the Jean Baptistes moved there after selling their home in Queens. These were the points of departure for my childhood understanding that New York was an unequal city and that my Black working-class immigrant family had a complicated relationship to it—raising questions that have been central to my sociological imagination.

Flatbush is bounded by Prospect Park and Brooklyn College. My side of Flatbush had all the indicators of what sociologists describe as impoverished, disadvantaged neighborhoods: high crime rates, low household incomes, densely populated housing, poor social services, and heavy policing. My dad often shared stories of his first impressions of racial disparity in this section of New York. When he arrived in Flatbush in 1981, Italian, Irish, and Jewish residents would hang out for hours on folding chairs in front of their apartment buildings. As Blacks moved in, it seemed as if these White ethnics disappeared in the middle of the night. Businesses and city services departed with them. None of these characteristics, however, told us much about the soul of the neighborhood, the people and their strivings.

Additionally, Flatbush represented the cultural, religious, ethnic, political, and social diversity of Black people in the U.S. My parents were politically engaged, and I grew up overhearing at home debates about the Rodney King uprising, the trial of O. J. Simpson, and the Jewish-Black tensions in Crown Heights. The political rallies organized by the Haitian community to usher in Haiti’s first democratic election, won by Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1990, were household events. My mother let me tag along with her when her Filipina and Jamaican coworkers were protesting for better wages and benefits in front of city hall with the 1199 Service Employees International Union. Growing up in a Black diasporic city, you were pan-African, transnational, global, and a labor activist by osmosis.

My downstairs neighbors were Puerto Rican. Those on our left were from North Carolina, and those on the right were from Spanishtown, Jamaica. Our landlord was a Hasidic Jew, and the building super was Dominican. My classmates’ families were from every Caribbean country from Cuba to Venezuela, and my teachers were the descendants of Puerto Ricans and Italian, Irish, and Indo-Trinidadian immigrants. We purchased our vegetables in Chinatown and our bagels in Italian Sheepshead Bay. The sounds of salsa woke us up in the morning, reggae marked the end of the school day, and hip-hop/soul put us to bed at night. Botánicas and apartments where voodoo ceremonies took place lived across the street from storefront Pentecostal churches. We took for granted that English, Patwa, Spanish, and Kreyol were the neighborhood’s official languages and that goat, collards, pork, fried plantains, and sweet potato pie were Thanksgiving staples.

I have fond memories of growing up on Ditmas Avenue. My parents were strict, but when I could, I would stay out a little late, attempt to learn Double Dutch (which I never mastered), go to the Puerto Rican store to buy sour power, or meet up with friends in the lobbies of their apartment buildings to talk about the latest songs from Bad Boy Entertainment or listen to one of our friends tell us that they were the flyest on East 21st Street. This was all hype, of course. We were wearing Catholic school uniforms and had varying levels of parental supervision, but none of us were running, let alone controlling, the streets. We just thought it was cool to have a tough mentality, to break open fire hydrants for water fights in the summer and in the winter to get into fights on street corners over whose shearling coats or Timberland boots were knock-offs. I didn’t have much to contribute to these conversations. I was just an observer. My family could not afford the latest styles from Karl Kani, FUBU, or Tommy Hilfiger. My family was split across borders, and the money my parents earned was to keep us afloat in Brooklyn and support my siblings in Port au Prince who were facing the volatile politics of the Aristide era and U.S. imposed embargoes.

Brooklyn was my home for sixteen years until my family purchased a home in Queens. My parents were among many families who had benefitted from a growing national economy and had house-buying fever during the 1990s. They wanted to use it as a source of shelter for the family. When someone lost a job, they could come home. If a romantic relationship failed, the door was open. As a teenager, I no longer thought that Queens was particularly remarkable. Instead, it represented a landscape of boredom and isolation. In order to continue attending my high school in Sheepshead Bay, I found an afterschool job in Brooklyn, even though it meant a two-hour commute home. Sometimes I stayed with my sister and brother-in-law, who had an apartment in Canarsie. I kept this up for over a year until I went away to college. I felt I was a Brooklynite visiting Queens, never truly belonging in the new neighborhood. I was reluctant to trade Flatbush Avenue for Jamaica Avenue, or Prospect Park for Flushing Meadows Park.

As I look back, our move from Flatbush to Queens seemed to be an overnight event. I have no memory of the moving trucks or my last days on Ditmas Avenue. I remember our many journeys from Flatbush to Queens to visit family friends, but now it was my family’s turn to have a place of their own.¹ As a teenager, I was immersed in my life and friends in Brooklyn, which the move threatened to rupture. It represented something quite different for some of my peers. Although Queens is a large and diverse borough, with pockets of poverty and affluence, many Black Brooklynites imagined it as a faraway promised land where the well-off went. I learned later that some of my peers who believed my family was on welfare because we were Haitian were stunned when I told them my family had bought a home in Queens.

When I was in college, I had no plans to return to Queens permanently after graduation. My sights were on graduate school. Second-generation Black immigrant millennials like me were a growing demographic group, and our incorporation had important implications for American politics and culture. A series of news reports drew my attention back to Queens, planting the intellectual seeds of this book. In 2004, the New York Daily News covered an incident at a public elementary school. Two Haitian students had been involved in an encounter, and as punishment a White administrator ordered them and other Haitian students to sit on the floor of the cafeteria and eat their lunch of chicken and rice with their hands while their peers watched. In Haiti, they treat you like animals, and I will treat you the same way here, the school administrator told them. I worried that the anti-Haitian sentiment that my siblings and I confronted in Brooklyn schools was à la mode again. I knew intimately the brand of anti-Black racism that these young students experienced. I had recently sat in the office of a Jewish college administrator who praised my academic achievements. Then, knowing little about my family, he joked that my parents could not have predicted the success of their daughter when they were off the shores of Miami, on a boat with sharks nearby. The arduous journeys of many Haitian refugees to Florida’s shores became the target of his casual racism, and my family and I the subjects of his insults.

Anti-Haitian discrimination was not new to me. However, what I found surprising was that the incident occurred at a school in Queens. My experiences with the Jean Baptiste family had left me with the impression that Black families seemed to prosper there, and I assumed that children of the well-to-do were welcomed in neighborhood institutions. It struck me as odd that Black Haitian families would have to wrestle with the same strand of racism in middle-class spaces that those in lower-income urban areas encountered.

A couple of years later, when I was working as a research assistant at the Russell Sage Foundation, Queens was back in the news. A New York Times article circulated that stated that Blacks in Queens earned higher household incomes than Whites. Racial inequality in the United States is such that Blacks seem to be permanently sorted by White institutional actors into lower-income occupations and positions. Queens represented a sort of anomaly, a hidden and unique site of Black achievement. The juxtaposition of Queens’s Black affluence and its nativist racism gave me pause as a budding sociologist. I wondered: How could a place where some of the most affluent Blacks in New York and the country live have schools that treat their children with ethnoracial animus? Didn’t money and suburbanization act as buffers between them and racial injustice?

As a graduate student, I searched for studies that might explain what was happening in Queens. But the vast body of scholarship on immigration and migration emphasized the experiences of urban, low-income immigrants. The stories of Black middle-class suburbanites and immigrant integration into those communities were hidden. Recent research on the Black middle class elucidated that Black middle-class outmigration did not lead to a promised land, but introduced new, underappreciated forms of racial segregation and inequality compared to the White middle class. However, this body of literature did not provide insight into the migratory experiences of Black middle-class people from different regions and nationalities. Growing up in working-class Brooklyn and traversing other New York neighborhoods, the Northeast, Africa, and the Caribbean, I became a student of the geographical and cultural complexity of Black life. It was at this nexus of personal and sociological inquiry that I began to identify neighborhoods to study the relationships between migration, mobility, and suburbanization among New York’s Black diaspora. From these events, The New Noir emerged.

1 Village Market

ENCOUNTERS IN BLACK DIASPORIC SUBURBS

Food has not just been fodder for our journeys, but embodies the journeys themselves.

Michael Twitty, in The Cooking Gene, p. 72.

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home and those who don’t.

Roy, in Tayari Jones’s American Marriage

Located on a main boulevard in Cascades, the Village Market, the community’s largest local retailer, is the pulsing heart and soul of the neighborhood.¹ The name of the market recalls the countries and regions from which Cascades’s residents come. Although Queens is a part of New York City proper, its eastern sections are considered suburbs in the city due to their tree-lined streets, Tudor-style homes, manicured lawns, and wider open spaces compared to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. At the Village Market, middle-class residents find the meats, produce, and spices they need for home-cooked meals. A casual visitor immediately notices that the market is neither an ordinary Pathmark or Shop Rite nor a higher-end Whole Foods or Zabar’s. Nor is Cascades your typical New York City area: not only are its residents predominantly Black, but they are also palpably multinational. Their range of accents, skin tones, and styles of dress demonstrate that this is a central meeting place for various diasporic groups. The marketplace is a diverse, multilingual space, and many of its clientele own suburban-style homes with well-tended gardens and entertain weekend guests with dishes that bring New Orleans, Cap-Haïtien, and Spanish Town, Jamaica, into their suburban kitchens. On an evening stroll through the neighborhood, the aromas of oxtail, rice and beans, spiced cabbage, jerk chicken, salted pork and grits, fried fish, and baked mac and cheese waft through the air. While to White observers these might seem like exotic cuisines, they represent the culture of places I call Black diasporic suburbs.

When you cross the main boulevard to get to Village Market, you move between MTA buses and wave away a dollar van driver with his locs held together in a beanie hat of black, red, and green stripes. The bass of a Beres Hammond lovers rock song vibrates the street, and the van’s reggae air horn sounds to announce the beginning of a dancehall music set. When you come into the parking lot, men of various colors and ages ask, Taxi, taxi? To the left, there’s a man selling Nollywood movies. The crowd of customers at the entrance to Village Market indicates its popularity. An older Black woman holds her young granddaughter close to her tiered skirt of blue cotton while she picks out yellow plantains. Next to the plantains are mangoes, strawberries, blueberries, cantaloupes, fuyu persimmons, and grapes. The side display of fruits and vegetables announces the variety of foodstuffs found in the market, the range of places where those who live nearby come from, and the local culinary influences of New York’s many diasporas. I grab a squeaky cart and walk toward the entrance. The Asian manager, likely in his fifties, and I make eye contact, and he gives me the usual nod and informal soldier’s salute. I enter a brightly lit and busy produce section with a dizzying assortment of foods from all over the world.

The Korean and Brazilian yams are popular. Cassavas, maniocs, and batatas (sweet potatoes) are clustered behind the fruits section. A caramel-complexioned woman in her forties ties a knot around one bag of green beans and another of okra to weigh them. She