The Hustle (18 page)

This is an important day for JT. For several years, at the urging of an older family friend who works as a longshoreman, he's been trying to get on with the union. There is more demand than work, so positions go by lottery. JT's number recently came up, and he got called to attend an orientation. A few days before today, he'd gone to a doctor, taken a physical, and peed in a cup for a drug test.

A job on the docks starts at $21 an hour, with benefits. For JT, that's way more than he can make anywhere else he can think of. As he sees it, his other options consist of low-paying work such as detailing cars. “I'm thirty-five effing years old,” he'd told me a few days earlier. “I really need this.”

The door into the trailer swings open, and we file into a narrow room with several rows, four-across, of plastic folding chairs. At the front, there's a TV on a wheeled cart and a whiteboard upon which the word
LASHING
is written and underlined. This is another test for everyone in the room, to see if they can handle the physical exertion it takes to lock down—“lash”—cargo containers.

After everyone settles into a seat, a white man in his forties, wearing jeans, a golf shirt, and a mustache, comes out and tells us to write our names on the clipboard he's holding. Then we'll watch a training video before going out to practice.

Later, everyone in the group dons orange reflective vests and white hard hats and files outside to stand around a stack of white cargo containers. They need to use a metal pole to pick up and secure each container with a long bolt. They have thirteen minutes to do all nine containers. JT does his in eight, but he is huffing and puffing by the end. Though the men cheer them on, neither of the two women can manage it.

After everyone is released, JT tells me that he was most excited by something the man with the clipboard had said before the test: “This is a way you can support your family.”

“That's what I wanted to hear,” JT says.

A few days after we meet on the docks, on a Saturday morning, I drive down with JT and his family to a Boys and Girls Club about twenty miles south of Seattle to watch Kiera, the daughter of JT's girlfriend, play in a tournament. As we enter the gym, we're greeted by the sound of basketballs hitting the floor and bouncing off the red walls as the two teams of eighth-grade girls warm up.

I sit to the left of JT on the aluminum bleachers, which are only four rows high. The gym is crowded with the parents and brothers and sisters of the players. Kiera's team is almost all African American, except for a few girls who look like Filipinas and a white girl. The opposing team is all white. JT wears jeans, Nikes, a baggy white T-shirt, and a thick green rubber band, like the Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bracelets, around his left wrist. When I ask him what it's for, he tells me, “So I don't get pinched!” I had forgotten that it was St. Patrick's Day.

JT's eleven-year-old daughter, Kamari, sits one row below us, next to JT's right leg. She wears jeans and a pink jacket, has her hair braided in cornrows, and listens to Lil Wayne on the pink iPod Mini she holds in her right hand. On the bottom row of the bleachers, JT's girlfriend, a dental assistant, sits and talks with another mother. JT's seven-year-old godson, Dajon, wears the blue-and-green jersey of the Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander, and hangs on JT's neck.

“God-Dad, do you know where Milwaukee is?” Dajon asks.

“You mean what state?” JT asks. “I don't know.”

“Do you know where Kalamazoo is?”

JT shakes his head.

“Do you know where Austin is?”

“No.”

“What about Fort Worth?”

“No, I don't know where it is! Tell me!” JT says, laughing.

“Texas!”

“This one's really smart. He does really well in school,” JT says to me. “He's really good at basketball, too.”

He turns to Dajon. “How many points did you score in your last game? Thirty-two?”

Dajon looks down bashfully. “Thirty-five,” he says.

After the game starts, Dajon goes to play on the other side of the club, where there are foosball tables and lots of kids running around. A little while later, I look over and see that Kamari has climbed up and is sitting on the other side of JT. She is leaning over and resting her head on his shoulder.

JT has three daughters in total: Kamari lives in Seattle with her mother; his two other daughters, four and two, live in Pasco in Eastern Washington with their mother, but come over to visit often. “Growing up without a father, you know how it feels, so you're not going to do that to something you love, and something, you know, that's very important in your life,” JT has told me. “I wanna be there so they don't let another man abuse them once they get out there on their own. Some guys can be really just ugly with a female, you know?”

In the gym, Kiera's team takes a big lead but eventually falls apart in the fourth quarter and loses. JT, who had been cheering enthusiastically—“That's what I'm talking about!” he shouted when a girl made a good play—falls silent, shaking his head at the implosion.

“I've got to get this longshoreman thing right,” he tells me as we sit in the stands. “I've got to support these kids.”

The streets, which had seemed exciting when he was fifteen, JT says, have gotten really old. You get tired of seeing the same people doing the same hustles day after day, year after year. The flush times of the crack era, JT tells me, are long gone—now it's nothing but a grind.

As far as the longshoreman job, even though he has passed all the tests, it could be years before he qualifies for a full-time job. Junior members of the union have to work up the ladder, filling in on call when there's a need. Because of that, the friend of JT's mom who hooked him up with the union has recommended he also take a course on how to be a flagger on construction projects—one of the guys who holds signs telling oncoming traffic to stop or slow down.

“When people ask my daughters, ‘What does your father do?' ” JT says to me, “I want them to be able to say, ‘He's a longshoreman,' not, ‘He's a drug dealer.'

“This is what I want my future to be. I want to make good money, man, take care of my kids. As long as I can take care of my kids and the woman in my life, if I get blessed with anything after that, cool.

“I'm sitting there looking at my girls and I'm like, man, it's up to you to get them out of the situation that they're growing up in. That
I'm
putting them in. You know what I'm saying? A lot has to with your parents, what position they put you in, they play a big role. If I can't get my kids in a better situation they're going to turn out like me. I look at my girls and I'm like, man, I gotta do something to change the situation or they'll be stuck in it. Just like me, James Credit, Tyrell.”

Gentrified

For years, the Reverend Samuel McKinney gave a clear message to the members of his congregation at Mount Zion Baptist Church: Resist selling your homes to the influx of white folks looking to buy into the Central Area. Mount Zion, founded in 1890, had become a venerable institution under the stewardship of McKinney, a Cleveland native who arrived in 1958 to head the church. It was McKinney, a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. from their days at Morehouse College, who had arranged King's only visit to Seattle, in 1961. In the following years, McKinney had been at the front of Seattle's civil rights movement, leading protests for open housing and school integration. As whites began to move into the Central Area in increasing numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, McKinney had been vocal about the need for the neighborhood to retain its African-American character.

So the congregation was astonished when he announced in 2001 that he was selling the home he'd owned for more than forty years and moving to one in the South End, ten miles from the church. Even today, says McKinney, who still keeps a post office box in the Central Area, someone approaches him every week and asks why he left. He tells them, “They made me an offer I couldn't refuse.” He bought his Central Area house in 1958 for less than $20,000; he sold it for $500,000. Like much of the congregation, McKinney now commutes in on Sundays.

McKinney's exit was simply the highest profile among thousands of African-American departures from Central Seattle. In 1980, with movement south into the Rainier Valley already under way, the Central Area was about 60 percent black (though some pockets were close to 90 percent black). It's now estimated to be less than 30 percent black and more than 50 percent white. Two-bedroom homes that sold for a few thousand dollars in the 1960s now regularly fetch more than $400,000. Over the past two decades, many older African-American residents of the Central Area, retired and on fixed incomes, found that they couldn't afford the property-tax increases on their homes. They sold, took their profits, and moved south. In the meantime, younger blacks without large incomes were priced out.

The result has been a swelling black population in the suburbs south of Seattle, while the number of African Americans in the city dwindles. In 2008, blacks made up an estimated 107,600 of King County's total population of 1.9 million. Of those, 46,000 African Americans lived in Seattle, while 51,700 were in south King County. (Seattle proper's overall population, in the meantime, climbed from 516,000 in 1990 to an estimated 602,000 in 2009.)

The black players from our team haven't been immune to this movement—all of them spent at least part if not all of their childhoods in the Central Area; all of them now live in the South End. In 1998, Coach McClain sold the home he'd bought for $5,000 in 1976 for nearly $300,000. The change in the Central Area only completely sank in for him a few years later when his church—at Twenty-first and Jefferson, really the center of the Central Area—decided to throw a block party. As they walked around to distribute flyers, McClain was shocked at the number of whites who answered their doorbelling. “We really found the makeup of the community had changed, almost like overnight, because no one had taken notice,” he says. “Almost every house, I was like, ‘Whoah.' There were very few blacks.”

The process of gentrification—in which middle- and upper-class people move into a dilapidated neighborhood and rebuild it, often displacing the poor who were there before them—is a global phenomenon hardly unique to Seattle. In Beijing and Shanghai, it's been led by the government, which has bulldozed many of those city's ramshackle old neighborhoods to make way for high-rises. In Harlem, both white and African-American professionals have bought and remodeled the neighborhood's stately old brownstones. Even Finland has seen poorer residents pushed out of its city centers to make way for wealthier residents.

As cities have seen traditional manufacturing industries decline, those businesses have been succeeded by postindustrial ones such as media, finance, and technology. To be plugged into the world economy, companies locate in cities that are transport and communication hubs. While whites fled the city during the 1960s and 1970s, many have been lured back by new restaurants, cafés, art galleries, boutiques, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and the frisson of multiculturalism. Every spike in gas prices and minute spent stuck in traffic makes proximity to work more attractive. Private schools have multiplied to serve the needs of those who don't want to put their kids in the public system. As this process ramped up in Seattle in the late 1980s, the Central Area—ideally situated and with dramatically undervalued property—seemed to be crying out for redevelopment.

No neighborhood goes back farther for black Seattle than the one at the northern end of the Central Area, where Twenty-third Avenue cuts through East Madison Street, about halfway between downtown and Lake Washington. It's the location of the twelve acres that black pioneer William Grose bought in 1882. The house he built there, which is now a private residence, still stands on Twenty-fourth Street. As Grose sold off pieces of the twelve original acres to other African Americans, the neighborhood became the city's first black residential community—the aforementioned “Coon Hollow.” Black-owned businesses followed along the commercial strip on Madison, west of Twenty-third, which was home to a succession of black-owned bars, barbershops, a fuel-supply business, beauty salons, grocery stores, nightclubs, and pool halls. When Ray Charles arrived in Seattle in 1948, he rented a room in the neighborhood and gigged at the Savoy Ballroom on Twenty-second and Madison, which was next door to the Mardi Gras, another club. Balancing out the sin, Mount Zion Baptist Church moved to its current location at Nineteenth and Madison in 1920.

As much as any other part of the Central Area, the East Madison neighborhood has rapidly whitened. One night I meet Andrew Taylor in front of his festively red, large Craftsman-style house a few blocks north of Madison Street. Taylor, who is white, moved in with his family in 1983 and has been active in the neighborhood since—first in community groups and now also by maintaining a local blog. For Taylor, a short, trim biochemist who wears chunky glasses and has a head of long, unkempt sandy-gray brown hair, the initial attractions of the area were the lower prices and the fact that he could bike to his workplace at a cancer research center in the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood. As we walk the blocks toward Madison, Taylor outlines the race and class shifts that have happened over the past twenty-five years.

When his family first arrived, Taylor says, the neighborhood was predominantly black—he remembers African-American kids coming over to use the swing set in his backyard; others played football on the triangular patch of grass in front of his house. The next-door neighbors ran a daycare out of their house. Though low-income, he says, “there was a feeling that things were going to improve.” Within a few years, though, rock cocaine arrived. Down the street, a home became a crack house, with people coming and going day and night. After a shooting, the police shut it down, but the drug traffic spilled over to the streets as the East Madison area became one of the city's quick stops for crack. A corner near Taylor's house was soon occupied with teenage kids who hung around the pay phone. “The bushes next to them were overgrown, they were great for hiding in, doing drug deals, exchanging drugs for sex,” Taylor says.

In response, the community gathered to discuss what to do. “I went along to the first couple meetings, and if you could have captured that energy, it was just astounding. A cross section of the neighborhood—young, old, black, white—everybody was pissed off at the drug dealers,” Taylor says. After a few meetings, a community group was formed and a strange thing happened: “We got organized, did things the ‘white' sort of way of having meetings and committees, and the black people went away and we never saw them again.” When I ask Taylor why, he says, “I don't know to this day. We would reach out to them, we would tell them we were having meetings, we would leave flyers.”

When I speak with Adrienne Bailey, an African American who grew up in the neighborhood after her parents bought a house there in the 1940s, she tells me the reasons for the lack of black interest were simple. For one, she says, there were cultural differences in communication, and older black people at the meetings felt they were not shown respect. Then there was the fact that though everybody saw the drug dealing as a problem, for the white people—many of them newcomers—it came down to an issue of nuisance and property values. The black residents had conflicting feelings—they knew the kids out on the street as cousins, brothers, and sons. When they heard whites speak about them as if they were “animals,” Bailey says, it hit a nerve. While the solution to the white people in the neighborhood was generally to involve the police, most blacks were unwilling to see the teenagers sent to jail for what they saw as a problem related directly to a lack of jobs, education, and opportunity.

The community association that did form immediately got to work, eventually getting the pay phone removed and successfully goading the city to trim the trees and bushes. They convinced the Seattle police to park a “mobile control center”—basically a big truck with
SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT
emblazoned on the side—in the neighborhood. What developed, Taylor tells me, was a zero-sum game with the community association that had started at Twenty-third and Union, the corner six blocks down where JT and Tyrell hung out. “Essentially it was Ping-Pong,” he says. “When we complained, we'd get more police emphasis, and the trade moved down to Twenty-third and Union. They'd get more emphasis, it would move back to us.”

The changes to the neighborhood accelerated in the mid-1990s as the crack era ended and the tech and property frenzies began. In 1993, Norm Rice, Seattle's African-American mayor, announced his vision for “urban villages.” The idea was to encourage “managed” growth and density in Seattle by creating a number of zones within which people would live within easy walking distance of daily needs such as grocery stores. The East Madison area was one designated hub within the grand scheme, with the business strip along Madison Street planned to serve the needs of the “village.” As the details were hammered out in community meetings and the city council over the next few years, East Madison was rezoned so that lots with single-family homes could be redeveloped into “denser,” multifamily residences. Commercial buildings along Madison, which had been low-slung at one or two stories, were allowed to go up to sixty-five feet—about six stories.

The practical outcome was a revolution in architectural style. As the tech economy heated up, the East Madison area—just ten minutes by bus to downtown and an easy drive over to the eastern suburbs where Microsoft is headquartered—became in demand. Developers realized that they could buy the homes on the block—many owned by older African Americans—for about $300,000, knock them down, and replace them with skinny, four-unit town houses. Each apartment in a town house could then be sold for about the price the developer had paid for the property. Taylor and I view the results as we walk down a block on Twenty-first Street just around the corner from his house. Only a few old bungalows and Craftsman-style homes remain, dwarfed by duplexes and two-story, flat-fronted gray and white town houses. I grab a
FOR SALE
flyer from a box. It advertises a three-bedroom town house unit with red-oak floors, a granite-faced gas fireplace, and a kitchen that will “entice a chef.” The asking price is $470,000.

We continue down until we hit Madison. Across the street, where the Savoy Ballroom used to stand, a mammoth luxury apartment complex fills the whole block, with a full-size Safeway occupying the ground floor. Kitty-corner to that building sits an empty lot dotted with grass and patches of asphalt. For years it was home to a small grocery store and a nightclub called Deano's. At night the bar attracted a younger African-American clientele, including JT, who sometimes stopped by to have a drink. The streets outside were often populated with crack dealers and users—generally only the most desperate, as the Seattle police subjected the area to continuous scrutiny. The local community association—with Andrew Taylor as the most vocal proponent—hounded the city to do something about the drug traffic, which they saw as directly tied to the club. After years of stasis, economics took care of the problem—in 2008, right before the Seattle property market crashed, a local developer bought the land from its African-American owner for $7.5 million. The developer plans to build a $60 million apartment and retail complex at the location. The people who will live there are expected to work in places such as the Amazon.com headquarters being built a few miles away, which is in the heart of an old light-industrial neighborhood that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has redeveloped with a vision of filling it with biotech firms.

In the midst of all the redevelopment sits a throwback to an earlier time, the beauty shop owned by DeCharlene Williams, a one-story brick building with yellow trim, fronted by a five-foot-high, gated iron fence. Pots filled with plastic flowers are arranged in front of three large windows, which feature framed photos of black women wearing fashions that would have been in style when our team was on the court in 1986. A poster says
CONFIDENCE IS ATTITUDE
. An old-fashioned striped barber pole hangs from the corner of the building.

One morning I stop by to speak with Williams, a short, tough, and outspoken woman with a taste for the flamboyant, as evidenced by her blond wig. Born in Texas in the 1940s, Williams moved at age four with her mother to Portland, Oregon, where her mom found a job in a shipyard. Williams started working in the fields picking beans and strawberries at age ten, married at age fifteen—she lied about her age—and moved to Seattle with her new husband. She studied business at a vocational school and soon was working several jobs—serving cocktails to the city's white elite at the Seattle Tennis Club, assisting in special education classrooms, and cutting hair. She bought her shop in 1968 and remembers that she got the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed as she was moving in. Staying in business hasn't been easy—it's included running off drug dealers, thieves, and corrupt cops looking for kickbacks. “I didn't let them scare me,” Williams tells me. “I got a .38 and a .22 and a derringer, and kept them with me, and I stayed out there and tried to help others. You've got to stand up and let them know.”