The Plot Against Hip Hop by Nelson George

both the most well known and notorious. Sometimes, walking down Livonia or Rockaway avenues, it felt as if the threat of violence was seeping up out of the ground, like the vapors from an overrun sewer, infecting the populace.
    It was this legacy that D Hunter was part of, and it hurt to know that deaths—Brownsville deaths—had molded him as much as his mother’s love or the books he’d read or the places he’d traveled to. Wherever D went, Brownsville was there with him, and unlike the BK MCs he sometimes protected, he knew this wasn’t a good thing.
    When D was growing up in the Ville, his subway stop had been Rockaway Avenue, right on the corner where Livonia intersected with the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects. Saratoga Avenue was the stop before Rockaway, and D had rarely gotten off there unless he was stopping by Betsy Head Playground, a New Deal–era athletic field and pool.
    In the two decades since D had escaped the Ville, the city government, in its infinite wisdom, had constructed the Marcus Garvey Houses between Betsy Head and Tilden. Named after the visionary “Back to Africa” leader of the 1920s, the low-rise public housing complex had not exactly become a source of pride for the people of the diaspora. Garvey’s construction had coincided with the crack era and so the buildings had been overrun by the epidemic, turning Brownsville an even grimmer shade of crimson.
    In the ’90s people would have laughed if you said there were Bloods in Brooklyn. But around the turn of the century, black inmates in New York City correctional facilities, tired of getting their asses kicked by the well-organized Latin Kings, used the Bloods brand to organize themselves under a banner. Supposedly, two OGs in Rikers were the key men behind this move, and as D sat on the Saratoga platform, he prepared to meet one of them. He’d gotten Ray Ray’s call that afternoon.
    “I’m about to earn that money, D.”
    “Go.”
    “I need you to come out to Brownsville tonight. I have a Blood I want you to meet.”
    “How much?”
    “Just bring two Gs for him. But don’t bring mine. Don’t bring my cash out to Brownsville.”
    “I hear that. You sure this is serious?”
    “This man is a real OG. Plus, he knows you from the Tilden projects, so it’s all good. Meet me at the Saratoga Avenue IRT station at seven.”
    “Cool, I know it well.”
    Ray Ray came up the steps at seven-twenty p.m., fifteen minutes later than he’d suggested, but by ghetto standards about a half hour early. “What’s good?”
    “I dunno,” D replied. “Anytime I have to do business in Brownsville, it’s never a good thing. Is he meeting us up here?”
    “I told you we have to go over to Garvey.”
    “Yeah. Shit.”
    As they walked down Livonia past Betsy Head, D asked for the quick bio on Ice. Since getting out of Rikers two years ago, he had rotated between three residences in Brownsville and East New York. This one housed Shaliya, the mother of two of his five kids. Because of this, Ray Ray figured things would be cool.
    Even since D had prevented Ray Ray and two of his buddies from setting fire to a homeless man at the Canal Street subway station, the young man had become a very useful asset to D Security. He wasn’t big enough to work the door or do personal security, but Ray Ray knew how to blend in a crowd and let D know when and where trouble might come from. D was proud he’d kept Ray Ray from becoming another African-American statistic, though the kid still knew too many gangstas for his life to be trouble free.
    “You don’t have to stay,” D said as they walked up to the Garvey projects. “Just introduce me to Ice and go.”
    “And leave you alone? Naw, dog. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
    “Yo!” The voice came from the roof of the nearest Garvey building. It was a youth, maybe seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Yankee cap and a scarlet Cincinnati Reds jacket. “Stay right there.” Then he spoke into a cell