Interview Description

Oral History Interview with Shameeka Mattis

Shameeka was born in Long Island College Hospital and spent the first five or six years of life Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn living on Throop and Jefferson. Her family then moved to Clinton Hill/Fort Greene close to Fort Greene Park on Lafayette Avenue. They finally settled in Fort Green in the Ingersoll Houses. She lived on the fourth floor of a sixth floor building from age six to eighteen. Most of her family also lived in this area of Brooklyn. Her aunt resided in a building on Albany and Troy (just recently torn down to build condominiums) with a storefront church where Shameeka's great-uncle was the pastor. Her mother's family is from North Carolina. Her father's family is from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Her maternal grandparents came up from South and North Carolina and settled in downtown Brooklyn. Her maternal grandmother later moved to Pitt Street in Manhattan.

Her mother maintained a deep connection to South Carolina visiting regularly and spending some childhood years there. Her father was technically deported from Canada in his early twenties after emigrating from St. Vincent. Instead of returning to St. Vincent, he moved to the United States. The details of this journey are unclear, but he settled in Brooklyn. He was first in Clinton Hill, later was on Herkimer Street, and finally lived on Brooklyn and Bergen in Crown Heights.

Shameeka left Brooklyn to attend SUNY Binghamton and the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Brooklyn in 2008 and lived there until 2012 when she moved to Queens. She is currently a social worker in Brooklyn.





In this interview Shameeka recalls her childhood in both Bed-Stuy and Fort Greene/Clinton Hill. She tells stories about her childhood such as how she was taught to play pool by an older woman with a Jheri curl at Tip Top Bar (then Junior's Bar). She details her childhood visits to the Albany Houses, and her years at P.S. 11, Phillippa Schuyler School (J.H.S. 383), and George Westinghouse High School.

She recalls her mother's family, and their move from North and South Carolina, and her father's journey from the Caribbean. She discusses the importance of her Brooklyn roots as a point of pride and her desire to represent Brooklyn with her clothing and attitude when she moved away from Brooklyn to attend SUNY Binghamton and, later, the University of Pennsylvania.

She reflects on how the neighborhood transformed in terms of demographics from the time she left for college to the time she moved back to Brooklyn in 2008. She noticed more people biking on the streets, neighborhoods feeling different, trains that were more crowded, more coffee shops and restaurants opening, and, finally, condo buildings being built where community centers once stood. Skyscrapers made the area feel different, she recalls, more like Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights. She noticed more and more white people in Brooklyn. This was a radical change from her view of Brooklyn as the black borough. She describes feeling extreme grief at the raising rents in her childhood home, forcing friends and family to move.

She brings up other neighborhoods and their evolution. She describes Williamsburg and how it changed from a sleepy area to a bustling hub. She relates her displeasure about the perception of Brooklyn as a novel mecca of art and culture when she overhears conversations about the borough on a plane or elsewhere; this is not the Brooklyn of her remembrance. She bristles at her memory of how friends and family elected to move because they were given fiscal incentives to leave the Fort Greene area by developers. She describes her growing awareness of this shift in demographics that, later, she would call gentrification.

She details changes she observed in Brooklyn during the Bloomberg administration such as more well kept community gardens, hidden detention centers, a halt in community programming, yellow cabs coming to Brooklyn, and Europeans renting brownstones through vacation rentals. She lists specific buildings that have changed such as The Chocolate Factory on Myrtle Avenue that was converted to condominiums. (Shameeka's wife, Rebecca, offers some comments here and throughout the interview. Also, at this point in the interview, a fruit fly that was in the room is referenced several times.)

Shameeka delves in to the construction of the Barclays Center and Atlantic Terminal and how it engulfed the low income housing that formerly existed there through eminent domain. She remembers how a man she dated used to sell drugs out of his apartment located where Atlantic Terminal is now. She reminisces about taking her ailing father to see the stadium area in his final years and his disbelief upon seeing the structure.

She relays how, in her career as a social worker, she often visits the areas where she went to high school and spends time near the court houses in downtown Brooklyn. She recalls feeling a sense of scale and irony when she spends time in the court buildings that are aesthetically pleasing but are also the site of many injustices. She also mentions a "true Brooklynite" - a black Panamanian-American who helped build the structure. She shares similar deep emotions about the possible closure of Long Island College Hospital where she was born and where her mother died.

She discusses her wife Rebecca (Becca) and how they met in college at SUNY Binghamton. She tells their love story. She relays how Becca grew up in Queens and that her family is from Haiti. She explains their differing cultural norms. She delineates her family's diaspora and how it relates to her family's cultural expression. She outlines the negative perception of Brooklyn by her in-laws. She postulates on the community perception of herself and Becca as black lesbians living in Bed-Stuy and their move to Queens. She parses out what she sees as the difference between black American culture and Caribbean American culture telling of her father's bias towards certain Caribbean cultural groups. She finishes with childhood memories of Coney Island and the demographic shifts there and her memories of Red Hook as a young person.

Citation

Mattis, Shameeka, Oral history interview conducted by Charis Shafer, June 11, 2013, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations oral history collection, 2011.019.054; Brooklyn Historical Society.