Premise: Two childhood friends grow up in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Underprivileged, with few advantages except their will to create better lives. Their paths eventually diverge and strangely, both live their dreams. Dreams that are very different.
Stir equal parts violence, drugs and housing projects
In a steaming, festering cast iron cauldron
A popular urban recipe we call Brownsville Brooklyn
Serves less than a million
Both born and raised here
Brownsville - our childhood frontier of fear
Latino in a Black neighborhood
Fathers we never knew or felt we should
Mothers gone all day, most of the night
Laboring, trying to make it right
Cassie's grandmother made sure we were fed
And most nights, we had a clean bed
We went to high school but never finished
This is a description not embellished
Metal detectors and chipped ID cards required for entry
Each door guarded by an armed sentry
The hated and feared 73rd Precinct
Our dreams polluted by the sound of cuffs that clinked
We were dealers
Never felt a need to become stealers
We lived OK, it was easy money
And always had the lure of our private honey
We both dropped out at sixteen, so dismal
Our past cruel
Our present predicated on a gamble
Our future mournful
At eighteen, I watched her change
A transformation I found strange
Always complaining and blaming
Accepting her street life as fate
Blaming her mother for being deadweight
Blaming her teachers who failed to innovate
Blaming her community that continues to degenerate
Blaming her genetics, that give no cause to celebrate
Blaming her friends, damn those who alienate
Blaming her priest – her demons he can’t assassinate
She became defined by her hate
And now it’s became her fate
We’ve shared the same life but not the same vision
I feed my driving ambition
I know how to laugh and live with affection
I trust my personal doctrine
I’m not sure how but believe I can make lives brighten
If I'm patient my good fortune will heighten
I live for now not my past so barren
I'm a paralegal making a good living
I live in a funky lower east side neighborhood not crumbling
I figured out no one will solve problems for me
I didn't have a charmed beginning, but neither did she
What happens next is always up to me
I don't see her anymore, my friend Cassie
Last I heard - she's still living in a Section Eight
Not a surprising fate
Still selling and searching for a mate
Treating herself to mac and cheese on a special date
I learned a lot from my old friend
Her dreams filled with new ways for blame to lend
In a strange sort of way, we both
Live our dreams
Cassie and I aren't very different you see
I've learned how powerful a positive state of mind can be
I paid her a visit last fall
Her daughter is ten and quite tall
She sat next to me at dinner, wrapped in a shawl
Aunt Jess, you know my momma always tells me
She said with pride and of her own freewill …
“There's no way outta Brownsville”
I shudder a sorrowful chill.
