The City We Became

Brooklyn Thomason, formerly hip-hop artist MC Free, is an attorney and City Council member before being awakened as the avatar of her namesake city. Her career trajectory represents a fight for social justice—first, as a youthful, rebellious artist defying the rules and the social norms of a male-dominated music industry, and then later in life as a lawmaker working from within the system. Second only to Queens in geographical size, Brooklyn is an imposing figure who projects authority in her role as local politician, but who struggles to reconcile her past and present selves. There is a tacit assumption that, as a politician, she is now part of the system she once rebelled against and is therefore a sellout. Bronca notes with smugness how Brooklyn can turn on the political charm at a moment’s notice, and it’s not until she slips “back into her old-school Brooklyn accent, dropping the politician voice” (377) that Bronca’s anger toward her eases a bit.

As Manhattan rents have soared, families have been driven to the outer boroughs, and those with necessary ties to Manhattan have increasingly relocated to Brooklyn. Family needs for child-friendly parks and safe neighborhoods have driven gentrification, cleaning up previously crime-scarred neighborhoods but also pushing up rents and forcing out long-time residents, many of whom are people of color. It’s no accident that Brooklyn is the only avatar with a dependent child. More than the others, she juggles many identities: mother, lawyer, caregiver to her father, city council member, and now, powerful avatar of what is, by population, the fourth largest city in the country.

Aside from Manhattan, Brooklyn has seen more gentrification than any other borough in the city. Williamsburg, once a sleepy neighborhood of Italian immigrants and Hasidic Jews has become a haven of hipsters and chic restaurants. As a native of Brooklyn, she has witnessed these changes firsthand, observing with dismay the loss of culture and character and fighting to preserve what integrity remains. It’s a hard, uphill fight, but Brooklyn, like her city, never shies away from a battle.

Bronca, a queer artist of Lenape heritage, runs the Bronx Arts Center, and as the oldest of the avatars she holds the most ancestral knowledge of New York City and the powers its avatars possess. The Bronx is the site of the Dutch West Indies’ purchase of Manhattan from the Lenape Indians, a transaction commemorated by the stone in Inwood Hill Park, and Bronca feels that historical betrayal even today. She exemplifies her borough’s past and present; she has seen the good and the bad, and she carries the weight of marginalization deep in her bones. She witnessed the institutional neglect that left the Bronx an urban war zone with burned out tenements and soaring crime in the 1960s. She watched the dual plagues of crack and AIDS ravage her community in the 1980s and ’90s. These tragic events have given Bronca a natural distrust of the other boroughs who, she feels, have turned their backs on her city in its time of need. In spite of her city’s traumatic past, however, she has seen a renaissance of art blossom in her community that fuels her and gives her the superpowers to battle a multidimensional invasion and racist, misogynist artists.

Bronca’s temper often gets the better of her. She has little patience for homophobia, bad art, or outside incursion into her city. She sees herself as the final arbiter of what constitutes good and bad art and who has artistic license to culturally and racially fraught material—at least within the walls of her arts center. While Bronca may be rough around the edges, Veneza brings out her protective, maternal side. She sends Veneza out of harm’s way when things get dicey, despite the younger woman’s protests. Seeing Veneza injured and trapped inside the maw of some monstrous, Lovecraftian beast hits Bronca with the same blunt force as if she were her biological daughter.

Queens has long been a borough of working-class immigrants, and Padmini typifies those attributes. She is a twenty-something, undocumented grad student from India with a gift for numbers. She and Manny are the two non-native New Yorkers in the group, but while Manny’s past predisposes him to the rough and tumble battle ahead, Padmini’s youth and naivety leaves her adrift and afraid. She works with abstract concepts like equations and formulas; she is not prepared to fight for a city that isn’t hers by birth. In the character of Padmini, however, Jemisin suggests that membership in the club of New Yorkers is open and fluid. One need not be born in New York to be a true New Yorker. Jemisin’s epigraph page reaffirms this notion: “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” Initially, Padmini joins the fight for the sake of her family, but that motivation expands to the entire borough of Queens once she witnesses the passion and devotion Brooklyn and Bronca bring to the table.

Underlying Padmini’s decorous exterior is a powerful sense of self-preservation. While Brooklyn and Bronca resign themselves to being “consumed” by the primary avatar, Padmini will not go without a fight. Perhaps she doesn’t yet feel the allegiance to her city that Brooklyn and Bronca do. Overcome with fear and despair, she physically attacks Paulo, screaming, “How dare you! How dare you!” (349). In time, however, she becomes a loyal member of the team, realizing that she has no choice. Queens has chosen her, not the other way around, and some causes are bigger than a single life.

A White woman in her thirties still living with her parents, Aislyn has never set foot away from the safe haven of Staten Island. She strains at these protective bonds, however, aching to see Manhattan and the larger world, but she is hampered by her fear. While it would be easy to dismiss Aislyn as simply a sheltered woman with an anxiety disorder, those anxieties have a root cause: her father, Matthew, an overbearing, racist cop who sees enemies at every turn, particularly in faces of color. For Aislyn’s entire life, he has filled her head with stories of “[t]hese fucking people” (95). It is therefore easy for R’lyeh to reinforce Aislyn’s preconceived notions of the racial others who, she believes, infest the other boroughs and, in due time, will do the same to Staten Island. While Aislyn flirts with independence, particularly after her mother encourages her to follow her heart, the pull of familiarity proves too strong. When the other avatars show up at her house, her fear of them and her anger at their mere presence fuels a titanic wave of energy that banishes them from her island.

In many ways, the character of Aislyn represents all disaffected White Americans, many of whom voted for Donald Trump because they felt unmoored by changing demographics and condescended to by city elites. Aislyn felt powerless and victimized her entire life, and her newfound city energy is intoxicating, especially after she uses it to ward off Conall’s attack and to blast Paulo far from her home borough. Unfortunately, she cannot be trusted to use it judiciously. Jemisin gives her audience just enough of Aislyn’s back-story to make the meek librarian almost sympathetic, but in the end she is an adult, and adults are responsible for their choices. Aislyn chooses fear over camaraderie, and were it not for Veneza’s awakening, New York would be supplanted by a generic, multidimensional city of Whiteness thanks to her actions.

The primary avatar remains an anonymous figure. Jemisin gives him no name and very little in the way of narrative action. In the prologue, Jemisin introduces him as a young, homeless street artist and hustler who lives by his wits. He senses strange disturbances beneath the city and processes these perceptions through his art, painting what he imagines he hears, including orifices filled with teeth and deep, dark gullets swallowing everything in their path. Most revealing is a self-portrait of himself sleeping in an abandoned subway station on a bundle of newspapers, a last bit of prescience before being nearly killed during his battle with the Enemy. This painting serves as the vital clue that leads the other avatars to him, allowing them to fully integrate their energy and defeat R’lyeh.

Choosing a young, homeless, Black man as the embodiment of all New York City speaks volumes about Jemisin’s view of who are the true New Yorkers and what New York is in this current time and place. She could have chosen a Wall Street financier, a struggling actor, or even an office worker, one of the faceless cogs that keeps the machinery of commerce running smoothly. Any of these would be accurate, but her choice of a homeless person of color highlights the inherent duality of New York, a city of extremes in which everyone has intrinsic value. Indeed, when most New Yorkers walk past the homeless without a second thought, Jemisin asks her audience to notice and to be aware that, in a city of millions, even those on the lowest social rungs may make the greatest contributions. This possibility, she argues, is the great promise of New York.

Veneza is a young Black woman of Portuguese descent who works with Bronca at the arts center. She respects Bronca’s wisdom and experience, only correcting her in matters of technology. Her role in the narrative appears to be twofold: to give Bronca a surrogate daughter to protect and to provide a youthful perspective. She is the go-to person for all things social media and internet-related. When the Alt Artistes become physically threatening, Veneza takes charge of deleting everyone’s personal information. The protective instinct works both ways, however. When Veneza sees Bronca in danger, she offers her tiny apartment as a sanctuary. While Veneza’s involvement in the otherworldly danger seems arbitrary at first, Jemisin keeps her around for a reason. When all appears to be lost, as Staten Island refuses to cooperate and R’lyeh is on the verge of victory, Veneza awakens as the avatar of Jersey City and proves to be the final piece of the puzzle, rousing the primary avatar and defeating the Enemy. Jersey City is technically not a part of New York City, but, as Jemisin points out, being a New Yorker is more about passion and attitude and less about geography.