City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success

by Nelson George

Overview

"City Kid is perhaps one of the seven greatest books ever written. It has the realness of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the warmth of The Color Purple, and the page count of Tuesdays with Morrie. It's a must read."-Chris Rock

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down, an affecting memoir of his coming of age.

Nelson George was the nerd of his ghetto neighborhood; the kid who devoured Captain America comics, Ernest Hemingway novels, and album liner notes. City Kid describes how George evolved into an award-winning journalist and filmmaker, becoming a key figure in framing hip hop for the rest of us. The story begins with a fractured family life-an absent father, a struggling single mother, and a sister who falls victim to the streets-but ends in triumph all around.

George overcomes both his own nerdiness, as well as the odds against him, to become a godfather of the hip hop movement-he was there at the beginning, and in City Kid he tells us what it was really like.

Writing with emotion, but without false sentiment, George creates an insightful and inspirational portrait of an emerging success, as well as the triumphant rise of hip hop culture and black artists in the 80s and 90s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780452296046
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nelson George, supervising producer and writer for the Netflix series "The Get Down," is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction. He has written for Playboy, Billboard, Esquire, the Village Voice, Essence, and many other national magazines, as well as writing and producing television programs and feature films.

Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

 
HOW I CAME TO BE

HIGH FIDELITY

THE VILLE

MY HERO

A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE

PEER PRESSURE

A THEATER ON PITKIN AVENUE

SOUL SONGS

HANGING WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA

BK ’69

AFRODISIACS

JOINING THE LITERARY GUILD

BK EARLY SEVENTIES

TILDEN TOPICS

NYC LATE SEVENTIES

THE WHITE LINES THAT BIND

NYC EARLY EIGHTIES

KINGS FROM QUEENS

BLACK HOLLYWOOD

FROM MOTOROLA TO MOTOWN

FORT GREENE DREAMS

TALKING HEAD

VOICES INSIDE MY HEAD

EAST NEW YORK

SPIKE

JOKES AND SMOKE

LIFE SUPPORT

FAMILY REUNION

ALSO BY NELSON GEORGE

NONFICTION

Post-Soul Nation
 
WITH RUSSELL SIMMONS

Life and Def

 
FICTION

The Accidental Hunter
VIKING

 
Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 
First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 
Copyright © Nelson George, 2009

All rights reserved

 
PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS Insert page 7 (top): Photo Chuck Pulin Insert page 10: © Chase Roe Insert page 12 (top): © David Lee 2008
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 
George, Nelson.

City kid : a writer’s memoir of ghetto life and post-soul success / by Nelson George.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-02240-5

1. George, Nelson. 2. Music critics—United States—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

ML423.G317A3 2009

781.64092—dc22

[B] 2008027422

 
 
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

DEDICATED TO MY FAMILY, FOR THE LOVE AND THE LESSONS

Between 1950 and 1957 alone, Brooklyn lost a total of 135,000 men,
—Elliot Willenski, When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957

INTRODUCTION

This book is called City Kid because, well, quite honestly I couldn’t survive in the suburbs or the country. I don’t drive. Malls give me hives, and I’ve never dined in a Denny’s and don’t wanna start now. This book contains few descriptions of rolling hills, limpid pools of water, or clear blue skies. There is, however, much talk of playground games, nightclubs, and boundless ambition.

Almost the entire book takes place in four of New York’s boroughs, with the exception of a chapter in Detroit, two in Los Angeles, and two in the Tidewater area of Virginia. I could have slipped in chapters set in my other favorite cities (London, Paris, Amsterdam), but this book is about how family and art intersect, and the most important connecting points for me are the concrete jungles of America.

Peace.

HOW I CAME TO BE

Like most black Americans, I have only a fleeting understanding of my family’s history. I know nothing of my African ancestors, but, thanks to the diligence of a few relatives, I do know a few things about my American ones. My two family trees were rooted in Virginia and North Carolina during the Civil War era. At some point during the early 1860s, in the small town of Bracey, Virginia, just north of North Carolina, Willie Butcher, a black man, met a white woman named Pinkey George. Miscegenation was much more common in this country, and in the South in particular, than our official histories let on. Yet a real romantic relationship between a black man and a white woman in that part of the country at that time makes me think Willie and Pinkey were crazy in love.

This union produced one son, Thomas George, born in 1862. Thomas, who married Harriet Boyd, born June 1, 1864, toiled on the Boyd plantation. Harriet’s father, a houseboy on that same plantation, was named Nelson Boyd, and Harriet gave his name to one of their six children, my grandfather Nelson Sterling George.

Nelson Sterling, born January 15, 1892, was a short, fair-skinned man with sharp, piercing eyes, curly hair, and facial features that suggested that Willie Butcher had some Native American blood coursing through his veins. In photographs Nelson Sterling is always very well dressed in nicely tailored suits that were often augmented by a straw hat. Older members of the George family recall that he was quite a storyteller, and that on some Sunday evenings down in Bracey he’d gather up the children and tell ghost stories. My mother says he was a very graceful, handsome man who grayed early, which only enhanced his looks.

My own memories of Nelson Sterling are fleeting. He died in October 1960, when I was just three years old. I remember a gray-haired man in a suit picking me up and holding me up in the air on a trip to Virginia. It must have been in September of that year, since the family held a birthday party in Grandpa’s backyard. I was the first George grandchild, and I was named after him, which must have been a great source of pride. My grandmother, Matdora, aka Mattie Clary, was nearly a foot taller than her husband, and about fifteen years younger, and she had a stern demeanor that was reflected in her omnipresent frown. Matdora would outlive her husband by some thirty-six years, and would be a strong, though not always warm, presence in my life.

What I do know of Nelson Sterling and Matdora’s life was that the early years were rough. They lived in a little two-room shack down in Bracey, and, as their family expanded to seven kids, some of them would be sent off for a time to live with other relatives, to ease the financial burden. Later most of their offspring ended up relocating to New York and Chicago. In the 1950s, Nelson Sterling and Matdora relocated to Newport News, Virginia, where a massive shipbuilding and dry-dock company, and the naval base it supported, became an employment hub. The Newport News shipyard, which for decades was the world’s largest, was built by Collis P. Huntington, who’d been the driving force behind the first transcontinental railroad. About his Virginia operation Huntington once said, “We shall build good ships here. At a profit—if we can. At a loss—if we must. But always good ships.” From World War II through the Korean War, the shipyard boomed, creating hundreds of jobs that, despite the limitations of Southern Jim Crow laws, ended up feeding scores of black families. Because of the shipyard Newport News became a place where a man of African descent could earn an honest wage, buy a house, and have some self-respect. In the cradle of the Confederacy, Newport News was something of a safe haven for black aspirations.

The Georges moved into a big, three-bedroom home, with a piano she loved to play and a big garden where she grew fruit for preserves and gathered the vegetables for her massive Sunday feasts. But all was not smooth in the household of Nelson Sterling and Mattie. He had a child—a girl—outside the marriage, and not with just any woman, but with one of his wife’s sisters. While her children eventually came to accept this unexpected sibling, my grandmother was, not surprisingly, reluctant to do so.

When my mother started dating Nelson Elmer, his father, a World War I veteran, was spending most of the week living at a Veterans Administration hospital, where he’d receive treatment for his diabetes, and then come home on the weekends. It seemed an unusual arrangement, and strikes me even more so now (perhaps fallout from his out-of-wedlock “marriage”?).

My father, Nelson Elmer, was in the middle of Matdora’s pack and, like his daddy, was on the short side, and had a gift for gab and a persuasive charm. He and his older brother, James, both served in Korea. When Nelson Elmer came back from Korea in the mid-1950s, he began wooing a cutie who didn’t live too far away from the George residence. The girl’s nickname was Doll.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "City Kid"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Nelson George.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction xiii

How I Came to Be 1

High Fidelity 11

The Ville 20

My Hero 30

A Thin Line between Love and Hate 36

Peer Pressure 41

A Theater on Pitkin Avenue 45

Soul Songs 51

Hanging with Captain America 56

BK '69 65

Afrodisiacs 67

Joining the Literary Guild 71

BK Early Seventies 81

Tilden Topics 97

NYC Late Seventies 104

The White Lines That Bind 131

NYC Early Eighties 137

Kings from Queens 148

Black Hollywood 159

From Motorola to Motown 165

Fort Greene Dreams 176

Talking Head 188

Voices Inside My Head 194

East New York 203

Spike 209

Jokes and Smoke 218

Life Support 232

Family Reunion 245

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Stories of [George's] boyhood moments are funny and downright arresting: his spiritual alignment with Captain America or the pluses and pitfalls of embracing the symbolism of the 1968 message movie 'Planet of the Apes'. You can see the seeds of a media critic being planted, and its fun to watch."
-Los Angeles Times

"In a direct and passionate writing style, George recounts what it was like to be young, black, poor-and driven...City Kid puts the reader at the pulsating fault line of the seismic shakeup of black movies and music in the 1980s and 1990s."
-BookPage

"Swift and authoritative."
-The Onion

"Charming memoir...a front-row seat to New York's shifting dynamics."
-Time Out New York

Editorial Reviews

"Stories of [George's] boyhood moments are funny and downright arresting: his spiritual alignment with Captain America or the pluses and pitfalls of embracing the symbolism of the 1968 message movie 'Planet of the Apes'. You can see the seeds of a media critic being planted, and its fun to watch."
-Los Angeles Times

"In a direct and passionate writing style, George recounts what it was like to be young, black, poor-and driven...City Kid puts the reader at the pulsating fault line of the seismic shakeup of black movies and music in the 1980s and 1990s."
-BookPage

"Swift and authoritative."
-The Onion

"Charming memoir...a front-row seat to New York's shifting dynamics."
-Time Out New York

From the Publisher

In his vivid and charming memoir, novelist and screenwriter George (Hip Hop America ) recounts incidents from an eventful life that has ranged from a tough upbringing by his single mother in Brooklyn in the 1960s to a career of assorted writing gigs in music journalism, television and film. Early in the book, George captures the anxieties of an intelligent child in a dangerous neighborhood, finding solace in his mother's soul records, screenings of Planet of the Apes and Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels. Later, George provides a welcome and appropriately nerve-wracking portrait of a young New York writer, interning at the Amsterdam News and writing concert reviews for Billboard . Slowly, the mature writer and tastemaker emerges, witnessing and shepherding hip-hop's sometimes rocky transition into the mainstream pop-music world, as exemplified by a bizarre concert bill featuring the Commodores, Bob Marley and hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow. George's life has been blessed by the presences of an eclectic array of black entertainers, including a young Russell Simmons and a struggling Chris Rock, and he sketches these characters with affection, though at times the book feels more like a collection of anecdotes than a cohesive narrative. Nonetheless, George provides tempting glimpses of the vibrant New York of the recent past. (Apr.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

George (The Accidental Hunter, 2005, etc.) chronicles his progression from an impoverished childhood to an accomplished career as a music journalist, novelist and filmmaker, with many stops along the way. The author was born into a working-class black family in swiftly changing Brooklyn. It was 1957: White families were moving out to the suburbs; African-American and Puerto Rican families were moving in. George's father was absent for much of his youth, and his hardworking mother served as his principal role model. The memoir serves up many images already shopworn from other coming-of-age stories set in New York during the '60s and '70s: stickball in the street, dancing to soul records, trading comic books, etc. George's recollections often seem romanticized, with one notable exception. His colorful descriptions of pop, soul and jazz, the experience of listening to music and his reactions to it, always seem authentic, and they point a clear path to his career as a journalist. He developed his craft at Billboard, New York Amsterdam News and The Village Voice (his dream job). As the author chronicles his professional success, the book's focus shifts to his relationships with an impressive, if lengthy, list of major black artists, including Russell Simmons, Spike Lee and Chris Rock, each of whom gets his own chapter. While these accounts provide a unique perspective on the development of African-American culture, they also fragment the text into choppy, piecemeal sections that abandon the subject of George's family life. He attempts to bring things full circle with concluding chapters on Life Support, a film he directed about his sister's battle with HIV, and a brief account of a familyreunion at his niece's graduation. Uneven but frequently engrossing.

Kirkus Reviews