Sidewalk - Teaching Notes - book about sidewalk vendors

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by Bob Blaisdell

By Mitchell Duneier. With an Afterword by Hakim Hasan. Photographs by Ovie Carter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $13.

"This is Sidewalk," I announced, showing them the book on the first day of class, a second-semester Freshman English course focused on research.

"You know those guys who sell books on the sidewalks?"

"I don't know them!" said Henry.

"You've seen them."

Now, the class agreeably nodded.

"This book is about those guys.--And I say 'guys,' because when--a few years ago--and where--on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, that's who..."

"I walk by them every day," said Lora, a mature woman from Jamaica. "On my way to work and back, and they're always quite friendly, at least to me."

"And you would say most of them are guys?"

"Yes."

"African-American guys?"

"Sure. Mostly," said Lora. She knitted her brows, and said doubtfully, "But this whole book is going to be about them?"

"Yes. It's interesting. They have lives like you or me. They're businessmen."

"Bums!" said Oscar, smiling.

"You mean 'homeless'?"

He shrugged. "The ones I seen around my way are all crackheads."

"Some 'unhoused' people, that's Duneier's term, some of them are crackheads," I said.

"Yes. But not all of them are, and this book, it's by a sociologist, and several years ago he thought, without thinking, that he knew who they were. He's an urban sociologist, and he wrote the book partly because he realized he should've known better than to trust his prejudices and ignorance about who these guys are. You'll like it."

The ones that were listening, besides Lora, grumbled or shook their heads.

And, except for a couple of stretches where Duneier contextualizes his study in sociological terms or investigates the political history of the laws that make unlicensed book-vending legal on New York City sidewalks, the students did, after all, like it very much. Duneier presents the men through first-hand observations and taped dialogues, most of the talk occurring at work, on the sidewalks, as Duneier vends alongside them or participates in the various, distinct jobs that rise on the sidewalks, among them book vending (this requires some capital, long-range commitment, and storage), magazine vending (most of the magazines had been set out for recycling, so it requires less outlay but a strong sense of the market), begging (some never beg; others feel no qualms) versus space-selling (location, location, location, they'll reserve a good spot on the sidewalk for you for fifty bucks).

Two men dominate Duneier's focus: Hakim Hasan, a book vendor and, in his own and his hero Jane Jacobs's term, a "public character," as well as a former proofreader who left "corporate America" to preserve his sense of independence, and Mudrick Hayes, an illiterate, fast-talking, ruthless capitalist with no capital:

... it wasn't long before the man who had consigned the mirrors to Mudrick in the morning came back for the money they had agreed upon. "You have my ten dollars?" he said to Mudrick.

Mudrick said, again with a straight face, "No. But I have eight. I have to go and get the money."

He walked away from the table, pretending to get some money, but really getting change from the newsstand. He came back with seven dollars in his hand. "This is all I got," he said.

"I'll take the seven," said the man.

The man walked away, apparently pleased to have a few dollars in his pocket. I asked Mudrick why he hadn't given the man the full ten dollars, especially considering that he had sold the mirrors for sixty dollars.

"There's no way I'm gonna give him ten. It costs him for talking to me. He didn't understand that part of the game."

"Explain to me that part of the game."

"The game is that you gotta pay me for talking to me. And I took three dollars of his money for talking to me."

"How is he talking to you?"

"He asked me do I want to buy the mirrors. That's a dollar. I said, 'Yes, I want to buy the mirrors.' That's another dollar. Then he asked me for the money. That was another dollar. Talk is not cheap. I was just fucking around with him. But he went for it. So, I didn't have a choice but to take it."

Mudrick has also sold a computer on consignment, and Duneier remarks: "After all the payouts, Mudrick still had seventy-five dollars in his pocket. Not bad for a man who came out to the street with nothing."

We had a lively discussion about Mudrick's business practices, with defenders pointing out, as Duneier does, that Mudrick ends up paying his friend Butteroll, who helped watch the merchandise, better than he said he would. (Long-term relationships count for something, even to capitalists.) Detractors insisted he was simply a big cheat.

Two semesters ago, the author came out to Brooklyn to speak to my class about the book, and he impressed us with details of his careful and rigorous research practices. But even better, perhaps because more surprising, was last semester, when Hasan, who from his book tables had mentored young people on careers and reading choices, came and spoke about his life (he has left the street-vending business and is now an administrator at a college downtown) and Sidewalk. Hasan is an intelligent and thoughtful man, and my students were engaged by his story and insights, but it was only when usually soft-spoken Karen, a single mother with two jobs, one of them her own home-based business, brought up her life story--wherein she thought she was similarly disgrunded with getting passed over for promotions in the office pool at a law firm, and feeling racist undertones in the company's actions--that we witnessed Hasan as the wise-man we saw dramatized in the book (I don't think I had realized until that moment that I had been still seeing him contained by the book). Hasan simultaneously encouraged and scolded Karen, reminding her that she needn't use racism as an excuse, since she wouldn't ever know for sure (maybe she wasn't as good as the person they hired! maybe there was some connection she knew nothing about and had nothing to do with her race!), and that what she wanted and where she needed to go had little to do with those people anyway. We were witnesses of a dispassionate but forceful exchange--a message Karen seemed to have needed (she was shaken and then later, she told me, rejuvenated)--and I was awed. Hasan's character in the book suddenly had an electricity we hadn't really felt before.