My Hero of Film: Spike Lee’s Crooklyn Was My Brooklyn
BY JEANINE DeHONEY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeanine DeHoney is a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction that speaks to, for and about Black and Brown adults and children. She says, “I write because it is my heartbeat. It is my healer and helps me catch my breath and exhale as I have my say. I always hope that my writing will heal, affirm and change others.”
Jeanine’s timely essay about Spike Lee’s 1994 film, Crooklyn, flows seamlessly between the story that unfolds onscreen and her own life growing up in Brooklyn. She brings the reader palpably onto the streets and into the homes of the characters in both settings. There is no better representation of her intent in writing the piece that her own words:
“Spike Lee's classic movie Crooklyn is celebrating its 30th Anniversary, three decades since it first hit theaters, and there are several events being planned to mark its anniversary. It is an iconic film, one that I and millions of others have treasured. So many of us could relate to the Black family it portrayed. We could laugh and cry with them through their ebbs and flows of living in Brooklyn. It was also a family we all knew in some semblance, whether it was our own or another family.
“Their rituals, their love, their sorrows, their joys, their vulnerabilities and strength, embodied the Black experience, especially during that era, when I was a young Black girl growing up in Brooklyn. Crooklyn is a film worth paying homage to, even for those who aren't Brooklynites. It is a film full of nostalgic reflections and poignant scenes.”
Jeanine DeHoney’s writing has been published in Essence, Empowerment For Women, WOW!: Women on Writing, Today’s Black Woman, Black Romance, Mothering.com, Timbooktu, Mutha Magazine, Literary Mama, Jerry Jazz Magazine, Rigorous Literary Magazine, Please See Me, Soul In Space Literary Magazine, radio and online journal The Dirty Spoon, Sisters AARP and Hallmark’s Mahogany Blog, among others.
She is an essayist in several Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies and in Theories of HER: An Experimental Anthology. She is also an essayist in anthologies by Black Lawrence Press, Black Freighter Press, BLF Press (Black Joy Unbound) and upcoming in an anthology by Zora’s Den. She won first place for her poem for the 2022 Colorism Healing writing contest, which was published in an anthology and was chosen as an Honor winner for Sleeping Bear Press’s Own Voices, Own Stories 2022 Award Season, as well as her children’s book, which will be published by Sleeping Bear Press in the Fall of 2025.
My Hero of Film: Spike Lee’s Crooklyn Was My Brooklyn
© 2024
“I think black people have to be in control of their own image because film is a powerful medium. We can't just sit back and let other people define our existence.”
- Spike Lee
I was fortunate to grow up in Brooklyn. East New York, Brooklyn to be exact. Along with my parents and older sister, I lived in a low-income housing project, affordable housing as my mother called it. But I also had extended family spread out all over the other boroughs in Brooklyn, mainly Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights and Fort Greene, in majestic brownstones, locations often depicted in some of my favorite Spike Lee movies.
I don’t think there could have been any other place in the world that would have been the perfect tapestry for my dreams of becoming a writer as I grew up than Brooklyn. I don’t think there would have been a more perfect urban backdrop for me that embodied the verve of black and brown people than in the Brooklyn I grew up in.
When it comes to Black and Brown people, Spike Lee was one of the directors anointed to tell their stories. His writing and his cinematography capture the essence of us. He captures our joy, our sorrow, our vulnerability, our rage, our tenderness, those rotten apple parts of us and those sweet, delicious parts of us. He spreads our stories across a canvas that chronicles the undertones and overtones of our lives. He shows us surviving, thriving, holding on to joy and creativity, and humor, and genuineness and strength in a world that has been so tone death to our needs and the needs of our communities and tries to insert daggers in our fissures.
The Brooklyn I grew up in, that Spike Lee so exquisitely creates films about is a Brooklyn that is shea butter smooth and Hershey chocolate kissed. It is his film Crooklyn, and as we celebrate three decades since this classic movie hit theaters, I can’t help but reminisce.
Crooklyn is the Brooklyn I knew with the catchy jingle playing from the ice-cream truck with children racing to it with a palm full of jingling change hoping to be first in line to get a vanilla ice-cream cone with extra rainbow sprinkles, a popsicle or push-up pop.
It was the Brooklyn where aromas hovered in the air from the neighborhood soul food shack and when you walked by you couldn’t help but stick your head in to say a quick hello and get an even better whiff.
It was the Brooklyn where music blared from an open window or boombox and there was dancing in the street. It was the Brooklyn where young men shot dice and played stickball and threw basketballs in makeshift hoops or hooped at the park in bare-chested brawn bravado showing off their future NBA skills and girls jumped double-dutch to jump rope rhymes and elders played dominoes on milk crates covered with a piece of cardboard as their shared stories.
It was the Brooklyn with open fire hydrants and cars rolling through the spray of water slowly to get a free car wash. The Brooklyn where afros looked like fluffy black cotton candy and young hair braiders as skilled as surgeons sat on stoops weaving intricate designs they adorned with cowrie shells and beads.
It was the Brooklyn full of the soulful melodies and finger snaps of doo-wop groups standing on the corner, and mothers calling their children home, pressing pause on their evening jubilee when the street lights came on.
In Crooklyn, Spike Lee gathered all of my most nostalgic remembrances as a child growing up in Brooklyn. It is a film I consider a beautiful sonnet, an ode to an African American family in this special place during the summer of 1973.
This 1994 film, produced and directed by Spike Lee and co-written with his siblings Joie and Cinque Lee showed a poignant depiction of the Carmicheal family who lived in Bedford Stuyvesant, before gentrification, and was also a coming-of-age story about a nine-year-old girl, played phenomenally by Zelda Harris, as Troy, and her four mischievous brothers; older brother Clinton played by Carlton Williams, Wendell played by Sharif Rashed, Nate played by Chris Knowings, and the youngest, Joseph, played by Tse-Mach Washington.
Troy’s parents were portrayed just as phenomenally by actors, Alfre Woodard, as the mother Carolyn, a school teacher, and Delroy Lindo as the father Woody, a struggling jazz musician.
There was a cast of characters like Snuffy played by Spike Lee who was the neighborhood junkie and drug dealer and glue sniffer, Tommy La La played by Jose Zuniga, and Tony Eyes with his coke bottle glasses played by David Patrick Kelly, and Vic Powell, a Vietnam Vet who was the Carmicheal’s upstairs tenant in their brownstone played by Isaiah Washington. There was also the character Uncle brown portrayed by Vondie Curtis-Hall and Aunt Maxine portrayed by Joie Lee. RuPaul even made an appearance and momentarily had Troy under her spell went she went inside a bodega and watched her dance seductively for the bodega owner.
Carolyn, the mother was an amalgamation of the many beautiful black women who had loved me oak tree strong and nurtured me as a child; my own mother, grandmother and aunts, their friends and even my Brooklyn neighbors. They were the ones like Carolyn who kept their worries and pain close to their bosom and did their best to keep things in the household running efficiently even through all the ebbs and flows in their life. They were the ones who sometimes had to be the one who put their foot down when it came to rules like in one of the scenes when the father Woody brought home cake and ice-cream for everyone to have for dessert and Carolyn told Nate, the second youngest who was repulsed by black-eyed peas, “You’re gonna sit there until you eat every black-eyed pea on your plate.”
Nate picked up his fork to eat them and ended up vomiting. This scene I could so relate too because I too as a child was repulsed by black eyed peas.
Still Carolyn was a loving mother and her children had a fervent adulation for her.
Woody, the patriarch in the Carmicheal household also reminded me of a loved one, my father who was a jazz musician like him. Growing up my father had a golden saxophone that made me feel like I was one of the richest girls in the projects whenever he took it out of its velvet lined case to play. He would set up his music sheets on a rickety music stand in my bedroom and make notations before he put it to his lips and hit those notes. I could listen to him serenade me and the neighborhood forever with his saxophone but my father’s golden saxophone was not worth its weight in gold. His infrequent gigs playing at house parties or Harlem clubs didn’t pay our bills or buy my sister and I school clothes or pay for our piano lessons which my mother insisted we have.
Those scenes of Woody wanting to follow his dream of playing music and the conflicts it caused in their household were bittersweet. For they brought back memories of my own father and mother and the dissension that came when the bills were piling up and how eventually my father gave up playing to get a regular job. That scene resonated with me because it had happened so similarly in my Brooklyn childhood household.
Troy as well personified the little girl I once was. Though shy, like Troy I would stand up to anyone who was bullying my friends or cousins as she did when she stood up and protected her younger brother Joseph from the neighborhood glue sniffing terrorizers, Snuffy and Right Hand. Though at times I wasn’t as audacious with my voice I was with my pen. I’d write stories to right the wrongs I saw around me, especially when it came to racism. Also, like Troy I was a Daddy’s girl.
When Carolyn died, after battling cancer, that part of the film pulled on my heartstrings. Still does, whenever I rewatch Crooklyn. Spike Lee handled her death and the gradations of grief of her family with a tenderness that eased the sledgehammer pounding of our somber heart pulsations so we could breathe. Troy was ten years old by then and became withdrawn but Woody wrapped his arms around her and let her know it was okay to cry, to mourn. And slowly, like sand in an hourglass, the Carmicheal family began their healing journey. and new normal.
In their new familial normal without their mother, there is a scene in which Troy is sitting in Carolyn’s chair combing her brother Joseph’s hair like Carolyn used to. And in another scene Troy has a celestial visit from Carolyn as she sits on their Brownstone stoop in which she reads a letter she wrote to Troy saying she misses her and how proud she is of her and the way she is growing.
Crooklyn also has a soul stirring soundtrack that speaks to the film’s era. This was the music my parents played on their record player as my sister and I did our Saturday chores, the music that played at birthday parties, and fish fries, and street festivals, and block parties. Music such as Respect Yourself by The Staple Singers, ABC performed by The Jackson Five, Everyday People, by Sly and The Family Stone, O-o-h Child by The Five Stairsteps, Soul Makossa, performed by Manu Di Bango and Soul Power performed by Jame Brown.
In Crooklyn, Spike Lee showed a Black family’s love and resilience. You didn’t need a magnifying glass to see the jewels in this film about the black family. You didn’t have to use a weedwhacker to trudge through the wildflowers to get to the good parts. You could see the roses growing in the concrete jungle, for his camera was laser focused on them all.
Spike Lee is an iconic filmmaker, director, screenwriter, and producer and so are his films. His films create space for us to be seen and heard in all of our totality. He lets his characters tattoo our spirits so that they will linger much longer than they would have if he hadn’t narrated them in his own inimitable way. All moments are captured, none lost. It is like looking through an overstuffed photo album marveling at your precious legacy.
I will always be an aficionado of all of Spike Lee’s films, from School Daze that tackled colorism and apartheid, to “Do The Right Thing,” that explored racial tensions and police brutality, to Mo Better Blue that explored relationships and ambitions, and Malcolm X, the biopic about Malcolm X. Crooklyn though is a film that is a balm for my nostalgic soul as he hones in on the Brooklyn era, I lived.
It is a film that stays with me long after the credits start to roll. Spike Lee’s Crooklyn will always be a classic R&B love song to my Brooklyn. Happy 30th anniversary Crooklyn.