Eat the City(74)
ONE fat, sun-dazed baby on her lap, another growing in her belly, Yolene Joseph raises the crab trap out of the water off the Coney Island pier. Her year-old nephew watches on her knee in fascination as the pincers reach out of the metal cage, followed by the rest of the spiderlike body.
Yolene and her twin sister, Yoland Thomas, have brought a whole watermelon and some drinks to the pier. They’ve spread out a yellow pad on the boardwalk where the baby can crawl. Yolene has three daughters to Yoland’s three sons, and the older kids are wading in the sea. Their mothers are up on deck, lowering empty crab traps and raising full ones.
They’re from Trinidad, where they used to live right by the beach. The crabs were always fresh—sometimes you could buy them right out of the nets off the boat. They would eat callaloo, a coconut stew made with crab meat, pumpkin, okra, coconut milk, and the leaf of the callaloo plant that gives the dish its name. Their mother, Darner Joseph, remembers shimmying up to the top of the coconut tree in a yard to grab fresh fruit and picking dried coconuts off the ground to cook into curry crab.
Yolene baits the trap with fresh chicken in a flexible wire basket whose hoop net will collapse and flatten on the bottom of the seabed. The water is clear enough that you can hang out over the railing and watch the crab walk right into the trap. Yolene manages two traps, so as soon as she frees a crab from one trap for deposit in the bucket, she walks over to raise up the second. There’s a rhythm to this. Sit, talk for a while, pull up one trap, pull up the second trap. Sit, talk, trap. It makes for stilted conversation but an impressive haul.
Though she has already netted several dozen crabs, Yolene says it’s not impressive enough. “I’ve been here where every time you pull up your basket, you have five or six crabs,” she says. Today the sisters will go home salty and hot and tired from the beach, and stuff the crabs in the freezer. They will have to make several cross-Brooklyn trips from their home in Crown Heights to catch themselves enough meat for curry crab, cooked with curry powder, coconut milk, onion, garlic, thyme, scallions. When they don’t trap crabs themselves, they buy them in Chinatown: enough for a big meal for the extended family could easily cost seventy dollars. Maintaining Caribbean traditions in New York City can be expensive.
Sometimes the sisters take their children to catch crabs at Sheepshead Bay at night. They shine a flashlight onto the water so the crabs freeze; then they scoop them up. “They’re kind of creepy-looking,” says Yolene. “It’s fun.” Sometimes they come here to Coney Island and stay till late at night. They bring a tent for the kids and put them to bed on the pier, letting them whisper and giggle until they finally sleep, beside the steady plop of the trap going into the water and the dripping crab coming up, claws thrashing silently in protest. They work hard during the week, all of them—Yolene, a caregiver in a group home for adults with disabilities, Yoland, who does data entry for a health care company, and Darner, their mother, who also works as a counselor in a group home. They’ve heard the advisories, but even eight months pregnant, Yolene pays no mind. “A lot of people cook them just how you see them there, but we actually break off the back and we use like a scrubbing brush, and we scrub out all the stuff from inside.”
Yolene herself seems to glow in the sun in her red and pink sundress, her belly swollen with her fourth child, her hair braided back off her face in rows, and her relaxed smile. She holds no stock in PCBs. Is she worried at all about consuming bottom-feeding scavengers that ingest the accumulated problems of the waters of New York City? “Not me—I’ve been eating it for years!” she says. The water flows in and out, it’s not sitting still, she reasons, so contaminants must simply drift out with the tides. “I’m still alive, and I’ve got a lot of meat,” she says, patting her thighs. “So!” she finishes, as though her own flesh is proof.
WINE
THE REDBRICK HOUSE on Ninety-Second Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan looks unremarkable. Narrow, four stories tall, with iron railings on the stairs, and a wood-paneled front door. You could walk by it every day and never know that in the backyard, there is a vine. The vine bears grapes, which climb all the way up the back side of the house and onto the roof. The family harvests the grapes on the rooftop and by reaching out the windows. The fruit makes wine.
The winemaking began decades ago. Latif Jiji, a mechanical engineering professor at City College, had ceded the narrow backyard of his family’s townhouse to his wife, Vera, for gardening. But one day in 1977, on an impulse, Latif brought home a cutting from a grapevine—just a bare branch, really—and stuck it into the soil. Soon, he said, “it took over.” Vera, a retired English professor, likes to point out the Freudian symbolism of a man with a stick who dominates. In any case, the scraggly vine gradually leaned forward, attached itself to the redbrick house, and grew tall, slithering upward like some kind of magic beanstalk. In time, it yielded fat bunches of green Niagara grapes—commonly found in northeastern backyards and supermarkets, not so frequently in wineries. Latif and Vera’s four children didn’t like them because they had seeds, and Latif found himself with a grape surplus. At some point around 1984, the thought occurred to him: “Why don’t we make wine?”
His father had made wine when Latif was a boy growing up in the small Jewish community in Basra in southern Iraq. His childhood vine was also tall—two stories high—and rooted in the central courtyard of the family home. The winemaking technique was “primitive,” Latif says now, and his father “violated all the rules” that Latif later learned from books. He didn’t take care to seal the wine barrel—Latif used to lift the cover and inhale the pungent fumes of fermentation. He didn’t siphon the wine to leave behind the sediment, but scooped it straight from the barrel into bottles. You would have to drink around the sediment in the bottom of your glass.