We woke up two Saturdays ago to find that Gilbert Kelley, the homeless man who had lived on our leafy brownstone block in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and had taken care of everyone’s garbage and swept the street, was dead. The man we knew only as Kelley was shot around 4:30 in the morning in front of a house a few doors down from us. Neighbors heard male voices talking and someone laughing. Then a single shot was fired, striking Kelley in the chest. He died on the way to the hospital.
I always figured that Kelley’s days were numbered—he was living a hard life on the street for nearly twenty years—but his death hit me with a surprising force, the shock of which I still haven’t absorbed, and not simply because he was murdered twenty-five yards from where I sleep with my husband and two small children. I’m not alone in feeling this way. The Friday evening before last, seventy of my neighbors—along with a handful of Kelley’s kids, whom none of us had met before—held an informal memorial, singing and lighting candles at the tree next to where he was killed. Residents of several of the blocks nearby, along with the local post office, where he’d once been a mail carrier, and our police precinct, have taken up collections for a plaque in his memory. Even the sanitation truck carries a sign reading “R.I.P. Kelley” on its side.
When someone you know dies, your last interaction with the person has a way of casting meaning on your entire relationship. My last interaction with Kelley was the afternoon before his death, ten hours before he was killed. He was pushing the shopping cart he used to collect bottles and cans, while I was walking home with my kids. My four-year-old son was on his scooter; Kelley challenged him to a race, and they started tearing down the street, with Kelley balanced on top of his cart, coasting along. Two women and a man were walking behind us—they seemed a little sketchy, possibly high—and the guy stepped forward to ask if we were okay. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about Kelley. “We’re fine,” I said. “We know Kelley. We’re friends.”
We met the day we moved in four years ago. I came outside with some boxes to find him in our front yard, putting the garbage cans out on the curb. Tall, medium-brown-skinned, ageless-looking (he was fifty-two), with graying close-cropped hair and a neat goatee on his lean, handsome face, he said, talking fast, that we could sign up with him to take care of the garbage. Most everyone on the street had a “contract” already. I was wary of getting hustled on our first day in our new neighborhood, and told him politely that my husband liked to take care of the trash himself.
Fall came, and Kelley swept up all the fallen leaves from the many trees on our street. He did this whether or not people paid him. Many people did. We paid him five or ten dollars every couple of weeks. In the winter, he shovelled the snow on the sidewalks and cleared the crosswalks, teasing, when I came along, that he’d cleared it just for me, the same joke I’d heard him make with the older black ladies on our block and, I suspect, with every woman who lives here. When the snow melted, leaving behind piles of garbage and dog poop, he cleaned that up as well. He took a lot of pride in our block, which was his home for the better part of three decades.
Kelley worked mostly at night. He would listen to Motown songs on his Walkman and sing along loudly and often off key. Sometimes, if I was having trouble sleeping, I found his singing annoying. But more often it was simply the sound of the night on our street: hearing it was strangely reassuring. As the nights grew colder, I’d listen for Kelley when I was up late, relieved when I didn’t hear his voice, since it meant that he’d found someplace to be indoors.
Late one night not long after we moved in, he banged on our window, and my husband jumped up and opened the shutters, asking who is it? “Sorry, sorry,” said Kelley. “Wrong house.” We figured he must have mistaken our place for the house a few doors down, where a small-time dealer was said to be living on the garden floor. We assumed that Kelley had a problem with drugs, which explained his homelessness, although we never saw him getting high or even acting that high. Sometimes in the morning he could be very grumpy and dishevelled-looking, and he’d say hello in a deep gravelly voice that suggested a rough night and the need for more of whatever dog had its teeth in him. But for someone who slept mostly on the street he was surprisingly well-kept, and managed to take care of his private business in private.
I passed him nearly every day, often twice or three times. “Hey, Ro-man,” he called to my son, pronouncing his name as if it rhymed with “yo, man,” and we would stop and chat. If my kids went outside and started heading down the street while I was still locking the door, he would call to them to wait at the corner, and they would listen to him. When he saw me on my stoop smoking my once-per-evening cigarette, he’d give me a hard time because, he said, his wife died of lung cancer from smoking. Once a day is one too many, he would tell me, which was pretty rich coming from him.
Over the last two years, he landed in the hospital a couple of times—once he was knifed and another time he got his ribs broken—and he went to prison twice for drugs or fighting or both. He told a neighbor that he went into the joint for the health care—he had a bad hip that gave him trouble, especially in the winter. I wondered if he got himself arrested to avoid the worst of the cold.
Whenever he came back to the street, he looked ten years younger. “Wow, you look great,” I would tell him, hoping that he might take the opportunity this time to stay clean. But then, a week or so later, the early morning rough voice and surly expression would be back.
Everyone on the block knew him by his last name, and almost everyone talked to him, and he talked to them, about the weather, the state of the block, a neighbor’s recent bout with illness. He talked to many people about his kids (he said that he had eighteen), showing pictures of them and his grandchildren. He had his fights with people, and he could be vicious in his criticism of people he didn’t like. Nevertheless, his care of the block, and his embracing of it as his home, helped to provide its definitions, turning a disparate collection of newcomers and old-timers, mansion dwellers and Section 8 residents, blacks and whites and hipsters into a community.
Kelley and I had our own brief falling out over trying to revive the block association, which had been dormant for much of the previous decade. He was really excited about the idea, remembering when the association had been active and threw block parties. He put me in touch with the woman who ran a successful block association a few streets over to get some advice.
But, when trying to organize our first meeting, Kelley and I disagreed about the best place to hold it. He wanted to have it in the pedestrian plaza at the end of our block, while I preferred a nearby nursery school. The plaza is often a hangout for local drug dealers, and since safety was one of the issues the block members wanted to discuss, this didn’t seem like the most prudent location. One evening that week, while I was sitting on our stoop with some friends, Kelley cursed under his breath, and, from across the street, threw a bottle that smashed at the foot of our stairs.
The next morning, my husband talked to him, and Kelley said that the guests at our house that night had disrespected him, which we all knew wasn’t true. I came to realize that he was mostly worried about being excluded. He still wouldn’t talk to me when I was walking up and down the block handing out the flyers for the meeting, so I placed one in his shopping cart.
A few nights later, he showed up at the nursery school, clean-shaven and sober, holding the blue knit cap he sometimes wore. We all went around, introducing ourselves and saying where we lived. When Kelley’s turn came, he said, “My name is Kelley,” and then he laughed. “And you all know where I live. I just came to say that I’m really glad you are doing this. It’s about time we got the block organized again. It’s important to know your neighbors, and for us to be a community together. That’s what this is all about.”
At the gatherings that have been springing up in the evenings to light the candles placed around the base of a tree where he was struck down, people trade stories about all the ways that Kelley helped them over the years: cleaning up the yard, installing air conditioners, or picking up some groceries or a prescription for the older people who were housebound; the many times that he intervened late at night to prevent someone from getting mugged or beaten up or possibly raped.
Why did he choose this block? I always wondered, but never asked him. In talking to his family in the days after he passed, I discovered how he ended up here.
Kelley grew up a mile or so away, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, as one of twelve children. His father wasn’t in the picture, and his mother worked for the telephone company to support them, but his younger sister Diane doesn’t remember them having to go without during their childhood. In high school, Kelley started dating a girl named Marie, who lived across the street. He was nineteen when Marie became pregnant with their oldest daughter, Iesha. They moved into their own apartment not far from Prospect Park, and Kelley got a job at the post office in Clinton Hill, where he began delivering mail to our block. He and Marie had five more children. He was a good father, she says.
Kelley lost his job at the post office in the mid-nineteen-eighties. If he’d attended a drug treatment program, he could have had his job back, Marie told me, but he never did. She broke it off with him soon after that, and he moved onto our block, into an apartment in the building on the corner, where, according to Kelley himself, “there was twenty-four-hour drug dealing.” He met a woman who lived next door who was a heavy user, with whom he had another eight kids. According to Kelley’s oldest daughter, they all ended up in foster care. After serving six or seven years on a federal drug charge in the mid-nineties, Kelley came back to the block and, lacking money or a place to stay, started sleeping outside.
Kelley’s daughter Queen, who is Marie’s second-oldest daughter, reconnected with her father eight years ago, shortly before the birth of her first child. He would call her to say hello or wish someone a happy birthday from the pay phone on the corner, or from the home of an older lady on the block, who let Kelley shower at her place in exchange for helping her out. Queen became his emergency contact, and, after his most recent stint at Rikers Island, it was her three-bedroom home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Brooklyn that he was released to.
She asked him to stay with her, as she had numerous times before, but he insisted that he had a place to live. He provided the address of an apartment on the block, although she discovered, after his death, that it was only where he received his mail. One time, when she came looking for him, she found him asleep on someone’s stoop, and he claimed to have dozed off while waiting for the woman who lived there to come home because she’d hired him to do some cleaning.
Queen told me that, besides her father not wanting the responsibility of renting a place, he didn’t seem to want to leave the block. “When he called me from prison, he wanted to know if I had gone by there and seen how it looked. It had snowed recently, and he wondered if people had been shovelling.”
When we first arrived, Kelley slept in a reclining chair in someone’s front yard, under a decrepit canopy that kept out the rain. Then he and the building’s owner had a falling out, and he started to move from stoop to stoop, choosing houses that were unoccupied because the owners were trying to sell them or waiting to close or renovating. (I once asked him where he went on the coldest nights, and he said that he had a hallway he could sleep in.)
In a neighborhood that is experiencing rapid gentrification (as noted by the Times and Spike Lee, among others), Kelley had any number of renos to choose from. But I worried sometimes that a newcomer would find him asleep on their stoop and get huffy or call the cops—that they wouldn’t understand that Kelley was a fixture on our block and had a right to be there, at least as much as everyone else. It seemed that once there was no longer a place for him, the neighborhood would have changed beyond the point of no return. But that hadn’t happened, yet.
At the memorial gathering, after many of the assembled mourners sang along to the R. Kelly song “I Believe I Can Fly,” which was the last song anyone could remember Kelley singing on the night he died, people went around saying a few words. His kids were visibly touched by the large turnout, and by how generally well-liked their father had been.
“Keep cleaning up the street,” one of them said, “to keep his memory alive.”
An older resident, who is black, chimed in that neighbors should also say hello to each other. “It didn’t matter if you were black or white. Kelley talked to everyone.”
“My grandmother was white, Kelley’s mom was white,” his daughter Queen offered. “I bet you all didn’t know that.”
“She was Italian,” corrected Iesha.
Before we dispersed, a neighbor told me that Kelley died while “defending the block.” I thought this was probably a sentimental spin on what I guessed was some beef with a dealer that had gone awry. But the detective assigned to the case told me that, as best as they can piece together from the security cameras and other evidence, Kelley confronted a group of teen-age boys from outside the neighborhood who came onto the block early that Saturday morning and asked what they were up to. An argument broke out. Then someone pulled out a gun and shot him. The knife Kelley carried for protection was found on the ground. The police have a suspect, but no arrests have been made.
Photograph by Nicole Kenney.
