n his lifetime, a Coast Guard schooner was named in Marcy's honor; after his death, his portrait graced the $1,000 silver certificate; and both the highest peak in New York (5,344 feet) and a town in the center of the state bear his name.
But his final distinction is the most memorable, if least glorious: In 1949, twenty-eight acres in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant were developed by the New York City Housing Authority as the site for a complex of six-story buildings, twenty-seven of which were christened "Marcy Houses." For a time, the seventeen hundred apartments provided affordable housing. But like Cabrini-Green or Robert Taylor in Chicago, Marcy declined through the years, becoming increasingly unsafe and decreasingly policed. Heroin hobbled the community during the 1970s before crack turned these neighborhoods into ruins. Thus William Learned Marcy, the man on a $1,000 bill, became Brooklyn's patron saint of poverty.
Now imagine a boy of eight named Shawn making his way, one summer afternoon in 1978, through those twenty-eight acres as he heads to his parents' apartment in Marcy. His mother, Gloria, works for the comptroller's office as a clerk; his father, Adnis—whose employment history is unknown but who we do know was the son of a Pentecostal pastor—will leave the family the following year after his little brother, Ray, is murdered at a Brooklyn bar. (Adnis thereafter will decline first into drink, then drugs, and then, when Shawn is eleven, into oblivion: He won't see his son again for two decades.) For now, in 1978, Shawn is returning to parents who have an R&B-heavy record collection, to Soul Train playing on Saturdays when the family of six cleans house together, and to a basketball hoop in the living room that Adnis installed.
So Shawn is making his way, and he sees a circle of older boys standing on the street, clapping, laughing. The boy makes a beeline for the circle. You can see it: a little kid sprinting flat out, pushing his way through the crowd, through bigger boys arranged like the petals of a flower around a buzzing center, or like metal shavings drawn to a magnet vibrating in the middle. If those similes don't quite cut it for you, these will, since they were written by the man the boy became—Jay Z—thirty-two years later: "It felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star."
The star at the center of that circle was a boy from the neighborhood. Here's how Jay Z describes him and the moment:
His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time—thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps. He rhymed about nothing—the sidewalk, the benches—or he'd go in on the kids who were standing around listening to him, call out someone's leaning sneakers or dirty Lee jeans. And then he'd go in on how clean he was, how nice he was with the ball, how all our girls loved him. Then he'd just start rhyming about the rhymes themselves, how good they were, how much better they were than yours, how he was the best that ever did it, in all five boroughs and beyond. He never stopped moving, not dancing, just rotating in the center of the circle, looking for his next target. The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next clap kept coming, and he kept meeting it with another rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside him. I was dazzled. That's some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.
Watching Slate—whose name means something to write on—it was like a switch was thrown. That night, Jay Z says, he began writing. The verses started coming, filling up his spiral notebook, and then a three-ring binde