Bob Moses—the 60s hero who went “inside the iceberg” to organize for voting rights in the Jim Crow South and then got a second wind as director of “The Algebra Project”—once mused America had a virtue: you could live a life in struggle here. Moses’s underdog’s version of American exceptionalism came to mind when I tried to take in Tom DeMott’s life, which was marked by nearly forty years of imaginative organizing against rent intensifiers (and Columbia U’s oblivion wind). But my brother Tom’s crazy early death—at age 67 on October 23rd—made everyone who’d walked with him wonder about personal costs of deep politics (which should never be conflated with come-and-go activism).
Tom reflected on what abides in his recent response to a Q&A about real estate profiteers here. He was modest about his own role in uptown resistance to gentrification and he might’ve steered me away from invoking a world historical figure like Bob Moses at the top of this tribute. FWIW, though, the tenants’ group Tom helped found surely belongs in someone’s grand narrative. Back in the day, after years of struggle against a series of owners (aided by wannabe co-opers) out to quash rent strikes in three buildings, the “Tenants’ Alliance” won one of the largest settlements ever paid by a landlord to tenants in New York State. It’s important to recall such victories. Not because winners rule, but because memories of justice are a charm against the syndrome Tom diagnosed in his “crib note”:
“The “obstacle” to anyone being an “effective leader” is that we are
mostly all made to feel like losers and to feel it everyday in part
from the real estate history we’ve lived through and feel daily in
our homes and hoods watching the weak and lovely fall”
Tom was alive to the harrowing of old New Yorkers. (“Landlord harassment on the rise, yeah. I certainly am getting many more people consulting me about apartment conditions, and their lease renewals – the care needed to fill them out the right way, as basic as that is…”) His answer to despair was, as ever, more care. His persistence reminds me of an undogmatic Catholic socialist’s incantations:
The longer I live, citizen, the less I believe in the efficiency of sudden illuminations that are not accompanied or supported by serious work, the less I believe in the efficiency of conversion—extraordinary, sudden and serious—in the efficiency of sudden passions, and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work. The longer I live the less I believe in the efficiency of an extraordinary sudden social revolution, improvised, marvelous, with or without guns and impersonal dictatorship—and the more I believe in the efficiency of modest, slow, molecular, definitive work.
But Peguy’s passage isn’t quite spot on. Tom never entirely gave up on the idea of revolution and his near-frenetic way in the world seems a bit removed from Peguy’s movement of mind. Tom was often in a hot rush, burning through one “molecular” task in order to race back to his other ninety-nine problems. His son Jamie may have caught something about Tom’s urban temper when he characterized his father as “a multicultural multitasker.” (Even when Tom was on break, he tended to mix it up. If he had a game on–the sound might be off so he could hear music as he folded clothes or pet the cats or did sit-ups or…)
Tom tried to ensure his immediate family didn’t pay for his strenuous life. His wife Maria was his camerada. Her mother Teresa–more inured to patriarchy than her leonine feminist daughter–was struck by radical equations that defined Maria and Tom’s love match. Mama Pres used to call them pitcher-and-catcher. There was no such thing as women’s work in Tom and Maria’s household. He did the laundry and most food prep. Tom’s moves when our own widowed mother, Peggy DeMott, became increasingly fragile in her last years were exemplary on this score. He jumped around from Massachusetts to Florida to NYC in order to live with and care for our mom. Even when he was out of town, though, I always felt he was watching over his younger brother up the block. But the fun/music we shared was even more important than the sense of protection I got as I grew in his shade. (What will Thanksgiving be to me if I can’t share the food of love with Tom?) Life without him will be a half-life. And when I think of what a Tom-less future means to Maria or Jamie or Billie…
Though it may be that no-one in our family will be more bereft than Tom’s granddaughter Shai whom he animated, educated, and exhilarated.
Not that Tom didn’t make numberless other New Yorkers feel beloved too. Those souls who filed in to Tom’s apartment, once the neighbor-gram about his death started going around, went to the heart of the matter. (As did his baby sister Megan who drove up from Massachusetts after midnight once she heard Tootah had died.) You could get a hint of Tom’s worldliness from a checklist of nations repped on that first night in his house of mourning—Haiti, D.R., Barbados, Ethiopia, Iraq, England, Senegal, Jamaica, China, Greece, Canada…
I should underscore that list is only telling because Tom’s people don’t belong to a class-bound, polyglot elite. Nor can they be reduced to their places of origin. Each of them have their own tendency in time and Tom had grasped what’s unique about their no-such-thing-as-normal-lives. A newish friend trying to comprehend Tom’s life leaned on a line linked with what was once the Columbia end of Claremont Avenue: Tom was “one of those upon whom nothing is lost.” With this nitty-gritty caveat, per (Tom’s old friend) Charlie O’Brien: “a lot just bounces off.” Tom had to armor up sometimes when he worked with hard-hit people.
He began knowing his homies from within after Maria and Teresa (who lives on in D.R. at 101)—brought him into their extended family in the 1970s. Tom had dropped out of Columbia (though he’d eventually be one of the oldest ever returnee-grads) and was beating up on himself like so many 60s-addicts. But Spanish is the healing tongue and once Tom learned it he was ready to meringue on Tiemann Place—a neighborhood that would morph into an undeniable community thanks to his indispensable will.
It’s easy to imagine Tom was always prepped for 125th St. where he worked for more than thirty years in the Post Office with Harlemites (who, like him, rarely got their mouths around the term African-American). It was second nature for el blanco to name his son James (after J.B.) and daughter Billie (after Lady Day). He was lost in black music from the moment Rolling Stones brought it back home in the early 60s. (Not to slight the love he shared with Maria for The Beatles or deny Exiles on Main Street went right by him since he was locked on “Vamanos Pa’l Monte” ((live)) and The Harder They Come.) B-ball was another key to his blackhand side (and Maria’s nice touch from 15 feet was on point). He came to the game relatively late but when he got serious in J-high he couldn’t imagine his fam wouldn’t pick up on his need to play. One of his echt X-mas regrets was the absence of a ball under the tree when he was twelve. (Not that it was on a wish-list—he’d trusted in Christmas magic and, blue Noel notwithstanding, upheld the faith each holiday season. At Tom and Maria’s Xmas eve parties, infants would gaze up at massive Once-Upon-a-Time-in-America evergreens.) When Tom was coming up, basketball was shot through with America’s irrepressible conflicts—courts were contrary places where sweet moves and/or meanness might jump off. Which brings me to my own origin story of Tom’s brotherhood.
It dates to the summer after I got out of high school. I’d been playing b-ball with Tom—a 2 on 2 pick-up game in the gym at the college where our dad taught. The game ended when a guy on the other team, upset about a foul I’d called or committed, stepped off abruptly. While his departure seemed a little odd, it wouldn’t have stuck in my mind or Tom’s for long since we’d played in numberless pick-up games with touchy players. But a half an hour later, the day became unforgettable. The guy whose skin I’d got under—an Asian-American Amherst College student—came back to the gym with a half-dozen black kids. High schoolers from the city of Springfield, they were enrolled in a program of tutoring and “cultural enrichment” during the summer on the campus where the Amherst man had a gig teaching them Kung Fu. After I’d chased a ball to an open court, I looked up to see the Kung Fu master and those young guys closing in…
As beat-downs go, it was pretty light stuff. In the moment, though, I was mad scared. The kids and their blows had come out of nowhere and, as I covered up, any horrible seemed possible. What happened in that gym was the kind of thing that’s said to turn beamish boys of the left into mature reactionaries, but Tom kept me from going wrong/right. While I lived scared for a short stretch, my fear always seemed petty given the example of courage Tom gifted me with on the afternoon I got assaulted. He was shooting baskets at the other end of the court when I was surrounded, but once he realized I was being beaten he raced toward the circle and took on all my attackers. I still don’t grasp how he fought them off but it surely wasn’t a cakewalk. (He took a punch to the head that put him in the hospital that night.)
My gym drama was a one-off—a singular event that wouldn’t shape my life. But there was more of a portent in Tom’s acts that day. My brother’s future would disclose a tight connection between fate and character since he was destined to become a…Brother. There’s a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me that helps tease out the significance of Tom’s ease in pre-gentrified Harlem. Out to clarify emotional constructs black people have built to last in America, Coates recalls an exchange between himself and another blood:
Not long ago I was standing in an airport retrieving a bag from a conveyor belt. I bumped into a young man and said, “My bad.” Without even looking up he said, “You straight.”…It was the briefest intimacy, but it captured much of the beauty of my black world…To call that feeling racial is to hand over all those diamonds fashioned by our ancestors to the plunderers.
Tom helped push that feeling on during thousands of night shifts and neighborhood raps. And, in his case, it didn’t end with a passing pound or “my bad.” True solidarity tends to rest on the foundational virtue. Tom’s fearless heart brought out the brave. Son Jamie thinks any memorial to Tom should include nods to gone homies who looked out for his father. I’m recalling on this front the late Hamidulla Al-Amin (who died young from cancer in 2016). Al-Amin was a for real for real original. A Dominican who changed his name (like Muhammad Ali or El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) from Radamez in the 60s. Al-Amin was a messenger from the don’t-fuck-with-us grassroots. When my brother received credible death threats conveyed by the lawyer of an enraged landlord, Al-Amin had Tom’s back for two years, accompanying him to and from work and countless public meetings. This stalwart brother-man wasn’t just harder than the rest. He was more graceful too. Especially when he danced latin or reggae which he did with equal flair (making him a rare mutt in a pre-reggaeton era).
Tom shared Al-Amin’s taste for pre-Dance Hall reggae. Riddims moved him to visit Jamaica before the two sevens clashed—his first deep dive into Black Atlantic musics that would give him so much joy in the 80s and 90s. JA was a trip. The last joint Tom smoked was a country splif that almost made him hallucinate. (From on high, yard chickens looked like beasts of no nation.) In his youth, Tom wasn’t averse to illicit lifts. But he fought debilitating habits. He threw away what would be his last pack of ciggies on his way out of Rocky, inspired not by the faux-fighter’s knock-outs but by his work-outs.
Tom’s weight went up and down and his knees became suspect, but he always yearned to get physical. He took up tennis again in the oughts after a 25 year layoff. It was our father’s last gift to him. In need of respites from caregiving during dad’s final hospital stretch, Tom found a tennis backboard in a Boston park, borrowed a racquet and began hitting…
After he retired from the P.O. other practices began to shape his days. He took up piano, guitar and harmonica. He was soon playing and singing his own songs. (Though he did covers too, including a version of one standard,”I Surrender Dear,” that might give masters of the American songbook a thrill/chill.) His compositions were just one aspect of his 21st C. wordy rappinghood. He began writing poems, stories and inventing his own hybrid forms of lit with a Spanish tinge. And then he got into painting…
His apartment is now full of his abstractions and landscapes. There are ghostly empty frames stacked in his hallway too, reminding me of all the canvases he won’t get too. But before I cry awhile, let me bow here to Paul and Christina Hunter—Tiemann neighbors who nurtured my brother’s color consciousness, reminding him to paint is to love. He had other in-house inspirations as well. Long before Tom started painting, walls in his apartment were vectors for his sister Joel’s eye for Southern folk art (and other raw visions). Thinking of colors inside Tom-and-Maria’s apartment–and recalling now-obscured views of the Hudson out their windows—I’m flashing on how their interiors accentuated the negative in an axiom of Doris Lessing’s. She once noted how idealists setting out to change the world invariably gather in charmless, grey-on-grey basements that seem to mock their humane intent. Much of Tom’s work as an organizer was done in such surrounds, but the older he got, the more he aimed to meld solidarity with beauty. Earlier this month–at our (31rst) annual Anti-Gentrification Street Fair–Tom turned a portion of Tiemann Place into a gallery. I trust the Fair will go on and I hope it retains this aesthetic dimension.
There was a period a few years back when Tom began to doubt he could be political and artful. He sang about his quandaries in his homemade CD “Songs of Impasse.” But he didn’t stay stuck. Ron Primeau has spoken to Tom’s instinct for happiness (here) which got stronger as he grew older. Kerouac and other Beats amped it up. (I’m reminded just now of how Tom drank in Aram Saroyan’s Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation.)
Tom always loved to go on the road. He drove through Europe with Maria and the kids and rolled out to California with them more than once. He was into the American West before he ever saw it as he relates in a lyrical piece sparked by Emmylou Harris’s cover of a C&W tune he first found infectious when he heard it as a six year old on “a cowboy compilation record with a wild west lasso cover.” I sung along to that record too–used to think we’d been sound-tracking the world together since “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but it turns out we go back further.
We went Country and Western again on our last night of live musicking. Tom and me and Maria caught the LSD tour with Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, and Dwight Yoakam last June at the Beacon Theater in NYC. Dwight was the closer, which made sense since he’s hard to follow (even without Pete Anderson running his band). When Dwight went into “A Thousand Miles From Nowhere,” we all felt lucky to be along for the ride. I don’t know if Tom saw the original video for that song, but I bet he’d approve of it so…
I heard from Tom an hour or so before he went beyond the horizon. He allowed he’d had reasons to stress over the past month. His landlord was looking to make “Major Capital Improvements” that would serve as an excuse to raise rent on members of the Tenants Alliance. And his work as the proxy for a 92 year old neighbor who’d been incapacitated by a stroke had become more complicated. The home healthcare regime he’d put in place after busting her out of a rehab center where she’d been waiting around to die had been upended. He was scrambling to nail down a new one (even as he covered open shifts). There were other issues that were concentrating his attention too, but he was still looking ahead. Before he checked out he signed off as follows:
so just a finger or two crossed here and there for my escape, anyway, I am whistling more, tom
I hear you brother.