Growing Up on the Home Turf of Murder, Inc. : THE VILLE: Cops and Kids in Urban America, <i> By Greg Donaldson (Ticknor & Fields: $22.95; 401 pp.)</i>

The Brownsville and East New York neighborhoods of Brooklyn exact an experience that remains foreign to much of the public. This is true despite the national media attention attracted by fatal shootings by teen-agers of teen-agers and a teacher at Brownsville’s main high school. It’s true even though facets of Brownsville (and comparable neighborhoods) are so influential among the young that advantaged kids from the suburbs to the heartland affect its quick-triggered talk and loose gangsta attire--baggy fabric that in Brownsville often conceals firearms or shoplifted clothes.

The proliferating children-with-guns culture of Brownsville is one of our corrosive open secrets; it’s mythicized and marketed, but it isn’t widely understood. Greg Donaldson, a teaching veteran of Brooklyn’s roughest schools, has written articles about the area and ridden at all hours with its police. In “The Ville: Cops and Kids in Urban America,” he takes us on an eloquent journey throughout Brownsville and makes us begin to understand.

The antagonist in these pages is “a system that is content to allow levels of joblessness, despair, and violence . . . that are destroying a generation of African Americans.” Occupied with this “loss of young lives,” Donaldson documents the social forces that transformed Brownsville from the ambitious Jewish community it was in the first half of the century. But even in the 1920s and ‘30s, Brownsville was dangerous, home turf of Murder Inc. and an area that Jews labored to leave. Along with gerrymandering, deindustrialization and the mushrooming of housing projects, designed in the ‘40s and ‘50s “for the working poor . . . (but) filled up with the unemployed,” Brownsville suffered, in the ‘60s, “the scourge of heroin” and “the living dead who scratched like chickens” through the burn-out surrounding its projects.

Donaldson explains that for kids who “grew up in a festering world of syringes, dope buys, strangers, and stupefied parents, the second wave was AIDS. . . . The third wave, crack, blew the doors down. Into the chaos rolled cars loaded with weapons purchased from gun stores in Virginia, brown boxes packed with guns delivered by mail order.” Now, in “the fresh hell of the gun,” 50,000 people inhabit the projects of Brownsville and East New York. As many as 90% of the youth there are jobless, their dreams grounded in the two square miles that also are home to the highest concentrations of methadone clinics, homeless shelters and homicides in New York City.

Although Donaldson is learned about these conditions, he doesn’t seek to inform primarily in the ways of standard scholarship. Instead, working “on that excruciating line between officers of the law and young men of the streets,” he sets out to dispel “cardboard images” on both sides of the line and to humanize public perceptions of these kids’ and cops’ personal struggles and warfare with each other. He successfully realizes these large-hearted hopes by portraying an unspecified recent year--summer 1991 to summer 1992--in the lives of an array of Brownsville’s cops, crack dealers, working mothers and grandmothers, teachers and many of its very young males who succumb to the acute pressure to carry guns to protect themselves and command respect.

The competition of recurring narratives in Donaldson’s account defies expectations of simple dramatic tension. That is as it should be. The loose-threaded tapestry of the narration aptly reflects the blurred scramble for recognition in the Ville itself. There is a central pair of stories, though--about two young men who do not meet.

Sharron Corley is a high school student and a member of the LoLifes, a gang identified by its passion for “boosting” and wearing Polo fashions. Gary Lemite is a young Housing cop and one of the few blacks on duty in these projects; he is eager to do the job and advance himself and his family. Sharron, like his girlfriends and other peers, has been thoroughly seduced by the “mad American marketing machine that trumpets, ‘Get things, get money and don’t settle for second best’ (and) makes ambition a religion”--especially for those such as Sharron who have no “access to the legitimate hierarchy.” Donaldson’s depiction of Sharron yields a close look at this dreary seduction.

But though Sharron has his vapid traits and fantasies of spotlighted acclaim, he is no mere bubble-head. It is engrossing to follow him as--brave and afraid--he cultivates the image of one who “gets paid” (has authority) and tries to steer a correct course through the lethal nuances of the streets, in schools and on Riker’s Island.

In Gary Lemite, Donaldson portrays an equally insistent, if not greater, will to succeed. Guided by more staid conventions of the American dream, Gary seeks all the overtime he can earn in hopes of buying a house for his wife, who is white, and their small children. But Gary also likes the sometimes cowboyish action of collaring “perps” (perpetrators). We see him on his way to becoming the most decorated PSA cop in 1992. We also see him almost lose his family in his zeal for the job. In our final view of Gary, a man not given to making much of color, we see him shaken by covert racism directed at him by some of his fellow officers.

Donaldson’s characterizations of Sharron and Gary and his cameos of many others are balanced, and sympathetic without being sentimental. He is uncondescendingly deft at showing inner contradictions, and he gives virtually everyone a human face.

So intimate are facets of these portraits that readers may well want to know more about relations between Donaldson, who is white, and his subjects. There is clearly a powerful further story within the personal reserve imposed by his third-person point of view. Yet Donaldson has more than earned the right to be judged solely on the basis of the story he chose to tell. This is because his occasional omniscient projections, even in bedrooms, are sensible, and unlike woodenly executed but similarly well-intended chronicles with which “The Ville” will be compared, each of Donaldson’s pages demonstrates that this man can write. His ear, timing and command of scene and understatement are true. Along with large and small gems of description throughout, there are masterful fluid sections that could also stand as set-pieces. For instance, there is an account of Old-Timer’s Week, when aging former residents return to the Brownsville community “with epic dignity and uncommon good cheer” to share what “they live from,” the kinds of memories that youths “who skulk around the edges of the proceedings . . . looking to make their mark . . . out of the line of fire, will never have.”

There is a three-page portrait of Gita Malave as she goes through a typical winter day on the subways, at an eight-hour clerical job, at the hospital for a visit and then at night school. With these words, Donaldson leaves Gita finally home for the night with her two youngest children:

“Victories do not come in clusters in Brownsville. There is no clear line of progress, no inspiring line of development. Everyone, it seems, is fighting alone. Gita is going to graduate with an associate’s degree in legal studies if it kills her. Then she will hope to find a better job. But her children are not galvanized by her feats of faith and endurance. They will not surpass her and head off to four-year colleges. . . . The pressures here are too great for that kind of momentum to build. Instead the victories are like sparks in a meadow; they flash and burn out. Nevertheless, her family is intact, there is no gunman stalking her (incarcerated) son, no police officers pounding on her door. She is not complaining.”

Various locations--like the Ville as a whole--take on the presences of characters: PSA 2, certain buildings in the projects and “Jeff,” Thomas Jefferson High, the huge school where “there is not one white child.” At Jeff we meet a dynamic teacher, Sharon King, and its principal Carol Beck, who was featured on 60 minutes. Beck takes Jeff’s students on retreats and dreams of building a dormitory for the ones who need shelter.

While describing one of Beck’s esteem-reinforcing cotillions, Donaldson convincingly identifies disillusion, not lack of motivation, as the source of poor success rates among African-American students. And his reflection on Jeff’s 1992 graduating class, 60% of it Caribbean, underscores a plight unique to African Americans, “who have been passed by immigrant group after immigrant group, (and) are being passed again. This time . . . by an almost invisible contingent, one that looks like them but has come from . . . cultures that were not exposed to such high levels of racism. ‘We just didn’t have so many white folks around growing up,’ the Jamaican Sharon King says. ‘We made decisions on our own.’ ”

Throughout Donaldson walks the razor edge between disclosure and what Carol Beck had in mind, when following a killing at Jeff, she refused to “whore . . . sorrow” and verbally spanked a “Geraldo” producer whose manner displayed “a cockiness that reveals how many things he has not felt”: “You cannot get into the psyche of the black and Hispanic man. As a people, we are through with the talk show. . . . You want to show a picture that says, ‘This is what the mother of a child who has been killed looks like.’ I ain’t about this anymore. Where is the benefit, the intellectual growth, that is going to come out of that? . . . I’m not telling you about my pain anymore. It’s tragic, yes. But do I need to share this with the white middle class? No. . . .”

Fortunately, Greg Donaldson doesn’t mistake this righteous no as applicable to his intentions in “The Ville.” He may not know all the psychic intricacies of street men of color--nor does he pretend to--but he knows plenty about both their circumstances and their psychology and he knows that, in the interest of everyone, this measured knowledge must be accessible to the middle class. At considerable risk, he has made that happen and given our wounded society a book that is smart, noble and potentially restorative. Read it. We need to. And it deserves to get paid.