Last week, Edwin Raymond—thirty-five, fit, not tall, long dreadlocks—walked into Kaché, a Haitian restaurant in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, ready, as always, to tell his story. All political candidates are serial self-narrators, but Raymond, who is running for a seat on the City Council, has an unusual biography: at a moment of stark opposition between police officers and radical critics of policing, he is both. He made his way from table to table, dispensing familial greetings (a hand on the shoulder, a pleasantry in English or Haitian Creole) to those he knew, and a grip-and-grin to those he didn’t. A loudspeaker played Sinatra—“New York, New York,” “My Way.”
Celeste Saint-Jean, eating alone but not guarding her solitude, struck up a conversation about the mayoral race. “I like the guy…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 28, 2021