B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (11 page)

That was the end of his dream, or the end of his telling it. He said it made him worried—maybe there would be a hurricane. I told him I wanted to go Yazoo City. He misunderstood me.
You been?

I told him I hadn’t been, yet. He said,
You better go before it’s gone. The river is right there! The Mississippi River is
right
there.
This shadow of destruction was overtaken by another.
It’s thick with white people. You got to go to a certain part to see black people.
I asked him if it had always been that way, and he said it had been, as long as he’d known. He said the black part was full of black people
shoulder to shoulder, like blackbirds flocking. You ain’t seen the blackbirds flocking,
he said.
They fly in and take over the whole space. I would like to see it again
.

That’s a long story.
Once, my neighbor Ms. Barbara was telling me about growing up in South Carolina on land owned and farmed by her grandparents. She was on her way there to attend the annual family reunion and said the best thing about going back was that all the family still lived on the land, in different parcels nearby, so she didn’t even have to get in a car during her
whole trip, they just walked back and forth visiting with each other. Ms. Barbara told me I should join her at the reunion one year, and I said I would very much like to. She told me how her grandfather used to own a lot more land and that they’d never had to work for white people, but he had sold it off for $150 per acre. Because she used to help him with his business by doing the receipts, she had suggested he sell for $500 per acre. He had not taken her advice, but he had only sold to blacks.

During the course of her telling me all this, and about which cousins would try to flirt with me at the family reunion and about all the things they used to grow on the land, Ms. Barbara mentioned in passing that she had been born in Harlem but taken back to South Carolina as an infant to be raised by her grandparents, and that she’d come back here as a young woman. It was related as a minor detail, but the thought of Ms. Barbara being born in one place, carried away as a tiny baby, and then returning sounded like an epic.

There are other stories I have forgotten because I didn’t write them down, and if I lived on a different block I would be told different stories. This fact strikes me when passing a corner that is not my own, where, in front of the liquor store or the bodega there stand arrayed a group of men—strangers to me, but familiar in disposition. They warily eye my advance until I broach a hello, inviting a chorus of returned salutations. If I tarried a bit longer or invented a reason to pass those other spots with regularity, I might gain a new set of friends and a new set of stories. Another writer might have done just that, trawling each gathering of streetcorner men as doggedly as Arthur Schomburg once searched dusty bookshelves. But I say hello and continue, thinking to mind my own business, thinking I should not turn my daily life into a hunt for “material,” and knowing that I could never linger long enough on enough different corners to hear all that everyone had to say.

Once, I was far from my usual circuit—“far” being 127th
Street near 8th Avenue as opposed to 133rd and Lenox. I was not walking slowly; I was not looking for a story. Despite carrying on at a normal pace—with a normal attention to my own business—I heard an old man tell a short yet complete, and completely staggering, tale:
He kicked me in the head and I stabbed that cracker in the heart and he died. My daddy brought me here in the back of a truck.

It’s a long story, indeed.

At times I go to the library on a daily basis, so that when I pass the neighbors on the way—calling out
Good morning
or
Good afternoon
—certain ones of them ask,
Going to the library?
and most of the time I am. My researches there have grown only slightly more focused, so that when I am on assignment and need to learn everything about the history of Liberia in a week’s time, or all there is to know about the Haitian Revolution, I spend some days at the library.

When I am bored with my own efforts there is much else of interest. High above the main reading room are the four mural-sized paintings by Aaron Douglas. They portray various stages in “the black experience.” The figures are all in silhouette; they don’t have faces, and their bodies are dark and angular. But this characteristically modern lack of expressive features does not detract from the anguish of the scene of Africans being kidnapped into bondage, the scene in the cotton fields, or the muscular striving in the scene of blacks moving into the industrialized cities. In the painting depicting slavery, a figure stands apart from the rest. He reaches out with his arm and points into the distance. There are no cardinal directions in a painting, but it is safe to assume that he is pointing north—he is indicating:
Onward!
He leads the way to freedom, and also progress. So when I am discouraged by
my own progress, I am reminded to take some of his initiative, look back down at my work, and carry on.

Once, I was looking for information about the numbers game because I never understood my neighbors’ attempts to educate me about Harlem’s clandestine lottery. On finding me a hopeless pupil, one neighbor abandoned the effort, adding that I didn’t need to know about the numbers anyway. This is why I was at the library with Rufus Schatzberg’s
Black Organized Crime in Harlem: 1920–1930
open on my desk. Schatzberg, a former New York City police detective who in his retirement acquired a PhD in criminal history, gives an account of petty crime in Harlem as

My study effort about the numbers racket was accompanied by other research fulfilling a separate line of inquiry, an article I was writing about the national movement seeking reparations for slavery. So, aside from my extracurricular investigation, among the books which I’d called down that afternoon was
We Charge Genocide.
The book compiles the effort
, led by Harlem-based Communist Party leaders William Patterson and Henry Haywood and endorsed by Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, among many others, to enumerate the crimes committed against black people in America, from lynching and other forms of mob violence to police harassment and brutality. The 1951 document of grievances
was presented to the United Nations to lodge a case on human rights violations in the United States.

I must have been moving from one train of thought to the other when a name in the litany of abuses and abusers jumped out at me. One episode mentioned in
We Charge Genocide
was the May 4, 1950, case of a
Mrs. Charles Turner of New York City
, prominent proprietor of “Mom’s” restaurant.
Mrs. Turner
was beaten by officer Rufus Schatzberg and other unidentified police when she and a very fair-complected Negro man companion, Melvin Barker, were leaving her place of business after closing time. Schatzberg was suspended.
The information stunned me. I could not make any sense of it. There was not any sense to be made. Yet it seemed to suggest an order within the library. Its design was unfathomable and inaccessible from any catalog system—a great labyrinth whose center could only be reached by walking steadily, blindly, with one foot placed in front of the other. One book held the key to another, though it solved a riddle I had not been trying to answer and provided information I did not know how to use. What other mysteries might be unraveled the more often I came and the longer I stayed?

I heard a man ask the librarian for a map of Africa
with the whole thing on it: Tanzania… and Khemet.
I heard a different man ask the librarian for a book that would show him a secret underground city in Egypt. The librarian did not know the place and probably suspected, as I did while listening to their exchange, that this secret underground city did not exist. When he insisted, she tried to direct him to the well-known subterranean carved churches of Ethiopia. A library patron who was also a Rastafarian once filled the reference section with his booming lilt. He complained that he shouldn’t have to speak softly, or not speak at all, in a library devoted to the culture of black people, because we were originally an oral people whose histories and stories were
preserved by speaking. At the microfilm machines I looked over the shoulder of a man who had a fist pick stuck in the back of his Afro: he was looking through reels of old issues of the Black Panther newspaper. I noticed that he paused at certain articles, including “In Defense of Self-Defense,” “Breakfast Programs,” and “Eldridge on Black Capitalism.” The man must have been observing me as closely as I observed him, because later he approached and invited me to attend the weekly meeting of the New Black Panther Party. He said that in preparation I would need to visit
www.newblackpanther.com
, study the Ten Point Platform, the Nine Objectives, and consult a list of study guides. Because I didn’t want to engage him in a long discussion, I accepted his card and nodded when he told me a name I would need to mention at the door, like a password, which I have since forgotten.

It was also at the library that I made the acquaintance of a man who said he was a member of the original Black Panthers, which means, for clarification, more original than the ones from Oakland, and certainly more original than the ones who meet these days in Harlem, under cover of secret codes. As a token, he gave me a copy of the item he had come to the library to find. It was an article in the
New York Times,
in which he himself was quoted. He had marked the quotation with blue asterisks in the margin. The headline said
City Proposal to Rebuild Harlem Gets Stony Community Response
. The dateline was February 3, 1983.
One speaker, David White
of United Harlem Growth, described the proposal as “another game trying to get us out.”

He also gave me a photocopied poem called “The Protector (about David White).” The author of that poem was not credited on the page, but a footnote mentioned that

One section of the poem was pertinent to the newspaper article, describing the forces against which protection was needed:

I am sometimes distracted by what goes on at the library, but Arthur Schomburg anticipated all this activity in his contribution to Alain Locke’s
New Negro
anthology, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” It is worth quoting at length.