B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (36 page)

The group of Native Americans who march in the parade condense a complicated history. Most of the people who march as “Indians” would be identified as African American by the untrained eye, or by any eye. For the parade, they are dressed in fringed leather, headbands, moccasins, and other ritual costumes. A person with a very trained eye might note that these Indians do not necessarily seem equipped to perform any particular ritual at all; they adopt a “Hollywood Indian” look. But there are no authenticity police on the sidelines, just cheers and simulated war cries. I once heard someone comment that the Indians should have the biggest float of all.

The Mothers Against Guns carry signs in memory of children killed by gun violence. They are followed by Morticians Who
Care, whose contribution consists of a creeping hearse, with a coffin rolled behind.
HOW MANY MORE WILL IT TAKE?
their signs inquire. Members of the NAACP form a subdued flock, centered on dignitaries riding slowly in a Jaguar. Their signs emphasize the hallowed history of their organization (
since 1927
) and promote their latest campaign (
Bury the ‘N’ word
).

Attempting a more radical position are the New Black Panthers, who are joined by some of the old Black Panthers and hold up signs with the faces of heroes like Assata Shakur, Fred Hampton, and Huey P. Newton. They are supported by members of the Jericho Movement, who brandish posters with the names and faces of political prisoners. A member of the New Black Panthers shouts,
This is protected by the red, the black, and the green,
and exhorts the crowd to join in with chants of
Black Power!
A few white people in green hats walk along with them as legal observers; police cars trail close behind. This is because almost every year the New Black Panthers have a scuffle with the law. It unfolds at some point between 130th and 135th as if according to a script. The chants of
Black Power!
soon transform into choruses of
Fuck the Police!

Decidedly more tranquil are the sisters of the black sororities, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Phi Beta Sigma, and Zeta Phi Beta. A float trumpeting itself as
a salute to black college women
carries homecoming queens and pageant winners in tiaras and satin gowns who greet the crowd with the classic elbow-powered regal wave and blown kisses.

It is possible that when I am rushing to see my favorite parts of the parade, I miss the passage of certain floats and dignitaries. You will say, what about Pigfoot Mary and Porkchop Davis and Carl Van Vechten? But look, there they are marching, and there is the man who brings a van from North Carolina loaded with sausage links, boiled peanuts, pickled eggs, and peaches and sorghum syrup and collard greens, which he sells from the street. There are
the girls playing double-dutch, there is that man who kept a tiger in his apartment, and yes, oh, there is Bill Clinton, we see him so infrequently at his office on 125th Street! There is this week’s winner of Amateur Night at the Apollo, there are the Korean American owners of Harlem’s most popular chain of soul-food buffet restaurants, there are those socialites going to the fabulous Harlem Renaissance parties, which I am quite tired of hearing about. They are all gathered at the parade. There is that man who asked me how long one had to live in Harlem before being allowed to write a book about it—implying, of course, that I had not lived in Harlem long enough to write a book about it. But what happened to the African hair-braiding ladies, what about the new boutiques, where is your gospel brunch with chicken and waffles, why didn’t I mention the Collyer Brothers
y porque no digo nada sobre El Barrio?
I will say,
Oh, they are all there, you must have missed them marching by.
And I will say,
It is getting dark, I should be going home soon. See you next year at the parade.

When the cowboys ride, that’s the end of the parade. They arrive as night falls. These are members of the Federation of Black Cowboys, who have a ranch in Brooklyn. I met one of their members once, while waiting for the subway at 135th Street. Seeing his hat, boots, belt buckle, and other authentic gear, I must have had a hankering for home. I asked him if he was a cowboy, and he told me he was in charge of the chuckwagon. He invited me to the ranch in Brooklyn to ride, and when he learned where I was from, he was even more eager to have me visit. He warned me that the other women who run with the Brooklyn cowboys might be jealous because I am from Texas. I never went to the ranch, but every year when the cowboys finish off the parade, I run to keep up with them, trying not to let them out of my sight, whooping and hollering as they charge up the avenue. They actually do ride off into the sunset.

Once they pass, everyone begins to pack up their folding chairs
and break through the barricades into the street. People who walked in the parade then mingle with the crowd, finding their way to the family and friends who’d come to see them march. The people who watched the parade from the perches of their windows and fire escapes above Seventh Avenue go back inside their homes; the out-of-town firefighters go back to the suburbs; my beloved Panamanian drummers and bugle players go back to Brooklyn. At the end of the parade, when everyone who has come from around Harlem to crowd onto Seventh Avenue from 110th to 145th Street goes back to their own blocks, when others who came from far away scatter back to their homes, it seems that Harlem is bigger than it was at the beginning of the day. All the spectators take a piece away with them, and they return every year to be renewed and restored.

Last year I would I have run with the cowboys all the way to the end of the parade, but their ride suddenly changed course. They made a right turn, heading east on 135th Street, missing the end of the parade route by ten blocks. I followed behind. At Lenox they turned south, galloping quickly, as if they were heading all the way back to the beginning. I couldn’t keep up, so by the time I reached my corner at 133rd Street I gave up the chase.

Ms. Shirley was standing at the stoop. I asked if she’d been to the parade. She said that she never goes because
folks don’t know how to act.
I stood with her for a while at the front door but did not go inside. The parade was done, but I wasn’t done with the parade. After many hours out-of-doors, I still wanted to be in the street, among people. I crossed 133rd Street back toward Seventh. As I reached the end of the block, a view of the avenue opened up, revealing a scene much different from what I had just witnessed. It had not been very long since the cowboys’ ride, but the uptown side of the street was already cleared of people, and where those people had been, discarded plates and bottles and flyers and many other varieties of trash lay strewn about. The median where many
onlookers had just stood was empty, too. Only the trampled plants and debris indicated the agitation that had recently been.

But in this hour after the parade, a new event was about to start. Across the median, the downtown side of Seventh Avenue still swelled with people. They had all been there before—these were the teenagers who, during the parade, were too cool to take much interest in the main event. While the parade was on, this side of the street had the atmosphere of a fairground, with tables of food stalls and trinket vendors. All day long, young people had strolled the downtown side of Seventh. They were dressed in their finest gear for the occasion—the spectacle of each other. Their seemingly aimless milling was part of a courtship ritual. Small clusters divided by gender passed each other slowly, feigning indifference while making split-second appraisals.

During the day, the cops had been there, too, but I had not noticed the police tower that was planted on that side of the street, waiting for nightfall. During the day, the cops had been policing intersections so that people would not run into the middle of the parade. After dark, their force was redirected. Now, their task was to police the groups of promenading teens. At nightfall, by virtue of the force now dedicated to controlling their movement, those youth were transformed into a throng.

From where I sat on the median, it appeared that the throng had a purpose—or if not an actual purpose, then certainly a destination. The destination was south—this was where the police were herding everyone. As with the mysterious turn of the cowboys, at nightfall, the northward aspiration of the parade was reversed. Because everyone was being pushed and prodded in the same direction, the people in the crowd moved as a unified body.

My memory of the next thing has faded. I don’t remember if I was ordered to remove myself from the median—taken as a stray who had escaped the pack—or if I joined the mass voluntarily.
Whether this propulsion occurred by an inner or outer force seems crucial, but the outcome was the same. Soon I was among them, being pushed along with them, goaded by the voices of the cops, if not by the threat of the nightsticks some twirled in the air and others held with both hands—each gripped at either end of the weapon, ready to engage. The police observation tower cast a bright light upon the street. Although the sun had long set, the scene was illuminated by a white glare.

We continued moving south, but just before we reached the crossing of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue where the statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., stands, gunshots sounded. This incident did not send panic through the crowd. There was no stampede. Instead among both the police and the young, there seemed to be an attitude that violence was to be expected. Paddy wagons formed part of the police retinue. As I moved with the crowd, I’d noticed that the teenagers and the cops seemed to regard each other almost with indifference. What was going on was, for both, business as usual. The teenagers were used to hostility from the cops, and the cops were used to hostility from the teenagers. The similarity in their attitudes did not translate to equity in power. This postparade roundup was probably also an annual event. I had never witnessed it before because I had always gone inside once the parade ended, when it was getting dark.

Although the mood of the crowd didn’t change—and I am not sure how it could have changed, without releasing the coerced crowd into mayhem—the direction shifted. Once we had reached the intersection of 125th and Seventh, we were stopped from continuing south, diverted from the scene of the shooting. The course of our progress changed like a train spontaneously jumping its tracks—we were pushed west, across 125th Street toward the river.

On 125th Street, the arbitrariness of the police directives was exposed. Some groups of cops stood around telling people walking
west via the sidewalk to get off the sidewalk and walk in the street, although vehicle traffic was still flowing. Cops in the street yelled at people to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk. A young man next to me, who had been ordered first into the street and then onto the sidewalk, protested the contradictions to one cop, but then he relented quickly, muttering to himself,
Man, y’all are trippin’
. People who wanted to go home but whose home was neither south nor west also tried to reason with the nearest officer, but walking in the wrong direction was cause for confrontation. I noticed a few people walking the opposite way, allowed to go in the direction we could not. These people were white.

It must have been when shots came from the west that I exited the crowd and wedged between a lamppost and a mailbox near the curb; I was barely on the sidewalk but not in the street. I continued to watch the people flowing in the direction from which the shots had come. It became clear that, in part, the violence that had broken out was related to the movement of the crowd. When we were herded south, shots rang out in the south. When we were herded west, shots rang out from the west.

Seemingly out of the way of the cops who wanted people on the sidewalk and the ones who wanted us in the street, I continued to note what I heard and what I saw. But this activity drew the attention of an officer. It isn’t necessary for me to find new words to describe what happened after that, because the next morning I wrote it up when filing an official complaint.

The officer’s refusal to identify himself was a minor violation, but it is upon such a breach that greater abuses stand. Perhaps my indignation at the incident only reveals my relative innocence about such common, daily aggression. But I had previously noticed the police walking their beats in Harlem, standing four in a line on street corners. Their presence seems to increase in correlation to the number of new condominiums—raising questions about who is being protected and who is being patrolled. I had seen them stop a carload full of young black men on 132nd Street. I’d paused nearby to see what would happen next, only to watch as the men were released back to their car, having been stopped for no reason and having done nothing for which they could be detained. Witnessing that may have had no use; writing down my complaint may have had no use. Is it possible to confront a force
that operates under the cloak of normality, a force that refuses to pronounce its own name?