Still Life in Harlem (16 page)

She smoked a cigarette and chewed gum at the same time, both with an exaggerated relish. The long handle of a heavy plastic comb was stuck in the back of her hair. But just as Henry promised, she said she would cook lunch for me. She opened the cupboards and from among the stacks and stacks of cans and boxes of food, bags of chips, plastic bottles of colorful fruit-flavored drinks, she pulled out a can of Vienna sausages and a box of macaroni and cheese.

There was a small TV in the kitchen that she watched while she cooked—or rather, while she heated up the lunch. There was a larger TV in the living room too, only four feet away. It was on at the same time. She was watching two programs at once.

The floor was covered with basketball shoes. Jolene said Henry owned dozens of pairs, a different pair for every day of the month, and he gave his brothers, it seemed like, she said, a new pair each week.

“And why not?” she said. “He's making three, four, sometimes five thousand dollars a week. Bought himself a new car the other day. Says he's going to buy me one too—soon as I can learn to drive.”

“And you don't care how he earns the money?” I asked her. She looked at me, cigarette dangling from her lip, like she hadn't heard, or like she thought I was crazy.

And why should she care? Perhaps a little for his safety on the streets, for young men die too easily on the streets and die too young, but certainly not for the illegality of his dealing, certainly not for the immorality of it. Not with this kind of temporary money at stake. And not with the permanent squalor she sees all around them every day. The money will come and the money will go, she knows, and life is a temporary thing; the lucky ones die young. But this despair goes on and on, so you take what you can while you can.

Henry slipped into the drug trade the same as most young people on the street. He went and talked to one of the dealers on a nearby corner. They're easy to find. They're all over the neighborhood. Anyway, Henry and everyone else knew all the dealers around, knew who they were and where they stood each day.

The dealers, of course, have no qualms about hiring a young boy of thirteen, or eleven, or eight—as long as the young boy buffers between the dealers and the police. And the younger the boy, the thinking on the street has it, the harder he works, because for the first time in his young life—and it may be for the only time in his life—he'll be respected. He's part of something, making his own money, doing for himself, and now he's got something to show for his time: money and the things money can buy.

“Most often,” Antonio told me, “a boy starts as a kind of runner. He takes the buyer's money, goes to where the drugs are hidden, comes back and completes the sale. He doesn't have anything else to worry about, just taking the money and getting the drugs from where they're hidden. He's not supposed to concern himself with the police or guns or anything else. We got other people up and down the block whose job it is to watch out and protect the business. All he has to do is worry about his end, work an eight-hour day, get paid at the end of the week. It's just like a legit job, only easier.”

“Except for the risk,” I said.

“Except for the risk,” he echoed. “But the bigger the risk … You know how that goes. Who can turn it down? I know I couldn't. Five hundred dollars a week. Easy money. Six hundred dollars a week. It just gets easier. You get more responsibility, closer to the boys at the top of the ladder, you make more money. It's just like corporate America.”

By the time Henry was fifteen years old he was handling twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars a week—not his own money, of course—all from the sales of small vials of crack cocaine, three dollars a hit.

“People would sometimes buy a hundred vials at a time,” Henry told me. “And we're not just talking about people from the neighborhood. These are white boys from downtown, from Long Island, from Jersey. That's where the money is. And they come here to get what we got.”

Not that people from the neighborhood weren't buying as well. Many women, young and not so young, always very thin and haggard, but always with the greatest smiles, have offered themselves to me for the meagerest amounts of money. And I have been told that the busiest day of the month for the dealers is the day the welfare checks arrive.

“And who is there to care?” Antonio asked. “Not the mothers of these young boys.” He checked himself.

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe some mothers care, if they know, because maybe they realize their sons are going to die or wind up in jail. Those are the only two places this road leads to. And they have to know that, if they know anything at all, if they even care at all. So they do what they can, I suppose, but what can you do with a young boy who thinks he's suddenly a man and he's making more money in a few weeks than you made all of last year—if you made any money at all apart from your welfare check? If you come down on him for what he's doing, he just moves out, moves in with his pregnant fifteen-year-old girlfriend and her mother, who are happy to have him and the clothes and the color TVs. And all that food and all that stuff he's buying just ends up in somebody else's house. And the somebody elses don't care at all where he gets the money or how he ends up. They don't care. They never do.”

So the mothers often pretend they don't know what's going on, pretend they have no idea where all the sudden money comes from. They learn to stop asking.

“Everybody,” Antonio says, “turns a blind eye—from the police on down: family, friends, people on the street. They just want to get from you while they can. Nobody really cares about you.”

Jolene said she cared. She was worried about Henry's physical safety on the streets, but she was also worried about the spiritual death that haunts these streets. She had seen it grip the other boys in the neighborhood. She admitted it had even taken hold of her.

“But what can you do?” she griped. “What the hell choice do we have?”

The last time I went to see them, Henry had been shot dead. He was seventeen years old.

 

 

 

My father wants to know if I regret the life I have lived, wants to know too, I suppose, if I regret missing the life I never had. At first glance the answer seems a blatantly easy one to give.

My young friend Henry lies dead on a table in his living room. Someone has carried him home and has laid him here. The table is low, close to the floor, like a little altar, and is surrounded by the basketball shoes that are so adored in the neighborhood. They are strewn all around Henry's young body like some kind of offering, as if he had been a god. And for a little while Henry
was
a god, in this house, in this part of the neighborhood. His face had once shone with the pleasure of power and recognition. Now his eyes are like ice. They hold no look of shock or surprise at what has happened. The eyes have always known, even if Henry didn't, that it was only a matter of time. The eyes frown now not from wonder, and not from remorse, but as if in Henry's seventeen years they have seen far too much. His face has been battered tough, his eyes are tired beyond belief. It is a face already too old to be so young. But it will get no older.

In another part of Harlem, Nicky-No-Arms lies between two streams of blood spilling onto the cold concrete floor of a warehouse somewhere. He shivers but cannot hug himself for warmth or comfort.

The mother of Antonio Morales spreads her legs in the backseat of a car. Another baby is born in Harlem.

There is nothing prissy, nothing neat about these streets where I live. I walk them every day, I stand at my window. What I see tears at my eyes. What I feel exposes who I am.

Not so long ago, across the street from where I live, new neighbors moved in for a short time. I watched them off and on that evening for over two hours as they set up house, laid the table, and got the fire going for a barbecue. They cooked. The radio blasted until the batteries went dead. The children played.

I thought nothing of it. It was the beginning of my second winter in Harlem. By then I had seen plenty.

The air outside was cold and damp, but the fire in the barbecue glowed with heat, first red, then white. It was, all in all, a happy scene. The three adults sitting on folding lawn chairs told loud stories and laughed. The children shared laughter of their own. They jumped rope. They played tag. They argued the way children do when one of them doesn't get his way. Then they all sat down to eat.

Funny thing though: there is no building across the street from where I live. There is only a large parking lot. Behind the lot is a grassy incline, and behind the incline there is a new track and a football field built for the school that's just up the road. Surrounding it all, there is a stone fence with iron bars along the top to keep out intruders. In front of this fence, on the sidewalk, my new neighbors had set up house. Their moving van was a metal cart on long loan from a grocery store.

The children played between parked cars and in the street. Dinner was set up on cardboard boxes overturned. When they finished eating and it was time for bed, the children slept curled up on blankets laid on the pavement.

I thought absolutely nothing of it.

It rained during the night. In the morning the family was gone.

One evening not long afterward, three squad cars pulled up in front of my apartment building. A lot of commotion, a lot of noise. One cop stood outside. The other five stormed into the building. I leaned out the window and watched for a few minutes. Then I turned away. My biggest curiosity had been about the lady cop who was with them and why
she
had been the one to stand guard outside and not one of the men. I was curious too about my strange
lack
of curiosity.

A few months later, someone took a shot at me on the street. As I rode my motorcycle down Amsterdam Avenue, a young man in front of a corner store leveled his arm and followed me with the barrel of a pistol. He fired twice, I assume at me. I put on the gas and didn't look back. Neither did I even flinch.

It is amazing what you get used to. By now it was all seeming normal. I had come a long way from Johnny Cannon, but in fact not so long a way at all. It seems too often that not much has changed since then.

And my father asks if I regret this life that I have missed.

I shout my replies into each Harlem night.

Over and over I have told myself that none of this is really mine, that I have gotten away from here, that I have disconnected myself from this world, that I have in fact escaped. Even now on this return I knew I would not be here long and certainly not forever. (Or so I thought.) The world outside my window each day and every night, the world I visit when I walk these streets, the world of Johnny Cannon stabbing, of the man just below my window trying to beat the will out of this woman, of Henry, of Nicky-No-Arms, of Antonio Morales, these are all parts of the same world that I have for two years now been walking through. This is not the world I think of as mine. I am only a visitor here, only passing through until my time here is up, and then I can be gone again. Then this world will have disappeared once more from my life.

No! My world—or so I thought—the world my father had sought to give me, is a world far from this one. The world he wanted for me and the world I seem to have found is a world without Harlem's borders, without Harlem's limits. No, nothing so corny nor so unrealistic as a world where
“All God's children…”
—or any such nonsense—no, not yet, not in this time or place. My father is a crazy man, it is true, but he is not so naive as to believe yet in a world where black men are judged solely by the contents of their character. He has dreams aplenty, my father does; that one is not his. My father has always been a realist.

No. The world he wanted for me was a world where I would, anyway, be able to choose for myself, a world where I would have choice.

When I was a young teenager he took me once to see a movie at a theater in his old neighborhood. I think it was a theater called the Comet. In my father's day it had been a swank movie house, but a black movie house when places like the Fox Theatre, the Loew's State, and the Loew's Mid-City were off-limits to black people. They—the mysterious and ever-present
they
—didn't want black people enjoying the same as the white folks, couldn't have them in the same space, wanted of course their money and so had to give them someplace else to spend it. And so there were movie houses like the Comet and the Criterion that my father continued to go to even after blacks were finally allowed into palaces like the Fox—at first in the balconies, the Nigger Heavens, as they were called, and then finally in the main part of the theater, but not until it was clear that the neighborhood was becoming blacker and blacker and the white folks had started to flee to the suburbs, leaving behind the black folks and the expanding, ever-earthly Nigger Heaven.

Nigger Heaven.
How does it sound? Not bad. Almost cute. Maybe in its day, even a little bit funny. It was what Carl Van Vechten called his novel about Harlem. It referred to those balconies where the black folks had to sit if they were allowed at all in white theaters, with the white folks occupying the good seats, the orchestra section below, “occasionally to turn their faces up toward us,” my father told me, “their hard, cruel faces, to laugh at us or sneer at us, but they never beckoned us.” In those old days when such terms could still be used, Nigger Heaven referred as well—and it still could—to uptown New York City, to Harlem. Places apart, Harlem and those black balconies: they were then, and they still are, all of them the same.

W. E. B. Du Bois, criticizing the Van Vechten novel, complained that
“‘Nigger Heaven' does not mean … a haven for Negroes—a city of refuge for dark and tired souls; it means in common parlance, a nasty, sordid corner into which black folk are herded, and yet a place which they in crass ignorance are fools enough to enjoy.”