Still Life in Harlem (2 page)

This vacant lot, like all the vacant lots in the neighborhood, is a receptacle for debris. People as they pass toss empty bottles and cans over the fence. Loose pieces of paper, candy wrappers, potato chip bags, old newspapers: all get thrown into the lot along with half-eaten sandwiches, apple cores and banana peels, tree branches and piles of wood and large chunks of concrete from some building being torn down somewhere. Around the trash and the rubble, weeds grow ragged where there might once have been grass, or where there could be even now if anyone cared enough about anything so simple as beauty. No one does—or no one seems to—and the debris piles up almost unnoticed, giving the rats that live in the buildings on either side of this vacant lot a place to search for food and plenty of daytime cover. The boldest ones, though, don't need the cover. They venture right out into the open.

Several of these rats had climbed the lower links of the fence and had gnawed into the plastic bags hanging there. Once inside, the rats were trapped. As they feasted on the garbage inside, a man took down one of the bags and laid it on the ground. Carefully he held the top of the bag closed and at arm's length, as far from his body as he could hold it without letting go. Then he stomped on it. Over and over.

The rats inside screeched in panic their high-pitched squeals of pain. The bag came alive as they tried to flee. The man stomped and shook the bag, stomped on the bag and shook it again, and kept stomping until finally the bag was still. The man hung the bag up neatly again and took down the next bag. He shook it to see if there was still life inside. When the rats stirred, the man put the bag on the ground and stomped the second batch of rats dead.

The man looked up. There was no agitation in his face, no look of disgust at either having done what he had done nor at having had to do it. There was an expression in his eyes of an icy emptiness.

It was this look that I had seen so many times before—too many times before—in the eyes of other black men. It is the look in their eyes of insignificance, no matter how defiant their gestures, the look of not being taken seriously, the look of being ignored. It is the look of believing what they have been told about themselves. It is the look in their eyes of surrender.

I have known very well that look of surrender. I have seen something like it often enough in my own eyes. It too is a kind of submission, and it hides behind my own arrogance, my own defiance, but it is surrender nonetheless, a surrender of an even more noxious nature, perhaps, because it comes from the oddly unfortunate vantage point of good fortune. But in my own ways I too wear that look of surrender. It is the look in my eyes of believing what I have been told about them—not about myself, I tell myself, but about
them
—as if somehow I can remain apart from them and they are different from me, as if somehow I am not them.

Harlem is where they live, and where I have come, and where, of course, I can always leave. Or so I have told myself. After these two years of living here, however, I now am not so sure.

 

 

 

An old Italian man I vaguely know fled from his native Italy when he was a young man. The Fascists were on the rise. Italy was in the middle of a depression, as was the rest of the world. In those times life in a small village must have been pretty tough. And that is all I know of this man and his situation. He might have been escaping the troubles already existing in Europe or running from the war that was on its way. He might have been looking for a better way to live than what was offered where he had grown up. For all I know he might have simply wanted to expand his horizons. I don't know his circumstance, but I once called him a coward anyway; called him a coward because he did not stay in Italy to fight against the evil that was spreading across his land; called him a coward because he would not stay to fight and to make his homeland the better place he sought elsewhere.

If this is cowardice, then I too have been a coward. I left home the same as the old Italian. I left that area of my life that I now call Harlem and I almost never looked back, left all that was familiar to me and even comfortable, turned my back on family and friends and neighbors, if not in any absolute way then at least in a metaphorical way, and perhaps not consciously, but I left them just the same. I have been away ever since.

I have also, in a way, been homeless ever since.

I left on a Saturday afternoon. I was ten years old. My family had recently moved to the suburbs. And on this Saturday I was sent to get a haircut. I left the house, took a right turn, or perhaps a wrong turn, I may never know which, and left Harlem. In leaving this place, I was leaving behind a world that was all black. I never really went back there. I never even looked back—until now. Suddenly Harlem began to whisper in the ear of my imaginings. Harlem began to sing to me, to speak to me, to call me home.

So I returned to Harlem, even though I had never lived there—came back for the first time a little over two years ago, came back although in truth I had never been here before, came back although in a certain sense I had never been away.

Harlem is like that. For Blackamericans, there is in a way no escaping it, no leaving this place. Even if you have never been here before, you have always been here. As Ralph Ellison once said,
“Harlem goes where black folks go,”
and try as one might to get out from under it, the shadow of Harlem falls over us all.

For Harlem is the alabaster vessel that holds the Blackamerican heart, that holds the history and hope of Blackamerica, that holds as well its frustrations and its desperation, so much of the poverty of spirit, the bitter pain and isolation of being black, and so much too of the energy, vitality, and exuberance. Harlem carries on its back the psychological freight of a people and perhaps of an entire nation as well.

Harlem is music in the soul of a people, a rhapsody, a torch song, a love song, a child's incantation. Harlem is a lullaby whispered in the long long night, a blues song repeated endlessly and coming from a place so deep in the Blackamerican soul and psyche that the words and the music are somehow known long before you have heard them for the first time, and quite impossible to forget. They are ingrained in the Blackamerican subconscious and part of the Blackamerican idiom. Harlem is the metaphor for black America.

I decided that Saturday afternoon not to go to the barbershop where my father and brother always went, where the barbers were black and the old men who sat and laughed at my father's antics were black and so were the little boys who waited patiently for their turn and never spoke a word. Their legs dangled over the edges of chairs too high for their feet to touch the floor. In an effort to be like the big boys and like the men, they slouched and tried hard to keep at least a toe tipping the ground. They watched in silence as the older men joked or talked about events in the news or in the neighborhood. The little boys kept still. They were watching carefully and listening, learning how to be black men.

I wasn't so interested in being a black man, just a man. I had watched and had been scarred the previous year by the doings of three black men, Johnny Cannon and his partner and the man they both stabbed, and if this was part of what it meant to be a black man, then a black man was not the kind of man I wanted to be.

I went that day to the barbershop where there was no gaiety in getting a haircut. There was just a stern white barber and a few quiet white men reading old magazines, no loud talking, no boasting or bragging, no laughter until I walked in and quickly out again.

“We don't cut black hair in here,” the white man said.

I had no idea what he meant. I was just a little boy.

“Mister,” I said. “My hair is brown.”

Probably they are laughing still, but the world they had inherited, the world they then adopted, adapted, and made their own before passing it on to their heirs, is now no laughing matter. The trickle has turned into a stream turned into a river turned into Niagara Falls. The men in that barbershop could not see or would not see what I, even as a ten-year-old, could see.

I knew their world was not the one I could entirely embrace either. I was and would for a long time be lost somewhere in the middle.

I cannot honestly say that I made up my mind right there and then about anything. I hated haircuts and had not wanted one in the first place. I'm sure it had been my mother's idea. Now I had an excuse and left that barbershop rather gleeful, if slightly confused. Certainly I did not feel humiliated; perhaps I should have. There were no defiant gestures; perhaps there should have been. I did not shout back, made no threats, never once pledged aloud or to myself, “As God is my witness—,” or any such thing. Instead I went to play.

But even as I was out playing, I was refusing to be swept to the margins and off the page completely. Or better still, I was deciding, inasmuch as it is at all possible, to make my own tableau, give my tapestry its own design, shape, and texture. All the rest would be background and border.

Such notions sneak rather than spring into the minds of ten-year-old boys. Somehow in the intervening years, however, I woke up to discover I was clinging so hard to the center that I had separated from the margins, the way meringue not firmly held against the sides of the pie pan will pull away from the edges. It makes for an ugly lemon meringue pie, but it's still a pie.

A person, though, can think he or she is something altogether new, an island, perhaps, wholly apart from the exotic lands just off its shore but always in sight. But beneath the sea the lands are one. There is no escaping it.

 

 

 

I have spent more time now in exile than ever I spent in the world of black folk, that world I now refer to as Harlem. I don't know how much of my former self I left behind in that world. I wonder now how much of that world, hidden inside me, I carried out.

I lie awake mornings and ponder. Very often lately the words of a song that I haven't heard in a long time turn inside my head. A song that asks, when I sing it in my own voice, who am I, a song that has me wondering if I am a mere résumé and nothing more, a portrait in words.

Is that who I am, is that all I am, a listing of things I've done, places I've been, books I've read? If so, it paints a picture of someone I do not recognize. It does not tell me really who is this person that is me, what I think, what I feel, what I know. It cannot tell me what I am doing here.

I lie straight and still in my bed. I do not move. I make barely any noise. The rhythms I hear come from the steadiness of my breathing and from the sound of my heart beating hard against my ribs. I lie in bed and listen to the words running inside my head.

When I least expect it, a gunshot rings out to call me awake, to remind me, to rip open the stillness of an early morning and let me know that I am in a world I am not familiar with, a world quite possibly where I do not belong.

The rapid-fire crackle from a small-caliber pistol shouts good morning, greeting and warning at the same time, flying over the rooftops and entering the courtyard behind my apartment. Five sharp bangs cry out, explode, hit the walls and windows and echo into every direction off the pavement and the brick sides of the buildings. It is impossible to tell this morning where the shooting comes from. But then, it always is.

When I hear shots—and I often hear shots—it is usually at night, often in the late evening, but never at this time of day, never in the morning.

Early morning is the only still and peaceful part of the day in Harlem. I like to waken early—four-thirty, five o'clock—when the sky in summer is just beginning to glow and the gray just edging toward blue. I like to lie calm and quiet for a little while in my bed, to think and have little conversations in my head, and to listen to the silence. There is no noise as yet on the street. The shouting and the music that continue all day haven't yet begun, nor the police sirens, the car alarms, the delivery trucks. I lie in the half-light of dawn, in the conscious coma of almost awake, and I listen for the sounds escorting the new day. Morning slides open gradually—unless, of course, it is trash day. Trash trucks shatter the stillness even more abruptly than the gunshots.

When I hear gunshots—and I hear them very often lately, too often—I always think they come from the housing project at Amsterdam Avenue and 133rd Street. I don't know why. Something about the way the sound enters my apartment. Something too, I suppose, about the way I perceive big urban housing projects, desperately overcrowded and very dangerous; but the shots could have come just as easily from somewhere farther down the avenue, or from just around the corner on 133rd itself, or even from just down this block.

A car alarm somewhere nearby goes off. As usual, no one pays much attention.

I look out the window of my apartment, and far away in the southern distance Manhattan rises above Central Park. The park spreads out almost like an oasis, but more like a no-man's land. Beyond it lies an El Dorado where the streets are paved with gold. A land of milk and honey and money. Oz's Emerald City. Paradise. From here, that is how it sometimes seems.

On days when the air is clear and still, especially on stormy summer days when the rain has washed away smog and haze, when there is darkness in the deep distance and rain where I am, and yet the sky is clear near the park, there is a dreamy otherworld quality to the light and to the city it bathes. Light and dark, clouds and clear sky, all swirl together in chiaroscuro and bright blue. Patches of darkness shroud parts of the picture. Light falling in streams selectively illuminates the rest. The high-rise apartments of the Upper East Side and the office buildings of Midtown stand out as white as any Portuguese Algarve village gleaming in the bright light of the Mediterranean sun.

From here the rest of the world seems so unreal, shimmering almost like a mirage, so unaffected, so remote, and so removed. A world away. Another world entirely. A world that begins and ends—as this one does—at 110th Street. By formal definition greater Harlem spreads from river to river—from the Hudson to the East River—and runs from 90th Street to 178th Street; central Harlem, from 96th Street to 155th. But no matter how you define this neighborhood, you don't reach the heart of Harlem until you cross 110th Street. From there on you know you are in a different world. The moment you set foot onto 110th, you have entered into the fullness of Harlem.