Still Life in Harlem (21 page)

He laughs a little bit, but only just a little.

“Just like when you were a kid and your mama told you not to cross your eyes 'cause if somebody slapped you upside the head your eyes would freeze that way. It's just like that.”

The laughter stopped.

“Only now,” he said, “we wear a different look. We don't be grinning all the time like we used to, we don't be having our eyes wide open and bugging out and putting the white folks at ease and making them laugh. Ain't no happy niggers no more. Everybody out here's mad. Now we be squinting all the time and frowning. Now we all the time tired 'cause we be working so goddamned hard and still ain't got nothing to show for it. I'm surprised every black man out here ain't killed somebody.”

I thought just for a second then of Eliot's brother and the story Eliot had told me as we walked. But there wasn't time for reflection. Eliot filled all the empty spaces with his anger. He kept talking.

“And white people can't see a fucking thing,” Eliot said. “We're tearing down the country, bleeding the place bankrupt with all this welfare shit, and teaching our children to surrender. And white people think they ain't got nothing to do with none of it but to keep the crime out of their neighborhoods—and keep the black folks out too, while you're at it; that's what they think the solution is for them, just put us aside and let us rot in the fucking filth they've stuck us in. Let me tell you one thing: as badass as we think we are, as powerful as we think we are, and might actually be, I don't know about that, but I know this: white people do not take us seriously. That's for damned sure. If they did, this shit would not be what it is.”

The first time I saw Eliot Winston, he was saying pretty much the same thing. It was late one afternoon on the corner of 125th and Park Avenue, not far from where we now stood. There he was, that first time I saw him, beneath the elevated rails of the Metro North 125th Street station, where the trains carrying those commuters pause briefly to give them each a little thrill. This is as close as most of them will ever get to setting a foot in Harlem. From the tracks high above the streets, the commuters can get a pretty good look at Harlem's decay, Harlem's blight, a pretty good view of hell before the trains continue on their way to purgatory and paradise—to Grand Central Station and the rest of Manhattan in the one direction, and in the other direction either up the lush and peaceful Hudson River valley and the semirurality of quiet towns with names like Pleasantville; or on toward New Haven, Westport, Stamford, and all the little commutervilles in between. The little thrill these commuters get is akin to the jolt of adrenaline the au pair with the baby carriage got the instant she realized she was bound for Harlem: a moment's uncertainty, not knowing what could or what might or what will happen, just knowing that this is not the place to be; and the unacknowledged relief when the doors finally close and the train pulls away again, takes them away again, out of Harlem and gone.

They are not unlike the downtowners of old, those long-ago visitors who would come uptown to Harlem for a glimpse of Nigger Heaven and who would then be gone again. They had seen, they had been thrilled, they had survived. But they didn't want to—and were glad they didn't have to—stay here for long.

From time to time when I look from the front window of my apartment, a big tour bus will rumble by. It is almost funny to see the faces of the tourists pressed against the windows, their eyes wide to catch every juicy and exotic tidbit of this foreign land, their cameras ever ready. You see these same buses parked on 125th Street or on Malcolm X Boulevard in front of Sylvia's, where as part of their tour they can stop for an authentic Harlem meal in an authentic Harlem restaurant. It is most noticeable on a Sunday, when the crowds of tourists make it often impossible to squeeze another soul into Sylvia's, when over on 125th Street the tourists and the vendors used to have the street nearly to themselves early in the day—that is, before the street vendors were exiled from 125th Street.

It is always good for a little laugh to watch the tourists venture gingerly from their buses, to watch them buy souvenir T-shirts from the vendors, to watch them snap photos of the Apollo Theatre across the street, to watch them walk from one corner to the next. But they never stray too far from the buses. It is as if they are tethered. They never let the buses out of their sight. When lunch is over or when the souvenir shopping is done, they all file back onto the buses, and they are gone once more, back whence they came, back to their own worlds far from this one.

And the vendors count the money they've made. They smile little smirks of victory. They mutter beneath their breath, and their eyes reveal it: be gone and good riddance to you!

And rightly so on the one hand. These visitors are the same lot who out West buy trinkets and blankets and beaded belts from the Indians at the trading posts that line the highways, or at the railway station in Gallup, New Mexico. They never notice that the curios they've bought were made in China. They think instead that they have tasted the culture, that they carry a bit of it home with them, even though they never even took their gloves off long enough to touch it, nor would they ever, and that is enough for them. It's on to the next stop on the tour. Indians back to the reservation. Harlemites back where you belong. Back to the margins, all of you, out of sight and out of mind and off the pages completely.

Good riddance, then, to them and theirs. So say the visitors on leaving, whether they know it or care to admit it. So say too the ones who are left behind.
Good riddance!
It becomes their battle cry.

“Christ, man!” Eliot once shouted at me. “We say that shit and we believe that shit and we live that shit every day. And every day we think we're winning some goddamned victory. But every day we're losing one. We're so goddamned stupid we don't even know it. They win, we lose, and we cheer about it. What could be stupider than that, or better for white folks? They get what they want, and we get nothing—less than nothing, when you sit and think about it—and we think we've hit the jackpot.”

Eliot tends to rant when he talks about being trapped.

“God! Just once,” he shouted. “Just for a little while, I just want to know what it's like to be white in this country, just so I could look at black people and laugh at us like white people must be doing.”

When I saw Eliot the first time, there outside the Metro North station, he was ranting at someone else. The man who that time was the object of Eliot's attention stood rather passively, almost unconcerned as Eliot beat the air with his long arms and vented his spleen. The man seemed to have heard Eliot's tirades before and was used to them. He paid as much attention to the passing cars, to the buses, and to the people going into and out of the station as he did to anything Eliot was saying. This man, I found out later, was Eliot's brother, T. C. Abernathy—same mother, different fathers—and as I passed he glanced at me from under one of Eliot's outstretched arms. He smiled briefly as if to reassure me. Eliot saw the smile somehow and the glance and turned to watch me go slowly by.

It was the start of a long moment that took place in slow motion. I am a slow walker anyway, can be very slow indeed, and this day, as I was not in a hurry yet, I was taking my time and strolled most casually in front of Eliot and his brother. Eliot's eyes and mine met and locked in a stare that goes beyond interest but seems rather some kind of primitive challenge mutually issued, mutually accepted. I walked past. Eliot followed me with his eyes. He finished what he was saying to T.C., and although it was part of the long lecture already going on and had nothing to do with me, it stabbed my ears as if it had been directed at me.

T.C.'s gaze shifted in this long slow moment from Eliot to me and back again twice before I reached the corner. We all three sensed something. Probably none of us knew exactly what.

Slowly, Eliot's flailing arms came down to his side. One hand rested on a hip. His body was still turned toward his brother, but he had turned head and neck and was looking in my direction. I had stopped at the corner and stood there waiting. The long moment continued.

The light was green, and I could have crossed. I waited until it turned red. Then I turned completely around and looked back.

T.C. had folded his arms across his chest and had stepped back to lean against the chain link fence behind him. He was out of the arena now.

On the fence the two brothers had hung the T-shirts that they were selling. Printed on these shirts were photos of Malcolm X, and beneath the photos were slogans. There were other T-shirts besides, and other things for sale, but only the Malcolm X shirts were on hangers and hung on the fence. When T.C. stepped back out of the line of eyesight fire, he tipped one of the hangers and one of the T-shirts fell. The long moment was broken. Eliot turned then to yell at his brother. And I was free to continue on my way to work, across 125th to Lexington Avenue and down to 103rd, over to Third Avenue and through the housing projects to Second Avenue, past the drug dealers who crowd the corner there and the first half of the block, and down the street to Exodus House, where I had become a teacher in an after-school program.

But I wasn't free yet, not really. Anyway, I didn't continue on. I couldn't. Not right away. I had to wait a little longer. The slow-motion moment had ended, but now I had moved into one where time stood utterly still.

It was one of those moments that brings everything into sharp focus, a moment through which one views clearly everything one has ever seen and everything one has ever done. It was one of those moments like all moments—though we hardly seem to notice it—that looks backward in time and forward in time all at the same time, and I could see at once all that I had seen in Harlem and all that I had done and all I was about to do. It was a moment through which I could examine everything I had yet done in my life and everything I would ever do. It was a moment that called into question everything there is about what it means (to me) to be black and what it means, in fact, to be me, an instance of such clarity that I could not miss the significance of the moment nor could I ignore it, and I could see right the way back to the barber refusing to cut my hair, back to Johnny Cannon doing his stabbing, back beyond even that, back to all the moments that connected then and now. I could see as well, so I tell myself now, into the not very distant future, though I hardly knew it at the time, and if I couldn't really see into the future, I could certainly feel my way forward at least as far as that late night and early morning when I would look out my bedroom window and knew I had to do something, knew too that I
would
do something.

Little by little the curtain parts. Little by little light splinters the darkness. Suddenly I saw what I had come to Harlem to see.

Standing on that corner that day, I could see it all and hear it all and my ears burned from what Eliot had said as I passed, his arms flying out, his hands coming back to his chest, and then that final gesture that seemed to suggest surrender: arms out, hands open and empty, palms up.

My ears burned as if Eliot's words were igniting the dry kindling of all I had heard in Harlem, and the smoke from the fire in my head filled my eyes, and what I could see, I saw through a veil of shimmering haze. What I saw and what I heard were the sounds and images of surrender.

Harlem is not all surrender, of course, the same as it is not all tired and lifeless misery. All is not the cliché of poverty that we've come to expect here, but the cliché overrides all else. Its images are powerful, and its reality is the one that matters here, for here and everywhere else life is defined not from the top down, as some might have you believe, but upward from the bottom where the numbers are greater. Notwithstanding the elegant homes that survive in Harlem, notwithstanding those who continue to strive, the doctors the lawyers the businessers and the woman over whose shoulder I peeped at the cash machine where I spied the surprising amount of money in her checking account—and who knows how much other money hides in Harlem—despite all this, when you stand on a street corner in Harlem and you see what Harlem has been saddled with, what Harlem has become from what Harlem once was, what Harlem has settled for and what Harlem continues to settle for, it is easy to see the ground beneath the things that Eliot was saying. It is easy to see the trap into which I and so many others had fallen.

“The black man is finished,” he said. “We are lost, man, and we don't even know it—so how can we ever find our way? We're through.”

These are the words that started the fire that singed my lobes, that filled my eyes with smoke. These are the words that froze my footsteps, that locked me in place.

I was wearing white silk trousers that day and a lavender shirt. I looked decidedly out of place, and easy it would have been for me to imagine that Eliot's words had been generated by the sight of me and directed at me in ridicule. Not many weeks before, I had been similarly reprimanded by a street vendor for walking down 125th Street with a woman at my side. The woman was white. I cannot remember if we were even talking, she and I, but certainly we were not holding hands, and there was nothing in our manner to suggest that we were anything more than two people sharing the same sidewalk. “Don't forget your race, man. Don't forget your race.” He was pointing at me as I passed.

Eliot was not pointing, but he did follow me with his gaze, and easy it would have been for me to take offense, feel a threat, respond in kind. I could have walked over calmly to him and demanded to know if he was referring to me. That would have been enough to get the show started. That would have been the easy way.

It may have been fear that kept me from puffing out my chest and challenging Eliot. It was a warm day. He was wearing a tight T-shirt that showed how muscular and strong he was. His brother was even more so. Although T.C. had smiled as I went by and seemed to take himself out of this showdown between Eliot and me, with men on the street, especially with brothers, you never know when a dispute is going to become a two-against-one situation. It may have been fear that kept me from moving, but I don't think so; it seems I am a confrontational sort.