Still Life in Harlem (3 page)

It is, isn't it, the way we want things, clear frontiers and easy distinctions between here and there, between what is real and what isn't, between us and them. The lines, once drawn, however, no matter how thinly, no matter how broad, begin immediately to flex and then to blur. Shadows fall toward both sides, depending on the light, cultures spill and spread, and there is a subtle sameness for a distance on either side of any frontier.

And here am I, one of the border shadows that falls to either side but that never quite reaches the heart of this side or that one, that never reaches too far beyond this hazy ground in the middle.

To whom do I belong, to which of these two sides? In which culture and in which set of values do I claim citizenship? Whose passport do I carry and to whom is owed my allegiance?

These are questions that have no easy or clear-cut answers. The odd thing about them is that I was never plagued by them before. I rarely even considered them. Now, however, they cause so much turmoil within that the questions themselves, let alone any answers I might ever come up with, color my every action, my every thought. Nearly every question is draped in a black shroud.

Is the wider world available to me too that I may lay claim to it or if I am to care, must the things I care about be only those things that black people care about? And if I am to live, must I limit myself and my choices to those places we consider black places, restrict myself to life on a reservation because that is what has been reserved for me—and without anyone asking me—places like this one where I now find myself, precisely because of these questions, these wonderings, this sudden sense of being caught in the middle and not belonging anywhere?

I wonder, then, since this is the world chosen for me and not chosen by me—I wonder then not only if I belong here but if I can fit in here. Ought I to even try?

Over and over I tell myself that I am not a prisoner here. I realize of course that I am. I am a prisoner of this place.

That is how I feel, oddly, like a prisoner on parole who has been called back before the prison board and who must spend a night or two in the cell block before final decisions can be made.

Over and over I tell myself that I am not a prisoner here, that I can leave this place anytime I choose, and that my world is the much wider world beyond the borders of this neighborhood. Still in my heart I know that, as voluntary as my confinement here is, I am as trapped as anyone for whom this
is
the wider world, as trapped as those who have lived here and tried to escape, as trapped as those who will never find a way out. I am a prisoner of this racialist thinking.

There is, of course, no way out, for Harlem is more than a neighborhood, more too than merely metaphor. Harlem is a state of mind, in many ways like a very dark dungeon. Once you have experienced it, there can be no going back. You can leave this place, but you can never get away from it—no, not really. Once you have lived here in earnest, once Harlem gets into your psyche and into your blood, the way it has gotten into mine, then you will carry it with you wherever you go and for the rest of your life, not as some moveable feast, but perhaps as a moveable famine, a reminder not of life's great banquet but of the meager table life lays for paupers.

We who live beyond these borders may need from time to time to be reminded. We who live in places like Harlem can never truly forget. We cannot forget how discarded and forgotten we are.

We are all prisoners here, prisoners of this place and its history, prisoners of our own history—even as we set about to make it.

For many who don't live here this seems to be among the scariest of propositions, persuaded as they are by fantasies of darkness and crowded streets, of black men robbers, black men thieves, black men the dealers of dope, the users and the fiends. They have no other idea, nothing to rely on but the images they glean from the TV, rumor and hearsay and wild imaginings. They think that when they cross 110th Street, they will have stepped into the darkness, into what might very well be, in fact, the darkest, dirtiest, most dangerous place on this earth. They—the brave ones who actually do, and even the ones who make the crossing only in their minds—they cross 110th Street and enter a world swarming with their worst fantasies.

Such is the power of Harlem and its myth.

A woman on a hot late-summer day steps onto the A train at 42nd Street. A young white woman pushing a baby stroller; she is obviously an au pair, the baby not her own. She speaks with a European accent and is going somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But after 59th Street the A train will not stop again until it reaches Harlem.

The woman translates the announcement in her head. You watch her eyes as she listens. You see the way her brow knits as she struggles first to hear and then to understand the crackly voice amid the noises of loud conversation, metal wheels scraping, doors sliding shut. You watch and you wait and then finally you see what you knew you would see: panic registering on her face, the recognition of her worst, most unhoped-for expectations. Harlem!

It is too late. The doors have closed. The train is moving. Next stop, 125th Street.

Over and over you can tell yourself that you are not a prisoner here. And people do. But in time you will realize that you are. You will know better than to think that anyone could live in a place like this and certainly not ponder it without being as profoundly affected as by time spent in prison, ever surrounded by high walls, bars and barbed wire. Without the walls, without gun turrets and guard towers, Harlem nevertheless is a prison.

If you look you can see a prison of poverty in the tired faces of the people you pass on the street, noble faces sagging and puffy, eyes dimmed or dimming from not enough chances, from not knowing which way if any is the right path to follow; young faces projecting strength and courage and very much posturing; older faces lined with an eternal frown from squinting in the sun, from scowling at the heaviness of a life that bends backs and turns walking into shuffling, faces furrowed from forever wondering why.

Time spent in Harlem is certainly no gentle sojourn in some provincial paradise, no cornucopia of riches and opportunity, no pleasurable garden of Eden. A year here for many would be more like a year in hell.

If you look you can see this aspect of the prison as well in the faces of those who are
not
trapped here. Whenever they chance to encounter this place, you see the look of panic that serves to further separate and isolate the prisoners on the inside from the prisoners on the outside.

I saw that look—which is panic, which is loathing, which is scorn, and which says,
I don't want to be here, bad things will happen to me here and I want to get out, I don't want to see this side of life, don't even want to know it exists, why in fact does it have to exist, and why must I encounter it?
—in the quivering bottom lip bitten almost until it bled and in the darting glances of the young white woman on the train that summer day two years ago. Wherever she was from, if she knew nothing else about Harlem, she was well aware of Harlem's dark shadows and that they are to be avoided. She seemed to know for certain that here was a place she did not want to find herself. She knew instinctively or at least had been told of Harlem's dangers, its poverty and its blackness, and that she had no business up there. When the train stopped at 125th Street, she picked up the stroller with the baby still in it and took the steps two at a time. She sprinted over to the opposite platform and leaped into the first train going back downtown.

This in part is what makes Harlem the prison it has become. Not many people on the outside want anything to do with the people on the inside.

To witness this extreme isolation can put a strain on the sensibilities of caring individuals. It can make you kind of sad. Or it can make you angry. Or quite simply, if you allow it to happen, it can make you open your eyes and wonder what's going on and why.

But there is another reaction that the white lady on the subway can elicit, an odd reaction perhaps, given the circumstance, or maybe not so odd, but it is the reaction I had, which made it very odd indeed. I hadn't yet moved to Harlem then. I was still only a visitor. I had come up that day to get the lie of the land, to get the feel of the place, and to continue the search for an apartment.

That search, by the way, had not been an easy one. I had been trying to find an apartment for weeks now, staying with friends who lived in the part of Manhattan called Chelsea and coming up to Harlem every day to find neighborhood newspapers like the
Amsterdam News
and to answer the ads I found there. You don't find many ads for apartments in Harlem in any of the other newspapers in New York, as if to say people who read those other papers wouldn't be looking for apartments in Harlem, as if to say people from downtown are not thinking of moving that far uptown, as if to say the only people who would consider living in Harlem are already in Harlem, and they can find what they need in the local neighborhood papers.

The world of Harlem and the world farther south remain separate and distinct this way, far apart and well removed, only an eight-minute subway ride from one world to the other, from midtown Manhattan to Harlem, but nevertheless they are worlds apart, so far apart that the two worlds rarely even touch.

But their orbits this day passed in close proximity, if only for a moment. Their paths crossed. They almost came together. Then like a comet, the one world merely gained momentum from the gravitational pull of being so close to this other world that it spun away and zoomed out of sight. She picked up the baby carriage, hurled herself into the first train that stopped, and disappeared.

Normally, if someone is struggling up the stairs with a baby stroller, I will lean down, grab the front end of the thing, and together we will lift baby and stroller up the steps. No need to ask. No need to say a word. Bending over and reaching down says all that needs to be said. And the help is always appreciated.

But this time I made no such offer. This time I just watched, the same as I had been watching as she bit her lip and anxiously peered through the windows of the train and into the blackness of the subway tunnel. I'm sure she wanted to know where she was and how much farther she had to go before she could get off. She must have been trying to read the writing on the walls of each station we sped through. She made eye contact with no one. She looked at no one. She looked down at the floor or at the baby, or she looked through the windows. She had closed herself off in that urban cocoon wherein people—women especially—can appear to be looking right at you, but the gaze shifts somehow and it is as if they never even saw you, as if they were never looking at you at all.

When we had gotten to 125th Street and she had fled, when the downtown A train had slammed its doors around her, rattled off into the shaft that snakes underground, and taken her away to the safety of the Upper West Side, I threw my head back, opened my mouth wide, and let out a tremendous laugh.

The laughter was only in part derision at what I considered her foolishness and her prejudgments. She anyway could have taken her time to get to the downtown platform. She didn't really have to panic or be quite so nervous. It wasn't, after all, as if she had stumbled by mistake into a leper colony. But she acted as if all around her were more than mere contagion; here was a world where she did not belong, did not want to belong, wanted no part of. She wanted to be gone from Harlem as fast as speed could carry her.

I watched her and I made a silent cheer.
Be gone then,
I speechlessly told her.
Be gone and get away from here. As much as you don't want to be here, we don't want you here. Go away from here, stay away from here, for this place, even if no other place on earth is, this place is ours.

I had fallen into the trap. I identified with the
us
of this black world, as if I were and had always been a part of it.

Harlem is ours, I was telling myself. Harlem is
mine.

 

 

 

I came up from the subway and into the bright light of day. I felt a little of what Langston Hughes must have felt when he first arrived in Harlem in 1922. It was a bright September afternoon that greeted me, a bright September afternoon that greeted him. And as he was happy and thrilled to be here, so was I, though probably not as much, for in 1922 Harlem was still young and new and its magic had yet to be tarnished. Langston Hughes was so delirious on coming here, he later wrote, that he was never able to capture on paper the excitement even of riding the subway uptown.

“I went up the steps,”
he said,
“and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again.”

I was happy to be here too. I turned the corner and was excited enough to leap up the stairs and go out, but instead I went slowly. At the bottom of the steps a man was folded against the wall and was sleeping there. I had to step over him before I could go up.

At the top of the steps an old woman, very thin and very shrunken, barred the exit and was begging for spare change.

When I climbed into the light, I took my own deep breath. The air all around the subway entrance smelled of urine.

Clearly this was not the Harlem of 1922.

Still, it was Harlem. Surely some of the old magic remained. And I was excited to be here, in touch at long last with what I had in many ways abandoned. I had come home again.

 

 

 

The past is a dangerous place to visit. It offers itself as a safety zone. At the same time it is a place as treacherous as hell. It is beauty. It is also burden. It is where we go, many of us, to remind ourselves who we are, and even sometimes to find it out. It is where we go often when what is here and now begins to overwhelm us, when the present begins to tarnish, when it refuses to sparkle and glow. But if we are not careful there in the past, its hypnotic swirls can suck us into a vortex of irreality and disillusion.