Still Life in Harlem (5 page)

The world looks at me and already in an instant has decided who I am, who I will be, and how I will act. The world thinks it knows me.

That is possibly too simplistic. Maybe the things I do are not the things that black men do, although I do them and I am a black man. Maybe they are not the things black men are supposed to do. Maybe they are not the things black men are generally allowed to do. I don't know who made these rules either, but maybe the things I do are things, in fact, that black men do not want to do and absolutely must not do if they are to be real black men. Perhaps, then, I am not a black man—just a man after all, and the things I do are only those things that Eddy L. does, nothing more and nothing less.

According to the rules, I don't look mean enough to be a black man, don't act rough enough, don't talk tough enough. I am too soft to be a black man, an aesthete, a dandy, a man who wears white silk trousers, in a world where, one would imagine, white silk trousers are unheard of—the world of Harlem, that is.

I don't wear oversize basketball shoes and baggy pants, don't put my hats on backward. I don't talk loud unless I'm in an animated argument. I don't scowl unless the sun shines in my eyes. I don't demand respect; I just get it.

The French have an expression,
D'être bien dans sa peau
—to be at ease inside one's skin. My father is at ease, I believe, inside his skin. I am at ease inside my own. I am my father's child.

But am I, too, Harlem's child?

 

 

 

Things are a little different now than they were—certainly thirty, forty, seventy years ago when Harlem, as they say, was really Harlem. It is a long way from those old days to these days, just as it is from midtown Manhattan to Harlem: only an eight-minute ride, but still a world away; only a few years gone, but still a million miles from what it used to be. And remarkably, perhaps sadly, not yet far enough from where it used to be.

From that day when I first strode 125th Street like I owned the place, like I belonged there, and like I knew where I was going and what I was doing there; from that first day two years ago to my last day in Harlem and to the many days in between, things are a little different than they were.

Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is Harlem's aorta. Perhaps it is only a throwback to an earlier era in Harlem, and perhaps 125th Street has always been this way, a visible testament to the life and vibrancy that has coursed through the now mean streets of this neighborhood for as long as Harlem has been black. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is evidence that there is still vibrant life in Harlem, and when you walk down this street you know it, you see it, you hear it, you feel it pulsating off walls, windows, and pavements. Or maybe 125th Street is a throwback all the way to Africa, for Africa is what it initially brings to mind. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is alive with confusion and commerce, noise and commotion and a hell of a lot of energy. It was even more alive that day, my first day in Harlem. Since then things have changed a little. Since then the police have moved in following orders from city hall, and they have curtailed much of the curbside hustle and bustle.

“It's what they do, man. It's what they always do. They don't care a shit about us until it's vote-getting time, and then the only ones they care about are the ones they can count, or the ones who can give them money, or the ones who look like they're on their same side. But the rest of us, you know, the ones of us who are out here struggling every day, trying our best to make it—man, we just get shit on. Especially if we are trying to buy into that American Dream stupidness.”

That was the angry voice of Eliot Winston. I would not meet him until much later, and if his words were not this day ringing somehow in my ears as I strolled 125th Street for the first time, then this day would in my mind's eye replay itself later on when I walked with Eliot the day the changes to 125th Street were imposed. On that day, cordons of uniformed police were stationed all along the street. In twos and threes they stood outside the shops. Blue police barricades lined the curbs. Order and, some would say, boredom replaced 125th Street's normal chaos. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street suddenly became a little more like any other street in New York, or in America—just a little blacker.

But on this day, my first day, 125th Street was still the old 125th Street.

I came up from the subway. I let the sun hit me, sit on my shoulders and face, let the sun darken me just a little blacker than I already was. I took a little survey, took a little breath, then I stepped off the curb and into the swelling sea of blackness.

Harlem. I was in it now. I was home.

At a publishing party in London, when the notion of living in Harlem was just occurring to me and taking shape, I had a conversation that addressed my chances of surviving Harlem. I was kicking the idea around in my own head to see how it fit, but tossing it around to others as if it were an idea already set in concrete. After all, following Africa and the Deep South, Harlem seemed like the next logical place for me to spend time.

I was overheard saying that I planned to live a year in Harlem—so I thought at the time, only a year—and that I planned to write about the experience. The woman I was talking to was appropriately impressed. She, I am told, registered something like a look of shock, no doubt projecting herself into my shoes and wondering how Harlem might be for her and whether
she
could survive it—as if Harlem were some kind of war zone.

“Do you think you'll be all right there?” she wanted to know. “Do you think you'll be safe?”

She is small, this woman, and white. She could see the world only through those delicate blue eyes of hers. I see the world through the eyes of a man who is black and who is tall and who, when he frowns and stands erect, making himself appear somehow larger, like a grizzly bear rearing up on hind legs, projects a formidable image, belied most of the time by kind watery eyes and a smile that turns his face into a baby's face. I am a coward, I am sure, but I am able to live and move within the bubble of certainty that not many people would take the risk implied by the image of me. I knew I'd be safe. And I told her so.

Safety never occurred to me before, nor very often during my time in Harlem. There would be over the course of the two years a few close calls, a few scrapes to call into question the ease and confidence with which I came to move in Harlem. I had been shot at, of course. I had stepped into a few tight spots and found myself in an altercation or two. And before it was all over, there would be, in the street right below my window, a man beating a woman. I had, however, the physical passport always to protect me.

I was not small, I was not frail, I do not look like anybody's victim. And more than that, I am black. If nothing else, on first glance anyway, I look like I belong here.
These are my people,
I kept telling myself.
I'll be at home here.

But Joseph Carver, who used to live in Harlem, reminded me not to wade too deep into the quicksand of racial identification. He warned me that it would be best not to be too foolish, not to let my guard down completely.

“Black people do some pretty bad things to other black people,” he said one afternoon over a shared pizza. He had lived in Harlem and his apartment had been broken into too many times.

“It got so bad,” he said, “I couldn't leave without worrying about somebody stealing my stuff. So you either worry all the time or you get used to living without having anything. I didn't want to live the one way or the other. So I left.”

And then, as if to emphasize, he told me the story of Bill Simpson, a thirty-seven-year-old black man who the previous winter had moved to Vidor, in east Texas. It was a story Joseph had read in the paper or seen on TV.

The federal housing projects in that part of Texas where Simpson lived were highly segregated, and Simpson's move was part of a court-ordered integration plan. He was one of only two blacks in his new town, which had been all white before the court order, and he was constantly harassed, he said, because of his race, and constantly on edge. He was all but ready to move back to Beaumont, where he had lived before moving to Vidor, to be back among his people.

“I don't want to worry who's going to do something and what they're going to do, when it's going to happen, where it's going to happen,” he once said.

So on a Wednesday afternoon he moved back to Beaumont, Texas.

Wednesday night, he was dead.

He had been shot five times as he walked along a street in Beaumont. A car had pulled up, the four men inside the car had demanded money. Simpson refused. One of the robbers shot him. The gunman was black.

Joseph Carver said, “Just because you're black, you can't think you're safe here or anyplace else. You can't think somebody's not out to hurt you. Especially if you've got more than he's got or if you've got something he wants. And you don't even have to. You just have to look like you do.”

I think I heard myself say, and I'm not sure if I said it to Joe or if I was only saying it to myself: Perhaps I ought to be very afraid here.

But I'm not!

I knew right then that there was no place on earth I would rather be.

I knew I needed to be here.

 

 

 

I felt like an orphan reunited with the parents he has not seen since a very long time ago. I felt like my father back once more in the old neighborhood. Elation blended with trepidation, relief commingled with tension, producing in me an intense desire to laugh, to shout, even to dance with the dancing man who stands on a cardboard mat on 125th Street between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—what used to be, before all the name changes, Eighth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. He stands in the shadow of the Apollo Theatre, and instead of begging for money, he dances for tips. If donations from passersby are not forthcoming, he dances there anyway.

I stopped a minute or two and watched him. He wore a pair of reddish brown boots highly polished to catch the light of the sun. They shone so brightly that the red in them overtook the brown and they shimmered like fire. From every angle his boots threw light into your eyes. He wore a beret, loose black trousers, sunglasses, a string of shells around his neck. He stayed on the cardboard mat and danced, moving very slowly, almost carefully. He seemed unaware of the people who passed. He seemed to dance only for the fun of it, the sheer pleasure of hearing the music and feeling the movement of his body. But if you watched his face and not the dancing, you could catch a glimpse behind the sunglasses and you would see every now and again that he glanced up and took notice from the corner of his eye.

I smiled at him, but he never acknowledged me. He was in his own world, completely within himself—or at least pretending to be. I left him there and walked on, deeper into the tunnel of darkness, a little further back in time and into a world where is written clearly the history of modern black America—which is of course the history, quite simply, of modern America.

As I walked the streets that day, my first day in Harlem, I could feel that history—not just on 125th Street but throughout the district. It was like walking through a living museum where someone pushes a button and you hear recordings of sounds and voices and see images of times gone by.

I felt that I was walking among the ghosts of Harlem's past, that I was coming here as they had come here, as Langston Hughes had come and Duke Ellington had come, as they all had come: the washerwoman and the seamstress; the heiress and the showgirl; the hard-laboring man and the vagrant; the high and mighty, the lowly and disregarded; the leaders and the followers; artists and intellectuals—coming home, coming to find peace, coming to gain in Harlem a sense of self and a new way of defining oneself, blackness, black culture, black awareness, that was independent of the white world's limiting influence and strictures and prying eyes. Here they and we and I could live completely within ourselves, in a world all black, all our own and of our own making. Or at least, like the dancing man, we could pretend to.

I felt the weight of Harlem's hope and the rhythms of its excitement. They were all around me, in my ears and in my eyes and upon my shoulders. They stirred in my soul like some half-forgotten memory now suddenly awakened. I felt amazingly free, as if I were really and truly free for the very first time in my life.

At the same time I felt strangely burdened, about as unfree and bound as anyone could be. I felt somehow as if I owed somebody something.

By 1925 Harlem was already the center of a certain universe, spinning in an orbit all its own, attracting other worlds to itself with the gravitational pull of an immense black hole. The August issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
that year noted that Harlem was drawing immigrants “from every country in the world that has a colored population. Ambitious and talented colored youth on every continent look forward to reaching Harlem. It is the Mecca for all those who seek Opportunity with a capital
O.
”

James Weldon Johnson came to Harlem from Florida, Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay came from Jamaica. W. E. B. Du Bois came from New England, Langston Hughes came from Kansas.

They came to Harlem from everywhere; people whose names should be on the tip of your tongue, people you never ever heard of. Businessmen came and racketeers came, profiteers and preachers came, the honest and the fakers. Nella Larson came. Madame C. J. Walker came. Pig Foot Mary came.

These came as they all came: seeking better. Some sought fame, some sought fortune, and some sought only the future. All of them sought the freedom that could not be had anywhere but here.

They came to Harlem the same as I had come: because Harlem seemed the place to be, the place where you could lose yourself and at the same time find yourself.