Still Life in Harlem (6 page)

Harlem by then had already become more than a place. It was becoming the metaphor. It was becoming the fiery hot liquid center of black creation, the supernova core of a galaxy in the making.

For the outside world Harlem was quickly setting the tone of the time, those energetic Jazz Age years when the war to end all wars was over and the Great Depression had not yet begun. It was a time of enormous excess. Life seemed good and was getting better all the time, but after such a war you could never be sure. Better to live for the moment. For those who did, Harlem was nightclubs and liquor and music. For those with a deeper vision, Harlem was the creative spirit of an era. Here, in terms of art and music and literature, was Paris and Berlin of the same era rolled into one, but with one tremendous difference. Here at last were the as yet unknown and unheard voices, not of a generation, however lost and suddenly found, but of an entire people stumbling on untested legs and falteringly learning to walk, squeaking and squawking to find a voice and then to find something to say.

And I was walking among their ghosts. I felt indeed as if I owed them something.

This was Harlem in those long-gone days. It was more than the place to be, it was the place you
had
to be if you were black, the place that called you and where your heart was, even if you never set foot there. It was a movement at the center of which was the search for a place of equality in American society, equality based on pride and what W.E.B. Du Bois called uplift. Harlem was the seat of the black search for an artistic and intellectual self, the search for identity that emerged during what we now label the Harlem Renaissance, the emergence of black culture to find its soul.

Blackamerica's mission in creating the center of its universe in Harlem was not only to build a black city, a mere place. Its purpose was to make possible this search for a new identity. As Alain Locke once said so plainly, “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul.”

And so they came to find it or to forge it—a new black identity.

It was the reason Langston Hughes was drawn here. “Harlem,” he said, “was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual, pulling him from everywhere.”

It was the reason Claude McKay found himself here. He came to achieve, he said, “something new, something in the spirit and accent of America.”

They came all of them with the best of intentions. They came to participate. They came to contribute to Harlem's growing glory and to benefit from it. What no one considered, however, and what no one realized at the time was that they all came sowing the seeds of Harlem's very destruction—and perhaps all of Blackamerica's as well.

I too ignored those seeds of destruction already sown, already taken root, already sprouted. In my eagerness to be in Harlem, to find or maybe to forge a new black identity of my own, I could feel the weight only of Harlem's former glory and of its former hope and promise.

It is promise of a bygone era, promise that by now perhaps has been denied, promise that perhaps has faded, but from the vantage point of 125th Street that day, it was promise only that had been altered and that had shifted but that had not yet died. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was alive. Harlem was alive.

They were just as alive that day—Harlem and 125th Street—as they had been in 1923 when Duke Ellington first came here; differently alive, to be sure, but alive and throbbing with pace and excitement. The Duke is said to have practically roared with enthusiasm. He said of Harlem that here was the world's most glamorous atmosphere, exclaiming at the time, “Why, it's just like the Arabian Nights.”

I don't know about the Arabian Nights or about the streets being particularly glamorous, but the excitement, the pace, and the noise were undeniable.

On this day, as on every day except Sunday, Saturdays being the worst, from St. Nicholas Avenue right the way across to Third Avenue, 125th Street was clogged with traffic. Cars and buses sped whenever possible, inched along most of the time, and drivers took out their frustrations in a symphony of horn honking that was mostly ignored except by those wishing to honk back. The effect was negligible on the movement of traffic but very great on the ear until you got used to it. Then the horn noise and traffic noise merged with the other sounds of 125th Street—the music blaring, the laughter rising above the streets, the children crying for one more piece of candy, one more hot dog, one more minute to look at something—and helped to carry you along. And you needed every aid, for the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk was every bit as intense as the car and bus traffic in the street.

From practically one end of the street to the other, on both sides of the street, 125th was jammed tight with shoppers and strollers and people just standing, looking, and listening. Soapbox orators drew crowds on one corner or another as preachers and prophets railed against the wages of sin, urged you to seek Jesus or Allah, or simply attacked the white man and his ways. Street vendors sold on folding tables everything from souvenir T-shirts to compact discs and videocassettes, to books and barbecued chicken. As you walk you are bombarded every few steps by examples of the music for sale, first jazz then reggae then rap, all of it blasted at megavolume so you are sure not to miss any of it, and trying to compete with the loud music are the voices of the vendors shouting at you, trying to draw your attention to this table of books or that table of incense and crystals, photographs, paintings, clothes. It is noisy and hectic, and anyone trying to walk in a hurry along the street is just out of luck. And anyone trying to enter any of the shops on 125th Street needs extra determination, for to try and cut across the current of this mighty river of people moving first one way and then the other along the sidewalk is like trying to canoe upstream on the Old Man Mississippi River itself. It's no wonder the shopkeepers here constantly complained about the street vendors. It was enough trouble just getting inside the shops. What's more, the street vendors sold much of the same material and, without the overhead of the shopkeepers, at much lower prices.

Baseball caps for sale, blue jeans and cassette tapes, sheets, towels, and socks, games and candy: all from boxes carried or set on the pavement or from the folding tables that line the curb.

On the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard—what used to be Lenox Avenue—the vendors crowd together in what looks and feels and even sounds and smells like a market anywhere in West Africa. They sell much of the same things in much the same kind of chaos, African trinkets and African cloth, and in fact many of the vendors have come from Africa, drawn to Harlem by many of the same things that motivated earlier generations to come here from Africa, from Jamaica, from the Deep South.

I can't help but think of Harlem in an earlier time when I walk these streets, can't help but see in these faces the faces of a generation for whom Harlem was the way up and out of the mire of blackness and into the glory of being black.

When I look at the woman called Khakira, I think of a woman my father used to talk about. She lived in Harlem in the 1920s and went by the name Pig Foot Mary. She had come to Harlem with practically nothing. She sold her wares on the streets of Harlem just as Khakira does, and by 1925 she was worth almost half a million dollars.

Khakira has her gimmick, just as Pig Foot Mary had hers, just as all the vendors do, selling, as they all do, whether they know the story or not, what they hope will help them to repeat Pig Foot Mary's rags-to-riches success.

Khakira wears floppy hats and clothes that come from Africa. Depending on what you sell, it is often best to appeal here to an Afrocentric consciousness and at the very least to show some sense of solidarity with black Africa, for here is where black Africa and black America meet. But Khakira, when she talks, sounds like she could be from almost anywhere, the Caribbean, North Carolina, Brooklyn. She sells incense and is known on 125th Street as the woman who smokes cigars.

A man called Ahmed speaks very little English. He really does come from Africa, from Mali, he says, as do most of the things he sells, the trinkets, the medallions, the pieces of carved metal shaped like the continent of Africa.

There are fertility necklaces on sale here, bean pies, African clothing. And here at the junction of black Africa and black America you can buy sweet potato pies and Malcolm X potato chips, assorted hats, assorted black nationalist tracts, books on the blackness of Jesus, books about a Blackamerican man traveling in Africa. Among the smells of sausages frying are mingled the smells of Jamaican jerk chicken and somebody cooking barbecue. And everybody, everybody jammed tight shoulder to shoulder in what seems to be a never-ending swell of blackness as far as the eye can see.

Here on 125th Street you can find it all, most of it legal, some of it not. It is, all of it, the same grasping for dollars—the only true yardstick in America—that you find in any of the shops along 125th or along Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue or any other shop on any other street. But here, the grasping has a decidedly black and African aspect to it that renders it more colorful than anything else.

Black or white or any other color, the aim is still the same though.

I turned the corner and walked up Malcolm X/Lenox Avenue. I stopped for lunch at Sylvia's, a famous soul food restaurant a couple of blocks up, and ate a meal straight out of my childhood: the tenderest spare ribs ever, collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas, and sweet potato pie. Then I continued my walk up to 135th Street for no other reason than to be on the corner where Pig Foot Mary made her fortune.

I think of her as Harlem's patron saint perhaps, for she in a way comes to symbolize for me, more than Duke Ellington, more than Langston Hughes, more than all the rest, the Harlem that many if not most people who came here were seeking: Harlem, the land of opportunity. Hers is the kind of story that would have become myth even as she was living it, and that needs to be remembered.

My father would tell the story as if Pig Foot Mary were a distant family relation. Her name was Lillian Harris. She was born in that part of Mississippi known as the Delta. My father's family comes out of Tennessee, but that part of Tennessee is only a puddle jump from the Mississippi Delta. For all I know she might very well have been a relative. Knowing my father as I do, he might just as easily have been making up the whole story. In this case, however, he didn't.

Pig Foot Mary, even more than the radiant luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, exemplifies to me what the Harlem of old was very much all about.

She was born in 1870 and left Mississippi when she was a young adult, still a teen really, and headed north. She was doing no more, perhaps, than many other black southerners escaping to the North and East. Pig Foot Mary was one of them, fleeing, in what some might consider an act of cowardice, the tyranny and terror and hopelessness of the South when her talents and determination might have served as a better example had she remained where she was. Or perhaps in trying to make a better life for herself she was exuding, others might say, the same sense of bravery and pioneer spirit for which we tend to honor the frontier men and women who subjugated the American West, and for which we need to honor the pioneers who came to Harlem, for theirs was the very same intention, that of forging a new life in a better place and of finding possibility where none might otherwise exist.

Pig Foot Mary left home with nothing, for presumably in the Mississippi Delta she would have had nothing, or at best very little. She reportedly tried her luck for over ten years in several northern cities before hitching rides on hay wagons, milk wagons, and vegetable carts, finally reaching New York City in 1901. She had five dollars in her pocket.

With these five dollars, Pig Foot Mary went into business.

With three of these dollars she bought an old baby carriage and a small boiler. With the rest she gambled, bought two dollars' worth of pig feet, and turned that old baby carriage and boiler into a traveling restaurant.

To start with, she sold boiled pig feet to those of her countrymen who longed for the flavors of “down home.” There were so many homesick southern blacks in Harlem that in no time business was thriving enough that she could expand the menu to include still more southern fare: chitterlings, hog maw, steamed corn, and always, always, the pig feet—cheap southern food that had yet to achieve cuisine status.

In a month's time the business was booming. In 1917 she had moved to the corner of Lenox and 135th Street, acquired a husband and a prosperous newsstand, and soon started investing in real estate. Eight years later, she who had once scraped by in a small one-room apartment was worth half a million dollars.

Then, success story complete, I suppose, she moved out of Harlem and went to live in Pasadena, California.

 

 

 

A twinge of something, I don't know what, touched the back of my heart all of a sudden as I stood there then. It was the same dull ache that day on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue as the pang that would nag at me that night, that early morning more than two years later when I would stand at the window of my apartment, look out to the street below, and spy on a black man as he tried to beat a black woman into submission. I cannot say if what I felt these two times—on this corner and at that window—was what I felt so many years before when I watched one black man stab another black man, for I cannot precisely remember the sensations I had on that distant day, but I imagine these feelings are all somewhat the same; and if not the same, at least related.

I would like to think that each of them represented somehow a moment of clarity, perhaps pieces of a grander moment of clarity, but I know nothing came anywhere close to clear until much much later.

I was encountering feelings similar to what an orphan might have on meeting his birth parents for the first time since they gave him over for adoption; or better, like the prodigal son returning home having once taken that of his heritage which he found useful and then, casting aside all else, running away: that sense of belonging and not belonging at one and the same time.