Still Life in Harlem (19 page)

“Yeah,” Antonio was saying to me. “We are some bad men.” And he said it with not just a little pride in his voice. I don't know if he intended it, but I think I also heard the mellowing edge of regret. “We do some bad things. Me, I've done a lot of evil shit but, man, I tell you, none of it as bad as what the people out there are doing to the people in here.”

He was talking, quite naturally, about the people of Harlem, but when he spoke—and I don't know if he meant this either—he touched his chest, the way men do in Harlem, for emphasis, but he touched himself gently this time, without the heavy thump, and the way he looked when he spoke, I had the feeling that when he said “in here” he wasn't just talking about the physical confines of his neighborhood.

“But they just don't care,” he said. “It's somebody else's problem. And the somebody elses of this world never seem to care.”

And here again was that Pig Foot Mary twinge.

Try to imagine now, just for a second, how it felt at that moment to be who I am, how it felt to be as black as I am, as tall as I am, as broad as I am, a man who has seen a bit of the world now and who cowers in the face of very little, a man who can look nearly as fierce, when necessary, as anyone on these mean streets and who for all I know may even be as fierce as they are—nearly, perhaps, but not quite, for even as I was trying to project an image of manliness, of being streetwise and tough, of walking that walk that says
Don't fuck with me,
all the time there were tears in my eyes.

Try to imagine, then, how it felt wanting to show how strong you are, how unmoved by all of this you are. At the same time you want to cry. You want to put your arms around this guy, this man who has done so much evil, this Antonio Morales, because he is hurting, this man who has sold drugs to children, who has helped to ruin people's lives, who has possibly taken more than a few.

But then imagine his reaction if you did put your arms around him, if you said to him, “Man, somebody cares, Antonio; I care.”

He would look at you and sneer, look at you and scoff, look at you and say, “Man, get the fuck away from me.”

He would punch you hard in your chest with both fists at the same time—if he had two fists—and push you into the street, turn his back on you, and say, “Man, you crazy. Nobody cares about us. We don't count here, and you know it. You're just a fool.” And he would never speak to you again.

Maybe I am a fool. Maybe Antonio would be right if he said those things to me. Maybe nobody else does care—nobody but Wilson Clark and me—and that's not true, I know.

But I know too that Antonio is likely to be dead before too long.

Good riddance! the world will say, one less piece of scum floating on the cesspool of Harlem, one less worry for the rest of us. One less headache. One less human soul for anyone to care about.

God almighty! What are we saying? Antonio Morales used to be someone's son! His mother labored thirteen hours in the backseat of a Chevy so he could be born. She would have sold her soul for him, if she hadn't lost her soul already, given her life for him, if she had had much of a life to give. But so much already had been taken from her, she had little left. As the mother was denied, so too the son. As the mother gets discarded, so too her son. We just can't see it.

It's not just Antonio and his mother. It's Henry and Jolene. It's Nicky-No-Arms and
his
mother. It's the countless boys of countless women.

God, even Nicky-No-Arms was someone's son, someone who cuddled him in the cold and counted with him his fingers and his toes and never thought for a single second that on a particularly bad day some particularly bad men would take an axe and lop off his limbs and toss his arms and his fingers into a rubbish bin.

The boys doing the hacking that bad day, they too were someone's sons. Their fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriends, these discarded mothers-to-be, they were someone's daughters. And the children who get discarded along with these young mothers: they are not just someone else's children but the young men's own, and the cycle never ends but goes on and on because this is what they have learned about life and love and caring for one another. This is what they have learned from us. This is what we teach them daily. The violence they know is the violence we taught them.

Yes! What they live and what they realize each day is what they have learned from the rest of us. Perhaps, then, discarded and uncared-for as they are, they are the sons and daughters of all of us, and this is how we have raised them.

I'm not trying to lay blame here …

(Like hell, I'm not. I just don't know where to put it. There are too many places where it fits the puzzle.)

But what if no one is to blame? Suppose what we see here in Harlem is nobody's fault. What then?

Perhaps it is all the result simply of the way we are somehow as a nation now, perhaps as human beings, and because there is no one to blame, there is therefore everyone to blame, just as it is everybody's problem—or soon will be.

Or maybe, as is too often heard, this is just the way things are. Maybe, as that look in Johnny Cannon's eyes suggested to me long ago, this is how it is and this is how it's supposed to be and this is how it will always be, truly and simply, and—I don't believe it, of course—there's nothing we can do about it, until … until … until it's too late.

No, I'm not trying to lay blame here. I think I'm smart enough to know that pointing a finger is the surest way to get a finger pointed back. Everybody has a thousand excuses for why things are the way things are. Everybody has a finger to point, and there are plenty of places to point it. When Pig Foot Mary is troubling me most, I even point the finger at myself.

I get the sense too that my father was pointing the finger at himself as well when he wondered if we had done things the right way, when he hinted at feeling somehow responsible. When he asked if I ever regretted the life I've lived, I wonder sometimes now if his question wasn't an accusation.

I stopped Antonio then, right there in the middle of the street as we crossed Malcolm X Boulevard. I didn't put my arms around him, though I wanted to, but I touched him on the shoulder just above the atrophied stump that used to be his right arm and I turned him toward me, purposefully, so he could see the tears in my eyes, and I said, “Somebody cares, Antonio. I care. That's why I'm here.”

Something happens to those manly men on the streets when you corner them. Either they will enter with you into a confrontation and you will try to stare each other down, or they cannot meet your gaze and hold it. They will look everywhere but right back at you.

Antonio stiffened and shifted his regard from whatever was behind my left shoulder to whatever it was over my right. He looked up, he looked down, and only when I refused to let him look anywhere else did his eyes finally meet mine. I don't know if he meant what he said next or if he just said it so we could get out of the street and go on up to 114th and Malcolm X, but he said: “I know it, man. I know it.”

But I don't know if he
really
knew it.

Either way, it made me feel better.

Then again, he never asked me, as if to say that caring is not enough,
But what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with this life you're so happy with?

 

 

 

A thousand times I have asked myself what it is I am doing here, wondering from time to time if this is some effort on my part to somehow save the world, and answering: God, I hope not.

It could be that I have been hoping only to save my own soul, and living in Harlem this short while has been no more than a feeble gesture.

Or it could be that I am simply trying to be Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic diplomat during World War II—not a Jew—who, when the world refused to believe the rumors about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in Poland, had himself smuggled first into and out of the Warsaw ghetto, and then into and out of a Nazi concentration camp, so that his firsthand testimony might be listened to and believed where the same stories from Jews were taken as too self-serving to be heard and so for too long were ignored.

No. I don't really know why I am here. I only know this: Rather like Jan Karski, and unlike Nicky-No-Arms or Antonio Morales and now certainly unlike young Henry, I can always get smuggled back out again. Prisoner though I may be here, I can always leave.

It doesn't matter that I made a commitment to live here for one year that turned into two, no matter if I had come to stay for ten years or forever, still—and this changes everything—I can always leave.

Too many times I did leave, I suppose, to take trips—some long, some short—to get away from the city, to see something different, to experience something new. It is a luxury many Harlemites cannot afford, nor can one who wants to pretend to live the Harlem experience. Worries for my safety, worries that I might not fit in and therefore might never get beneath the surface of Harlem, these were the concerns others had about my coming here. For me, this ought to have been the biggest misgiving: that I might not do Harlem justice, might not spend as much time here as I should, for mine is a restless soul and I have not been known to stay in one place for very long. Since I was eighteen years old, my Harlem address has been my longest-kept address.

My friend Ann Plymouth chided me about this. She said I was too often gone from here, either out of town or simply away visiting friends who lived downtown and wouldn't come up.

“Being here part time is not enough,” she said, and surely she was right, but no matter how many days and nights I spent here in a row, I could never know what they who live here know, nor truly feel what it is they feel.

I told Ann this, and she threw up her hands.

“Then why come here at all?” she shouted at me. “This ain't no sideshow so you can go back waving your arms around and telling your downtown friends, ‘I've seen it, I was there, yippee, and I survived.' We can suffer plenty without you pretending to be some great humanitarian from the Red Cross or something. This ain't no game for you to come up here and play at.”

It wasn't funny, what she was saying, and of course she was right; we had had this conversation many times already. But when she is mad at me and shouting like that she has a way of making a fist with her tiny hand and holding it at her side as if she is waiting for me to do or say something stupid so she can smack me. And I always do. But she never does.

She has the smoothest skin, I think, I have ever seen. To hold her hand, caress her face, or to touch her arm is to know the physical equivalent of innocence. And when she smiles she can brighten any dark room or dismal situation. But when she is mad at me and her face is a scowl, she is at once a tantrum-throwing three-year-old and a weathered old woman you've cut in front of at the supermarket checkout, all wrinkles and fury and venom. The smoothness vanishes from her face, and she is rage.

I tried not to laugh. I couldn't help it, quickly moving to defend myself.

“It's not you,” I said. “I'm not laughing at you. Honest, this time. It's just that you remind me of somebody.” And I told her this story.

One night I took a bus home from downtown to Harlem. I had spent most of the afternoon and evening in Chelsea. I had cadged a meal from my friends Mat and Pam and had stayed late but didn't want to spend the night. In the early midnight hours, I jumped onto the M-11 and rode the bus up to 133rd and Amsterdam.

The bus driver was a fellow named Gus. He is, or at least he was that night, one of those chatty drivers who, probably to avoid the boredom of routine, talks a lot into the PA system and announces each stop or each landmark as he approaches it. Jacob Javits Center. Forty-second Street. John Jay College. Lincoln Center. Seventy-second Street.

From Midtown into the eighties the crowd on the bus was a New York City crowd, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. But as the bus climbed into the nineties, the lighter colors got off. At Ninety-ninth Street, Gus made this droll announcement: “One Hundredth Street coming up next. Time for all you good white folks to jump off now and hurry on home.”

He said it to be funny, but only slightly. The blacks and Hispanics who would ride the rest of the way to Harlem recognized the truth in what he was saying, nodded at one another, and laughed, but clearly there was irritation in Gus's voice. Gus is a black man.

Sure enough, one by one, street by street, the white folks did all get off. By 113th Street, blacks and Hispanics were the only ones left. But at 104th Street there were still four young white people on the bus, only four, the four of them friends. They had been talking and laughing the whole way up since 66th Street and making a lot of noise on the bus as if it were theirs, and now as three of them stood to get off they began making plans to get together again. When the bus stopped, two jumped off right away. The third lingered too long, saying good-bye to the fourth. Gus grew impatient and refused to wait. When the doors closed, Gus would not open them again and the bus pulled away.

“Hey, hey! Wait a minute. I want to get off.” There was just the touch of panic in his voice, even though his friend was still on, probably a student at Columbia, and even though he would have only two blocks to wait and walk back.

Gus muttered loud enough for the folks in the front of the bus to hear.

“I got a schedule to keep,” he said. “I can't be waiting for you to do all that hugging and kissing back there. This is the bus to Harlem. This ain't no ride at Disneyland.”

The blacks and browns who were left laughed. And I laughed too, was laughing at Gus in fact when I laughed at Ann. She saw the connection but didn't think it was funny.

“Yeah,” she said. “That's just the way it is, isn't it? Nobody wants to be here.”

She glowered at me.