Still Life in Harlem (24 page)

I don't know what any others think or feel when they encounter these same groups of men blocking the sidewalk, but always inside me buzzed a little electric tingle of apprehension, almost fear, and always always there was the thought that I should go around them, cross the street maybe, find another route to take. Always always I chose to walk straight toward them. If they were blocking the sidewalk, I would walk right into the middle of the pack and part them, touch one of them on the shoulder or on the back, and say “Excuse me, fellows.”

It seems such a simple thing to do, perhaps not an easy thing, but a simple one. And you can see what it says: that I'm not afraid; or that if I am afraid, I'll not show it, I'll not act like it. But it says one thing more, and this one thing may be the truly important part: that those men on the corner, those men standing in a crowd on the corner—they are not to be deferred to, they are not to be treated as if they are to be avoided and feared and kept at a distance. In other words, I would not let them change my path, my thinking, or my way of being. I would not, in fact, let them change me, for to change would be all too easy.

If I were to act any other way, then like that other writer visiting Harlem I might as well buy the clothes that would make me fit in here, try to camouflage myself, walk the way a ghetto child is supposed to walk, talk the way a ghetto child is supposed to talk, and buy into the image as projected, the image as perceived and accepted. Then once more I would be wearing that look of surrender that confesses how much I believe what I have been told about them—and about myself.

I choose therefore not to believe all that I have been told. I prefer to see for myself. My father long ago had given me that choice. It lay in his mandate that I create for myself a world of my own, one that not only would make sense for me but that I could put my faith in. And I simply cannot believe in a world that seeks to diminish me or to erase me completely. So I preferred not to alter my walk, my talk, the way I look, or the paths I take.

Of course there was that one time not so long ago when I was left questioning the wisdom of my beliefs, my certainty, and my stubbornness.

I had taken an afternoon stroll and was walking along 149th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. A young man was talking to his girlfriend. He had that look of romantic bravado about him, and he took up more space on the sidewalk than he needed or had a right to.

She sat on the short stack of steps in front of her building. He sat on a box a little left of center along the path. Behind him, in one of those shallow wells that passes for a planter, a skinny tree tried to grow. The girlfriend was leaning back, resting on her elbows and arms, her legs stuck out straight, crossed at the ankles. The young man leaned forward over a tiny table where they had placed the two cans of soda they were drinking. They took up practically the entire sidewalk. Two other young men and a young woman stood nearby.

The boy looked up at me as I approached and then turned away nonchalantly. Without a word, he was speaking to me and telling me how this was to be played out; clearly I was supposed to go around them both. He didn't care that I would have to step either off the sidewalk and into the street or into the muddy little well. His only worry was that I not disturb him.

I wonder what I might have done had he been older, bigger, and looked stronger. I wonder what he might have done if the girl and a couple of his pals had not been there and he had been alone.

I knew what I was supposed to do and I did it. I stepped past this young boy and his young girl, stepped over her outstretched legs and tipped the little table with my knee. I excused myself as I passed through, held my hands out in a gesture of peace, and apologized for almost knocking the table over. It wasn't enough.

The boy jumped up. Everybody else froze. I kept walking.

“Hey,” he shouted at me. I had gone but three steps. I stopped and turned. He was glowering.

“Yeah, man, what?”

“Why don't you go around?” he said. “You don't be stepping through my shit like that.”

Again, I said I was sorry. Still it wasn't enough. Now he had a point to prove, and I could tell he had a point to prove by the way he kept looking at the friends around him.

“Naw, man,” he said. “Sorry don't cut it.”

I walked straight to him then. I stood over him and he who had felt himself in command now was nervous.

“What's it going to be then?” I asked him. “What more do you need?”

He didn't say a word. He felt the threat I posed and skipped any intermediate stages that might normally have filled the next few moments. He went straightaway far from the realm of reason. He lifted the bottom of his sweatshirt and revealed to me the pistol he had stuck in the waistband of his baggy pants. He never pulled the gun. He simply showed it to me—as if showing it would be enough.

It is one of the gestures, it seems, of the streets nowadays. I had first seen it from the window of my apartment. A fight had broken out in the street below, and I had stuck my head out to listen more closely, and of course to watch the action. I have no idea what the fight was about, don't know who won. Possibly there was no real winner. There was no real action. There was only a lot of shouting until one young man lifted the tail of his shirt and showed the gun.

“Come on, then,” he shouted in his final series of taunting. “You want some of this?” That's when he exposed himself. That's when he showed the pistol.

The other man backed down, backed away, turned away, walked away.

I thought at the time that, if ever facing a similar situation, a similar pistol stuck in a similar waistband and a similar offer to back down, I would have backed down too. It was the prudent thing to do, the easy thing to do. But when my turn came, I all of a sudden didn't think anymore that the easy way was the best way.

Perhaps after all, when my turn finally came, and it was upon me now, I simply stopped thinking, wasn't thinking at all, in fact. I was just feeling.

I looked at the pistol. I looked at the man behind the thing. He was just a boy. He was, like my young buddy Henry, far too young to die, this youngster, this young gangster, this child who was some mother's son and far too young to die in the wars that raged nowadays in these streets. He would never live to be an older man if someone didn't teach him a different way.

It didn't have to be me who taught him. I would have preferred that it not be. I would have preferred not to have been on that street on that particular day, when and where a boy too young to have a legal drink in a bar had the power of serious injury and even the power of life and death over me. I would have preferred to have been at home, an iced bucket of champagne beside my bed, a little osetra caviar and smoked Nova Scotia salmon to tide me over until dinner. But there I was. I had been chosen to teach him.

It didn't have to be much. He merely had to learn that he had a choice.

I wasn't thinking any of this at the time. Of course not! You don't have but a second and a half to come up with a course of action before one is thrust upon you. It is better, I have found, to do the thrusting yourself.

“What are you going to do with that thing?” I said. “Are you going to shoot me? Or are you just trying to scare me?” He only glowered.

“Look, man,” I said. “Any pussy with a pistol can scare somebody. Hell, any pussy with a pistol can shoot somebody too. It's no big deal.”

I took the last step toward him. He stepped back.

“What else you got?” I asked him. “Is this what you're about? Is this
all
you're about? What do you do when the gun's empty?”

Until now this youngster perhaps had never been asked to consider. Maybe he had never been offered any choices, and he did what he did and he was who he was in large part because the world seemed so ordained for him, so circumscribed. He did what everyone around him did—no more, no less.

Perhaps there had been no one to tell him that his world did not have to resemble an anthropological study, and that it did not have to devolve into some kind of Darwinian microcosm in which impulsive violence reigns almost as a survival tool: an avenue, it can be said, to status.

A shot at survival: that seems to be, in an anthropological sense, what it is all about, all of it, a chance to survive. We're talking here about a type of survival that is different from personal survival and has to do more with something that is locked away in our genes, a tendency toward survival of the fittest—which is not to say best or brightest or strongest or bravest, but which has to do entirely, it seems, with the attainment of those almost arbitrary things of a given place and era which afford an increase in mating opportunities. By mating often, anthropological man and the apes exhibit what lie deeply embedded in the genetic makeup: the desire and perhaps the need to survive to the next round. The genes that survive are the genes of this game's winners.

The triumphant, of course, are those men who win in the competition for reproductive success. That's what it is all about: access to women, genetic survival. Plainly put, then, life among men is a contest for women, and the winner wins not with muscle, money or might, although these might be part of the equation and at various times certainly have been. The winner wins with status.

In every human society, as in the society of chimps, males compete with one another for status. To gain and guard respect are among the desperate desires of men and manhood, and a man will go very far indeed to be a Man, to exhibit his manhood, to earn respect and to counter and avenge any signs and acts of disrespect directed at him. This in large measure explains the threat of violence that seems to hover forever near in the interaction of men, violence that cannot always be labeled and brushed aside as social pathology. It is what men do. Reproductive success depends on it.

What I knew then, of course, was what I knew from long ago: when you find a man who has killed a man he knows, chances are that the murder took place in front of witnesses. Violence, it seems, often requires an audience.

On the street that afternoon, we were not alone, this boy and I. His friends were there with him. They were watching and listening when I said the things I said to him, and their presence worried me more than anything else. On these streets the war rages in part because so little else exists to reinforce a man's image of himself. Respect and reputation are as important as they are anywhere else. In fact it can be argued that respect and reputation are everything, since there
is
so little else. Status is hardly secured in the same ways as it is in the outside world. The rules are different here. Words are weapons. Every slight is an insult. An insignificant dispute can lead to a beating, can lead to a killing, and a man is a man only if he can stand up and back up his words with action. The threat of violence runs through every encounter.

My young man could easily have felt his reputation under siege by the way I spoke to him. But if I backed down now, my respectability would have vanished. Without meaning to, without thinking, I had managed to back him and me into a corner.

He had possibly never had anyone to teach him that he didn't have to do what the others might do, or what they might have him do, that he could create a world and a way of his own. Maybe there had been no one to tell him how; no one to give him a sense of himself, no one to demand of him that he be unafraid—no one simply to demand of him what he would not think to demand of himself. For both our sakes, I wished someone in his younger life had showed him. Since there hadn't been, it looked like I had been chosen to be that someone.

“You don't have to use that thing,” I said to him. “You don't have to be afraid not to.”

By the look on his face, I had now confused him.

“Just hold it for a second,” I told him. “And think about what I just said. You can pull that pistol and you can use it, or you can not use it. Whatever you choose, it's your choice, so think about it first. And whatever you do, don't do it because you're afraid not to.”

He stood motionless for a long moment. Slowly he relaxed and let his shirttail cover over the butt of his pistol. He didn't shoot me.

It could be that his cooler nature had prevailed. It could also be that I had perplexed him. Or maybe I had gotten him to think for just a second, to try and find a better way than the instinctive way. A better way? I don't really know, but at least a different way. The different ways are the ways that most people don't try. They are the ways maybe that need to be taught.

I came to this realization one night in autumn—my first autumn. I was only a witness. Nothing happened to me that night, in fact nothing happened very much at all that night. I was simply walking home. It wasn't so very late, somewhere between twelve-thirty and one o'clock in the morning. Three women were gabbing in front of the apartment building where they lived at the corner of Convent and 128th. A young child was riding a bicycle in the middle of the street. The bike was a little too big for the kid, he was a little awkward on it, and a car was coming. It came slowly enough. There seemed to be no immediate danger, but all of a sudden the mother of the cycling child screamed.

“Get your ass out that street,” she cried, and the little kid panicked at the suddenness of the mother's shrieking. He pedaled as fast as he could and aimed his bike for the sidewalk and hit the curb. He nearly fell, and I laughed a little.

My thoughts as I strolled that night had been a thousand miles to the west. All at once I was brought back to Harlem. All at once I noticed that this kid was not the only kid on this street at one o'clock in the morning. There were four or five others. These were their mothers, these women chatting on the street. And the children were playing nearby.

At noon, or at six in the evening, it would have been a pleasant scene, the kind of homey snapshot that might grace a small community's church calendar. As it was, I had thought nothing of it at first, for the scene was an all too common one in Harlem, even at this late hour: children playing, mothers hanging out, everyone watching everyone else's children. But for some reason the lateness of the night hit me then, and I wondered why this woman was yelling at this child for playing in the street when the child, to my way of thinking, ought not to have been out playing anywhere at that hour—not in the street, not on the sidewalk, not anywhere. Tomorrow was a school day. That kid and all those kids should have been in the house, in bed, fast asleep.