Still Life in Harlem (27 page)

Without a word, just being there, they offered us—I don't want to say they offered us something to aspire to, for a fancy car is no big deal, nor is being a sports star, but they offered us choice, a way to be that we could accept or reject. There was choice.

I looked into my closet and I pulled out the silk trousers and the lavender shirt.

 

 

 

When I was a small boy, the black men I knew always seemed to dress well, maybe even better than they could afford to dress. They always looked good, always had a certain style about them. I never knew why, never even questioned. Now I believe they were making a statement. Dressing well, looking good: these were more than matters of taste and habit. They were acts of defiance that showed in the way the men walked, in the way they talked, in the clothes they wore. There was a sense of dignity in the way they carried themselves, in how they showed themselves to the world.

It has never been easy to be black in this country. You had to do some small thing—many things, in fact, large and small—to keep hammering, to keep surrender one more day away.

Dressing well wasn't much, perhaps—you cannot save the world, I know, with the clothes you wear—but it was something. Probably with such silly things you cannot offer much hope either, but you do what you can, no matter how small, no matter how ridiculous, to keep the cruelty of the beast at bay. And maybe—just maybe—you can offer a little choice to those who seem to have none. It takes a certain naïveté to believe in hope, to believe that the world can be changed, that the world one day
will
be changed.

Nowadays the young men of Harlem dress as if to hide themselves. They wear costumes of cool and suits of rebellion, hooded sweatshirts, baggy pants, shoes big enough to drown in. It is an effort, it seems, to speak in a loud and angry voice to the rest of the world, but with their hoods up, their shoulders hunched, shuffling low as they walk, they seem as well to be hiding, trying hard to be invisible to a world that already ignores them. They seem to have lost the naïveté to believe in hope. In fact they seem to have lost hope itself.

There is a look in the eye that says it, that says the hope is all but gone. It is the look of resignation and surrender. It is the look that says, This is how it is. It is the look of bitter disappointment and shame, the look of being ashamed for mankind if this
is
in fact how things are and how they are going to be.

It is the look that Johnny Cannon wore, the look that stared back from the mirror at Wilson Clark, the look, I'm sure, of the man who beats the woman outside my window. It was the look that Eliot Wilson was about to put on, not that day on the corner by the Metro North station, but that day as we walked up Park Avenue. He was almost tired enough to put it on, but not quite yet. His naïveté had almost left him, the same as it had already left the woman whose kid rode his bike in the street at one in the morning. She no longer seemed to care.

As I think back over my time in Harlem, I remember very clearly the expression of the woman who had offered to lend her body to me in exchange for two dollars. It haunts me. I see it in my dreams, that look in her eyes. I think of it, oddly enough, not as a ghostly warning of death. In her eyes there was despair, that is certain. There was also a tiny light I could not see at the time, and in my memory it shines faintly, but distinctly, not a dim light fading out, but a dim light trying to come back on. She may have given up, but she was fighting to get the light back on, fighting to get back into the game. She was not through yet. There was still a bit of naïveté within her. It may not have been in her eyes, but it was in her walk. I cannot forget how she sashayed when she walked toward me, how she tried to look alluring and desirable. You have to start somewhere. And then you do what you can.

I keep thinking of Hans Hegeman. I think of Wilma Bishop too, sitting on the front stoop, watching, caring, showing those children playing that she cares.
Someone
has to care, she told me. Someone has to stay and watch over them.

And I think of Ann Plymouth, who, so she says, likes to have me and my funny clothes around.

“It's not just the clothes,” she told me. “It's you and where you're going, it's you and where you've been. When you come around, you light up my child's world with the stories you tell. You let her know that the world she sees every day is not all there is.”

Ann had reprimanded me once for my coming here and pretending to be poor.

“No, that is not your value here,” she said. “We already know how to be poor. We don't need somebody from the outside coming here and feeling all sorry for us and everything. We don't need somebody coming up here to tell us that the world out there doesn't mean anything and that we shouldn't want what we don't already have. What we need is somebody to show us that there
is
a world out there and it's our world too and that we should not settle so easily and so blindly for this one. That's what I need you for. That's what my child needs you for. Otherwise we are doing just fine without you.”

Ann Plymouth opened my eyes, and when I looked more closely I could see that all is not death and dying in Harlem, all is not surrender. Harlem has other heroes too who have remained and continue to fight, or who left and returned. Harlem has other patron saints who stand on the pedestal beside Pig Foot Mary. There are the thousand stories you hear of men and women like Bessie Delany, a Harlem dentist who during the Great Depression gave food to those of her patients who were hungry and had no money, and who in twenty-seven years as a dentist for the poor people of Harlem never once raised her rates; and the many others like her, some that we've all heard of, the countless others who are nameless to us. They all, like Pig Foot Mary, had a choice. Bessie Delany elected to stay.

Hans Hegeman had the same choice as Bessie Delany, the choice to leave or stay. He got out. He had been born in Harlem and raised in Harlem, but he had gotten onto the pathway that leads out and away from Harlem. He had gone to an elite boys' academy called Collegiate School, and went on to Princeton University and to law school at Columbia. He got a job as a corporate lawyer, he worked in the district attorney's office, he worked for the public defender. None of these jobs, however, fit who he was. After a while none of them, he said, made any sense. It wasn't what he felt comfortable doing, so with his brother Ivan he came back to Harlem and started an after-school program in the yard, in fact, of the very building where he and Ivan had lived as boys.

The program was initially designed to give kids in the neighborhood a place to be instead of on the streets with the dope sellers and the users. Eventually it grew into an alternative school program. There are more than just a few of these programs in Harlem, attempting, all of them, to do what the public schools have failed to do. They call them storefront schools.

I asked Hans Hegeman to give me a job. He did. He gave me a chance to do what little I could. It wasn't much, but it was the finest thing I have ever done.

Two times a week I went to help out in the after-school program. Most of the kids stay until the early evening. The extra two hours gives them a little more time in a safe place, less time on the streets, still more time to learn something new. I offered a writing class to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds and helped them find ways to express themselves on paper.

When I first got them, three or four lines of writing was all I could coax out of them. By year's end, it was difficult to get them to stop when each session was over.

It was to this school, East Harlem School at Exodus House, that I was headed when I met Eliot Winston for the first time. Now when I think of Eliot, I think always of Hans Hegeman.

“Our mission,” Hans told me, “extends beyond formal education. Our roots are here in the community, so we know the narrowness of this world. A lot of these kids would never think to go below Ninety-sixth Street just to walk around or have a look or go to a museum. It's got to be a school trip, and that's only a once-or-twice-a-year thing. To them it's a completely different world down there below Ninety-sixth Street, another strange group of people they've had no opportunity to figure out. They don't bother us, so we don't bother them: that's how they feel. Most of them don't go into any type of analysis, wondering how the people downtown affect the situation up here. They don't have the luxury and they don't have the desire to engage in that kind of thinking.”

And it seems the folks downtown don't have the desire either.

“People downtown only think about these things at election time or when there's a problem,” Hans said. “For most people downtown, the people up here are the others. These are sweet wonderful kids, but the folks downtown don't make the effort to find them. The folks downtown don't go out of their way to do anything for them. Unless somebody cares—unless we care—they'll all just get lost.”

He seems not to be a sentimental man. He makes deals with the drug dealers on the street so the kids can walk to school unmolested.

“If these kids had some way of finding out about the wider world out there, they might get the shot at it,” he said. “But man, it's hard. It's incredible to me the hoops I have still to jump through at the age of thirty-five with two Ivy League degrees just to get anything accomplished, and it's scary to me knowing what they're going to have to face. And they'll need every single advantage they can possibly get.”

Hans Hegeman. Ann Plymouth. Wilma Bishop.

There is a choice to make; there is always a choice.

We like our choices and decisions to seem like great battles that rage within us, as if what we write are epics to last the ages, as if by what we do and think we carry the weight of the universe upon our shoulders.

I look from my window and I think that maybe it's true, that maybe white silk trousers are important, that maybe what I am about to do will have a huge impact on the destinies of mankind. So I would like to believe, but we do what we do, I think—no matter what we tell ourselves and one another, no matter what we pretend—we do what we do to save our own poor souls. We do what we do because it's who we are.

I looked from my window, that night of nights, and it all crystallized before me, and the darkness provided for me a moment of calm, despite the jumble that had been made of my thoughts and feelings, despite all I had seen and done, heard and felt, despite what I knew I was about to do. The darkness provided for me a moment of utter clarity. I looked out through the shadow of that late night and early morning, and for a long second there was rage—rage enough to be blinded by.

A man was beating a woman.

In the few moments of my indecision I told myself that enough was enough, told myself that I wanted no longer to be black if this is how black men behaved, told myself that I wanted nothing more to do with a world without beauty in it, and that cared not for beauty. It had been beautiful and joyful once, but this—this man beating this woman—this is what we've let it all come down to: this man beating this woman, the drug dealers lining too many streets in the neighborhood, women willing to sell themselves for a pittance and men willing to buy them, the rats and the roaches, the joblessness, the fatherless children and the mothers who do not care, the far too many people who do not seem to care.

I told myself that I refused to be black—as if I really could, as if I am black because of the color of my skin, because of the things I do, and not instead because of the ways in which the world sees and reacts to and treats that color.

I refused to be black, as if there were freedom in that refusal, as if by rejecting I could likewise reject any responsibility I might have, as if I were an island not at all connected beneath the surface to the lands all around me.

I refused to be black because suddenly I could no longer see the beauty that is out there, the beauty in Wilma Bishop's caring, the beauty in Ann Plymouth's smile and in the way she wants me for her child, the beauty in all that Hans and Ivan and Bessie Delany have done and are doing and will ever do.

But the water boils and the bubbles burst across the surface, and I open my eyes and I look into the street below and I can see more clearly.

My father asks if I regret the life I have lived, and I answer him. He asks what I intend to do with this life I am so happy with, and for this one I have no reply because I am caught, the same as we all are caught, between our two lives, our two histories: the ones we've lived, and the ones we might have lived; and caught as well between the world of theory and the world of practice, our public selves and the selves we live with in private.

When I open my eyes, the man is still beating the woman. When I open my eyes, I cannot close them again until I decide who I am.

There are ways of coming back. There are ways to make a presence known and felt. Perhaps to someone a visible presence might count for something.

It is awfully naive of me to think that my coming back to Harlem means anything to anyone but me and perhaps to the few people whose lives have touched mine, naive to think that my white-silk-trousered presence makes any difference at all, that Harlem would not be what it has become if I had stayed. Perhaps it is the opposite that is true, that I would not be who I am if I had remained here. My sensibilities would be different, and all that I have seen along these streets and from this window would seem normal to me. There is beauty in Harlem, much beauty in being black, but my vision has been clouded by the outside world I have seen and become a part of. I have trouble seeing the beauty sometimes.

No, it is not outside my window this night. There is nothing lovely in one man stabbing another, no joy in a man beating a woman, but beauty does exist on these streets somewhere, and the only way to find it, perhaps, is simply to look for it, perhaps even more simply to create it.