Still Life in Harlem (4 page)

I had been to the past many times before. My father used to take me there when I was a boy. He was looking, I think, for a world that no longer was—the past,
his
past, his former world that had in fact vanished a long time ago, a world that in his memory at least was somehow more everything: more fun, more difficult, harsher, softer, simpler, in a way more alive. Together we would search the scenes of his younger days, the places where he had played and gone to school, fought with the boys and toyed with the girls.

But the scenery by the time I got to it had all turned to ashes and ruin. Nothing was as it had once been, of course; nothing ever is. All had crumbled away. You could see the changes washing across my father's face as we drove around the old neighborhood. The laughter from a long time ago that had been ringing in his ears began to fade. The smile he carried at the anticipation of going home again flattened out across his features into an expression bordering on sadness. His eyes had been sparkling like a child's. Now they dimmed a little. The wonder that had been in them was squeezed away in a wince of melancholic pain. The memories were within him still, but none of the people he knew were still living there. No one there knew him. There was no physical proof left that he had ever been there, or that he had quite simply ever been.

He looked at me as if I were his proof. He stared at me much too long with an expression like that of a deranged man or a demon. I have never liked that look. I knew what it meant.

He bit his lip. He shook his head. He asked me to pull up at the corner so he could step into the liquor store. In a little while he would be nearly drunk.

No! Nothing was the same, not on this trip into his past, not on the last one; nor would it be on the next one. Everything had changed, even the response to my father's particular brand of lunacy.

My father is a maniac. Not long ago this crazy man and I took a drive down to visit his sister Leola. She lives still in St. Louis, not very far in fact from the neighborhood where she and my father had been children. She has a nice house, kept up after all these years in a neighborhood that has deteriorated in time around her, and in her backyard there are fruit trees and a vegetable garden. She grows peaches and tomatoes that, while I'm upstairs visiting, my father likes to steal.

When we left my aunt's house we took a drive, as I knew we would, through the old neighborhood. This time, on the way out the smell of barbecue caught us in its grip and lured us with its enchantment. It defined our mission for the rest of the hour.

“Somewhere around here,” my father said, “somebody's making our lunch. I think, I think, I think.” He put his head out the window and started sniffing.

His smile was coming back.

We drove around awhile. Finally, on the corner of St. Louis Avenue and Newstead, in the derelict parking lot of a discount food store that had notices all over the windows shouting that food stamps were accepted, we found three women sitting in the shade of a makeshift canopy. They were bathing in the cloud of smoke that came from the huge metal barrel behind them that they had turned into the barbecue pit, and were fanning themselves.

As we drove past, my father eyed them carefully. Without turning toward me he said, “What do you think? Do you think it's all right?” Sometimes he can be quite squeamish about what he eats. Sometimes it seems he'll eat almost anything.

“It'll be all right,” I said. “I'm hungry.”

We parked the car up the street and walked back to the corner. I walked not quite at his side, but a step or two behind him. I was the sidekick. I have always been the sidekick.

I have been this man's sidekick, in fact, since I was four years old and couldn't walk. I was born with a leg and foot deformity, and when I was four it was thought that surgery might correct the problem. During the long convalescence my father would throw me onto his shoulders and carry me wherever he went. We spent many hours together in Gracie's Tavern, on a corner not far from where we lived in those days.

It was a dimly lit place, if I remember correctly. In a corner there was a machine that was like a little bowling alley. My father would stand me up there and let me hurl the balls at those pretend bowling pins, which would retract violently when the ball hit the right spots on the table. Bells would ring, lights would flash, my father laughed. Then we would sit at the bar.

My father drank beer. I drank soda. I would sit on a stool next to him while he flirted with the barmaids or joked with the men. Every once in a while someone would say something to me. I was happy being my father's sidekick.

Since then we have traveled much together, this old man and I, though not as much as I would have liked. But then, he is not my friend the way he is friends with my brother Tommy. We don't share the same interests the way they do, don't talk about the same things. We are not alike at all, it seems, but more alike I suppose than I would ever have guessed. In fact one of the reasons I travel the way and as much as I do is that I learned it from my father. I am far better at it now than he ever was. I have shown him more in places he had been to without me than he ever saw on his own. In many ways he should be the sidekick, but he's not. He is still
the Man.

He is now an eighty-year-old-plus man. He is to me still and has always been the embodiment of black manhood.

No, that's not quite right. He is the embodiment to me of manhood. When I grow up, I would like to be very much like him, although it can be argued that in a sense he has yet to grow up himself.

We sauntered to the corner, father and son, like two desperadoes in a Western. I stopped at the barbecue stand. My father didn't. He rounded the corner and looked over the scenery.

Many of the houses in the neighborhood looked as if they had been burned out and were boarded up. Most of them were empty. In the space between those houses, the yards were overgrown with weeds and debris. Where people still lived, the houses, the doors and windows, were protected with bars. Looking at this scene, I found it hard to tell if the bars were to keep people in or to keep people out, and just who, in fact, was the prisoner here. My father bit his lip and put on a face half sad, half sickened at the sight.

In the derelict parking lot, three men doing nothing leaned against the wall of the grocery shop. My father went to say something to them, probably about the demise of the old neighborhood, maybe to tell them how grand it once was here or to ask if anybody knew whatever happened to old Cootie Johnson who used to live on this corner, or what became of the tavern that used to be across the street. In a few minutes he had them all laughing. When he came back to where I stood trying to decide what to eat, he was wearing his big grin.

He said to the ladies sitting there, “All right now, baby. Give it up or show me where it is.”

Nobody moved a muscle. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Knowing him as I do, I thought he was making some crude sexual innuendo—but again, knowing him as I do, he could have been speaking the language of a holdup man demanding the money or the safe where they hid it. Whatever he was saying, I laughed and he laughed. These three ladies were not in the least bit intimidated or amused, but clearly they didn't know what to make of this old man.

I didn't know what to make of him myself. I'm not sure I have ever known. But I watched with tremendous admiration as he glided into this world with the ease of a native well versed in its ways. The trouble was: these ladies didn't seem to be a part of the world he knew.

The world he knew was not an easy one, certainly. It was riddled with strife and with the struggle for justice and for fair treatment. In creating the world we now know, the larger society put restrictions on fairness, but none on hostility and resentfulness. My father has never been an idealist; he could never afford that comfort. Neither could he allow himself to surrender to the lure or to the luxury of defeat. He filled his world instead with the kind of laughter that made the bitterness bearable. A good time, he used to tell me, was always just a smile or a joke away.

“The white folks,” he said, “have such petty concerns. We get the monumental ones. That's why we laugh louder and party harder.”

He speaks of a sense of unity that once existed, a sense of common struggle. Now, he says, it's every man for himself.

“It's always been like that,” he tells me. “Every man for himself. Every
black
man for himself. Now there's something different about it. We used to like ourselves more. We used to like each other better. We used to have a certain lightness about us, and with all the evil shit going on around us, we knew how to enjoy who we were and what we had.”

I watch my father, and he moves as if there is still that unity in blackness, still that enjoyment.

I looked around and I saw that the world my father knew was no more. Not that it mattered to him whether that world was gone or whether these women were a part of it; he carried that world with him always. He was who he was, and he was not going to try to be anything else.

It might have mattered to the women, though. They looked at him as if he were crazy.

When they had served us what we wanted, my father took his lunch away and went to talk to the men leaning against the wall by the grocery store. I watched him walk away. He is indeed an old man now, but he looks twenty years younger. And he acts it.

I spoke to the women.

“Don't mind him,” I said. “He just remembers a time when being black was fun—a lot of fun.”

I look at this old man who is my father and watch him negotiate his way into this world that I am no longer familiar with. I don't know how familiar with it he still is, since all of the world he knew has changed, but he glides effortlessly here. He seems to know these people, he speaks their language, and they seem to know him as one of their own. He talked to the men in the parking lot for over half an hour.

How much am I merely my father's son, and how much again am I actually my father? When these people see me, do they see the father in the son, do they see the father's world and his experience in my face, in my being and in my bearing? Or am I just the pussycat to the panther, related but not at all a part of this world, not at all belonging to it? Do they look at me and see something familiar, look at me and say, as they say in the South, “I know your people”? Do they see one of their own in me? And am I still in fact, after all this time away, one of their own, and can I make it here?

I get a headache when I try to sort it all out, but these are the questions that drove me to want to live in Harlem—to find out not so much who I am, for I think I know the answer to that one, but where exactly, if anywhere, I might fit in. Who are my people, and about whom should I care the most?

And is in fact any of this really mine?

 

 

 

I watch my father and I am reminded of and I see all that is beautiful about being black and about being a man and about being, I guess, a black man. Despite my protestations about not wanting to be seen as anything more or less than just a man, I
am
a black man—whatever that means—for I am a man and I am definitely black. Or so says the mirror.

I am a black man, say the people who see me, and in large measure we are or we become who other people tell us we are. We are what we are seen to be. We are what we allow ourselves to be treated as. We come to fit, we sanction and give credence to, most of us, the realities we let others create for us.

A distressing letter came for me the other day. A dear friend, Colin Schmidt in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wrote to me and relayed a bit of conversation he overheard his wife having with his daughter. The conversation was about me.

Colin is a white man. He is married to a white woman. She had previously been married to a black man and had two children with him before the divorce and her remarriage. Colin has been trying to raise those two black children as his own. He has been more of a father to them than the black man whose blood courses through their veins, but he is constantly aware of that blood as he has tried to shepherd these two daughters through the maze that is the struggle for racial identity. It is no easy task there in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa is not quite the bastion of diversity and tolerance and liberal thinking that it pretends to be.

I visited them once in order to lend something of a black male presence to the house. There aren't many black people where they live, and I was the first black
man,
I think, to set foot inside their home.

After my weekend there, so the letter says, the evening of the day I left, in fact, one daughter said something to her mom about me and black men in general. The mom and the elder daughter echoed the same sentiment. The mom replied, “Most black men are not like Eddy Harris.”

I don't know what that means, but reading the letter puts me in mind of another friend, Jonathan Hunt, who lives in London and who once said to me, quite innocently, “Eddy, you are the whitest black man I have ever known.”

Who makes these rules about what a black man is or is supposed to be, and why the narrow definition of acceptable blackness?

You are, I suppose, what you think and what you do and what you try to do. I am, so the mirror tells me and so the world that doesn't know me tells me, a black man. Therefore aren't the things I do and think and try the things that black men do, since I am a black man—and like all black men, never just a man?

Because I
am
a black man, because of the rules of the larger culture in which I am trapped, I am required to be like all the others who share my shade. Yet in this same culture we do not seem to expect all white folks to think and act white, nor any of the others, however we define them—race, family, neighborhood, right down to shoe size. We do not require that they act and think as the others in their community.