Still Life in Harlem (7 page)

I was indeed Harlem's prodigal son. I had taken my heritage, the parts I found useful, and had run away with it. I had chosen to live far away from home, far away from here, and squandered that birthright, some might say, while at the same time using it to my great advantage. By pulling myself out of Harlem, out of the world of blackness, I had done more than run away from home, away from this world; I had in fact abandoned it.

Here the elation blending with trepidation, and the relief commingling with tension, join with still another emotion even more powerful: guilt—and the questions that come with it. What might (here the ego speaks) this world have been had I remained in it? And what might I have been if I had stayed?

This last is the one that scares me.

I know now why these questions came rising from the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. This corner is my spiritual home. Pig Foot Mary, as much as she ought to be Harlem's patron saint, could very easily be my own personal patron.

Pig Foot Mary made her fortune here in Harlem. The foundation may have been laid elsewhere, but here on this very corner, on the site of an old newsstand, the walls went up. In the best sense of the word
exploit,
Pig Foot Mary exploited her resources, her drive, her ambition, her imagination, and her vision. At the same time—and here is where the word
exploit
turns a bit shady, and here I might be stretching things a little too far in trying to make a point—she exploited the very black people she had once served. She used them of course to make her fortune. She knew what they wanted and gave it to them. She took their trade. She took their money. It's only fair. But then, having come to Harlem, having exploited Harlem to the fullest measure, having become one of the wealthiest women in Harlem, she turned her back on the place and on the people. She got what she wanted and left the rest. She too, some might say, abandoned it.

She did not, however, turn her back completely. She had invested heavily in Harlem real estate, and although she no longer lived in the community, this community continued to support her. She became a wealthy absentee landlord, as unfeeling, it turns out, as any other. She was resolutely unsentimental about the condition out of which she had risen and unsympathetic about the plight in which many of her tenants still existed. Business being business, she cared, it seemed, not a whit for them or their circumstance. When the rent was slow in coming, she would write to her tenants, “Send it, and send it damn quick.”

She continued to profit from the black community, but who could blame her—either for the profiting or for the leaving? Who could blame her for wanting to spend her old age in quiet and respectable retirement, tasting the sweeter side of life, the sunnier side far away from the desperate poverty and the dangers of Harlem's slums?

Harlem was the promised land, it is true. Harlem held out to black men and women the promise of a world made in their own image, a world of black self-respect and possibilities unknown to them elsewhere. But for the average dweller of this neighborhood, this world was still unkind and very difficult. Harlem was still a ghetto, and much of it was a slum, crowded and dirty.

As I stood on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, I was planning, perhaps without knowing it, my own getaway, my own profit-taking.

I felt the weight of Harlem's history heavy upon my shoulders. I was thrilled to be here and dazzled by the radiance of the Harlem sun. Surely I was just a little bit blinded by it, as blinded as were they who came here dreaming of the glory of Harlem and brimming with hope, striving for a self-determination, self-awareness, and black identity that had not existed before, and which they found, many of them; and yet they were, as in my own way I was, planting without knowing it the seeds of the wasteland.

The wasteland has already been sown, already taken root, already sprouted. And I have helped to plant it. I ask myself again: what might this place have been had I, had Pig Foot Mary, had we all stayed?

I knew I would be in Harlem only for this short time and then gone. I did not come here to stay. This is not my world. I don't even know if I can pretend it is.

This world is the narrow world of Johnny Cannon doing his stabbing, the world of the man outside my window doing his beating. Although I was witness to both of these events, it is not a world I intimately know. I don't know it now that I have become this other thing.

This other thing that I have become is partly the fault of my mother, who when I started learning French in school began to call me her little Frenchman, and of my maniac father, who when I was young would joke by telling us that we were Jewish, Harris being, he said, a Jewish name. I didn't know he was joking. Sam the Tailor to whom we took our clothes to be mended was a Jew. His last name was Harris. Why not then my father, whose name likewise is Sam Harris?

I knew I was Catholic, of course. I never missed a Sunday Mass. But no one ever told me you couldn't be both Catholic and Jew. Or anything else, for that matter. My father also claimed that somewhere in his family someone was Chinese. My mother speaks of ancestors who came from Cuba.

From this bit of lunacy I figured I could define myself in any of several ways. I could be Jewish if I wanted to, no matter what the Jews say who define Jewishness not by what someone does to keep the faith, not by cultural or religious habits, but by the Jewish ancestry of one's mother. It's just a rule decided on. Stir up the Eddy Harris pot and you're likely to find almost anything. Other people's rules notwithstanding, I could define myself any way I pleased.

I admit I don't really know what it means to be one thing or another—black, Jewish, French. I doubt if anyone else does either. But someone is out there making the rules that stop us from being individuals and instead force us into groups, rules that steal away liberty and choice and shrink the realm of possibility.

Let me be free to choose: neighborhood, region, religion, taste in food. Let me honor the gods and cultures of my choice.

Culture
—a word, a concept, that is tossed around much these days but never really defined. I have, of course, my own definition: that which people do to help them get through the day, and which in doing as a group tends to define the group.

But does following the practices of a particular group make you one of the group? The tribal chief in an Inupiak village might say no. I would ask rather, Why not?

With cheese and red wine I can become a little bit French. Seder supper on Passover, and I become a little bit Jewish. Why not?

I have been Irish on St. Patrick's Day, I eat pasta twice a week, I have an ongoing love affair with Mexico. Who was there to tell the small boy in me that I couldn't participate?

The world is mine, I thought as a young boy. Its cultures can all be mine.

Since I was a small boy playing at make-believe, I have put myself into the shoes of many men and women. I have lived in my head a life of others. I have been at times a soldier fighting Indians on the American frontier, and then turned around to be a Plains Indian fighting against those same soldiers and against the theft of my land. From the books I read when I was a young invalid, I became black man white woman Asian African Eskimo.

I have lived under the mistaken belief all these years that this was what it meant to be truly American, that not only could I celebrate these cultures and these peoples but that I could somehow be them; that what they shared, I could share in as well, that I could be simply
citizen,
and by this one word so define myself: citizen first of country, citizen then of the wider world.

I never forgot that I was black, of course. Being black needed neither reminder nor effort but was evident each time I looked into the mirror, each time I sat down at the table with my family, each time my brother turned on the radio. Black culture surrounded us warmly and held the other cultures in place. Black culture was always there. It tethered us; we could—and would—always come back to that. In the meantime I grew up believing I could be anything or anyone I chose, and that I could do anything. I thought I could have it all, that I could be black and at the same time be more than just black. I have always wanted to be more.

I have never wanted to be limited.

But now I have come back—come back to limit myself—back to this culture, to this community, back to Harlem. But I have come back from a long way off, from such a long time gone in fact that Harlem is hardly mine anymore, hardly home now. I don't know if I belong here, if I can possibly fit here.

This was the worry, I think, of Clare Alexander, the woman in London who worried that skin color might not be enough, that size and stature might keep me safe but that safety might not be my only consideration. I wanted to live in Harlem to be among people like me, perhaps. But is skin color enough to indeed keep me safe and make me like them, to allow me to be accepted?

A cloud of confusion swirled about me there on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Suddenly I knew I didn't belong here. Suddenly I wasn't even sure I wanted to be in Harlem, why I had come, nor who I was.

Perhaps that is what I came to find out. Perhaps living this time here was my attempt to answer the who am I question.

 

 

Years ago I began to recognize my kinship

with all living beings.… I said then as I say now,

that while there is a lower class I am in it, while

there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there

is a soul in prison, I am not free.

—Eugene V. Debs, 1920

 

 

The streets of Harlem are paved no longer with gold. Instead the streets are filthy. The sidewalks are an obstacle course of garbage and dog shit. Mountains of trash sit piled up on just about every street and lure rats into the open to forage for food before they scurry back into the buildings they infest, buildings, many of them, that are very old and in need of repair. Even the newer ones seem somewhat decrepit.

Practically every street reeks of ruin, poverty, and despair, and you cannot move without the sense of danger forever present around you. The danger itself may come and go, may not even be real, but the sense of it never vanishes. As in the minds of the white folks too scared to venture this far uptown, Harlem might very well be the darkest, dirtiest, and most dangerous place on the face of this earth. If Harlem was ever once a paradise, it is certainly no longer that same paradise, certainly not in reality, but not even in the imagination.

Oddly enough, however, the myth remains somehow and somewhat intact. Mysteriously
Harlem,
both the word and the place, still resonates with magic in the ears of many.

There is a woman, Olivia Maxwell, who even now sits in her kitchen in a Chicago public housing apartment and romanticizes about a Harlem that once was, envisioning a place she never knew, a place that was long ago. Its mission, its raison d'être, was in part to give concrete hope to people like Olivia who live lives of nothing but hope—and dreams unfulfilled.

She is a very large woman taking care of two small grandchildren. Her daughter, their mother, is a cocaine addict who professes for the ninety-ninth time that she is trying to kick the habit—for real, this time, she says. In the meantime, Olivia takes care of the children in a small apartment where we once sat in the kitchen and drank tea.

It was wintertime, fiercely cold outside. The wind that lashed in from Lake Michigan was biting enough to tear your flesh, wicked enough to rattle the windows in Olivia's apartment and to sneak in through the cracks. With each new gust of wind came a whistling sound and a draft. The kitchen was by far the warmest room in the apartment. The door was kept closed, and all four gas burners on the stove were lighted for the heat they gave.

“I would offer you some cake to go with the tea,” she said, but she never completed the thought. She didn't need to.

This was life in a Chicago tenement, cold and cakeless. The furniture in the living room was old and ugly and had the look of a secondhand store showroom. Even at half the price it would have been too expensive. The kitchen table was part of a cheap dinette set that ought not last much more than a season or two beyond this one, but that had probably been around for ten and would probably go for ten more. The chairs did not match.

In the cupboard were rows and rows of canned soups, canned stews, canned vegetables, bags of potato chips, boxes of presweetened cereal. You can look in the cupboards of poor people all over the country, and this is what you will find. And most of it paid for with food stamps.

A roach crawled up the wall. I wouldn't have been surprised to see a mouse. Or worse.

Although Olivia's apartment was kept clean, the building itself was foul. It was a twenty-story high-rise. There were two elevators. They were old and slow. You could easily wait ten, maybe fifteen minutes for an elevator to come—if they both happened to be working. By then a small crowd would have gathered, and the elevator would be packed.

Better crowded than empty, for there was a decidedly dangerous feel to the place, especially to the elevator. Not only was it old and slow and run-down, and you felt all the while that it was about to break down, you also got the feeling that something else was about to happen. I don't know what. I don't know why. But there was the same sense of imminent danger that you feel often on the streets of Harlem. The lobby was crowded with many people just hanging around, many people coming and going, and there was a security guard stationed at a desk by the front door. He somehow added to the presence of danger when he should have alleviated it.

This is but one picture of black life, but an all too common one, and perhaps the picture that sticks most in the mind and becomes too often the representation of the whole of black life. It was definitely this image that Harlem as the new Jerusalem was supposed to alter or erase.