Still Life in Harlem (9 page)

I have lived in Harlem so far now for almost one full year.… Mice and roaches are conspiring to take over my kitchen and nothing I do seems to help. They can't be after food; there is nothing here to eat. There is nothing in the refrigerator, only staples on the cupboard shelves: rice, beans, flour for biscuits, cereal for breakfast, a chicken frozen in the freezer. Winter this year promises to be especially long and severe. As its approaching shadow lengthens and expands, my money supply continues to shrink. I have $1,293 in the bank; no immediate prospects for more. $1,293 is not much money in New York City. The rent is more than half of what I have and due in eight days. And there are other bills to pay. Do I pay the bills or do I pay the rent? Or should I buy groceries? I know I am not, but these days I feel very very poor.

—November 22

I was really living the life now, I thought.

What I didn't think, and what I now know to be true, was that I was slipping deeper and deeper into the trap.

As money became more of a problem, I became less and less prompt with the rent payments, but by then I cared nothing about the landlords and their cash flow, no more than they cared about me and mine—apart, that is, from my ability to pay the rent.

Send it, and send it damn quick:
Pig Foot Mary all over again.

Harlem is as Harlem was. There is little difference between Pig Foot Mary and Mr. Levine; there never has been. Harlem is not and has never been paradise—not with white landlords, not with black landlords. Harlem is still Harlem, a hard place to be.

One night, in the middle of the night, my father asked what would seem for him a very unlikely question. He wanted to know why I wanted to live in Harlem.

It was about three o'clock in the morning. We had been up all day and all night. Now we were racing to get back home and speeding toward St. Louis. We had been out traveling again; I was once more and forever the sidekick.

I have never seen my father so thoughtful as he was that night, as if, like an old man in a melodrama, he was anticipating some disaster or expecting to die.

After I had found the right apartment in the right part of Harlem, while the building managers had the place cleaned and did whatever they do that prevents you from moving in straightaway, I had gone home to St. Louis. When I went back to New York to sign the lease, to hand over money, and to collect the keys, my father had come with me. He had wanted to look over the apartment, see what I was up to, and make sure everything was all right. He still worries about me. I guess I will always be his little boy, just as I will forever be the sidekick.

To find this apartment I had tried adverts in the newspapers, I had tried calling the numbers on the For Rent signs I had seen when I walked the neighborhoods, I had tried asking strangers on the street. Finding an apartment in New York City is tough enough; finding one in Harlem seemed quite impossible. But I knew somebody who knew somebody who used to live in Harlem, and she had used a Harlem agency to help her find an apartment. I got the name of that agency, and they helped me too.

There is, of course, a hefty fee attached to using a rental agency: an amount equal to one month's rent. Along with the agency fee you need an additional month's rent for a security deposit, as well as the first month's rent itself. You need, in short, a fairly good chunk of money to get a place to live in Harlem, and you need it every time you want to move. If you've not got a lot of money, you always start off in a hole. If you've not got a lot of money, you can easily find yourself stuck in a place because you can't afford to move.

I have the answer now when people ask—and people do ask me—why, considering the reputed plight of the place, Harlemites don't just move away. I tell them that moving away is sometimes harder than it seems.

My father and I left the offices of the management company on Third Avenue. I had signed the lease, had taken the keys, had surrendered the rent and the security deposit. But we still had to go back to Harlem to the rental agency and pay them their fee. My father decided not to come along. He wanted to walk the neighborhood a bit. So I dropped him off on the corner of 145th and St. Nicholas and told him I would be back for him in forty minutes.

When I returned, my father was standing in front of a liquor store midway up the block. He was wearing baggy brown trousers. The cuffs dragged on the ground. A half pint of cheap bourbon was stuck in his back pocket. From time to time he would take a little swig from it. The rest of the time he stood there with his hands behind his back, stood there observing everything, just stood there trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

He wore a baseball cap that day with the bill turned around not quite backward as the current style dictated, but rather sideways. Instead of looking like a tough guy hanging on the streets, he looked almost demented, the more so because he just stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet, his hands behind his back, doing nothing else.

Movement is what makes New York City. To stand still in the middle of the block for more than a few minutes is not often done here. Apart from shifting his weight, my father's only movement was to now and again take the bottle from his pocket and have another sip. He was about as inconspicuous as an icicle in July. He did not look like he belonged here.

He told me later that he wanted to look a little crazy so nobody would bother him. He had gotten his wish. People passing stepped well away from him before going by, probably half expecting him to ask for a handout. He had not shaved that morning, his shirt was not tucked in very neatly, and all of the buttons were not done up. His big belly pushed through the opening. He might very easily have awakened recently from a night in a doorway and now was drinking away his hangover, begging loose change for his breakfast.

That is the image he offered this day to the world around him. To me, watching him from across the street, he looked at first very comical, and as I laughed at him I wondered if this could possibly have been the same man who had given me my sense of sartorial style. He had always kept himself so neat, was always so well-dressed. There was a flair about him, an élan that I attributed to all black men, for the black men of my youth—or at least in my memory—always wanted to look good. They would not dream of ever leaving the house, except maybe when laboring manually, unless they thought they were sharply dressed.

Those days are long gone now. My father is a little out of practice. He lives most of his life these days lounging around the house in a bathrobe.

I watched him for a few minutes and remembered the old man when he was young, all pride and dignity. Now he seemed a little silly, easily disregarded. I laughed for a few minutes at him and at the way people looked at him until suddenly I stopped. Seeing him like this and knowing how he used to be, the sight of him wasn't funny anymore.

All at once I was wondering if this was the same man who had branded me when I was young with the fierce pride I carry, the same man who helped to give me my sense of myself. Where was the pride in his appearance, where was his self-awareness? I was almost angry with him for not caring how he looks anymore, for having given up, for having let his youth and his pride and somehow even his hope all slip away.

The anger turned to sorrow when I saw how old and how tired he seemed. I know much of what he has been through. I have heard all the stories. And I could see by the look in his eyes that here was a man a little bit lost. He was in his world again, that's true, but this was not the world he ever knew. This was not the world he had ever hoped for.

My father comes from a time and from a place where almost everything he did was for his children and for his family. You could say he lived the life he lived for the sake of the future, that he and other men like him did what they did for the ones who would follow. The Harlem my father saw that day was probably not what he—not what
they
—had in mind.

If they had thought consciously at all about these things, my father and the men and women who were like him, they might have thought they were making a garden, might have thought they were tilling rich soil and making it fertile. They would not have considered, and perhaps they should have, that they were planting along with the roses the roots of a weed bed.

For a time Harlem was the kind of garden that is magical: something made out of nothing, for nothing was what they had to work with, nothing but their souls and their hopes, a spirit and a dream. And with not much more than these was made something glorious, something fruitful, and much more important, something made with their own hands, their own efforts. Something to be proud of. Something all their own. Something finally in their own image and likeness.

If,
that is, they had their own image, their own likeness, and were not merely reflecting someone else's image, someone else's likeness, nor someone else's image of who they were, who and how they ought to remain.

They came to create in the garden something that had not been before—something
they
had not been before, something they had not been allowed to be, but something, after such a long time in the darkness, hands, feet, and spirits bound, something they wanted to try. They were creating a new way to be who they were, a way to be who they yearned to be. Finally now they were free to choose. Harlem was where they chose to do it.

Not that there hadn't been then and have not since been other significant black communities. In fact even as Harlem was being planted and was taking shape, every city north and south—same as now—had its Nigger Alley, its Coontown, its dark side of the tracks where the black folks lived. And as Harlem was a long time in the making, these other communities too were the same long time in the making, created perforce out of the same conditions that had created Harlem then and that have made Harlem what it has become today: the same seeds planted deep in similar soil, comparably nurtured, and fertilized with the same never-ending supply of manure.

These black towns and black sections of other towns and cities tried to achieve something on the order of Harlem, but somehow Harlem was always different. Somehow Harlem became the center of the black universe.

Perhaps for no other reason than that it was New York City, already the center of a certain universe. Conditions there were perfect for an explosion. The time was certainly right.

The world in general had caused it; the world in general was ready for it. It could even be said that the world was in need of it. The black world in particular needed it too and was definitely ripe for it, ripe enough to burst forth with succulent juices all its own, ripe enough and ready set to split open like a busted watermelon and then to spill far and wide the seeds of its pent-up passions, appetites and emotions. Harlem.

Suddenly the earth tilted on its axis an extra three degrees, and the moon and the stars aligned just so. The tide swelled and the ocean roared, and when the wind blew, the word was whispered across the land and across the seas. Harlem.

Harlem!

Harlem did not spring forth in full bloom, of course. Its seeds long ago had been planted in the soil of a national constitution that recognized black men as only three-fifths of a whole man and didn't recognize black women at all, and that gave neither black men nor women any rights of citizenship. Its roots lay gently cradled in the soft loam of extreme prejudice. They were fertilized daily within a nation's Christian conscience and watered with care, the tender shoots covered over and kept warm with an abundance of dung.

It was a long time, indeed, to the making of Harlem, a long time from tending the soil to first planting, a long time from the garden until the weeds took over. You have only to live here to see what too much care—the wrong kind of care and the wrong kind of fertilizer—can do to poison the soil. You have only to visit here to see the making of Harlem made complete, perhaps now in fullest flower, the final effects of too much neglect. The weeds have won.

It is a very long way from the Harlem of hope to the Harlem of despair, from the flower garden to the weeds, but once there grew here the kind of magic that even time and distance could not easily dim, the kind of magic that gives concrete hope to the lives of people like Olivia Maxwell in Chicago, the hope that out there somewhere black people are living lives that are glamorous and beautiful and really worth living.

Forty, fifty, seventy-five years ago, when Harlem was still Harlem, still the Blackamerican mecca, and indeed a mecca for black people the world over, when Harlem as the Harlem we know was still young and new and magical, this place had the power within its self-created myth to make black people feel free just by being here.

It is a long road from where we've been to where we are now, from where we've been and where we are to where we are
not
now, a long way from the days of old when Harlem—as they say—was really Harlem, days long ago when jazz was king and Edward Kennedy Ellington was the Duke, a time when the A train, instead of being dreaded, was part of Harlem's amazing enchantment.

The music plays in my head each and every time I enter the subway and board that train, Billy Strayhorn's music, Duke Ellington's band, the satin voice of Ella Fitzgerald, and I call to mind what once was, a world long past.

You must take the A train to go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. If you miss the A train, you'll find you've missed the quickest way to Harlem.

As he stood in dismay waiting for me on 145th Street that afternoon, my father too must have been reminded of how it used to be when the world was full of change and hope and possibility, when, as I offered to those ladies selling barbecue on that street corner in St. Louis, being black was a whole lot of fun.

I could see my father wondering where it had all gone.

Harlem before it burned itself out must have been
really something else.
Anyone who knows anything about the Harlem of those days will tell you so. It was more than a mere place. It was a spirit, a zeitgeist, more than just some neighborhood, the same as it is more than just some neighborhood now. Then as now, for so many black people throughout the world Harlem meant something truly special—and not the same something special that it means today. Harlem then, even with its problems, was full of hope. If you were young and if you were black, if you wanted change, a taste of freedom perhaps or a little excitement, then Harlem was where you longed to be.