This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  We were in the same city where three Zambian students had been severely beaten, one left in coma, just a few months before we arrived. Several years earlier, Lamzar Samba, a fifth-year student from Senegal at Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, was shot dead as he left a club with his friends. A hunting rifle decorated with a swastika was found at the scene. As I sat in that Subway shop, thoughts of what could have happened to both me and Daniel swirled in my head. We could have been severely beaten. I could have been raped. We could have been left half dead on the street outside that hole-in-the-wall bar and the police would have taken us to jail, and once we came to, the officers would have said that we were damaging St. Petersburg’s reputation with our Western hooliganism. When I explained to the Edinburgh students just how afraid I was, their laughter subsided. Their eyes expressed concern. They were sympathetic, but they weren’t capable of true empathy—this fear wasn’t theirs to know.

  As white people, they could never fully understand. Sure, they might have realized that I could have been targeted because I was black. But that understanding is an abstraction. When it is contained within your black body, well, that is different in a way they will never be able to wrap their heads around, because they don’t have to.

  In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published an essay called “Harlem Is Nowhere,” which Ralph Ellison had written nearly two decades earlier, in 1948. The inspiration for his piece was a trip he’d taken to the first mental hygiene facility in Harlem, the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, where black residents could receive care for twenty-five cents. Located in a church basement, the clinic and its staff, who worked for free, hoped to provide clients the tools they needed to survive in a hostile world. The essay begins, “To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay.” Ellison observed that, in Harlem, a common response to “How are you?” was “Oh man, I’m nowhere,” signaling the speaker’s lack of a stable position in society.

  When I first moved to Harlem, I found a summer gig teaching first- and second-generation Chinese students who wanted to test into elite prep schools. The job was in southwest Brooklyn, and my subway commute was an hour each way. I would try to carve some kind of private space for myself during that time by reading books and sticking my earbuds in so deep that I believed that everything was the soundtrack of my own biopic. I learned early on that if you want to be invisible in New York City, it is very easy. Someone may be sitting next to you on the train, but you can squeeze your body so far into itself that you can fool yourself into believing that you alone have the whole row of seats. Homeless people and hopeful rappers may call out to you on the street, but you can walk past them without so much as turning your neck. Then there are the people who do not want to be invisible, who will do everything to bridge the gap between public and private spaces.

  One morning soon after I’d moved, I got on the subway to ride downtown and a black woman was standing near the side of my train car, opposite the sliding doors. She was gently swiveling and placing all her weight on her right hip. Her jaw jutted outwards; her lips were pursed. I thought she was sucking on a Sour Patch Kid, or maybe she had to go to the bathroom. Beside her, a youthful, grungy-looking white guy with his hair in disarray was playing with some kind of electronic device.

  Out of nowhere, this black woman began talking to him about Jesus in a thick West Indian accent: “Ya hafta repent to di Fatha for all yuh sins. Him comin back soon.”

  She spoke to him with such assertion that I assumed they knew each other and he was intentionally ignoring her. She continued to go on and on about how this white man needed to take heed of Jesus’s imminent return. He rolled his eyes and walked to the other side of the car as the woman continued to warn not only him but now everyone else on the train to get right.

  I thought that this woman must be a lunatic. To be fair, I think every person living on the island of Manhattan harbors some degree of madness. We’re all crowded together in small spaces, and we need to claim something out in the open as our own by any means necessary. The vast majority of us are crammed into apartments that we cannot afford, and every day we bunch into the subway, our energies boomeranging off one another. (An Afro-Cuban woman from Brooklyn advised me to wash each night to rid myself of the accumulated energy from all the people I unconsciously interacted with on the subway, and then rub peppermint oil on my skin for good measure.) In the weeks immediately after my move, I would feel exhausted after riding the subway, even if I’d only gone from Harlem to midtown and back on a short errand. Once I saw a man on the 2/3 train talking to himself, very loudly, about all the slaughter and pestilence in the Old Testament. He ended with each sentence with an emphatic “sick.” Then, he snapped back into sanity when he apologized to the woman beside him for hitting her with his belongings. I have seen young men rap aloud on crowded trains; countless people play music on their phones without using headphones. All of these people riding to and from Harlem on the subway—the majority of them black, a small portion Latinx—seemed a little bit unhinged to me.

  I had never lived in a predominately black space before moving to Harlem. For as long as I can remember, I have been taught to not embarrass my mother with certain kinds of behavior and styles of dress, and to not act “simple.” She never said this, though, when we were in a black church, at a black cookout, at a black anything. It was only a warning issued when I was going out into the wider white world, in which blackness and all of its inexplicable grooves are suppressed. Unless I was in a space that was totally black, my dialect had to be modulated, my gesticulations moderated, my voice quieted, my hair tamed, my clothes fastened. This is what I considered proper. This is what I considered normal. If I wanted to achieve any kind of success, I first had to recognize that success was a white domain and that if I did not adhere to its rules, then I would never go anywhere. Not in no literary world. Especially not in no New York.

  The thing was, when I moved to Harlem, I ain’t know shit, and I was not prepared for how far out of my element I would be there. My brain had assembled images of Harlem like a collage of black history, yet none of these images were congruent with one another. I knew of the Cotton Club and the Apollo, James Baldwin and Billie Holiday, crack cocaine and crime. Having been educated in majority-white spaces, I was guilty of reducing my own culture. These images brushed up against one another, inevitably fraying one another’s edges. I couldn’t get used to the block parties that lasted far past midnight, the arguments underneath my window at two a.m., the rap music blaring on the corners. I couldn’t understand why black men sat on crates in front of barbershops and hat stores all evening, why black women and men sold sweet potato pies and incense on the street at 125th and Lenox if those same items were being sold in stores one block over, why everyone spoke so loudly that everyone knew everyone else’s business. I was the same race as my neighbors, but I was not from the same culture.

  In fact, I felt closer to my white, gay, Republican roommate than anyone else—at least I thought I did. Thomas had lived in Harlem for a decade and witnessed our block change dramatically. Former roommates had been robbed at gunpoint, but now I could walk home at two a.m. and find no other entity on the street besides a stray cat. The mantelpiece in our living room was stacked with his books, their authors ranging from James Joyce and Georg Hegel to Harriet Ann Jacobs and James Baldwin. We quickly established a rapport over our shared love of literature and trap music. We spoke frequently about gentrification. He firmly believed that if it weren’t for gentrification, neither of us would be living in Harlem. I began to wonder if perhaps, in a place like Harlem, I exerted the same amount of damage as a white person like Thomas did. If somehow he and I were both gentrifiers because we were college-educated and upwardly mobile.

  I was so intrigued by the idea that I could be both black and a gentrifier t
hat I wrote an article about it for the Guardian, which went viral. Some readers praised me for my introspection, and others judged me for being lazy and not contributing to my environment, an accusation that was true to an extent. I had never even gone to a block association meeting. Most of my friends were those whom I’d met at Princeton. Most of the places I frequented were upscale restaurants and bars like Cove Lounge, Corner Social, Sylvia’s, and Red Rooster. I partook in a carefully curated version of life in Harlem.

  But I didn’t write the piece out of a feeling of superiority; I wrote it because I felt confused. I became less sure that the people I saw expressing themselves on the subway were unhinged because I realized I had always used white behavior as a reference point. I did not know how to live in a black space. I did not know where to start, or who could teach me. I was trying to learn behavior that should have been instinctive, behavior that I had been conditioned to see as outside of the norm. Now, in Harlem, this behavior was spread across my world like jam on toast. It was forcing me to tear myself apart, a persona that had been forged in my New Jersey upbringing and on trips abroad, and be free. But I pathologized that freedom. In my heated conversations about police brutality and blackness with Thomas, he would always want me to state facts and sources, explain my reasoning, and he would launch into a harangue when my responses were not to his liking. Each time I would walk away feeling as if my blackness had been whittled down like wood. I realized that that closeness I felt with him was duplicitous and in order to see Harlem, to really see and understand her for myself, I had to shut him out.

  One of the critics of my Guardian piece turned out to be my next-door neighbor, a black man named Alexander who had lived in the area for almost twenty years. He sent me a private message on Facebook, asking if we could meet up for smoothies. At first, I was afraid. According to his page, Alexander was a part of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center, one of the leading institutions of black culture in the world. In my article I’d declared that, despite being black, I felt a separation from Harlem, and I assumed that meeting with him would only make me feel more alone. I expected that he wanted nothing more than to eviscerate me, calling my work ahistorical and irrelevant over a nice strawberry-banana smoothie with a wheatgrass shot.

  He told me to meet him in front of the lobby at the Schomburg, less than ten blocks from my apartment. A few minutes after I got there, I saw a bald, light-skinned black man emerge from the door. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, and had a goatee and a dignified smile. After grabbing our smoothies from a small shop around the corner, he took me back to the Schomburg, a place that holds Langston Hughes’s ashes, signed documents from Toussaint Louverture, and a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech. Over ten million objects of the black diaspora are stored there.

  Alexander led me down to the courtyard, where we spoke about what it meant to be black, especially in a place like Harlem. He told me that he had wanted to meet me in person because, although he thought my article was interesting, he found it to be incomplete and knew that there had to be more behind my words. He was right. At the time, I hadn’t been able to pick apart all my constantly shifting thoughts about who I was, and what Harlem meant to me.

  Towards the end of our rendezvous, Alexander matter-of-factly declared, “Blackness is everything.” It was there in that courtyard where I began to see my neighborhood through a new lens. Blackness was everything. Harlem was everything. Neither Harlem nor blackness could exist in a bubble, in a pocket that I only turned inside out when I boarded the train uptown. It had to be my everything. My everywhere. Harlem was everywhere.

  About four months after publishing that gentrification piece, after I published my first piece on The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, I received an email from Augustyna, a warm Polish woman who had been one of my biggest academic supporters as the undergraduate administrator of the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton. She’d left the school before I turned in my thesis, and besides a fortuitous crossing of paths during commencement weekend, when she’d met my parents, I had not seen her since, and I missed her. She asked if I would like to come to her home, a Dutch Colonial farmhouse situated in Somerset County, for lunch, and when I accepted she explained that her beloved husband was significantly older than her, and she was his caregiver. I told her not to worry; my mother was my late stepfather’s caregiver, and so I could understand what to expect. Relieved, Augustyna wrote back to say that her aunt and uncle would also be coming for lunch. They were interested in getting to know me, a student whom Augustyna had talked about, and they often visited their niece.

  I had some preparation of my own to do. I stood in front of my freestanding mirror and undid my bun, letting my tight curls graze my shoulders. These were elderly European people after all, and I was worried that my naturally curly afro would be interpreted as too militant, or as a statement in the context of my politically charged articles. As a black woman, I feel it is one thing for me to wear my hair out in an afro when I am in public and interacting with people of many different backgrounds. It is quite another when I am invited to a white person’s home. I didn’t want to make Augustyna, her husband, or her aunt and uncle uncomfortable. Furthermore, I didn’t want to expend mental energy on figuring out how to maneuver away if anyone tried to reach and pet my hair. I eventually decided to moisturize my hair with water and shea butter before pinning it back into a bun, with some of my curls hanging to the side.

  As soon as I descended the steps of the New Brunswick station, I could see Augustyna smiling through the windshield of her black truck. It was a gloomy, rainy day, but I had to restrain my excitement as I crossed a busy intersection to reach her. Her dirty-blonde hair was in loose curls, seemingly untilled by the bristles of a brush or comb, accentuating her easygoing personality. Exhaustion peeked through the inner corners of her eyes, but her charming smile reassured me that I did not have to apologize for being an extra burden.

  Augustyna’s home was situated near a river. As we drew nearer, she suggested that I look through the passenger window at all of the farmhouses perched on acres upon acres of land. Apparently the area was famous for playing a part in the Revolutionary War, but all I could think about was how many black servants might have worked in each house, and where they would have lived.

  As soon as Augustyna pulled up and turned off the truck’s engine, her aunt opened the front door and yelled for us to hurry and get out of the rain. No taller than I was at five feet, she had short brown hair, an infectious and constant laugh, and a thick Polish accent. Her husband was her foil in both appearance and demeanor—he was medium height. She greeted me with a hug, but he stood in front of me, emotionless, while his cold blue eyes fixated on my face. I nervously smiled and said hello; then Augustyna’s aunt tugged at her husband’s arm and said, “Say something to her in Russian. She speaks Russian. Say something to her in Russian.”

  He held up his right hand, and she said no more.

  My skin constricted. I had studied the language for four years, traveled to the country, and could even read medical science and technology articles without using a dictionary. I could handle whatever he threw at me, but I did not trust that he would be easy on me. He might pepper his sentences with archaic words not taught in Russian classes, and if I did not respond quickly enough he would think that I was a liar.

  But instead he said, “I read your articles.”

  My shoulders dropped. “Oh yeah?” I replied in a perky voice as we made our way to Augustyna’s living room, where her aunt relentlessly urged me to drink white wine.

  Augustyna’s husband didn’t seem as sick as she’d implied. He was the one asking me the majority of questions about my work, my time at Princeton, and my reasons for getting into writing. All the while, the aunt was urging me to drink more, to drink more. I had nothing else in my stomach besides cornflakes and I worried that I would become tipsy before lunch was ready. The uncle barely said anything to me, just sat upright in
his chair, his blue eyes unyielding. While Augustyna set the table in the dining room, I regaled the three of them with my deep dive into multiple languages, my travels to Japan, and my time in St. Petersburg. I made sure that I pulled my jaw back so that my mouth could not move too freely, allowing my voice to spill over with too much passion. I decorated the middles and ends of my sentences with flashy smiles and strained to keep my hands from making too many associative gesticulations. Augustyna’s aunt and husband were visibly impressed by all that I had accomplished, but I can’t recall her uncle even sipping the glass of wine that was in front of him. He was too preoccupied with studying me. I had become accustomed to that kind of stare when I was in Russia, and I knew how to carry on in spite of the scrutiny.

  After Augustyna called us into the dining room, her aunt sat on my left and her uncle on my right. As I placed pear-and-arugula salad and some vegetables on my plate, he finally spoke.