Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  I wasn’t so interested in being a black man, just a man. I had watched and had been scarred the previous year by the doings of three black men, Johnny Cannon and his partner and the man they both stabbed, and if this was part of what it meant to be a black man, then a black man was not the kind of man I wanted to be.

  I went that day to the barbershop where there was no gaiety in getting a haircut. There was just a stern white barber and a few quiet white men reading old magazines, no loud talking, no boasting or bragging, no laughter until I walked in and quickly out again.

  “We don’t cut black hair in here,” the white man said.

  I had no idea what he meant. I was just a little boy.

  “Mister,” I said. “My hair is brown.”

  Probably they are laughing still, but the world they had inherited, the world they then adopted, adapted, and made their own before passing it on to their heirs, is now no laughing matter. The trickle has turned into a stream turned into a river turned into Niagara Falls. The men in that barbershop could not see or would not see what I, even as a ten-year-old, could see.

  I knew their world was not the one I could entirely embrace either. I was and would for a long time be lost somewhere in the middle.

  I cannot honestly say that I made up my mind right there and then about anything. I hated haircuts and had not wanted one in the first place. I’m sure it had been my mother’s idea. Now I had an excuse and left that barbershop rather gleeful, if slightly confused. Certainly I did not feel humiliated; perhaps I should have. There were no defiant gestures; perhaps there should have been. I did not shout back, made no threats, never once pledged aloud or to myself, “As God is my witness—,” or any such thing. Instead I went to play.

  But even as I was out playing, I was refusing to be swept to the margins and off the page completely. Or better still, I was deciding, inasmuch as it is at all possible, to make my own tableau, give my tapestry its own design, shape, and texture. All the rest would be background and border.

  Such notions sneak rather than spring into the minds of ten-year-old boys. Somehow in the intervening years, however, I woke up to discover I was clinging so hard to the center that I had separated from the margins, the way meringue not firmly held against the sides of the pie pan will pull away from the edges. It makes for an ugly lemon meringue pie, but it’s still a pie.

  A person, though, can think he or she is something altogether new, an island, perhaps, wholly apart from the exotic lands just off its shore but always in sight. But beneath the sea the lands are one. There is no escaping it.

  I have spent more time now in exile than ever I spent in the world of black folk, that world I now refer to as Harlem. I don’t know how much of my former self I left behind in that world. I wonder now how much of that world, hidden inside me, I carried out.

  I lie awake mornings and ponder. Very often lately the words of a song that I haven’t heard in a long time turn inside my head. A song that asks, when I sing it in my own voice, who am I, a song that has me wondering if I am a mere résumé and nothing more, a portrait in words.

  Is that who I am, is that all I am, a listing of things I’ve done, places I’ve been, books I’ve read? If so, it paints a picture of someone I do not recognize. It does not tell me really who is this person that is me, what I think, what I feel, what I know. It cannot tell me what I am doing here.

  I lie straight and still in my bed. I do not move. I make barely any noise. The rhythms I hear come from the steadiness of my breathing and from the sound of my heart beating hard against my ribs. I lie in bed and listen to the words running inside my head.

  When I least expect it, a gunshot rings out to call me awake, to remind me, to rip open the stillness of an early morning and let me know that I am in a world I am not familiar with, a world quite possibly where I do not belong.

  The rapid-fire crackle from a small-caliber pistol shouts good morning, greeting and warning at the same time, flying over the rooftops and entering the courtyard behind my apartment. Five sharp bangs cry out, explode, hit the walls and windows and echo into every direction off the pavement and the brick sides of the buildings. It is impossible to tell this morning where the shooting comes from. But then, it always is.

  When I hear shots—and I often hear shots—it is usually at night, often in the late evening, but never at this time of day, never in the morning.

  Early morning is the only still and peaceful part of the day in Harlem. I like to waken early—four-thirty, five o’clock—when the sky in summer is just beginning to glow and the gray just edging toward blue. I like to lie calm and quiet for a little while in my bed, to think and have little conversations in my head, and to listen to the silence. There is no noise as yet on the street. The shouting and the music that continue all day haven’t yet begun, nor the police sirens, the car alarms, the delivery trucks. I lie in the half-light of dawn, in the conscious coma of almost awake, and I listen for the sounds escorting the new day. Morning slides open gradually—unless, of course, it is trash day. Trash trucks shatter the stillness even more abruptly than the gunshots.

  When I hear gunshots—and I hear them very often lately, too often—I always think they come from the housing project at Amsterdam Avenue and 133rd Street. I don’t know why. Something about the way the sound enters my apartment. Something too, I suppose, about the way I perceive big urban housing projects, desperately overcrowded and very dangerous; but the shots could have come just as easily from somewhere farther down the avenue, or from just around the corner on 133rd itself, or even from just down this block.

  A car alarm somewhere nearby goes off. As usual, no one pays much attention.

  I look out the window of my apartment, and far away in the southern distance Manhattan rises above Central Park. The park spreads out almost like an oasis, but more like a no-man’s land. Beyond it lies an El Dorado where the streets are paved with gold. A land of milk and honey and money. Oz’s Emerald City. Paradise. From here, that is how it sometimes seems.

  On days when the air is clear and still, especially on stormy summer days when the rain has washed away smog and haze, when there is darkness in the deep distance and rain where I am, and yet the sky is clear near the park, there is a dreamy otherworld quality to the light and to the city it bathes. Light and dark, clouds and clear sky, all swirl together in chiaroscuro and bright blue. Patches of darkness shroud parts of the picture. Light falling in streams selectively illuminates the rest. The high-rise apartments of the Upper East Side and the office buildings of Midtown stand out as white as any Portuguese Algarve village gleaming in the bright light of the Mediterranean sun.

  From here the rest of the world seems so unreal, shimmering almost like a mirage, so unaffected, so remote, and so removed. A world away. Another world entirely. A world that begins and ends—as this one does—at 110th Street. By formal definition greater Harlem spreads from river to river—from the Hudson to the East River—and runs from 90th Street to 178th Street; central Harlem, from 96th Street to 155th. But no matter how you define this neighborhood, you don’t reach the heart of Harlem until you cross 110th Street. From there on you know you are in a different world. The moment you set foot onto 110th, you have entered into the fullness of Harlem.

  It is, isn’t it, the way we want things, clear frontiers and easy distinctions between here and there, between what is real and what isn’t, between us and them. The lines, once drawn, however, no matter how thinly, no matter how broad, begin immediately to flex and then to blur. Shadows fall toward both sides, depending on the light, cultures spill and spread, and there is a subtle sameness for a distance on either side of any frontier.

  And here am I, one of the border shadows that falls to either side but that never quite reaches the heart of this side or that one, that never reaches too far beyond this hazy ground in the middle.

  To whom do I belong, to which of these two sides? In which culture and in which set of values do I claim citizenship? Whose passport do
I carry and to whom is owed my allegiance?

  These are questions that have no easy or clear-cut answers. The odd thing about them is that I was never plagued by them before. I rarely even considered them. Now, however, they cause so much turmoil within that the questions themselves, let alone any answers I might ever come up with, color my every action, my every thought. Nearly every question is draped in a black shroud.

  Is the wider world available to me too that I may lay claim to it or if I am to care, must the things I care about be only those things that black people care about? And if I am to live, must I limit myself and my choices to those places we consider black places, restrict myself to life on a reservation because that is what has been reserved for me—and without anyone asking me—places like this one where I now find myself, precisely because of these questions, these wonderings, this sudden sense of being caught in the middle and not belonging anywhere?

  I wonder, then, since this is the world chosen for me and not chosen by me—I wonder then not only if I belong here but if I can fit in here. Ought I to even try?

  Over and over I tell myself that I am not a prisoner here. I realize of course that I am. I am a prisoner of this place.

  That is how I feel, oddly, like a prisoner on parole who has been called back before the prison board and who must spend a night or two in the cell block before final decisions can be made.

  Over and over I tell myself that I am not a prisoner here, that I can leave this place anytime I choose, and that my world is the much wider world beyond the borders of this neighborhood. Still in my heart I know that, as voluntary as my confinement here is, I am as trapped as anyone for whom this is the wider world, as trapped as those who have lived here and tried to escape, as trapped as those who will never find a way out. I am a prisoner of this racialist thinking.

  There is, of course, no way out, for Harlem is more than a neighborhood, more too than merely metaphor. Harlem is a state of mind, in many ways like a very dark dungeon. Once you have experienced it, there can be no going back. You can leave this place, but you can never get away from it—no, not really. Once you have lived here in earnest, once Harlem gets into your psyche and into your blood, the way it has gotten into mine, then you will carry it with you wherever you go and for the rest of your life, not as some moveable feast, but perhaps as a moveable famine, a reminder not of life’s great banquet but of the meager table life lays for paupers.

  We who live beyond these borders may need from time to time to be reminded. We who live in places like Harlem can never truly forget. We cannot forget how discarded and forgotten we are.

  We are all prisoners here, prisoners of this place and its history, prisoners of our own history—even as we set about to make it.

  For many who don’t live here this seems to be among the scariest of propositions, persuaded as they are by fantasies of darkness and crowded streets, of black men robbers, black men thieves, black men the dealers of dope, the users and the fiends. They have no other idea, nothing to rely on but the images they glean from the TV, rumor and hearsay and wild imaginings. They think that when they cross 110th Street, they will have stepped into the darkness, into what might very well be, in fact, the darkest, dirtiest, most dangerous place on this earth. They—the brave ones who actually do, and even the ones who make the crossing only in their minds—they cross 110th Street and enter a world swarming with their worst fantasies.

  Such is the power of Harlem and its myth.

  A woman on a hot late-summer day steps onto the A train at 42nd Street. A young white woman pushing a baby stroller; she is obviously an au pair, the baby not her own. She speaks with a European accent and is going somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But after 59th Street the A train will not stop again until it reaches Harlem.

  The woman translates the announcement in her head. You watch her eyes as she listens. You see the way her brow knits as she struggles first to hear and then to understand the crackly voice amid the noises of loud conversation, metal wheels scraping, doors sliding shut. You watch and you wait and then finally you see what you knew you would see: panic registering on her face, the recognition of her worst, most unhoped-for expectations. Harlem!

  It is too late. The doors have closed. The train is moving. Next stop, 125th Street.

  Over and over you can tell yourself that you are not a prisoner here. And people do. But in time you will realize that you are. You will know better than to think that anyone could live in a place like this and certainly not ponder it without being as profoundly affected as by time spent in prison, ever surrounded by high walls, bars and barbed wire. Without the walls, without gun turrets and guard towers, Harlem nevertheless is a prison.

  If you look you can see a prison of poverty in the tired faces of the people you pass on the street, noble faces sagging and puffy, eyes dimmed or dimming from not enough chances, from not knowing which way if any is the right path to follow; young faces projecting strength and courage and very much posturing; older faces lined with an eternal frown from squinting in the sun, from scowling at the heaviness of a life that bends backs and turns walking into shuffling, faces furrowed from forever wondering why.

  Time spent in Harlem is certainly no gentle sojourn in some provincial paradise, no cornucopia of riches and opportunity, no pleasurable garden of Eden. A year here for many would be more like a year in hell.

  If you look you can see this aspect of the prison as well in the faces of those who are not trapped here. Whenever they chance to encounter this place, you see the look of panic that serves to further separate and isolate the prisoners on the inside from the prisoners on the outside.

  I saw that look—which is panic, which is loathing, which is scorn, and which says, I don’t want to be here, bad things will happen to me here and I want to get out, I don’t want to see this side of life, don’t even want to know it exists, why in fact does it have to exist, and why must I encounter it?—in the quivering bottom lip bitten almost until it bled and in the darting glances of the young white woman on the train that summer day two years ago. Wherever she was from, if she knew nothing else about Harlem, she was well aware of Harlem’s dark shadows and that they are to be avoided. She seemed to know for certain that here was a place she did not want to find herself. She knew instinctively or at least had been told of Harlem’s dangers, its poverty and its blackness, and that she had no business up there. When the train stopped at 125th Street, she picked up the stroller with the baby still in it and took the steps two at a time. She sprinted over to the opposite platform and leaped into the first train going back downtown.

  This in part is what makes Harlem the prison it has become. Not many people on the outside want anything to do with the people on the inside.

  To witness this extreme isolation can put a strain on the sensibilities of caring individuals. It can make you kind of sad. Or it can make you angry. Or quite simply, if you allow it to happen, it can make you open your eyes and wonder what’s going on and why.

  But there is another reaction that the white lady on the subway can elicit, an odd reaction perhaps, given the circumstance, or maybe not so odd, but it is the reaction I had, which made it very odd indeed. I hadn’t yet moved to Harlem then. I was still only a visitor. I had come up that day to get the lie of the land, to get the feel of the place, and to continue the search for an apartment.

  That search, by the way, had not been an easy one. I had been trying to find an apartment for weeks now, staying with friends who lived in the part of Manhattan called Chelsea and coming up to Harlem every day to find neighborhood newspapers like the Amsterdam News and to answer the ads I found there. You don’t find many ads for apartments in Harlem in any of the other newspapers in New York, as if to say people who read those other papers wouldn’t be looking for apartments in Harlem, as if to say people from downtown are not thinking of moving that far uptown, as if to say the only people who would consider living in Harlem are already in Harlem, and they can find what
they need in the local neighborhood papers.

  The world of Harlem and the world farther south remain separate and distinct this way, far apart and well removed, only an eight-minute subway ride from one world to the other, from midtown Manhattan to Harlem, but nevertheless they are worlds apart, so far apart that the two worlds rarely even touch.

  But their orbits this day passed in close proximity, if only for a moment. Their paths crossed. They almost came together. Then like a comet, the one world merely gained momentum from the gravitational pull of being so close to this other world that it spun away and zoomed out of sight. She picked up the baby carriage, hurled herself into the first train that stopped, and disappeared.

  Normally, if someone is struggling up the stairs with a baby stroller, I will lean down, grab the front end of the thing, and together we will lift baby and stroller up the steps. No need to ask. No need to say a word. Bending over and reaching down says all that needs to be said. And the help is always appreciated.

  But this time I made no such offer. This time I just watched, the same as I had been watching as she bit her lip and anxiously peered through the windows of the train and into the blackness of the subway tunnel. I’m sure she wanted to know where she was and how much farther she had to go before she could get off. She must have been trying to read the writing on the walls of each station we sped through. She made eye contact with no one. She looked at no one. She looked down at the floor or at the baby, or she looked through the windows. She had closed herself off in that urban cocoon wherein people—women especially—can appear to be looking right at you, but the gaze shifts somehow and it is as if they never even saw you, as if they were never looking at you at all.