Baseball caps for sale, blue jeans and cassette tapes, sheets, towels, and socks, games and candy: all from boxes carried or set on the pavement or from the folding tables that line the curb.
On the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard—what used to be Lenox Avenue—the vendors crowd together in what looks and feels and even sounds and smells like a market anywhere in West Africa. They sell much of the same things in much the same kind of chaos, African trinkets and African cloth, and in fact many of the vendors have come from Africa, drawn to Harlem by many of the same things that motivated earlier generations to come here from Africa, from Jamaica, from the Deep South.
I can’t help but think of Harlem in an earlier time when I walk these streets, can’t help but see in these faces the faces of a generation for whom Harlem was the way up and out of the mire of blackness and into the glory of being black.
When I look at the woman called Khakira, I think of a woman my father used to talk about. She lived in Harlem in the 1920s and went by the name Pig Foot Mary. She had come to Harlem with practically nothing. She sold her wares on the streets of Harlem just as Khakira does, and by 1925 she was worth almost half a million dollars.
Khakira has her gimmick, just as Pig Foot Mary had hers, just as all the vendors do, selling, as they all do, whether they know the story or not, what they hope will help them to repeat Pig Foot Mary’s rags-to-riches success.
Khakira wears floppy hats and clothes that come from Africa. Depending on what you sell, it is often best to appeal here to an Afrocentric consciousness and at the very least to show some sense of solidarity with black Africa, for here is where black Africa and black America meet. But Khakira, when she talks, sounds like she could be from almost anywhere, the Caribbean, North Carolina, Brooklyn. She sells incense and is known on 125th Street as the woman who smokes cigars.
A man called Ahmed speaks very little English. He really does come from Africa, from Mali, he says, as do most of the things he sells, the trinkets, the medallions, the pieces of carved metal shaped like the continent of Africa.
There are fertility necklaces on sale here, bean pies, African clothing. And here at the junction of black Africa and black America you can buy sweet potato pies and Malcolm X potato chips, assorted hats, assorted black nationalist tracts, books on the blackness of Jesus, books about a Blackamerican man traveling in Africa. Among the smells of sausages frying are mingled the smells of Jamaican jerk chicken and somebody cooking barbecue. And everybody, everybody jammed tight shoulder to shoulder in what seems to be a never-ending swell of blackness as far as the eye can see.
Here on 125th Street you can find it all, most of it legal, some of it not. It is, all of it, the same grasping for dollars—the only true yardstick in America—that you find in any of the shops along 125th or along Madison Avenue or Fifth Avenue or any other shop on any other street. But here, the grasping has a decidedly black and African aspect to it that renders it more colorful than anything else.
Black or white or any other color, the aim is still the same though.
I turned the corner and walked up Malcolm X/Lenox Avenue. I stopped for lunch at Sylvia’s, a famous soul food restaurant a couple of blocks up, and ate a meal straight out of my childhood: the tenderest spare ribs ever, collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas, and sweet potato pie. Then I continued my walk up to 135th Street for no other reason than to be on the corner where Pig Foot Mary made her fortune.
I think of her as Harlem’s patron saint perhaps, for she in a way comes to symbolize for me, more than Duke Ellington, more than Langston Hughes, more than all the rest, the Harlem that many if not most people who came here were seeking: Harlem, the land of opportunity. Hers is the kind of story that would have become myth even as she was living it, and that needs to be remembered.
My father would tell the story as if Pig Foot Mary were a distant family relation. Her name was Lillian Harris. She was born in that part of Mississippi known as the Delta. My father’s family comes out of Tennessee, but that part of Tennessee is only a puddle jump from the Mississippi Delta. For all I know she might very well have been a relative. Knowing my father as I do, he might just as easily have been making up the whole story. In this case, however, he didn’t.
Pig Foot Mary, even more than the radiant luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, exemplifies to me what the Harlem of old was very much all about.
She was born in 1870 and left Mississippi when she was a young adult, still a teen really, and headed north. She was doing no more, perhaps, than many other black southerners escaping to the North and East. Pig Foot Mary was one of them, fleeing, in what some might consider an act of cowardice, the tyranny and terror and hopelessness of the South when her talents and determination might have served as a better example had she remained where she was. Or perhaps in trying to make a better life for herself she was exuding, others might say, the same sense of bravery and pioneer spirit for which we tend to honor the frontier men and women who subjugated the American West, and for which we need to honor the pioneers who came to Harlem, for theirs was the very same intention, that of forging a new life in a better place and of finding possibility where none might otherwise exist.
Pig Foot Mary left home with nothing, for presumably in the Mississippi Delta she would have had nothing, or at best very little. She reportedly tried her luck for over ten years in several northern cities before hitching rides on hay wagons, milk wagons, and vegetable carts, finally reaching New York City in 1901. She had five dollars in her pocket.
With these five dollars, Pig Foot Mary went into business.
With three of these dollars she bought an old baby carriage and a small boiler. With the rest she gambled, bought two dollars’ worth of pig feet, and turned that old baby carriage and boiler into a traveling restaurant.
To start with, she sold boiled pig feet to those of her countrymen who longed for the flavors of “down home.” There were so many homesick southern blacks in Harlem that in no time business was thriving enough that she could expand the menu to include still more southern fare: chitterlings, hog maw, steamed corn, and always, always, the pig feet—cheap southern food that had yet to achieve cuisine status.
In a month’s time the business was booming. In 1917 she had moved to the corner of Lenox and 135th Street, acquired a husband and a prosperous newsstand, and soon started investing in real estate. Eight years later, she who had once scraped by in a small one-room apartment was worth half a million dollars.
Then, success story complete, I suppose, she moved out of Harlem and went to live in Pasadena, California.
A twinge of something, I don’t know what, touched the back of my heart all of a sudden as I stood there then. It was the same dull ache that day on the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue as the pang that would nag at me that night, that early morning more than two years later when I would stand at the window of my apartment, look out to the street below, and spy on a black man as he tried to beat a black woman into submission. I cannot say if what I felt these two times—on this corner and at that window—was what I felt so many years before when I watched one black man stab another black man, for I cannot precisely remember the sensations I had on that distant day, but I imagine these feelings are all somewhat the same; and if not the same, at least related.
I would like to think that each of them represented somehow a moment of clarity, perhaps pieces of a grander moment of clarity, but I know nothing came anywhere close to clear until much much later.
I was encountering feelings similar to what an orphan might have on meeting his birth parents for the first time since they gave him over for adoption; or better, like the prodigal son returning home having once taken that of his heritage which he found useful and then, casting aside all else, running away: that sense of belonging and not belonging at one and the same time.
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 fro
m 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 thi
s 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.
Still Life in Harlem Page 5
