Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  It was, as Duke Ellington exclaimed when he first got here, like something out of the Arabian Nights, a time of amazing excitement, incredible frolic and carousing.

  In Parties, Carl Van Vechten’s novel of this early era, one character tells another: “And we’ll get drunker and drunker and drift about night clubs so drunk that we won’t know where we are, and then we’ll go to Harlem and stay up all night and go to bed late tomorrow morning and wake up and begin it all over again.”

  Harlem was where you went to cap festive evenings—and that was only if you hadn’t started the partying there. ’Round about midnight the Harlem bands started swinging, the joints started jumping, and Harlem exploded with merriment.

  You didn’t want to live there if you were white, but you wanted to go there: to the Cotton Club, to Pod’s and Jerry’s Catagonia Club, to Tillie’s Inn; to hear Duke Ellington’s band, Fletcher Henderson’s, Cab Calloway.

  Harlem was a wondrous destination on a magical tour of nightclubs, music, and liquor, exotic living and excess. Harlem was full of life. Harlem was the place to be.

  If uptown was, as Harlem on the surface might have seemed and as Van Vechten titled it in another novel, a kind of “Nigger Heaven” to blacks, it was for whites a different kind of paradise. When the Broadway shows let out and the dining was done, the white folks went uptown for a taste of the exotic, stayed until the wee hours, and then glided back downtown.

  This is the Harlem of legend, the place we think we know. If we think of Harlem, this mythic Harlem is very often the Harlem we call to mind, that era of hot nights and swinging jazz and what is now called the renaissance of black art and literature, but was in fact the first birth of a black voice, the finding of a new black identity.

  Nowadays another image of Harlem has taken the place of the previous one. Nowadays we look at Harlem and see nothing glamorous here. Exciting, perhaps—in a way. Dangerous, yes. Even exotic. But glamorous? There is nothing in the reports of Harlem, nothing in the modern definitions of Harlem, that suggests allure or appeal. The Arabian Nights have given way to the bitter reality of morning’s harsh light, morning in America.

  When the white folks had had enough of Harlem, they slid back downtown, out of sight, gone from here. They abandoned Harlem as if they were refugees fleeing a battle zone.

  They stayed as long as they could. When the black invasion began, white owners organized into neighborhood associations to repulse the enemy. They advertised for white tenants, they pleaded with other whites to join the antiblack crusade, to protect themselves, protect their property, and keep their property values up by keeping blacks out. They devised covenants among themselves, promising not to rent and not to sell to blacks. It was even suggested (by John Taylor, founder of the Harlem Property Owners’ Improvement Corporation) to white people living on the borders of black blocks that they build twenty-foot fences to separate themselves from their black neighbors.

  They resisted the black hordes for as long as they could, but it was a lost cause. Too many white landlords were losing money. Real estate values spiraled downward. Buildings sold at bargain rates. Owners who had honored agreements not to sell or rent to blacks found no whites willing to rent. To keep the tenants they already had, they had to reduce rents still further. Many simply sold out. Many lost out to foreclosure. Many others stared at the dilemma: to stick to a policy trying to keep Harlem white and risk losing everything, or to rent to blacks—at higher prices, of course.

  In the end the white folks gave up on Harlem. They surrendered. They abandoned Harlem, abandoned their homes, abandoned property as if they were fleeing and seeking refuge elsewhere.

  Harlem became black.

  Then Harlem became mecca.

  Said one black man: “If my race can make Harlem, good lord, what can’t it do?”

  It didn’t happen overnight, but it happened. Harlem went from being a neighborhood where blacks could finally get decent housing to becoming the black part of town to becoming, as James Weldon Johnson put it, “the greatest Negro city in the world,” a source of black pride, a place of enterprise for black people, a place of hope for black people.

  Then Harlem became a slum.

  * * *

  I don’t know what my father was thinking as he stood there and watched the street that day. I don’t know how much of Harlem’s history he knows. But whether we’re talking about Harlem or about East St. Louis or about East Palo Alto or about the black parts of every town and every city in this country, the process of segregating blacks from whites has always been the same—the process and the end result—and he would have seen it all.

  As a young man traveling, my father would have seen these Niggertowns and Black Bottoms, as they were called, the Smoketowns and the Bronzevilles. As a younger man growing up, he would have lived in them. As a young black man knowing nothing else, it might all have seemed so normal. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, if he didn’t feel a little bit cheated, a little bit angry. I certainly would have been. In fact I certainly was.

  My own anger turned to sorrow then when I saw that sad look in his eyes as he watched all around him and saw the decay that had taken over from the garden that should have been.

  Harlem held on to its original mission for a long time. It could not, it seems, hold out forever. The weeds finally own this garden, and I could see, again by the look in his eye, that my father himself was wondering where it had all gone, where it had all gone wrong. He was not only wondering what in the world had happened, he was questioning why it had happened.

  He has the same watery eyes that I have, and when he fills with emotion it looks very often as if he is about to cry.

  My anger turned to sorrow when I saw that look in his eye.

  He said to me in the car that night as we made the long drive home, “Do you ever get the feeling that we’re doing everything all wrong and that something just isn’t right, that this is not the way things are supposed to be?”

  “Pop,” I said. “I get that feeling all the time.”

  I also had the feeling that he wasn’t really talking to me.

  There is an old man with milky eyes who stands each warm day on the corner near his apartment building. His hands shake with a kind of palsy. His fingers are long and bony, his knuckles gnarled. Every now and again he takes a dingy white handkerchief from the pocket of his pants, the same brown trousers he wears every day, and he wipes the summer sweat from his brow. His hand, ever trembling, lingers near his eyes.

  He might easily have been blotting away a tear, but it is only the mucus from an old-age infection, stuck there in the corner at the bridge of his nose.

  His name is Herbert Washington, and he tells anyone who will listen, myself included, that he has lived in this part of town since he was a boy—not as uncommon here as it may seem in this modern era of mobility and transitory lives. He has seen men come and seen men go. He has seen things change.

  “But of course not fast enough,” he once said to me.

  He stopped to remember. Then he frowned.

  “Some things, I’d say, have changed a little too fast,” he declared. “Some of the changes, I guess, we just weren’t ready for; they caught us off guard. Some of the changes just never should have happened. We’d be a lot better off, I think, if some of the old ways had been left alone. I don’t know much, but I do know this: things ain’t supposed to be like they are. Things ain’t like they used to be, that’s for sure, and not what they could be, and not what they ought to be. But no matter how you look at it, things sure ain’t supposed to be like this.”

  He shook his head and pocketed the handkerchief.

  “Kind of makes you sad, don’t it?” he said. He looked sharply in my direction, caught my eye and held my gaze for a long long time.

  “And if it doesn’t,” he said, “it ought to.”

  He knew, he would often say, exactly what is wrong and exactly how to fix it, but whenever I asked him, he would always tell me the same th
ing.

  It was an almost daily occurrence now, almost like a ritual. I would pass. Herbert would be standing as if on guard in front of his building. Our eyes would meet, our hearts shake hands, but instead of hellos, we would exchange greetings of a coded kind.

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “Not today,” Herbert would say. “You ain’t been here long enough.”

  We would swap smiles. If I was actually going somewhere, I would continue on. If I wasn’t in a hurry, which was most of the time, I would stop and we would chat.

  The first time Herbert said this to me, that I hadn’t been in Harlem long enough, I was shocked and nearly offended.

  “Almost a year,” I roared, for that was how long I had been here then. “Almost a year, and that’s not long enough?”

  “Not nearly long enough,” Herbert would tell me again and again. “A year ain’t nothing.”

  Once he even said to me, changing the daily ritual slightly but profoundly, and saying it as if he had given it a lot of thought: “A year ain’t much; not if you’re trying to learn about something more than yourself. And even then it ain’t much.”

  For two seconds I said nothing. Those two seconds’ hesitation probably told him everything he needed to know.

  “You’ve been black all your life,” he said. “Have you learned what that’s all about yet?”

  I said nothing.

  He smiled then that imperceptible smile of a stud poker player who has aces wired back to back and knows you can’t beat him and knows you can’t drop out of the hand. All you can do is call.

  Again I said nothing.

  “No,” he said. “You can’t know either one in just a year. It’s a lifetime of knowing, a lifetime of feeling. You got to know yourself a whole lot better, just like you got to know Harlem a whole lot better before you’ll even know what I’m talking about. You can’t be just living on the surface all the time. You got to get under it. You got to go through the changes, be here when summer turns to fall and winter becomes spring. You got to be here, you got to be in it. You got to blend in with these surroundings, see the way things are done here and be part of it all. You got to know your neighbors, and they got to know you, they got to see you, they got to get used to seeing you. You got to feel what’s wrong with this place before you can know—before you can really know—what is good here and what is right. You got to know what’s wrong with something before you can try to fix it, and what’s right so you can leave that part alone. The answers are not as tough as you might think, and I’ll tell them to you when you’re ready. Believe me, I know what needs to be done.”

  Oddly enough, I did believe him, and I longed for Herbert to tell me what he knew.

  What he knew, he said, no one else wanted to hear.

  I guess that included me too. I certainly had my own notions about what I did and did not know—if not about Harlem, then at least about myself, the changes I had already been through, the seasons that had come and gone, and certainly what it meant to me at any rate to be black.

  He was right about one thing. I did not want to listen to some old man who thought he knew better than I knew myself why I had wanted to come here, why I had needed to come here, and—he even said this—why I had to come here. But I did want to hear what he knew about other things.

  What Herbert knew, he said, was that no one on these mean streets of Harlem would listen to him nor do what he would say to do.

  “Who of these young people wants to hear what an old man has to say?” he asked. “They all got more important things to do.”

  He grinned, but just a little. Then the grin became a smirk.

  Your eyes follow his gaze as he glances around. You try to see what Herbert sees.

  You look down the block. You walk this street, or any street, any avenue in Harlem, especially in summer, but anytime the weather is nice, and what you see will be the things that Herbert sees, the things that I saw—clusters of people; children playing on the sidewalks and in the streets; young women gathering, gabbing, women far too young to have so many babies at their feet, in their arms, held on out-thrust hips, pushed in flimsy strollers; young men huddling, posturing, and talking loud, pretending to fight; far more men than women. They get together each day, stand around and talk.

  Herbert is one of them. He stands this day where he stands every day. He has nothing else to do, no place else to go. He takes his position early and stands here most of the morning. He talks to the old people who pass. He speaks to the neighbors he knows. He is not unlike the other men standing on these corners, in front of these buildings, sitting on stoops, hanging out in front of the little grocery shops. The one difference, though, is that Herbert is not young. Though he doesn’t altogether look it, he is seventy-six years old.

  “I’ve lived my life,” he says with a certain pride, as if achieving a certain age were achievement enough.

  “And I worked hard, very hard,” he tells me, his pride in himself and in what he has done showing itself all at once and then swelling. “I worked for everything I’ve got, and nobody gave me nothing.” He tries to stand a tiny bit taller.

  “I’ve made my living and all the noise I’m going to make. If I was going to have any kind of impact on the world around me, by now I would have already done it. Ain’t much else I can do now. So I’ve earned this here spot and this nothing I do all day. But the young men you see up and down this street here, this is what they do. This is all they do. They got nothing else.”

  He tosses his head at the men on the next corner and sneers at them as if it was all their fault, and their fault alone. No one who sees him pays him any attention.

  “It was never like this before,” he says. “There was a time when an old man was respected and listened to, a time when people said ‘Yes, sir’ to you and ‘No, sir’; ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.’ They didn’t do everything you told them to, but at least they would listen to you. Maybe we need to get back to some of that.”

  Herbert shrugged and slowly turned, moving back to lean against the wall of the building he lived in.

  “Naw, it didn’t used to be like this at all,” he said. “But this is what it has all come down to now. Too many young men with no jobs, no prospects, no real way to take care of their responsibilities, not a damn thing to do but loiter on these streets all day and drink and do drugs, talk shit and make a whole lot of noise. Yeah, and make a whole lot of babies they can’t take care of. Or don’t want to take care of.”

  Suddenly his entire countenance changes. It is as if he has grown tired and can no longer hold himself so erect. The frown remains, but his stern squint is no longer so severe, neither piercing nor accusing. His hand once again wipes at his eye as if to clear away a tear, and he mutters behind the handkerchief that hides his face.

  “Poor forgotten children of God,” he says, as if to himself, and you don’t know if the old man is talking about the babies themselves or about the ones who make them.

  As he speaks, as he wipes his eyes, you try to see what he sees, try to know what he knows and feel what he feels, and suddenly things are just a little bit clearer.

  The twinge returns, the little pang at the back of my heart. I had felt it on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 135th Street, a small pain still throbbing as if from a scar that has not healed. I have felt it often, and I know for sure now it is the same ache I felt when I was a little boy and I watched Johnny Cannon do his stabbing. It is what I feel when I think of Pig Foot Mary.

  It is a twofold feeling, two-pronged, for it pricks twice at once. It touches two nerves that are connected and yet somehow opposite, and when I stand where I stand I am tugged in two directions.

  Herbert Washington takes his position and stands the same as he stands every day on this corner. He shakes his head time after time at the blight that further decays around him. He sneers at the young women with so many babies. He despises the young men with nothing to do all day but stand on these corners and bluster. />
  “They have no jobs,” he says. “And that’s one thing. But they have no initiative either. If they did, things wouldn’t be what they are. If they had some initiative, things maybe could get a little bit better.”

  It is for this that he blames them.

  Somewhere between his anger and disgust, he hangs his head and wipes his eyes.

  Seventy-five years ago, Herbert was just a baby. Harlem was new and alive. Harlem was magical. Seventy-five years later Herbert stands on a street corner and shakes his head in disgust. He has seen both sides of paradise. Now, he says, when he looks at Harlem and at what it has become, it makes him want to cry. Although he knows what to do to put things right, still, he says, he cannot understand what really went wrong.

  He gets a faraway look in his eye. He shakes his head. It is—the same as everything is—not as it should be, and it makes you more than wonder. It can make you sad if you think about it. Or it makes you open your eyes and question. Always the how. Always the why. Always the what-ifs.

  My father had that same faraway look in his eye as we drove home.

  We spent most of that afternoon and evening without saying much. It is often that way with us. We have so little in common, it seems on the surface, that there is little for us to talk about. We often find ourselves manufacturing conversation, talking about events in the news, then easing gently into some kind of reminiscence. There is always my childhood, always my father’s early life with my mother, always his earlier life before he knew her. I am like a small child: Tell me about before I was born. He has always been a storyteller.

  He likes to tell me his truest stories. He likes to tell me how it was and how it is. He likes to tell me, too, how he thinks things ought to be.

  Because I masquerade as a writer, this old man sees me, I think, as his witness, someone who will record the things he tells me and not let them die. It isn’t simply that he wants me to know the deeds he’s done. He wants me to know why he did them.