Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  I don’t think I ever understood this before today.

  This is the only way he has, I guess, for me to know who he is and who he was and what he did to smooth for me the path I am on. Much of what he did was done so I wouldn’t have to do the same, and much was done so that I could be not only who I am and what I am but, within reason, any damned thing, in my father’s words, I wanted to be. He did what he did so that I could live the life I chose. He did what he did so that I could live.

  All the things he did for me I will never know, but everything he did was right there, all of it, in his face as we drove toward home that afternoon and evening.

  I have seen him with the look of a demon in his face, and he will stare at me sometimes as a gambler stares at the roulette wheel. He has borrowed against the future, mortgaged the house, sold pieces of his soul to place this wager, and everything—absolutely everything—is riding on this turn of the wheel.

  Sometimes it is a softer stare he offers, and in his face is pure expectancy—which is different from the tense nail-biting expression of a gambler making his last double-or-nothing bet. This look in his face is all hope and all trust. It is the radiant gaze reserved for that god in whom all faith and all future reside, and for the sake of whom the many sacrifices have been made.

  I am the culmination of my father’s hopes and his efforts. I am somehow what he wanted to be. I am what my brother was before me and what no one else can ever be until I have children of my own onto whom I can pass this burden. I am, in the words of my father, “the last of the big boys.”

  I have been hearing this funny little phrase of my father’s since I was very little. Often it was the ribbon on a package of praise. Often it was the stinging cattle prod of encouragement. Often it expressed disappointment at some foolishness or failure. Always it served to remind me that something was expected of me. I’m not sure I ever knew what it was, but I definitely knew it was something.

  I knew it was something.

  But there was in his face as we drove toward home something that I had never seen before. In his face was a look of deep sorrow and disappointment. In his face was the faraway look of fatigue that is born of loss and profound confusion.

  He was lost in thought, and I didn’t want to disturb him.

  We had driven for over seven hours without saying much except to comment on the number of deer browsing at the side of the road. As we crossed into Ohio, a doe jumped onto the highway. We swerved and missed it.

  “I’ve never seen so many before,” he said.

  He leaned forward and looked up at the sky through the front windshield.

  “It’s going to be a clear night,” he said. “The moon is going to be bright.”

  He was right about the night sky. It had started to get dark. A few stars had appeared. There was not a cloud anywhere. But the moon hadn’t risen yet.

  “The deer come out in numbers when the moon is full, or nearly full, and very bright,” he said. “So take it easy. You don’t want to hit one of those things. And stop when you want to. When you get tired, let’s get a hotel.”

  But I wasn’t tired. My mind was racing two miles a minute. Harlem was in my head, my father was in my head, past and future were in my head. I wasn’t worried about deer or about being tired. I just wanted the easy concentration that comes when you drive long distances. After a while you find yourself in a blank zone. Your mind runs on automatic. Thoughts and feelings come to you from nowhere, without order and without conscious connection. Time and distance pass unrecorded. Hours are consumed with a single thought. You don’t remember covering the last seventy miles. You are only what you are thinking. Your body has become weightless and has disappeared. You don’t feel the pain in your back or the stiffness in your legs until you stop for gas and get out of the car to stretch.

  It was after midnight now. We were somewhere in Indiana. I was getting very tired, but we were only four hours from home and I didn’t want to stop. My father had begun to talk. We had lived for a time in Indianapolis, and anytime he has an excuse, like being someplace he used to live, he starts remembering when, going back to that place when he was young and thin and happy to live in a one-room apartment and own nothing.

  He was laughing, as he always does. The stories he tells, even when they are sad and serious, echo with joy and hilarity.

  One minute he was climbing into the window of his girlfriend’s house. Her parents were home. They got caught, and my father was scrambling back through the window.

  The very next minute he was a taxi driver taking out-of-towners on a forty-minute ride to a place they could have walked in fifteen. But they wised up and refused to pay. My father pulled a pistol and shot it into the nighttime sky.

  “You should have seen them as they ran away,” he said. “They were running in zigzags down the middle of the street, screaming and shouting and throwing money every which way. Of course it was too dark for me to find it, but man! those were the days.”

  Those were the days, all right, and those are the stories he tells that I might know how great those days were. Many of the tales I have heard four thousand times by now. Some I’ve only heard a couple of hundred. But they never cease to be funny, and when this old man dies, his laughter and his weird stories are what I will remember most.

  Suddenly the thought of his dying filled the car and fouled the air. We had driven into a strange mist, and things got a little spooky. The air outside had cooled off instantly and quite a lot. Now the hot breath of our laughter fogged the inside windows. I looked at him and he looked at me, and nothing was funny anymore.

  It was my fault, I’m sure. I was wondering how he would really like to be remembered: as a maniac laughing and full of life and telling his crazy stories, or as the old man he has become who sleeps a lot and drinks a lot. I would like to think of him as both of these, but also remember the man who reads a lot, a dictionary always at hand and still asking me definitions of words he has just looked up, as if I’m being quizzed.

  He is, of course, all these and more, and I guess I’ll never really know him, nor fathom entirely what he and other men and women like him did to smooth this bumpy ride we’re on, but Harlem was on my mind at the moment and all I could think of was the sorrow in my father’s eyes as he looked over what has become of the black world that used to be full of so much life and laughter and hope.

  I thought then of the young man my father used to be, scuffling to take care of a family, missing out on all he could have had and done.

  I was thinking of the man who always had two jobs when my brother and I were growing up. Sometimes he tried to work three. It meant we didn’t get to see him much, which was all right with Tommy and me. My father was the discipline master in that house, and the less we saw of him the better.

  It wasn’t so hard on my mother. She was in on the plan, and anyway she had us in the same way that we had her always there. Not so with my father. It was one of those things he had to do, but I know now that it was hell on him not being with his family all the time. He was hardly home and didn’t get to know my brother and me the way he would have liked. Nor did we get to know him very well.

  I may never get to know him now as well as he or I would like, but I spend as much time with him as I can, and certainly I see him a little bit better now. I’ll remember him differently too.

  “Pop,” I said. “What do you think? Any regrets?”

  His expression was not quite the demon one. It was mostly hidden, barely illuminated by the dashboard lights and the lights from passing cars, but I could see he was looking at me like I had just said the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

  “Brother,” he said. “If you don’t have regrets, then you never made any of the tough choices.”

  I have never thought of my father as particularly sensitive or thoughtful. I think I have been wrong.

  “There was a time when I didn’t have a care in the world,” he said. “I had a job, a pension coming one of these days, and
I had a car. That was good enough for me. I didn’t want anything else, I didn’t need anything else. Life was good to me, and I was having a good time.”

  He didn’t need to say more. I knew what happened next. My mother came along and put a monkey wrench into the works.

  “It’s a whole lot different when you’re not thinking just about yourself anymore. Suddenly you’ve got the future on your mind, and you’ve got to lay tracks to get there. That’s what your mother was good at. We wouldn’t have what we have if it weren’t for her.”

  I hesitated to ask him this next question. I was afraid of the answer.

  “Yeah, but, Pop,” I finally said. “Have you been happy? Has it been worth it?”

  “Happiness is not all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t forget that,” he said. “You can enrich yourself with misery too, you know. So you make your choices and you stick by them. Then you try to find some happiness if you can. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had more than most.”

  “So it’s been worth it,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ll have to answer that one. The world I’m leaving you is certainly not what anybody had in mind. We thought we were doing what was going to work out best. Sometimes it seems like just the opposite.”

  “We’re doing all right,” I said.

  “Yeah, we are,” he said. “And that’s exactly why we did everything the way we did it. And maybe that’s part of our problem. We did what we did, and we thought everything was going to keep getting better and better. But it didn’t. Somewhere along the way we hit a wall. Somewhere along the way something happened, and I don’t know if we walked to the cliff and got pushed or if we were led there and jumped. But I have the nasty feeling that whatever happened, we did it to ourselves. And if we didn’t do it all, we sure helped.”

  Right away I recognized the expression that had darkened my father’s face. It was almost the same look, only more sinister, a puppy offers when he knows he’s done something wrong but doesn’t know exactly what. It resides halfway between sorrow and disappointment on the one axis, acceptance and something like—but not quite—relief on the other. Oddly, it is a look that I have seen many times in men’s faces and that I myself have worn and that reminds me—now as I write, but not then during the night drive home—exactly why I had to come to live in Harlem. (Had to come to live here. More than wanted to, stronger than needed to, but, just as Herbert Washington suggested, had to—though not for the same reasons he would suggest.)

  I tell myself, I told my father that night in the car when he finally asked me, that there are myriad reasons to come here, to live here, to be here, so many reasons that they jumble now into confusion, all of them true yet none of them quite complete. But there is only one reason I had to come.

  To these “myriad reasons” my father responded, “Yeah? Like what?”

  The only one that spilled from my mouth was that I thought I needed the experience.

  I didn’t know what else to say to him. I tried to find a suitable answer, one that would make sense, but it was all I could come up with. My thoughts were clouded with my father’s expression, with Harlem’s history, with Pig Foot Mary.

  I stammered once and repeated. “Just to have the experience,” I said.

  My father said, “Hmm.”

  The experience I claimed to need and seek is, I suppose, the black experience, and although in many ways I have missed out on it, I have not missed it—for how can you miss what you have not had, what you have not known in such a long time? How can you say you miss what you have not wanted?

  When I think back on Johnny Cannon and his stabbing victim, when I look out my front room window and watch a black man beating a black woman, when I think of the villain who broke into my apartment last year, I tell myself, Yes: I have not wanted it; I have not missed it.

  I am telling the truth. At the same time, I’m telling a lie.

  I was lying too when I told myself I thought my coming to Harlem was part of a logical progression, an evolution. When asked later why Harlem, I would often answer that Harlem was the next obvious place for me. After Africa and after the Deep South, Harlem was the only place that made sense.

  Of course it could have been that after all this time I really did want simply and suddenly to be black—in ways that I had not been black before, or at least not in a very long time. It could be said too that I wanted to be poor for a while, that I wanted to limit myself so that I might know how the caged bird really feels.

  I like to think of myself as living very often a life outside of my own, a life of others. As I did when I was a child pretending to be first one somebody and then another, I like to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes, someone else’s near-situation with the hope that I can see other sides of life, hear other stories, and understand other ways of being. Then I can know a little of how it feels, as nearly as possible, to be someone else. If I can put myself—or nearly put myself—in someone else’s place for a while, having seen what he sees every day and having known the tiniest bit of what she knows and having felt a little of what they feel in their bones, perhaps when I see these others I can see myself.

  We who live beyond the periphery of places like this need to be reminded that other worlds and other people exist. We who have seen these other worlds and lived in them will carry them with us everywhere and forever afterward. How much easier it is to remember them once we have met them, once we have lived among them, once we have laughed with them, cried with them, and tasted their tears.

  Then even from a distance their smiles can be seen in the memory of our hearts.

  Then even from a distance we can care about them.

  I was not thinking of saving the world. I was only trying to save my own poor soul.

  I was thinking of Pig Foot Mary Harris and how she made her fortune and got out of Harlem, and yet still managed to make money from those she left behind.

  My father asked me that night in the car if I would be doing what I do and what I have done if I were not black. I didn’t answer him.

  I was thinking of Michael Simms, who had been my best friend in childhood before my father moved our family to the suburbs. I have missed Michael very much over the years and have longed often for his company and for his mother’s cooking.

  I was thinking of downtown landlords who stay away from Harlem, who take money out of Harlem and in a way suck the life out of it.

  I was thinking of how the garden turned into rubble, how the flowers turned to weeds, how the mecca became a slum.

  I was thinking of my father wanting to move to the suburbs.

  I was thinking about what he said: that whatever has happened here, we did it to ourselves, and that even if we didn’t do it all, we certainly had a hand in it.

  I was thinking that by moving his family away from the black community, he was responsible—or felt he was.

  I was thinking too much, and my thoughts were a cloud. I wasn’t concentrating on my driving. I was no longer listening to my father. I heard him, but I didn’t know what he was saying. I was getting sleepy, dreaming a little, dozing at the wheel. My head bobbing snapped me awake. It was the only thing that kept my eyes open.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw it. Great brown eyes bulging in panic. A moment of gray caught in the headlights.

  I heard the scream before I heard the impact, didn’t know the scream was my own. The scream, more like a grunt, came after the thud, came after my life flashed before my eyes, not as a prelude to death but in answer to my father’s unlikely question. I didn’t realize I had heard it, but at the very moment we were slamming into a deer as it tried to cross the highway, my father was asking me: “Do you ever regret the life you’ve lived?”

  Personne n’a le droit d’être heureux tout seul.

  No one has the right to be happy all by himself.

  —Raoul Follereau

  To come home after a long time away is to feel the heaviness of a place’s history, the weight
of time that has passed, of the yesterdays you have missed. Even if the hands don’t tremble, even if the knees don’t weaken, there is a certain anticipation that feels a little like dread, a little like relief, and that stokes the imagination. Trepidation mingles with delight. A fire built of questions burns beneath your skin. Nostalgia moistens the eye, quickens the heart. There is triumph and there is doubt, and a vague sense of sorrow shapes your smiles as you make your way back home. Slowly—slowly the significance sinks in.

  The significance has as much to do with the setting as it does with the actual return, for here suddenly before you is this place that is indeed home—or used to be—but that now is foreign ground. You know it, but you don’t. It has made you, shaped you, gone with you from here to there, this place called home, fueled your dreams, warmed your thoughts. Wherever you roamed, you carried home inside, the way a warrior off to battle carries home and family and friends. But when you left it, you really left it. You left it all behind. You were not here when yesterday became today. You were not here to know it.

  To be part of a place—any place—and to know it, you have to be there. As Herbert Washington says, you have to see the seasons change.

  Here beside you now stands the sibling whose pulse beats in unison with your own, whose blood is similar to the blood that fills your heart, whose past is very much your past but whose history now is not your own. This avenue we travel is not a two-way street. Its single track leads instead to a fork in the road, which leads to a fork in the road, which leads to yet another fork. Where once there might have been one story, two histories and more diverge.

  The markings are somewhat the same. The influences that frame your place in the world are similar to those that shape the world of the ones who stayed. That much is easy to see, and if you walk backward along your path you will find where your road meets these other roads; retrace further, and you will find the starting point. It is this place, the starting point, that once was home, and would be still if you had stayed, but that you don’t know anymore—no, not fully—and that doesn’t know you.