Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  We pretend. We hope. We dream. No matter. It is no longer home.

  And yet many many things are as familiar as if they were yesterday, so familiar they seem right; so familiar they seem good.

  These are what we take along when we leave a place. They soften the smiles of strangers in strange lands; they make tolerable their ways. They warm the cold nights. These are the things that remind us of home and how it all used to be here. And these are the things that one day call us back. And when at last we see them once more, that’s how we know we have come home again.

  My memory is crowded with these markers of Harlem, these things I have done without, that I once turned my back on, that I have missed without realizing. They are what I remember from a time long ago when being black seemed a very fine way to be. It seemed, in fact, when I watched my father, that being black was indeed a lot of fun. It was hard work; it has always been hard work, but the task at hand gave us something to rally around, to close ranks against. It made the music louder. It made the laughter richer. There was nothing wrong then with living in a black neighborhood. Anyway, we had no choice. And anyway, we kept the neighborhoods mostly safe. And anyway, that’s how I remember it. But then again, I left a long time ago, and I was very young.

  I remember, I remember, I remember.

  When I walk the streets of Harlem now, having moved, in a way, back home, I am flooded with memories of my youth, as if I were an old man. That is one of the great powers of place: to get you thinking, to get you feeling.

  There are the obvious things, of course: friends not quite forgotten and food that has been replaced with more elegant fare but that now seems to taste even better than I recall, better after a few nights, I guess, in memory’s cooler. I never knew how much I loved sweet potato pie until I came to live in Harlem, or how much I missed black-eyed peas and candied yams. We ate these things often when I was a kid, but we ate them, I thought, because we had to, because we were not the wealthiest folks on the block and eating a mountain of beans each week or two tons of collard greens was how to stretch the money. Nowadays, when I don’t feel like cooking, I often wander over to Sylvia’s on Lenox Avenue to stuff myself with what have become in my mind the delicacies of my youth. They don’t do them as well there as Michael Simms’s mother did them and probably still does them, but they remind me, as they are supposed to do, of what I have been missing. They remind me that I have been away and that I have come home.

  All of a sudden nostalgia fills the blank spots in a memory, and no matter how good that food and those days really were, now of course everything then seems somehow better than it was or more than it was—or even worse than it was, which in a nostalgic sense is still better. You are an old man remembering when, wondering where the good old days have gone.

  You come out of Sylvia’s with a belly full of nostalgia. You stand on a street corner and everything seems familiar. You’re home at last. The realization brings a satisfied smile.

  But something is not quite right. Something is so familiar it is disturbing, and that smile of recognition fades away.

  There is something about the way American black men walk that marks them in the world—not all, but many. They move with a certain swagger, as if to be seen, as if to make known a presence: a sexiness, a strength, a fearlessness. I myself walk with this same show-offy walk; I don’t think I do it consciously, but it must come from the same place in my being, for it speaks the same meaning: Look at me, see me; I am here. When I see other black men walk, I see myself.

  And there is something about the music that pours from the windows of Harlem, fills the air, booms from the big boxes on street corners and from passing cars. It is not the same music I grew up with, not the music my father’s age would want, but in a way his music and my music and this music are very much the same music. At times it has been joyful and sad, by turns proud and prayerful, now angry; all of it music that attempts to soothe a soul in anguish. And if the music has changed, it is because the souls themselves have changed, responding, as does the walk, as does the rich rich laughter, the loud talk, as do the backs that still bend and the tired black faces that have not changed much since I was young and probably even since my father was a boy, responding to a situation that likewise has not changed. And when you stand on a Harlem street corner, with your tummy filled with nostalgia, your eyes smiling remembrance and recognition, then you will see how much of this place has remained the same, how after all this time so much is so very familiar—too much, in fact—that it seems as if time has stood still.

  While this may make home feel at first like home and seem all the more recognizable, it underscores—for me at least—how histories have diverged, even while remaining entwined, and how home has become an unfamiliar place.

  It is no longer the world I know, not the life I now have gotten used to. It is not a place I would care to remain. It is far too bleak now.

  As of the very day I moved into Harlem, out of a population of over 250 million Americans there were 31 million blacks who by statistical definition were that day and are still seven times more likely than whites in America to die by homicide, who are three times more likely to contract AIDS, who are twice as likely to live in central cities and four times more likely to be born out of wedlock. Compared to white Americans, blacks are half as likely to have college degrees and three times more likely to live in poverty, three times more likely to be unemployed, seven times more likely to serve time in prison. One out of every three black men in his twenties is in jail. As much as we hate to admit it and try to skirt the manifestly obvious, skin color counts for much in this country, and despite what I believed as a child, despite what I still naively hope, that I could be and can be anyone I choose to be, achieve anything I want badly enough, and live any life I very much desire, being black is defined by certain statistical realities and by the narrower realm of possibilities.

  The median worth of black households in America on that day was $4,169; of white households, $43,279.

  This is not an average. This is to say that half the white households in America have a net worth of over forty thousand dollars, and that half the black households in this country are worth less than four thousand.

  Something seems to have gone horribly wrong. Things are definitely not as they ought to be, not what they could be.

  Being black in America has always been a less than easy task. Although I myself have been extremely lucky, for some, perhaps for many or even most, being black never seems to get any easier. In many ways it has never been harder.

  “That,” said my friend Wilson Clark, “is because this is a different America than the one that pretends to believe in fairness and equality. This is the America that we in the outer world know nothing about, pretending even that it doesn’t exist and that if it does exist, it exists the same way the prison world does: because of the poor choices of the inmates—because of something they did. They could, the thinking goes, have been anything they wanted, lived any life they wanted, but this life in one way or another is what they chose.”

  Wilson is right. People have often asked me why the people who live in Harlem, if life is as bad here as it seems, don’t just move away from here—as if they could, as if they had someplace else to go, as if for most people in Harlem living here has been a choice.

  For some people it is a choice. For me these days, and for Wilson Clark, who came, he said, driven here by that woman with the baby stroller on the A train. These were not his words, of course. He never saw her. He had not been on the subway with me that summer day, but when I told him how she looked, he knew without another word the panic that widened her eyes. He had seen it already a thousand times, he said, and that’s why he had come to Harlem: to get away from it.

  “To escape,” he said. “To escape that look in white folks’ eyes.”

  Like Olivia Maxwell in Chicago, and like myself, I guess, though I never would have suspected it beforehand, Wilson Clark had fallen under the spell of Har
lem and into the trap.

  “I didn’t realize it when I came,” he said. “I was just so thrilled to be coming here and then to finally get here. Man, that’s all I thought I needed was to get here. But now I know that when I let that look—you know that look—when I let that look finally get to me, drive me almost out of my mind, when I let that look force me to come to live in Harlem, now I know I was letting the white folks win. I was giving up the game. And I was letting my grandfather down.”

  We were sitting in a dark bar on 125th Street, just off the corner of Morningside Drive. From where we sat, even if we had sat by the window or if we had been outside, we couldn’t see it—and if you didn’t know it already, you wouldn’t know it from where we were—but we were sitting in the shadow of Columbia University.

  If you walk a little farther down Morningside you will come to a park that starts in the flats but then climbs up a towering hill. This park, this hill, is the beginning of a line that separates two worlds. At the top of this hill sits one of the mainstays of the one world, the Columbia University complex, which, along with the other institutions that buttress and buffer it—Barnard College, Teachers College, Jewish Theological Seminary—remains a constant reminder of the privilege and opportunity the one world dangles before but then ultimately denies this other world. Columbia University is in Harlem, on its westernmost edge but undeniably clustered well within the confines of the neighborhood.

  Along this corridor, from 114th to 120th Streets, the two worlds come together in the same way that cultures meet in those buffer zones that separate border towns: softly, the one always vaguely aware of the other and yet in a way completely oblivious, for life goes on and the twain rarely meet; so close and yet so far apart they might as well be on different planets, so close that the spires of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, which sits high atop this hill, can be seen from the flatlands below wherever there is a gap in the tall buildings.

  It is easy enough to walk there, into that world, to sit across from the cathedral and have a coffee or a pastry in the Hungarian café on Amsterdam Avenue, easy enough to pass through the heart of Columbia’s campus and cross over from Amsterdam to Broadway, out of what seems the delirium and despair of Harlem, whose glory days have clearly passed, and into a world that is all hope and opportunity and pointed toward the future, a world linked as if by some magical pipeline to the City of Gold, the rest of Manhattan and the rest of the world, a pipeline that clearly doesn’t open onto the rest of Harlem.

  It is easy enough to go there and see what they have, those who have, and what they who have not are missing out on, the same as it would be easy enough for those others to come see what their brothers and sisters in Harlem are lacking. It is easier still to stay where you are and pretend not to know, pretend not to care.

  As soft and flexible as it seems, the frontier is nonetheless a hard-edged line that segregates the two worlds. Whether these two worlds seem separated by the grassy knoll of Morningside Park or by the soft border of 110th Street, also called Cathedral Parkway, or by any other geographical boundary, they are separated as well by the rigid boundary line of color and money. They are two worlds so physically distinct and so separated—not just separate—that something as ubiquitous in the rest of Manhattan as a taxicab is essentially nonexistent in Harlem. South of Cathedral Parkway, the symbol of the city might easily be a tricolored flag: white of course, and green like money, and then yellow. The yellow would be the yellow of taxicabs.

  Certainly there are taxis in Harlem. But as you go in either direction along any of the avenues—south or north, down toward paradise or uptown toward Harlem—the careful eye cannot help but notice the comings and goings of the yellow cabs, their existence on one side of the line and their mysterious disappearance on the other. They are replaced on the Harlem side of the line by what are called the gypsy cabs.

  The line—the line—the line that separates, the line that isolates, the line that turns Harlem into the prison it has become.

  If you stroll downtown from 133rd Street where I live or from higher up, you will cut across the dark heart of central Harlem, dark as dark can be, and on through the soft edge of Harlem to the border area where Harlem ends and the rest of Manhattan begins, that buffer zone where the one world meets the other, where there is spillage and there is seepage and you stand as if in two different worlds at the same time.

  In the buffer zone there are black people and there are white people and there are the brown Hispanics who to the undiscerning eye can seem black or brown or even sometimes white, and who are regarded in much the same way—if not by themselves, then certainly by the outside eyes looking in—that blacks are. Harlem belongs to them too now, to the Cubans and to the Mexicans, to the Dominicans and the Puerto Ricans whose neighborhood was once the lower east end of Harlem but then spread along the southern rim and up the West Side. Now those edges have blurred. It is impossible to tell sometimes where black Harlem ends and Hispanic Harlem begins, and you are as likely to hear Spanish in many parts of Harlem as you are to hear English.

  Harlem belongs to all of us now, these blacks and Hispanics who, though at odds with each other in many ways, share in many more ways the same circumstance and fate and isolation, the same restrictions imposed by place. They all live in this land beyond the buffer zone, and the demons within Harlem and the demons without that conspire to make black life the prison it has become in Harlem and to maintain this prison conspire as well to lay the same dark shroud over the lives and conditions of the Hispanics.

  Antonio Morales, who lives in East Harlem, has come to recognize that in New York City, in all of America in fact, it matters very much whether you’re black or white or Hispanic. In fact, he says, it’s the only thing that really does matter.

  “It is all about race in America,” he says. “Makes no difference how they try to dance around it, it is all about race: what you are, what you get, what you don’t get. And if you’re black or Chicano or Puerto Rican, all you have to do is turn on the TV and see what you are never supposed to have. Oh, they want you to want it, all right, and they want you to think you’re going to get it. They want you to think it’s all there in front of you waiting for you to just grab it, that it’s all in your reach, all in a day’s honest work; all you have to do is play the game they want you to play and the way they want you to play it. That’s what they want you to think. That way, when you don’t get it, you know it’s always something you did wrong that keeps you from getting in on the good shit. That way they can keep you dissatisfied with yourself, always down on yourself, always wanting something you ain’t never going to have, and always thinking you’re nobody ’cause you don’t have it: that new Benz, that gold Rolex, that high-powered job. That way they can keep you down, that way they can keep you here, always dangling just enough of the good life and letting you taste just enough of it to keep you plugged in and keep you from tearing the shit down—not just this shit you see all around you here, but the whole shit. Which is what we need to do: burn it all down and start over. But they keep us from tearing down their shit because that’s the shit they got us thinking we want, and if we burn all that shit down, we ain’t never going to be able to get it. So we burn our own shit down instead, trash our own neighborhoods, and let everything fall apart. We don’t care about nothing ’cause for the most part they keep us drugged and they keep us calm by letting us have a nice color TV—with cable, of course!—a nice car, and promises that if we’re good little boys and girls and if we pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, we can enjoy a nice life too—not as nice, but a nice little life. In the meantime, those straps are attached to boots that are standing on our throats. They don’t want us to have good jobs, or really anything decent at all. If they did, don’t you know they could make jobs for us. They don’t want us to be part of their world. And they don’t want us living anywhere but here. This is what they really want us to have.”

  He makes a sweeping gesture with his left arm,
for he has no right arm, and shows you the street he lives on.

  “This is all they want us to have.”

  We walk together along the street he lives on, East 111th, back in the other direction along the next street, and up toward 114th and Malcolm X, where the Dominicans sit for hours and hours on folding chairs and play dominoes in the afternoon. Antonio goes there to play every now and again. But there is something else going on there too. Either it’s some kind of illegal gambling, or it’s drugs. Someone is always peeping out around the corner.

  Did you see any cops in the subway? Or down the block? Any cops coming this way?

  As we walk, Antonio stays to my left and a little in front as he points out the decay—as if it needed pointing out.

  I realize, watching him, that if you just look at his walk, at the way he moves his body, if you could ignore the color of Antonio’s skin, you would swear you were watching a black man walk. It is the same swagger, it shouts the same message: Look at me, notice me, I am here and I am a lion on these mean streets; don’t fuck with me!

  Someone, however, did. It’s how Antonio lost his arm.

  Antonio, like a lot of the fellows he knows, like a lot of fellows on the street for whom there are no good jobs, nor anything close to a decent job, and no way to afford what gets dangled before them—and before all the rest of us too, I suppose—as the sine qua non of wholeness and happiness, Antonio used to be in the drug trade. He was lucky; all he lost was a few years in jail and his right arm.

  “It could have been worse,” he says. After he thinks about that a few seconds, he says: “I don’t know about that. Maybe dying is not so bad after all.”

  Many of his partners and competitors have died on the streets: overdosed, shot to death, pushed out of upper-story windows.