Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

“I guess dying beats going to jail forever,” he explains. “You get a little taste of what they say life is all about, you blow up big, and then you die while you’re still whole, before they take away your manhood and your self-respect. It sure as hell beats this poverty shit.”

  Just before going to jail—the first time—Antonio was ambushed while he sat on the front stoop of his building, playing a few games of dominoes before dinner. He was shot several times, either by the police, some say, demanding more protection money, or else by rival drug dealers, or else by pistol-packing punks in the neighborhood jealous of the clothes and the cars and all the attention Antonio got. He wouldn’t tell me how much money he had made and spent, but he said it was a lot.

  “What do you do with that kind of money?” he said. “It’s all in cash. You can’t walk down to the bank with it and start buying savings bonds. They want to know where you got it. The tax people want to know. The stores, though, they don’t care; they like your cash, even pretend to like you too. So you find ways to spend the money, stupid ways, the stupider the better: clothes, a couple of cars you don’t need, some jewelry. And then you got to spread it around a little bit too, you know, trying to have a good time with your partners while the good times last, ’cause they don’t come easy and they don’t come often enough around here. It’s amazing how many friends you get when you start tossing around cash, buying things for everybody. But let a man get shot a couple of times, lose an arm, go to jail, his income starts to fall off: man, people will desert you like a motherfucker.”

  He takes a few deep breaths and blows them hard through his nose. Then he is quiet. The swagger in his walk is not so pronounced now. He doesn’t rock so much from side to side. In his face there is a frown of confusion where there had been one of defiance. He reaches for the arm that is not there and squeezes the stub.

  We walk over to Malcolm X without another word.

  There is another drug dealer I know, he goes by the name Nicky-No-Arms. He won’t talk about it, but he is reputed to have killed many men: those who got in his way, those who would not or could not pay what they owed him, those who jeopardized his reputation or put at risk his income. He has made much much money. He has spent just as much. And he has stayed many nights in jail. He lost his arms when rivals in a drug-turf war kidnapped him one afternoon, held him down, and whacked at him with axes. They hacked off his arms—above the elbows—to teach him a lesson. Nicky and his boys had encroached on their territory. It was not a thing to be done. Why they didn’t just kill him, no one seems to know, but it didn’t discourage him from the drug business. Now he is more feared than before. Now he has little left to lose. He wheels himself around the neighborhood as bold as you please in a specially rigged land cruiser that he can drive without the use of his arms.

  And then there was Henry.

  Henry hit the streets when he was thirteen years old, selling crack cocaine. His was the only income in a household of five. In their home there was no other man older than his thirteen years. His three younger brothers had three different fathers; none of the men lived with the boys and their mother, Jolene. She didn’t work. Who would mind the kids? she asked me. So she stayed home, stayed on the phone most of the day, or in front of the television, and the only people on the block making money were the drug dealers on the corners.

  Henry once said to me, “That’s all we knew, man. We never saw anybody going outside the house to work. All the women in the neighborhood did was talk on the telephone or watch the TV or sit around out front on the stoops and complain about this and that. If they did anything at all, once in a while they cleaned the house. And the only men we ever saw with anything that even looked like a job were the crack dealers. And they were damn sure the only ones who had anything like clothes and cars and money. So what am I supposed to do? I’m thirteen years old, I’m the man of the house, and we got no food ’cause the food stamps only last us to the middle of the month. I want to be like a man, I want to take care of my family, and the only men out there working are working the streets. What would you do if this is all you know?”

  You should have seen the way he talked to me, this now seventeen-year-old man, four-year veteran street-corner drug dealer. His arms flailed out wide, two at a time, one at a time, always back hard with a pop to the chest, one hand slapping his chest, one hand sailing out for emphasis. And he had that walk. They all have that walk.

  He looked so tough in his NFL jacket and his overpriced basketball shoes, his trousers baggy in the butt and loose everywhere, a nine-millimeter pistol stuck in the elastic band of his underwear. He looked so tough, his face as tired already as an old man’s. If you saw the two of us standing side by side, you would be hard pressed to say which of us was older. But he was just a kid. He should have been in school somewhere, or on some playground chasing a ball around.

  “School!” he once shouted at me. “Man, this is the school. Here is where you learn what it’s all about.”

  What it was all about, of course, was the money. Now there was food to eat, “all kinds of food,” he said, “any kind of food you want, just go on up there and have my mamma fix something for you.” He was the man in the house; he gave the orders now.

  “She needs an old man like you around the house sometimes anyway,” he said. It was good to see him laugh.

  Upstairs in the crowded apartment there was too much bad furniture and not enough space. Two old sofas were jammed in a corner next to a small table. Flimsy kitchen chairs were in the living room. The walls were crowded with tasteless pictures, some religious, some political, some adverts cut out of magazines. And there was Jolene, not much more than a kid herself, just sitting around, exactly as Henry said she’d be.

  She had Henry when she was fifteen—because she was in love, she said. Yeah, it was an accident, but “I wasn’t thinking about giving up my baby. And Henry’s father, his name was Henry too, he was a fine young thing. You could see he was going somewhere with his life. Well, he sure enough did. He got me pregnant with another baby, and then he went on about his business. Not another word out of him. Just gone. And the other two: that was just me being stupid, needing a man. One man already had a wife, and the other fool was just looking for somebody to fatback on—looking for somebody to take care of him. That got old quick, and I threw his ass on out of here.” She snapped her fingers three times with a flourish.

  She smoked a cigarette and chewed gum at the same time, both with an exaggerated relish. The long handle of a heavy plastic comb was stuck in the back of her hair. But just as Henry promised, she said she would cook lunch for me. She opened the cupboards and from among the stacks and stacks of cans and boxes of food, bags of chips, plastic bottles of colorful fruit-flavored drinks, she pulled out a can of Vienna sausages and a box of macaroni and cheese.

  There was a small TV in the kitchen that she watched while she cooked—or rather, while she heated up the lunch. There was a larger TV in the living room too, only four feet away. It was on at the same time. She was watching two programs at once.

  The floor was covered with basketball shoes. Jolene said Henry owned dozens of pairs, a different pair for every day of the month, and he gave his brothers, it seemed like, she said, a new pair each week.

  “And why not?” she said. “He’s making three, four, sometimes five thousand dollars a week. Bought himself a new car the other day. Says he’s going to buy me one too—soon as I can learn to drive.”

  “And you don’t care how he earns the money?” I asked her. She looked at me, cigarette dangling from her lip, like she hadn’t heard, or like she thought I was crazy.

  And why should she care? Perhaps a little for his safety on the streets, for young men die too easily on the streets and die too young, but certainly not for the illegality of his dealing, certainly not for the immorality of it. Not with this kind of temporary money at stake. And not with the permanent squalor she sees all around them every day. The money will come and the money will go, she knows, a
nd life is a temporary thing; the lucky ones die young. But this despair goes on and on, so you take what you can while you can.

  Henry slipped into the drug trade the same as most young people on the street. He went and talked to one of the dealers on a nearby corner. They’re easy to find. They’re all over the neighborhood. Anyway, Henry and everyone else knew all the dealers around, knew who they were and where they stood each day.

  The dealers, of course, have no qualms about hiring a young boy of thirteen, or eleven, or eight—as long as the young boy buffers between the dealers and the police. And the younger the boy, the thinking on the street has it, the harder he works, because for the first time in his young life—and it may be for the only time in his life—he’ll be respected. He’s part of something, making his own money, doing for himself, and now he’s got something to show for his time: money and the things money can buy.

  “Most often,” Antonio told me, “a boy starts as a kind of runner. He takes the buyer’s money, goes to where the drugs are hidden, comes back and completes the sale. He doesn’t have anything else to worry about, just taking the money and getting the drugs from where they’re hidden. He’s not supposed to concern himself with the police or guns or anything else. We got other people up and down the block whose job it is to watch out and protect the business. All he has to do is worry about his end, work an eight-hour day, get paid at the end of the week. It’s just like a legit job, only easier.”

  “Except for the risk,” I said.

  “Except for the risk,” he echoed. “But the bigger the risk … You know how that goes. Who can turn it down? I know I couldn’t. Five hundred dollars a week. Easy money. Six hundred dollars a week. It just gets easier. You get more responsibility, closer to the boys at the top of the ladder, you make more money. It’s just like corporate America.”

  By the time Henry was fifteen years old he was handling twenty, twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars a week—not his own money, of course—all from the sales of small vials of crack cocaine, three dollars a hit.

  “People would sometimes buy a hundred vials at a time,” Henry told me. “And we’re not just talking about people from the neighborhood. These are white boys from downtown, from Long Island, from Jersey. That’s where the money is. And they come here to get what we got.”

  Not that people from the neighborhood weren’t buying as well. Many women, young and not so young, always very thin and haggard, but always with the greatest smiles, have offered themselves to me for the meagerest amounts of money. And I have been told that the busiest day of the month for the dealers is the day the welfare checks arrive.

  “And who is there to care?” Antonio asked. “Not the mothers of these young boys.” He checked himself.

  “Okay,” he said. “Maybe some mothers care, if they know, because maybe they realize their sons are going to die or wind up in jail. Those are the only two places this road leads to. And they have to know that, if they know anything at all, if they even care at all. So they do what they can, I suppose, but what can you do with a young boy who thinks he’s suddenly a man and he’s making more money in a few weeks than you made all of last year—if you made any money at all apart from your welfare check? If you come down on him for what he’s doing, he just moves out, moves in with his pregnant fifteen-year-old girlfriend and her mother, who are happy to have him and the clothes and the color TVs. And all that food and all that stuff he’s buying just ends up in somebody else’s house. And the somebody elses don’t care at all where he gets the money or how he ends up. They don’t care. They never do.”

  So the mothers often pretend they don’t know what’s going on, pretend they have no idea where all the sudden money comes from. They learn to stop asking.

  “Everybody,” Antonio says, “turns a blind eye—from the police on down: family, friends, people on the street. They just want to get from you while they can. Nobody really cares about you.”

  Jolene said she cared. She was worried about Henry’s physical safety on the streets, but she was also worried about the spiritual death that haunts these streets. She had seen it grip the other boys in the neighborhood. She admitted it had even taken hold of her.

  “But what can you do?” she griped. “What the hell choice do we have?”

  The last time I went to see them, Henry had been shot dead. He was seventeen years old.

  My father wants to know if I regret the life I have lived, wants to know too, I suppose, if I regret missing the life I never had. At first glance the answer seems a blatantly easy one to give.

  My young friend Henry lies dead on a table in his living room. Someone has carried him home and has laid him here. The table is low, close to the floor, like a little altar, and is surrounded by the basketball shoes that are so adored in the neighborhood. They are strewn all around Henry’s young body like some kind of offering, as if he had been a god. And for a little while Henry was a god, in this house, in this part of the neighborhood. His face had once shone with the pleasure of power and recognition. Now his eyes are like ice. They hold no look of shock or surprise at what has happened. The eyes have always known, even if Henry didn’t, that it was only a matter of time. The eyes frown now not from wonder, and not from remorse, but as if in Henry’s seventeen years they have seen far too much. His face has been battered tough, his eyes are tired beyond belief. It is a face already too old to be so young. But it will get no older.

  In another part of Harlem, Nicky-No-Arms lies between two streams of blood spilling onto the cold concrete floor of a warehouse somewhere. He shivers but cannot hug himself for warmth or comfort.

  The mother of Antonio Morales spreads her legs in the backseat of a car. Another baby is born in Harlem.

  There is nothing prissy, nothing neat about these streets where I live. I walk them every day, I stand at my window. What I see tears at my eyes. What I feel exposes who I am.

  Not so long ago, across the street from where I live, new neighbors moved in for a short time. I watched them off and on that evening for over two hours as they set up house, laid the table, and got the fire going for a barbecue. They cooked. The radio blasted until the batteries went dead. The children played.

  I thought nothing of it. It was the beginning of my second winter in Harlem. By then I had seen plenty.

  The air outside was cold and damp, but the fire in the barbecue glowed with heat, first red, then white. It was, all in all, a happy scene. The three adults sitting on folding lawn chairs told loud stories and laughed. The children shared laughter of their own. They jumped rope. They played tag. They argued the way children do when one of them doesn’t get his way. Then they all sat down to eat.

  Funny thing though: there is no building across the street from where I live. There is only a large parking lot. Behind the lot is a grassy incline, and behind the incline there is a new track and a football field built for the school that’s just up the road. Surrounding it all, there is a stone fence with iron bars along the top to keep out intruders. In front of this fence, on the sidewalk, my new neighbors had set up house. Their moving van was a metal cart on long loan from a grocery store.

  The children played between parked cars and in the street. Dinner was set up on cardboard boxes overturned. When they finished eating and it was time for bed, the children slept curled up on blankets laid on the pavement.

  I thought absolutely nothing of it.

  It rained during the night. In the morning the family was gone.

  One evening not long afterward, three squad cars pulled up in front of my apartment building. A lot of commotion, a lot of noise. One cop stood outside. The other five stormed into the building. I leaned out the window and watched for a few minutes. Then I turned away. My biggest curiosity had been about the lady cop who was with them and why she had been the one to stand guard outside and not one of the men. I was curious too about my strange lack of curiosity.

  A few months later, someone took a shot at me on the street. As I rode my motorcy
cle down Amsterdam Avenue, a young man in front of a corner store leveled his arm and followed me with the barrel of a pistol. He fired twice, I assume at me. I put on the gas and didn’t look back. Neither did I even flinch.

  It is amazing what you get used to. By now it was all seeming normal. I had come a long way from Johnny Cannon, but in fact not so long a way at all. It seems too often that not much has changed since then.

  And my father asks if I regret this life that I have missed.

  I shout my replies into each Harlem night.

  Over and over I have told myself that none of this is really mine, that I have gotten away from here, that I have disconnected myself from this world, that I have in fact escaped. Even now on this return I knew I would not be here long and certainly not forever. (Or so I thought.) The world outside my window each day and every night, the world I visit when I walk these streets, the world of Johnny Cannon stabbing, of the man just below my window trying to beat the will out of this woman, of Henry, of Nicky-No-Arms, of Antonio Morales, these are all parts of the same world that I have for two years now been walking through. This is not the world I think of as mine. I am only a visitor here, only passing through until my time here is up, and then I can be gone again. Then this world will have disappeared once more from my life.

  No! My world—or so I thought—the world my father had sought to give me, is a world far from this one. The world he wanted for me and the world I seem to have found is a world without Harlem’s borders, without Harlem’s limits. No, nothing so corny nor so unrealistic as a world where “All God’s children…”—or any such nonsense—no, not yet, not in this time or place. My father is a crazy man, it is true, but he is not so naive as to believe yet in a world where black men are judged solely by the contents of their character. He has dreams aplenty, my father does; that one is not his. My father has always been a realist.

  No. The world he wanted for me was a world where I would, anyway, be able to choose for myself, a world where I would have choice.