Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  When I was a young teenager he took me once to see a movie at a theater in his old neighborhood. I think it was a theater called the Comet. In my father’s day it had been a swank movie house, but a black movie house when places like the Fox Theatre, the Loew’s State, and the Loew’s Mid-City were off-limits to black people. They—the mysterious and ever-present they—didn’t want black people enjoying the same as the white folks, couldn’t have them in the same space, wanted of course their money and so had to give them someplace else to spend it. And so there were movie houses like the Comet and the Criterion that my father continued to go to even after blacks were finally allowed into palaces like the Fox—at first in the balconies, the Nigger Heavens, as they were called, and then finally in the main part of the theater, but not until it was clear that the neighborhood was becoming blacker and blacker and the white folks had started to flee to the suburbs, leaving behind the black folks and the expanding, ever-earthly Nigger Heaven.

  Nigger Heaven. How does it sound? Not bad. Almost cute. Maybe in its day, even a little bit funny. It was what Carl Van Vechten called his novel about Harlem. It referred to those balconies where the black folks had to sit if they were allowed at all in white theaters, with the white folks occupying the good seats, the orchestra section below, “occasionally to turn their faces up toward us,” my father told me, “their hard, cruel faces, to laugh at us or sneer at us, but they never beckoned us.” In those old days when such terms could still be used, Nigger Heaven referred as well—and it still could—to uptown New York City, to Harlem. Places apart, Harlem and those black balconies: they were then, and they still are, all of them the same.

  W. E. B. Du Bois, criticizing the Van Vechten novel, complained that “‘Nigger Heaven’ does not mean … a haven for Negroes—a city of refuge for dark and tired souls; it means in common parlance, a nasty, sordid corner into which black folk are herded, and yet a place which they in crass ignorance are fools enough to enjoy.”

  I asked my father why we still went to the Comet and to the Criterion when we didn’t have to, and he looked at me for a long, long time.

  “You don’t have to,” he said. “We’ve tried to make sure of that. But I still have to.”

  He could see, I suppose, that I didn’t know quite what he was talking about.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to do things you really don’t have to do.”

  “How come?” I said. “If you don’t have to do them, then you don’t have to do them.”

  He smiled.

  “Watch the movie,” he said. Then he slouched down in his seat and went to sleep.

  I still remember the movie we saw—or rather, that I saw. It has been since then one of my favorites, but at the time it was quite confusing: a convoluted Italian Western with American actors and a twisting story you had to follow carefully or it would lose you. My father, who had been drinking that day, gave up on it early and went to sleep. I watched the movie twice.

  When he awoke he was sober, which was bad luck for me.

  We had started the afternoon partying at my older sister Camilla’s house. My father wanted to go to a movie, but of course we had to cruise through his old neighborhood first. He always took me along because he knew that at some point he would have a few drinks. Even though I was only thirteen years old, I already knew how to drive. My brother, who was fifteen, had been in no hurry to learn. I had always been my father’s sidekick anyway; I became my father’s backup partly by default. He knew I could always drive him home if he needed me to.

  Unfortunately, he had sobered up. He always did, and I never got my big chance to drive the car all the way home.

  Before we started out he turned to me and gave the look that has always reminded me and warned me at the same time that he expected much of me, that I, as “the last of the big boys,” was and am the focal point of this man’s dreams and of all his struggles.

  “This world is a cruel and hostile place,” he said as we drove toward home. It was not the first time I had heard it from him. “It will kick you in the ass if you let it.” Then he gave me that look and commanded.

  “Brother,” he said, “don’t you let it.”

  He spent the next half-hour telling me what a hard, cruel man he was—he liked the image he thought we had of him as a tough guy; he reinforced it whenever he could. He wanted me to know of the things he had done to keep the world from taking too big a bite out of his soul. He especially wanted me to know what he had done so the world would take an even smaller bite out of mine.

  He said, “This world we’re living in does not make a whole lot of sense. You will find very often in this crazy life that you have to do things you don’t really have to do. And that’s different from doing things you don’t want to do. There is a consequence to everything; remember that. And you never have to do what you don’t want to do as long as you’re willing to pay the price of conviction. Do you understand?” I gave a little nod.

  “But you always have to do what you have to do.”

  He smiled his moonbeam smile then, covering his mouth the way he always does when he laughs.

  “Even,” he said. “Even when you don’t have to.”

  Then just as quickly, the smile was gone.

  “Maybe especially when you don’t really have to,” he said. He was nodding to himself. He had found for himself a moment of clarity. He paused a moment to think it over.

  “That’s how you know,” he said. “That’s how you know who you are. That’s how you know what’s important to you. You’ve got to be your own man. You’ve got to create a world of your own, one that makes sense for you; that is one of the ways you do it.

  “Always, always, always,” he said, “look out for yourself and take care of your own. Everybody else is doing the same—no matter what you might hear. So try to create your own world and don’t let anybody ever tell you who you are or how you ought to be; not even me. You be the one to decide.”

  Then that look again, and the question that was more a command.

  “Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. And we drove home.

  * * *

  Over and over I can tell myself, because of this man now grown old, because of the avenues he pointed out for me, that I am a prisoner neither of Harlem nor of the color of my skin. When I look around me now I see that the life I have lived has nothing in common—so I again tell myself—with the life Henry lived before he was killed. My world is a world far removed from the world of Nicky-No-Arms, of Antonio Morales, of the nameless others. I long ago escaped from the narrowness of that world and those lives.

  In a way this world where I now find myself is my father’s world more than it is mine. Oddly enough, this is not the world he wanted me to have.

  “Yeah,” he often told me. “It was good enough for me. It is not good enough for you. It is not enough for you. So don’t you settle for it.”

  It seems very often that there are these two ways to be a father: either you want your sons to follow in your own sacred footsteps, or you want your sons to follow an easier path. My father worked hard to disinherit me.

  Harlem was part of the world that was his. It was the world as he knew it: a hostile and bitter place with rigidly defined boundaries of where he could and could not go, what he could and could not do. It was a world he struggled most desperately for me to avoid.

  Perhaps it was a world he himself would have wanted to escape, but being of another time and being too much a part of that world, too much a product of it, he was unable to pull completely away. He always had one foot stuck in that world’s reality. The other foot he could—and did—lift out and set down in a world of dreams and possibility, but it was shaky ground, too unstable for him to get a foothold there and climb out onto. So instead, he lifted me up, carried me the way he did when I was an invalid child, and set me down in the world he wanted me to have, a place where the terrain was a little less harsh.

  Perhaps there had been no choi
ce for him. Perhaps he had to live in Harlem. But he made sure that I didn’t have to, made sure I would not be confined to a life of hopeless resignation and gloom, some Nigger Heaven where the high walls of the labyrinth block out the beacons of possibility and choice and freedom, the maze where Antonio Morales lives, where young Henry died, and where Nicky-No-Arms rules the streets; this world where you can be shot at in passing just because your bike is blue.

  None of this is to say that every square inch of Harlem is misery and surrender. Not very far, in fact, from where I live, there is a small two-block section of Harlem that in the glory days was called Strivers’ Row. Two streets, 138th and 139th. Bounded at either end by Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Two blocks of row houses designed and built in the late 1800s by the famous architect Stanford White, some of them, and the others by Clarence S. Luce and Bruce Price. These homes were then among the most elegant buildings in Harlem. They still are. But the people who own them and who live in them seem to live a life apart from the rest of Harlem.

  Built, of course, for white people and enormously expensive, these large and beautiful townhouses of brick and limestone were given up when the nature of Harlem changed. The white folks moved out. Black folks moved in. The section came to be known as Strivers’ Row because of all the doctors, the lawyers, the members of the black elite, who lived there. They were the only black people rich enough to afford to live there. They were the strivers.

  It might still be called Strivers’ Row, and for the same reason. The price of these townhouses is more than the average Harlemite will see in a lifetime.

  There are other elegant homes in Harlem, other fabulous and expensive townhouses, swank apartment buildings where doctors and lawyers and politicians hide behind doormen in uniform, private courtyards, and high prices. They live here still. They have stayed in Harlem. At the same time, they don’t really live here. They don’t see the same world the other Harlemites see. (But at least they are here; and that’s something—I don’t know what, but something—even if they live lives barely connected to the rest of Harlem.)

  They send their children to private schools out of the neighborhood. They take vacations to Europe, to Africa, to Polynesia. They come and go with the ease of a chauffeur-driven car. They do their shopping mostly away from the neighborhood. They are ambitious, still striving, still reaching—and prospering, it seems, even if their brethren are not.

  Early on during my time in Harlem, when I still had a few dollars in the bank, I stood in line to draw money out of a cash machine. The woman in front of me was old and wore a fuzzy cloth coat that was frayed at the edges. She was short. I am not, and being more than curious, I peeped over her shoulder as she did whatever she was doing. When her bank balance flashed onto the screen of the money machine, I was astounded. She had close to twelve thousand dollars in her checking account.

  There is money in Harlem. There is life in Harlem. There is ambition and success in Harlem. Unfortunately they are hidden. Because they are hidden, they cannot erase the images of Harlem that prevail: that of a tired and lifeless world overcome by violence and poverty and despair, where the exit routes are barred at every turn.

  This world that is Harlem is not the world as I have come to know it, but it is the Harlem I have come to know. It is not the world I want.

  Nor is it the world my father wanted for me, and for me to have answered him—Do I regret the life I’ve lived?—in any way but the way I did would have been to repudiate all he had ever done. I would have disappointed him, I am sure, the way Wilson Clark feels he has let his grandfather down, for my father sought to give me—and somehow succeeded—a life of choices where none had existed before, a life of advantage and wide possibilities.

  So I offer my thanks and I shout my replies to my father’s question into the darkness of each Harlem night.

  But sometimes in the day I wonder as I walk. Sometimes I just don’t know. Come then in those moments the fires inside that are built on a pyre of questions. First my father’s questions. Then my own.

  Do I regret the life I’ve lived, he wants to know; do I ever get the feeling that we’ve done everything all wrong?

  When he asked, there was in his voice the same kind of liquid sadness that fills his eyes when he has looked for the old neighborhood and cannot find it, when he wonders what became of the world he knew, what became of the world he had hoped and worked for, what, in fact, has become of the world.

  I don’t know what happened to the world he had wanted to create. Maybe in some way I have actually managed to live it. I’m not sure. But the world he once knew, that world he sought to escape by moving to the suburbs, was in many ways right here in Harlem, right here on these streets, right here outside my window.

  Not much has changed in the time since I’ve been gone. And yet nothing seems the same.

  I feel sometimes like my father must feel when he goes searching for the old neighborhood. It seems, when I look for it, that too much from the old days that was good has gone, and I recognize little. I feel lost. I feel a little sad. Those things that were not so good have gone nowhere. So much that ought to have changed has remained the same. Johnny Cannon is still in plain view when I look out my window.

  The wisdom of Herbert Washington rises to me in those moments, and I hear him tell me once again that some things have changed too much and far too fast; others not fast enough. Those things that have not changed cause for me the most bewilderment. I don’t know if my father feels this too, but I am in a time warp, and there is an odd discomfort at finding what is familiar.

  The world should have moved on by now. Nothing should be as it was. But it is. Time has stood still, has even, in many ways, gone backward.

  Strivers’ Row notwithstanding, there are too many faces imprisoned in Harlem, too many backs bent from bearing a load that does not go away at the end of the workday or week, too many souls atrophying from the effects of hopelessness, too many eyes glazed over from narcotics numbing the effect of not enough chances, of being pushed to the edges and left there, discarded and uncared-for, on the trash heap of Harlem.

  For many of the people of Harlem everything is the same as it was. Yet nothing is the same. Maybe I and the life I’ve lived are evidence.

  But sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I am racked with guilt. Perhaps my father too. Perhaps it is why he wants to know.

  The night he asked had been a very clear night, exceedingly starry, surprisingly cold, and we stood shivering side by side, each of us silently and in his own way thinking about the wreckage that lay before us.

  “We have been very lucky,” my father said. “It’s enough to make you wonder.”

  “Wonder what, Pop?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, fumbling now lest I suddenly discover this side of him he thinks he has kept hidden. “Maybe I’m wondering why some people and not some others.”

  “Yeah,” I said. That’s all I could think to say.

  I looked from one to the other, from the wrecked car to the deer lying dead in the road.

  I wanted to say something philosophical. My father spoke first, saying something then that seemed silly, given the direction the conversation was taking, but more like the man I knew.

  “Brother,” he said. “It is sure a pity to waste all that fresh meat.”

  Immediately, a semi truck came roaring down the highway and ran over the carcass, no longer meat, just mush.

  I glanced sideways at my father. He was shaking his head. He still couldn’t get over how lucky we had been.

  We walked up to a gasoline station in Pocahontas, and while we waited for the police and a tow truck to come, the gas station man filled my father’s ear with stories of similar accidents, one where the deer instead of being hit straight on, the way we had done it, had come up over the top of the car, crashed through the front window, and as it was trapped but not dead yet, started kicking frantically, trying to break free. The deer ripped open the chest of the man who had been driving the ca
r.

  “They get crazy when they get trapped like that,” the man said.

  My father trembled a little and frowned.

  Now suddenly I heard the question for the first time. I don’t know why—maybe the fragility of life suddenly made all too clear, maybe the thought of being trapped myself, I who so far had been so free, I believed, and knowing how crazy I would get if I were ever similarly trapped—don’t know why it hit me then, but it did.

  I realized now that I had heard it as we were hitting the deer. I realized too that in the instant of the accident I had seen selected glimpses of my life flashing in front of me.

  These flashes came not accompanying death, as myth says they will. They came as part of the question I was only now conscious of having heard. They came as part of the answer.

  From the flashes you start to grab randomly, close events first, then ones from farther away. You start to play silly scenarios in your head, a game of what-ifs. What if we had gotten a hotel in Columbus and had slept away the rest of this night? What if we had been driving a little faster? A little slower? What if we had been five miles—or more—from the nearest town instead of five minutes?

  What if when I was ten years old I hadn’t kicked Donna Quirk in the thigh for ripping up a paper airplane I had just made; what if I hadn’t gotten into so much trouble that day? She was a white girl. It was a mostly white school. What if the trouble had been worse?

  What if I had married my college sweetheart? She was a white girl. What if her family hadn’t raised such a ruckus?

  So many ways I could have avoided being on that road that night. So many little avenues, twists, and turnings that had put me there. So many reasons in fact that I had to be there—if only to hear my father’s stories one more time. So many reasons for why Harlem, and why now.

  And so many ways the accident could have been a disaster.

  If I had never realized it before, if I never think the same way again, I knew all of a sudden that I had been blessed with a charmed life. There have been a multitude of missteps and mistakes, each one followed, it very often seems, by a miracle. I have walked a balancing act that leaves my fearless brother nervous and amazed. I have sinned and I have grieved for things I’ve done and I have wept at the loss of dear friends. Many things I wish I had never done, many things I wish I could do over. But after all the sorrows and all the triumphs, there is no one else or no way else I would rather be. And not a thing, nothing in this world, would I trade away for being in the car that night with my dear father.