Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  The young boy opposite me watched me. He too said nothing. Then I turned to watch him watching me, and we stared each other down. It’s what men do. He wanted me to look away. I defied him, I challenged him, I stuck my feet out in the aisle, crossed my arms and continued to look at him.

  All of a sudden the boys teasing the girl stopped. Their attention now was on us, the starers. The two by the door watched us as well. The boy across from me finally got up and stood right in front of me.

  “What you looking at, man? You looking at me?”

  I said nothing. I only nodded. Slowly.

  “What’s your problem? Why you staring at me?”

  One of the two by the door came and sat to my right. He seemed the oldest. He seemed the leader of this band. He leaned forward, elbows on knees.

  “What’s the problem?” he said. “Why you staring at him?”

  There was one on my left by the door, this young boy standing inches away in front of me, my eyes locked on him, and there was one sitting beside me.

  It would have been easy to capitulate. Too easy. It would have been very easy also to do the expected in such a situation, to leap to my feet, grab the little one by his throat and shake him dead like a terrier killing a rat, and then try to take out one or two of the others before they killed me, or fight them off until the train stopped at 125th and the doors opened and I could flee. And then what? What happens to the girl once I angered these boys? What happens to her anyway?

  These scenarios and considerations were among the thousand thoughts I scanned as I waited for the next gambit. But all the choices were the easy ones, the too easy ones. Perhaps there was a better way, a way untried, a way we could all win.

  The ringleader beside me gave me this chance.

  “What’s the matter, man, you having a bad day?”

  “Just like you, man,” I said to him. “Every day’s a bad day.”

  It was as if he had been lightly jabbed. His head snapped back just a little. A hmmph tried to escape but got trapped in the back of his throat. He nodded. He smiled. Then he laughed. They all started laughing. The young one in front of me was the last to catch on, but he laughed too. He laughed because the others laughed. And the tension cleared.

  When the train stopped at 125th, they all got out. I waited until just before the doors closed, then I got out too. The girl stayed on. I don’t know now which path was easier, didn’t know then.

  Stuck on a street corner in Harlem, unable to move, I still didn’t know which path was easier.

  The turnabout was slow, and the walk was long back to where Eliot stood waiting for me. His hands were on his hips now. He was definitely waiting. And I was suddenly but just as definitely angered—but at whom; at what?

  I turned. I looked at him. I felt the hot flush of my outrage. Not so much at what he had said. Not so much at the way he watched me and seemed to challenge me. But at everything. And it hit me all at once.

  “The black man is finished,” Eliot had said. “The black man is through.” And I wished to God in that moment that somehow Eliot had been right. I looked up and down all the streets and avenues that fed into the spot where we now stood, and I could see clearly—if I hadn’t known it already before—that unfortunately Eliot was dead wrong. The black man was not dead. Not yet.

  Harlem had been born and Harlem had slipped toward death too quickly, seems often and in many ways to have been almost stillborn, as if it never had a chance to achieve very much of the fullness or the richness of life beyond its first glorious breaths, withering then and nearly dying, and yielding, as the fruit of its flowering, the black man who as black man, like the night-blooming moonflower, ought similarly to have flourished brilliantly and dramatically, which the black man did, and ought then to have died suddenly and vanished away, which he did not. The black man was never allowed to die.

  And in dying, to come to life again and live.

  But though the end of Harlem came in a way swiftly, the end of the black man about which Eliot speaks is and has been for a long time the lingering death of decay, the burning and smothering death of a garden that has been buried in an acid fertilizer.

  The turnabout was a slow one, and it took us away from all the hope and possibility that Harlem of old had once generated. At the same time it was perhaps much too quick, should not have happened this way at all, I don’t suppose, but it was as inevitable, given the tenders of the garden, as my turning around, given the man that I am, to confront Eliot head-on. And now I don’t know if I am to celebrate the dying as part of some new beginning, if indeed there is a new beginning, or mourn, but on this corner as I look all around and up and down the avenues and streets that feed into this place, into this moment, I feel cheated that Harlem is not what Harlem was. I feel cheated and angry that I must continue to live as a black man who ought to have died by now, whom Eliot thinks has died.

  On this corner I feel shamed that I have allowed myself to fall into this trap that I—and many of us here—even now embrace.

  On this corner I feel at the same time absurdly guilty about having left Harlem—absurdly because, if my argument is to make sense, then I ought to be glad those who got out of Harlem did indeed get out, like Pig Foot Mary, who springboarded from here and into the wider world and refused, inasmuch as was possible in her time, to settle here, refused to be content with what she would have had to settle for here.

  Yet I cannot help but wonder, as my father wonders, if in springboarding away from Harlem we who did leave are not somehow responsible for the condition of Harlem and those who have been left behind, and wondering if, had we remained, Harlem might have been somehow different. Always that question. As if Harlem needed us and still needs us in some way.

  We have these two histories, it seems—these two histories at least: the one we’ve lived and continue to live, and the other stories we might have known if we had made better choices, or worse ones, but anyhow different ones. We are stuck now certainly with the one, for good or for bad, and we’re left to look at the others and can only wonder what has happened to us, what we’ve done to and for ourselves. We are left to wonder why, of course, and left to wonder what might have been, but we cannot change the past; we can only wrestle with the future.

  The past hangs over us like a mighty promise made and never kept, and I cannot escape—not only the questions and the wonderings, but the very notion that we (here again the ego speaks, and speaks loudly) who maybe should have stayed in Harlem didn’t. We left. And Harlem was left to die.

  As fine a vision as it may be to see beauty rising from decay, to watch the butterfly emerging from its cocoon, we ought to remember as well that as we float to the heavens to dry the dust on our wings, we have left behind the many others struggling still in the cocoon. We ought to remember that perhaps there is a collective cocoon and that we should all worry about it. It is the reason for the silk trousers, I think, and the purple shirt.

  It was all there, then, at once and suddenly, the whole of it, on this corner and in these moments: the trousers and the shirt, the rats and the telephone and the taxis, the waste and the settling and the whole of Harlem, this magical place whose importance very well might reach far beyond the physical, as perhaps it might always have done, and into the realm of something much more soulful and sorrowful, something even spiritual.

  I wondered then if this was what Herbert Washington had refused to explain and wanted me to discover.

  I had come to Harlem and had pretended to be someone else. It was this that Ann Plymouth had warned me against, this coming to Harlem and pretending to be poor, allowing myself in fact to be poor and thinking that by doing this I could more easily seem one of them, as if to be truly black I had to be poor, had to use the pay phone down the street from my apartment, had to walk a certain way, talk a certain way, dress a certain way, and not mind the rats, the roaches, and the mice, that I had to be one thing or another and settle for less, that I had to imprison myself body mind and spirit.
/>
  I heard of a writer who came to Harlem once and felt conspicuously out of place and endangered. He bought clothes to make him look like a ghetto child. He went to a barber and asked for a haircut that would help him fit in. He wrote a very standard story. He had accepted the standards that are set for Harlem, and he believed in them—for those around him and for himself while he was here. He tried to camouflage himself.

  I once thought like him, thought that to be safe here, to be accepted here, and to have anyone to talk to here, I had to pretend to be someone else. I think now it is the wrong way to think.

  Without meaning to, I had fallen far enough already into the trap that imprisons us all: an insular life. We allow ourselves to be cut off from the rest of the world by race and class; we even encourage the segregation and the pitiful, usually thoughtless, acceptance of the way things are that such isolation leads to. In the process we limit ourselves even as we attempt to limit and control others, to narrowly define them and decide who is, what is, and who can be. Into this trap we fall so willingly. If I could help it, I would fall in no farther.

  Along the West Side of Manhattan runs the Seventh Avenue/Broadway subway line. The 1 train and the 9 train make the local stops, the 2 and the 3 are the express trains. At 96th Street the two express trains branch off to the east and cut across Manhattan beneath the northern tip of Central Park. The 3 train goes farther uptown; the 2 goes over into the Bronx. If you want to go farther up along the far West Side, unless you’re already on the local train, you must get out at 96th Street and from there take the 1 or the 9. They both continue up Broadway, and the next stop after 96th Street is the Cathedral Parkway stop. It is also called 110th Street. The subway conductor will announce it for you.

  But even if you make the change, the next stop goes by the same name—110/Cathedral Parkway. It is not at all the same stop.

  The 1 and the 9 trains stop at the 110th Street station, which is on the corner of Broadway, right at the doorstep of Columbia University. The 2 train and the 3 train stop at 110th and Lenox.

  If you are on your way from Midtown or downtown to, say, Columbia, and you’ve taken the 2 or the 3 and you happen to be gabbing with your friends or napping or reading the paper or in some other way not paying close enough attention, you might easily forget to make the change. Surprise! You could find yourself coming up from the subway in a part of Harlem that you were not expecting.

  Camellia Scott grew up not far from the Harlem station where the 2 and the 3 trains stop. She remembers how she and her friends would wait around at the top of the steps and how they would laugh when people came up bewildered and quite shocked to be in a neighborhood they did not recognize.

  “You could tell they had made the big mistake,” she told me. She spread her hands wide apart in front of her when she said it: The big mistake!

  “You could see it in their eyes, that panicky look. It was funny to watch the way they stood in one spot and turned all the way around. They could never figure out what they were doing there alongside the park. And by the panic in their faces you could see them asking themselves why there were so many black people all around—black folks everywhere, and they all seemed to be staring. That’s how it is when you feel out of place, and they weren’t used to it; you could tell: all those black folks staring at them and laughing? And they were just as confused as could be, those white people coming up out of the subway. They were always white people, completely lost, out of their element and afraid, and it was nice for a change to have white people trapped in a world that was not theirs. This one was ours. And boy! did we laugh at them and throw things and just terrorize the hell out of them. We wanted them to know that this place was ours, and that here we had all the power.”

  That was when Camellia was a young teenager. She doesn’t live in Harlem anymore. She had to move away, she said, because eventually she fell victim to the same trap she had once laid for the white folks. She went off to college. She got a job at a big bank downtown, where she analyzes overseas currency markets and evaluates the risk of foreign currency speculation. She makes good money. She wears nice clothes to work. She stays very late sometimes at the office.

  “After a while,” she said, “it got so that I was afraid to go home after work. People would be sitting out on the stoops and hanging out at the corners and they would say mean things to me and about me as I passed. Even if they said nothing, there was something in their eyes that spoke of threats. I didn’t belong there anymore. Harlem wasn’t mine anymore. I was an outsider. So I moved away. I went downtown.”

  Who could blame her for being afraid, for feeling excluded, for feeling that Harlem belonged to others and that she now ought to stay away and cannot go there?

  If the answer is No one, then how can you blame the yellow taxi drivers who, except on rarest occasions, will refuse to come this far uptown? You hardly ever see yellow cabs on the streets of Harlem. They just don’t come up this far. As a consequence many black fares are left standing on downtown avenues. Many cabbies will assume that black fares heading uptown are going home to Harlem and too often will refuse to pick them up.

  The drivers themselves will tell you, Yes, that it’s the law, that they have to drive you there—to Harlem or anywhere else in the city—if that’s where you want to go. In practice it is quite another thing.

  A driver downtown said to me, “Sorry, buddy. I just don’t go up there.”

  He knew, of course, about the taxi commission’s rule.

  “Look, bud,” he said. “I know all that stuff. It’s like the law, or something. And I know what you probably are thinking. But I don’t drive into Brooklyn either, and it’s not just some racial thing. It’s just too hard to get a fare coming back into the city, so I got to come back empty. And if I’m driving around empty, I’m not making any money.”

  “And that’s the only reason?” I asked. “That’s all there is?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s all it is.” But I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror, and they were watching me watching him. “It’s just too far away,” he said slowly—very slowly—then added, “And it’s too fucking dangerous.”

  And who can blame him? Forty-one taxi drivers had been killed in New York City that year, most of them in the Bronx and in Harlem. Who can blame cab drivers for not wanting to go there?

  Who can blame Camellia Scott or Pig Foot Mary or Joseph Carver, who felt unsafe, who left Harlem, who moved to Brooklyn? Who can blame the white folks who don’t come up, who don’t live here, who don’t want to be here? Who can blame Camellia Scott and her young friends for their gloating response: Go away from here, we don’t want you here, this is ours?

  Who can blame them all for falling into a trap that has been camouflaged for so long and that they cannot see?

  Go away from here, this is ours, we don’t want you here.

  (And the counterpointing voices: Yes indeed, this is theirs.)

  How the voices sting in my ears, the times I’ve seen these words in action, the times I’ve said them myself!

  And this is what those words, those actions, the sentiment, have brought us to. Here is where we stand.

  A white woman I knew walked along 125th one evening in the direction of the subway station at St. Nicholas Avenue. It was raining. It was getting dark. Three men blocked her path, she told me, and made her change direction. She crossed the street, they crossed with her, in front of her, and when they got close enough to her, they muttered at her: “Uh-uh, bitch. Not here.” And that was all. They wanted nothing else but to scare her and let her know where she did not belong.

  A white man I knew worked for a time at the Paul Robeson Health Center on 125th Street. He left work one afternoon, walked to the bus stop on his way home. He was attacked on the street and beaten. The men who jumped him did not take his wallet. They did not demand money. They only wanted him to know where he was and whose neighborhood it was.

  Whose neighborhood is this, whose world?

  I remem
ber the walk I took when I first moved to Harlem. It was a rainy day, but warm, and I wore no coat. I had found my apartment and moved in and now was feeling out the blocks that would be my new neighborhood. I felt truly at home in Harlem, happy to be black, happy to be in a black place. I turned the corner from Convent Avenue onto 145th Street, and in the doorway of the church that is there, two Asian men huddled beneath the portico to keep out of the rain. They could have been Korean shopkeepers who lived in the neighborhood, could have been Japanese tourists. I saw them from across the street and all I could think was, What are you doing here? Go home, get away from here. Get on the bus and go. This does not belong to you, this is ours.

  And there it was. I had fallen into the trap that divides this country into at least two worlds, the one world black and the other world white, with the barriers that separate them rising like mountains, the one world so willingly trying to isolate itself from the other.

  Hundred Twenty-fifth Street, now and for a long time the main street of Harlem, was once the shopping center for the white folks, mostly Irish, who lived on the West Side above 116th. It was a time of separation. Blacks were not welcome to shop on 125th Street, even after Harlem had become the black quarter of New York City. Nor, for the most part, were they even allowed to work in those stores, not even to serve the white people who shopped there. The separation of these two worlds, black and white, was nearly total, and almost entirely at the discretion and whim of the world that is white.

  Now again we find ourselves in an era of separation. Except for the tourists on Sunday, and here and there the odd white soul brave enough to venture up to Harlem, the one world and the other world are not a part of the same world. At any rate, they do not intersect anywhere near Harlem, for Harlem sits on the edge of a shelf far away from the centers of power and privilege, and to be here is to be acutely aware of this isolation, I would think. To be here is to be waiting always to be swept off the table altogether, onto the floor and into some corner where we go seemingly choiceless but at the same time all too freely.