What I knew then, of course, was what I knew from long ago: when you find a man who has killed a man he knows, chances are that the murder took place in front of witnesses. Violence, it seems, often requires an audience.
On the street that afternoon, we were not alone, this boy and I. His friends were there with him. They were watching and listening when I said the things I said to him, and their presence worried me more than anything else. On these streets the war rages in part because so little else exists to reinforce a man’s image of himself. Respect and reputation are as important as they are anywhere else. In fact it can be argued that respect and reputation are everything, since there is so little else. Status is hardly secured in the same ways as it is in the outside world. The rules are different here. Words are weapons. Every slight is an insult. An insignificant dispute can lead to a beating, can lead to a killing, and a man is a man only if he can stand up and back up his words with action. The threat of violence runs through every encounter.
My young man could easily have felt his reputation under siege by the way I spoke to him. But if I backed down now, my respectability would have vanished. Without meaning to, without thinking, I had managed to back him and me into a corner.
He had possibly never had anyone to teach him that he didn’t have to do what the others might do, or what they might have him do, that he could create a world and a way of his own. Maybe there had been no one to tell him how; no one to give him a sense of himself, no one to demand of him that he be unafraid—no one simply to demand of him what he would not think to demand of himself. For both our sakes, I wished someone in his younger life had showed him. Since there hadn’t been, it looked like I had been chosen to be that someone.
“You don’t have to use that thing,” I said to him. “You don’t have to be afraid not to.”
By the look on his face, I had now confused him.
“Just hold it for a second,” I told him. “And think about what I just said. You can pull that pistol and you can use it, or you can not use it. Whatever you choose, it’s your choice, so think about it first. And whatever you do, don’t do it because you’re afraid not to.”
He stood motionless for a long moment. Slowly he relaxed and let his shirttail cover over the butt of his pistol. He didn’t shoot me.
It could be that his cooler nature had prevailed. It could also be that I had perplexed him. Or maybe I had gotten him to think for just a second, to try and find a better way than the instinctive way. A better way? I don’t really know, but at least a different way. The different ways are the ways that most people don’t try. They are the ways maybe that need to be taught.
I came to this realization one night in autumn—my first autumn. I was only a witness. Nothing happened to me that night, in fact nothing happened very much at all that night. I was simply walking home. It wasn’t so very late, somewhere between twelve-thirty and one o’clock in the morning. Three women were gabbing in front of the apartment building where they lived at the corner of Convent and 128th. A young child was riding a bicycle in the middle of the street. The bike was a little too big for the kid, he was a little awkward on it, and a car was coming. It came slowly enough. There seemed to be no immediate danger, but all of a sudden the mother of the cycling child screamed.
“Get your ass out that street,” she cried, and the little kid panicked at the suddenness of the mother’s shrieking. He pedaled as fast as he could and aimed his bike for the sidewalk and hit the curb. He nearly fell, and I laughed a little.
My thoughts as I strolled that night had been a thousand miles to the west. All at once I was brought back to Harlem. All at once I noticed that this kid was not the only kid on this street at one o’clock in the morning. There were four or five others. These were their mothers, these women chatting on the street. And the children were playing nearby.
At noon, or at six in the evening, it would have been a pleasant scene, the kind of homey snapshot that might grace a small community’s church calendar. As it was, I had thought nothing of it at first, for the scene was an all too common one in Harlem, even at this late hour: children playing, mothers hanging out, everyone watching everyone else’s children. But for some reason the lateness of the night hit me then, and I wondered why this woman was yelling at this child for playing in the street when the child, to my way of thinking, ought not to have been out playing anywhere at that hour—not in the street, not on the sidewalk, not anywhere. Tomorrow was a school day. That kid and all those kids should have been in the house, in bed, fast asleep.
But then, the mothers would have had to sacrifice their night out on the stoop. And then again, someone would have had to make a connection between sleep and rest and performance in class, and a further connection between performance in class and escape. Still again, someone would have had to care enough to care enough.
Wilma Bishop informed me one time that caring isn’t easy. The asperity in her voice grated the nerve edges of my heart.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s easier to forget than to care. And it gets easier and easier, until—you know—finally you just forget how. That’s how it goes when you feel trapped.”
Four little girls, one of them hers, were jumping rope on the sidewalk in front of an apartment on 139th Street. I had stopped to watch them. The rhythm of the swinging rope, the lilt of the ditty they chanted, transported me back to my long-ago childhood when I would stand and watch the girls and never get invited to take a turn. I have never jumped rope on the street.
From the days when I was very very small I have been an admirer of rope jumpers, double-dutchers, those girls who could toss themselves into the eggbeater blades of two ropes held at the ends by two companions, who turned each rope in an opposite direction from the outside in. Sometimes both ropes were held at one end by only one companion, the other ends tied to a rail, or one long rope looped around a street lamp. Girls when I was young would jump rope for hours and hours, and I would watch them and never get a chance to play.
I used to watch the girls when the other boys in my neighborhood had gone into the alley to shoot basketballs into a hoop nailed to someone’s garage door. While they imagined themselves stars in a crowded arena, I watched the girls who did what they did for the love of it, for the fun of it, stepping briskly to the rhythms of the turning ropes, reciting the words of some singsongy ditty and counting the number of successful passes of the rope. And I would be mesmerized.
The girls before me that day in Harlem held hypnotic sway over me in the same way as the jump-roping girls of those old days, and I stood watching them for twenty minutes before Wilma came out to keep an eye on me, who kept an eye on the young girls. To put Wilma at ease, I walked to where she stood and sat at her feet on the little stoop.
I told her I liked watching little girls jump rope. She eyed me with suspicion.
“Um-hum,” she said. “Lots of men like watching little girls. You live around here?”
I told her where. I said I was just out for a walk, and we chatted for a few minutes. She relaxed a little, but she never surrendered her vigilance.
She reminded me somehow of those simpler days of my not so long ago childhood and of the women who prowl my memories, a lifetime ago surely, although it seems more like a hundred years or more have passed, so much has changed. Yet here was Wilma Bishop like some neighbor lady out of my past, a somewhat kinder time, it seemed, when young children were watched, when the neighbor ladies kept an eye on us all. They would yell at us if we stepped out of line. They would report to our parents the crimes we had committed. They would open their doors to us and bandage us when we fell too hard and left the skin of our knees on the sidewalk. If our moms weren’t home, there was always a neighbor lady that we could run crying to. We didn’t always like it, I’m sure, those neighborly eyes all the time spying on us. Nor could we possibly have come close to appreciating what those neighbor ladies meant to us. But no matter. Even if we didn’t like it, even if we didn’t appreciate i
t, even if we didn’t altogether know it, we were safe on the streets of our neighborhood in those days. Someone was always on the lookout, always watching over us, the same as Wilma Bishop was doing with her kids and with the kids of her neighbors.
“Someone has to do it,” she said to me. “It’s not easy to care anymore, but somebody has to.”
Her words rang out with the magic of an incantation and hung for a long time like dust in the air. Wilma’s voice was the voice of a sorcerer casting a spell, and the spell came back to haunt me again and again. I heard her voice, I heard her words, I remembered them, I thought about them often. They slipped into my ears as I walked home that night and watched and heard the young mother screaming at her child for playing in the street. They formed the faraway echo I heard when Eliot Winston with an incantation of his own bid me to turn round and approach him. They still had their sting that night, that early morning, when I peered into the darkness outside my window and saw the man beating the woman, when I knew there was a choice to make and I made it.
So dramatic it sounds, as if some great battle were raging inside my head, as if I were about to do something wildly out of character, something noble and heroic. But no. What I did that night was no more virtuous, no more courageous than wearing white silk trousers and lavender or salmon-colored shirts and walking the streets of Harlem. In fact, they were the same thing to me.
One day I will realize that there is nothing I can do about anything that truly matters, or that perhaps there is simply nothing to be done about anything because nothing at all really matters. I will continue to tell myself that I care about Harlem and about black people, of course, but from that moment on I will look only inward. And in that moment, Harlem will have happened to me.
I will stall that moment’s arrival for as long as I can. I will refuse for now to surrender more than I already have.
I looked into my closet and considered the shirts and the silk trousers with the same sensation of defeat with which I looked from my window that late night and early morning. It was the same sensation that pricked me when the woman screamed and startled the kid on the bike, the same again that was with me when I overheard Eliot saying, “The black man is finished.” There was a choice to make—in the closet, on the street: a choice to make.
Life is all about choice, I have decided, life and the predicaments we find ourselves in. It is all about what we have chosen or not chosen, and about what others have chosen for us.
Whether we realize it or ever even notice, someone has made for us—very often we, ourselves, have made them; very often not—the choices that seemingly affect our every breath, our every thought, and all that we do or try, and all that we are. And we are left, as a result of all the choices taken or not taken, in a way, rather choiceless.
As I watched the mother that night and the child who nearly fell from the bike, the child who ought to have been asleep in bed; as I looked up and down the avenue and up and down each street I crossed as I was walking home that night, and every time I set foot after that night onto the streets of Harlem; as I witness the man beating the woman outside my window; as I listen to Wilma Bishop and think of Eliot Winston and his brother T.C., of Hans Hegeman and Ann Plymouth and Wilson Clark; I can see, more clearly than I can see anything else, that absence of choice is the active ingredient in surrender. When what is becomes in the mind what will be, when the heart tells you that this is how it is, that this is the way things are and the way things are going to be, then what’s the use in fighting? What’s the use in trying? The game is up and there is nothing left, no pain no joy no satisfaction, nothing but the look of the surrender and the resignation that Wilma Bishop seeks every day to avoid.
“Someone has to care,” she said. “Someone has to sit out here on this stoop and on these streets and keep an eye on these children. Someone has to make sure they get something to eat at suppertime and make sure they go to bed at bedtime and make sure they go to school in the morning. And somebody has got to care about how they’re doing in school. Somebody has got to do all these things if for no other reason than to show these children out here that somebody cares. Not just about them, but that somebody cares about something. Anything. Otherwise, what they see all the time is what they’ll get stuck with. And all they see every day is that nobody cares about them or about much of anything else either. So why should they? The poorest ones, the saddest ones, the ones who need the most caring of all, they’re the ones nobody cares for or looks out for. And they’re the ones it’s easiest to lose. If you don’t care about these little children, pretty soon they don’t care about themselves. And when they stop caring about themselves, they stop caring about you, and it doesn’t take long before they don’t care about much of anything.”
There was a fire suddenly lit in her eyes, and I thought all the tears in the world would never put it out.
“And that’s where we are now, goddamn it!” she said, and said it so loudly, so violently that the world’s heart skipped a beat then, but only for a second. One of the girls turning the rope lost her rhythm. You could hear it in the way the rope slapped at the pavement. The girl at the other end lost her hold. The rope slipped from her fingers. The girl jumping got tangled up. For a second it seemed that nothing moved, and nothing did. Wilma had snared the attention of all the girls and all within earshot, and they all stared, a little startled.
Surely on these streets they had heard stronger language and anger. This was more.
They looked, the girls did, and then went back to their playing. Everything was back to normal. Wilma again put the lid on the kettle where it belonged, where it had been for such a long time, and where for a long time it had contained the pressure building up, which cried out for release but could find no outlet. Now the seal had been broken, and Wilma hissed like steam escaping.
“It is a prison here, goddamn it. It is a prison,” she said. “A prison of the mind, a prison of the spirit. And we’re all trapped in it together. It doesn’t matter whether we live in Harlem or in the backwoods of Kentucky somewhere. We are all caught up in the same prison, but they can’t—none of them—see it. And it never seems to occur to them how it’s all connected and that something needs to be done. They just hurry on past and keep their eyes closed and act like they can’t see the ones who are crying.”
They cry invisible tears—the ones you hear rather than see, or if you see them, they are the kind you see not on the face but in the way lives are lived.
I do not know to whom her plea was directed, for I never asked her, but it was a plea, that much is clear, the same lament that has been echoing in the souls of black folks in America since the beginning and that will continue as long as the isolation continues.
It is the isolation that makes the prison, of course, and as with all prisons there is confinement on both sides of the fence. We hold our positions like some kind of army encamped and we guard ourselves against the outsiders, against all the ones who are not like us, the others among us, for we are this one thing (I am one thing, you and I together are this one thing, we are Jews, we are black, we are Christians, we are white, we are Americans, we are whole—whatever that means), and they are those other people. And we don’t want them near us, don’t want them included in these things that are ours.
Thus we must be ever on guard against them, build for ourselves mighty fortresses with many defenses in place. After a time, it becomes difficult to tell who are the imprisoned.
Until, that is, you come to Harlem and you see what some have been left with, and what some have settled for.
I walked one afternoon across 135th and turned south onto Fifth Avenue—the same Fifth Avenue that downtown is crowded with shops and shoppers and yellow cabs and is all hustle and bustle and business. It is the same Fifth Avenue, but it is a different world.
A woman approached me as I neared 129th Street. She smiled, greeted me like an old friend, stopped me, and started talking. She said, “You’re looking mighty handsome tod
ay,” and I thought maybe I had met her before and just didn’t remember. It was a nice day, she said, she was feeling better, she said, she hoped good fortune was smiling on me. Then she asked me for a quarter.
A quarter!
I know that quarters add up, and if you bum enough of them you, like Pig Foot Mary, could turn a little into a lot, even into a fortune. But the woman could have asked for a dollar, or a couple of bucks, or she could have said, “Can you help me out with some spare change?” I don’t know why, but to ask for twenty-five cents seemed such a desperate request that I just felt sad.
Another day, another street, another woman. Gaunt and ghostly, she hardly seemed human, and was so frail a stiff wind would have blown her down. Her skin hung like limp clothing from her bones, and there were gaps where her teeth had fallen out. But she sashayed—or tried to—as she walked toward me, her pathetic grin twisting her face into a hideous grimace. She offered me the use of her body for two dollars.
Two small dollars.
For food, for a drink, for a vial of crack cocaine: it doesn’t matter for what. There was in her eye such a look of desperation and submission that I could scarcely contain my disappointment. I looked at her and I looked in my memory and I looked up and down every street and avenue in Harlem, and in that briefest of moments I remembered every black man I had ever seen standing with nothing to do on some street corner and every embittered black woman with a baby in her arms or in the street or clutched to her hip. They were present there in this woman’s eyes.
In the book of Exodus there is a passage that came to me, the Pharaoh’s decree that “Every boy that is born shall be thrown into the Nile, but let every girl live.” I can see daily the drowning of the men and wonder at the myth that the women were allowed to live. It seems they were hurled into the Nile to die as well, for how can you kill the one without taking the life of the other?
Still Life in Harlem Page 19
