Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  The jobless, prospectless men on every corner; the women begging for drug money; the child biking in the street at all hours of the night; the rats and the roaches and all the signs of poverty and degradation that have been settled for and that pass for living here: it is no wonder that Eliot Winston insists that black folk are finished, that they have, in general, given up the game and surrendered. Who in the face of such continuing gloom would not be ready to quit?

  I was ready myself to give up, as ready as I would be that night and early morning to believe what I have been told and taught about black people and about being black, ready then to turn my back and walk away once and for all from all that black has become and is and means, ready once more to leave Harlem, to seek out the quiet life in some out-of-the-way place far from here and never look back.

  Perhaps my father wasn’t fooling after all when he told us that we were Jewish. Perhaps he meant it literally, perhaps he didn’t, but in terms of historical oppression and revulsion there are so many parallels between the one people and the other that they might as well be the same people. And when the seder Haggadah tells us that “our history moves from slavery toward freedom. Our narration begins with degradation and rises to dignity,” it might easily be referring to the plight of black people in America.

  But where is the rise to dignity?

  Perhaps the black man, the black woman, have given up, are finished, are through, are dead.

  Eliot’s death of the black man is different from mine. When I think of this death, when I think of the world my father must have been hoping for, when I think of myself and the way I am in the world, I think in terms of victory. I think of a time when the black man will be able to die to himself and reemerge in glory, to move beyond the horrors of the past and into a world where he can participate fully, and not just in the segregated sections set aside for him and that he too often ends up settling for.

  It used to be that if we weren’t allowed to play we would knock on the doors loudly enough and persistently enough, make enough noise and commotion until we were finally let in. Now it seems that if we aren’t allowed to play, we’ll take what crumbs we’re given and just go home, piss on them and make a paste and hurl them at someone.

  Eliot disagrees that blacks have given up the struggle, that we’ve ceased making trouble. He says that every act of surrender, every drug deal, every act of violence, is a hammering against the protective coating of an insensitive society.

  “Every bit of pounding,” he said, “dents their sense of safety, and people start to think everything is caving in around them. And it is. And we got to keep on pounding until they’ll realize that what goes on in here has an effect on what goes on out there. It’s like Malcolm X said: ‘We got to make them see that we are the enemy. We got to make them turn their defense money on us and either destroy us or cure the conditions that brought our people to this point.’”

  We were still walking down Park Avenue with a view into the two faces of American life. Eliot had calmed down.

  “We got to keep pounding until they start to take us seriously, until they start to care about us and what happens here,” he said. “As it is now, they only pay attention to us because all the demons that terrorize their sense of safety have gotten completely out of control and they don’t know what to do. Everything’s coming apart all around them, but the white folks are so stupid they still think they can fix what’s wrong with the country without dealing with the statistical realities that define a large part of black life and culture—certainly in their eyes, since it’s the most visible aspect of present-day Harlem: the drugs and the crime and the poverty and the rats and the apathy and the despair that plague our community. It’s the saddest and the most tragic part, that’s for sure, and that’s all they can see. Hell, sometimes it’s all I can see too.”

  He let a large puff of air escape from the strong statue that he was, and he seemed to deflate. As long as he maintained a certain tension, a certain anger, he stood tall and he scowled and he was fierce. The minute he let himself admit to the apparent hopelessness of the situation, he weakened. The breath he exhaled seemed to carry with it Eliot’s intensity, almost his very soul. I thought he might cry.

  It was as if a sinister pall had been draped over him, the same one that has been draped over the landscape of Harlem, over its life and over its spirit.

  “We’ve been deprived of light and air for so long,” Eliot said. “The hope that once sustained us, the hope that one day we as a people would get to the promised land, has been pretty much extinguished here. Maybe it was naive to hope that we could someday—all of us; not just black people—be judged by the content of our hearts, like Dr. King said, and not by the color of our skin. Wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t so limited by the abjectness of our circumstance, if our fates were not so subject to the whims of white people? Why can’t our destinies lie in what we choose to do for ourselves? Isn’t that what they promised us, that given the right amount of effort, the right amount of perseverance and, yeah, even the right amount of luck, we could indeed strive and achieve, live any life and be anything we set our hearts firmly enough on? But it’s a lie. Who has persevered any more than black people? Who has worked harder and for less reward than we have? Maybe it’s the luck part, because we have been damned sure unlucky.”

  He tried to muster a laugh. He couldn’t find it.

  “We only had the one hope,” he said. “We just wanted to be treated fairly. We just wanted to be given the unimpeded opportunity to succeed. But every time, man, they closed every door we tried to step into. The promise that patience would win the day, that tomorrow would be better than today. Man, that promise has been broken time and time again. The dream deferred from one generation to the next has not come true. Life has not gotten better, or even remained the same; it’s gotten worse. The hope here on the streets of Harlem has been smothered and snuffed out. Our hope has been erased.

  “That’s why we think so small,” he said. “We think we’ve accomplished something great by making a record and singing and dancing on TV. That’s what we think of when we think of success, singers and basketball players. If we can’t do that, we self-destruct because we got nothing else. Even when we can do that, we get caught up in drugs and all kinds of stupid traps. And that’s the saddest part of all. That pounding we’re doing, all that noise we think we’re making, all those acts of violence, all the drugging and the robbing and all the rest of it, it might be waking up the white man, but mostly what we’re doing is destroying ourselves.”

  He looked away and stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “Man,” he said. “It’s hopeless.”

  It’s hopeless, he said. It’s hopeless.

  It’s hopeless.

  It’s hopeless.

  It’s hopeless.

  The echo was startling.

  “It’s hopeless,” he said. “And there is nothing we can do about it.”

  This was the Eliot Winston who when I first saw him was brimming with bravado. Even as we walked up Park Avenue he seemed a pillar of rage. He was preaching against the white man, hurling abuse at a system that because of its injustice was collapsing under the weight of its oppression. And now here he was ready to sign off.

  “No,” I said. “You’re wrong.” That’s all I said. I thought it as I looked at Eliot and listened to him: the black man is dead, but as much as I longed—and still long, in fact—to see the death of the black man, it is a different death of which I speak and for which I yearn for all black men. It is the death of what the black man has come to symbolize. It is a death signifying glorious resurrection and rebirth.

  He stared into my eyes for another long moment, and when he took his eyes away from mine he looked me up and down. His grin was half smile, half pursed lips of forced patience, the look one gives a child acting silly. He gave a little snort and a hmph.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “I hope you’re right.”

  He held out h
is hand to me and we shook. A tense moment had passed.

  “I hope so too,” I said. “I hope so too.”

  All around us there were the signs of surrender, staring us in the face, impossible to miss, impossible to avoid, everywhere surfacing and resurfacing, no matter how swell a street, no matter how prosperous a neighborhood, no matter how upscale and mobile, no matter how vibrant, no matter how tough talking and cool.

  And here was Eliot, not just that day on the corner, but this day too on Park Avenue, a marathon runner out of wind, out of leg, out of life; an until-death-do-us-part partner who just can’t go the distance anymore.

  And here was his brother T.C., who had made a career of smashing windows to vent his frustration—car windows, shop windows, any window he thought belonged to someone white—and slugging white people to vent his rage, and who in the end was afraid that he would take a hammer and steal at random into the homes of white people and bash their heads in. He had been to prison twice already. He didn’t want to go back. He came to Harlem instead, to hide, he said, because he couldn’t take the outside world any longer. He gave up.

  Wilson Clark too, now that I think of it, had given up, had come to Harlem because he felt a deep need to be in a place that was his, not theirs.

  Wilson had long known the myth of Harlem and had been seduced by it. He had heard of the magic of Harlem in stories his grandfather had told him, rumors whispered in old movies, the glory of Harlem that, even if it no longer existed, could still be felt along the streets and avenues where the restless spirits of the past still wander.

  “I used to tell myself,” he once said to me, “that I was coming to Harlem to live among the spirits of our past. You know? It’s like how ghosts have to wander restlessly as long as the lives they led lack some kind of completion. A man who’s been murdered or a body that’s not been properly buried: they can’t pass to the next world, to the next life, until things are settled for them in this one. It’s the unfinished business that does it. But I never suspected that by coming to Harlem I would be giving up. I thought I was coming here to save myself, to escape that look in white folks’ eyes, sure, but to save myself, to be among my people, to be where I could feel safe from that look. You know that look. It’s the look that says ‘This world is ours and everything that’s in it. And you, black man, you’ve got no right to any part of it except what we grant you.’ It’s that white-people look, and sometimes it’s panic, and sometimes it’s arrogance, and sometimes it’s a threat. You’ve seen it a thousand times, and if you stick around, you’ll see it a thousand times again. Well, I got tired of that look. I didn’t want to see it anymore. I came to Harlem to get away from it.”

  He took a sip of beer. (We were in the bar where we had met, near the corner of 125th and Morningside.)

  “But its hot gaze reaches all the way up here,” he said. “Maybe you feel it even more up here, because here you cannot fool yourself. Here you can really see just how separate the two worlds are: the one world where people believe that playing by the rules will get them somewhere closer to their dreams; and this other world where there is hardly any dreaming done and playing by the rules is meaningless. There are no rules here—not that the other America would recognize anyway.”

  Wilson looked up from the glass of beer he had been staring into since he began. He turned briefly to me and then looked away. He caught his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar and stared for a long time at himself.

  “I didn’t realize it when I came here,” 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 with the black folks, away from white people. Let them have the rest, let them have it all, I said to myself. Let them have it all. Now I know that when I let that look drive me almost out of my mind, when I let that look force me to come to live in Harlem, I was letting the white folks win. And I was letting my grandfather down.”

  I thought he was going to cry. He stared at himself in the mirror without blinking until his eyes watered. He clenched his fist around his beer glass tighter and tighter until his arm quivered. Suddenly all tension left him, and his spirit slumped from fatigue. He was weary, physically and emotionally, about as tired as I have ever seen anyone.

  I can understand his fatigue. And Eliot’s fatigue. And T.C.’s. I have felt it too. Sometimes I just want to run and hide, move to the south of France and sip champagne all day, far from the field of battle. I just want to put my feet up and relax.

  And suppose I did. So what? Suppose I retreated, turned my back once more and concerned myself with only me. What then? Would it be such a great loss?

  I can’t help but think of a man who lived in my childhood neighborhood. I don’t know his name. I’m not even sure I knew his name then. But he bought a shiny new Cadillac and parked it on the street in front of his house. On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was nice, out in front of the house he’d be, stripped to his shorts, a bucket of soapy water in one hand, a rag or a sponge in the other. Every week he washed that car. He kept it shiny. He kept it looking new.

  The car sparked a bit of envy, I’m sure. It had those big tailfins of the late 1950s, and it had electric windows and an air conditioner. It was the talk of the neighborhood, even after it was no longer new. It always looked good. It was well cared for. It was a thing of beauty, a kind of monument.

  The car became community property. The car was our car, the neighborhood’s car, and the kids would lean against it when the man wasn’t looking, before he could come out of the house and chase us all away. Then he would walk down to the car and check for any damage we had done and wipe away the smudges and smears with a cloth he always carried. We would hide behind lampposts and other parked cars to watch him, and then lean again on the car when he had gone back inside. He could chase us away, but the minute his back was turned, it was our car again, something all the kids on the block took a little pride in.

  In retrospect it wasn’t much, having a Cadillac on the block, not really such a big deal. And neither was having Bob Gibson, who lived across the hall from us. He was a rookie pitcher with the baseball team the year he moved in, and we scarcely knew him, but somehow he and the man with the Cadillac meant something to us, just to have them near, just to be able to look at them and say: “Those men, what they do, where they go, and what they have: they come from here. Where they go, we go. What they have, we have. For they are us.”

  Without a word, just being there, they offered us—I don’t want to say they offered us something to aspire to, for a fancy car is no big deal, nor is being a sports star, but they offered us choice, a way to be that we could accept or reject. There was choice.

  I looked into my closet and I pulled out the silk trousers and the lavender shirt.

  When I was a small boy, the black men I knew always seemed to dress well, maybe even better than they could afford to dress. They always looked good, always had a certain style about them. I never knew why, never even questioned. Now I believe they were making a statement. Dressing well, looking good: these were more than matters of taste and habit. They were acts of defiance that showed in the way the men walked, in the way they talked, in the clothes they wore. There was a sense of dignity in the way they carried themselves, in how they showed themselves to the world.

  It has never been easy to be black in this country. You had to do some small thing—many things, in fact, large and small—to keep hammering, to keep surrender one more day away.

  Dressing well wasn’t much, perhaps—you cannot save the world, I know, with the clothes you wear—but it was something. Probably with such silly things you cannot offer much hope either, but you do what you can, no matter how small, no matter how ridiculous, to keep the cruelty of the beast at bay. And maybe—just maybe—you can offer a little choice to those who seem to have none. It takes a certain naïveté to believe in hope, to believe that the world can be changed, that the world one day will be changed.

 
Nowadays the young men of Harlem dress as if to hide themselves. They wear costumes of cool and suits of rebellion, hooded sweatshirts, baggy pants, shoes big enough to drown in. It is an effort, it seems, to speak in a loud and angry voice to the rest of the world, but with their hoods up, their shoulders hunched, shuffling low as they walk, they seem as well to be hiding, trying hard to be invisible to a world that already ignores them. They seem to have lost the naïveté to believe in hope. In fact they seem to have lost hope itself.

  There is a look in the eye that says it, that says the hope is all but gone. It is the look of resignation and surrender. It is the look that says, This is how it is. It is the look of bitter disappointment and shame, the look of being ashamed for mankind if this is in fact how things are and how they are going to be.

  It is the look that Johnny Cannon wore, the look that stared back from the mirror at Wilson Clark, the look, I’m sure, of the man who beats the woman outside my window. It was the look that Eliot Wilson was about to put on, not that day on the corner by the Metro North station, but that day as we walked up Park Avenue. He was almost tired enough to put it on, but not quite yet. His naïveté had almost left him, the same as it had already left the woman whose kid rode his bike in the street at one in the morning. She no longer seemed to care.

  As I think back over my time in Harlem, I remember very clearly the expression of the woman who had offered to lend her body to me in exchange for two dollars. It haunts me. I see it in my dreams, that look in her eyes. I think of it, oddly enough, not as a ghostly warning of death. In her eyes there was despair, that is certain. There was also a tiny light I could not see at the time, and in my memory it shines faintly, but distinctly, not a dim light fading out, but a dim light trying to come back on. She may have given up, but she was fighting to get the light back on, fighting to get back into the game. She was not through yet. There was still a bit of naïveté within her. It may not have been in her eyes, but it was in her walk. I cannot forget how she sashayed when she walked toward me, how she tried to look alluring and desirable. You have to start somewhere. And then you do what you can.