Harlem Redux

by Persia Walker

  “Did he hurt her?”

  “Things ... like I said ... ain’t always the way they seem.”

  He considered the matter. “I’ll stay until I’ve talked to Sweet. Maybe he and I can reach some agreement.”

  She leaned toward him, her eyes burning. “Mr. David, it’s time for you to take your place. Here. You got a point to make. Make it now. Later might be too late.”

  She led him up the stairway, humming a spiritual as she climbed. She moved slowly, but he moved even slower. His suitcase seemed to grow heavier with every step.

  Part of him was relieved. He had been waiting for this summons for a long time. The night before, he had dreamed that by returning home, he would be walking into a trap, that his family, Strivers’ Row, Harlem—they were all bundled together—would swallow him, smother him. He had seen mocking phantoms, knowing smiles, and pointing fingers. Tossing and turning, he had entangled himself in his bedcovers, ripping the sheets as he struggled to break free. When he’d finally jerked upright, he was panting and disoriented, drenched in cold sweat. He’d stared blindly into the dark, his agitated heartbeat thudding in his ears. He had known he couldn’t run forever. Known he would be summoned back. Someday. Somehow

  “It’s so nice to have you back, Mr. David.” Annie swung open his bedroom door and led him into the room. “I freshened it up for you real nice.”

  She offered to unpack his bag for him, but he shook his head. He watched tensely as she bustled about, plumping pillows that had already been plumped, smoothing a bedspread that had already been smoothed. Then she glided past him with a warm smile and was gone, drawing the door closed behind her, leaving him alone with his ghosts.

  He understood what people meant when they spoke of time standing still. The room seemed to be exactly as he had left it. Even the extra pair of navy blue socks he had laid out but forgotten on the dresser top was still there. He left his suitcase by the door, crossed the room, and yanked his closet door open. It too was as he had left it: empty, except for an old black suit and his army uniform. He stroked the lapels of the army greatcoat and fingered a cuff.

  It had been seven long years since the war. Since the Hell Fighters marched up Fifth Avenue. Since the city had given a dinner in their honor.

  Damn, we were so proud then, so proud. And so hopeful. To think of all the dreams we dreamt ...

  Faces of the men he’d known flashed before him. Joshua Lewis, Ritchie Conway, Bobby Raymond ... He’d lost contact with all of them. He would have liked to believe that most had fared well, but from what he’d seen since returning in 1919, he doubted it. A week after coming back, his best friend, Daniel Jefferson, had died while still in uniform, and it was an American mob, not a German soldier, that killed him. Danny had had the temerity to tell a white woman in Alabama that he was a man who had fought for his country and deserved better than to be called “boy.” He was dead within the hour.

  The war over there was nothing—nothing compared to the one over here.

  David fingered his medal, still pinned to the front of his jacket. He had won the French Croix de Guerre for facing down a German raiding party on his own.

  Medals are for heroes, he thought, heroes ... and dropped his hand from the medal as though it suddenly burned him.

  His eyes moved to the black jacket. June 1921. His father: an old man, propped up by thick pillows, dying from tuberculosis; an old man with a grasp of iron and a will of steel.

  “You go finish up at Howard. Be somebody. Make a difference and fight the good fight. And always, always protect your sisters.”

  Then there was his father’s funeral service at Saint Philip’s Episcopal. As befitting a man of Augustus McKay’s social and financial stature, the service was weighty, dignified. An impressive convoy of expensive cars accompanied his coffin to the cemetery. Afterward, there was a small gathering at the house “for the right people.”

  When the last guest was gone, David and Lilian huddled near one another on the parlor sofa, sharing a pot of tea, relieved at the quiet. Gem flounced into the room, gay even in funereal black. She saw her brother and sister sitting together and was instantly jealous.

  “Plotting, plotting. Something nifty, I hope?”

  David gave her a look that silenced her immediately. She actually flinched. He was hard hit by his father’s death and showed it. He and his father had never gotten along. Whether David could admit it or not, there had been several times when he had wished his father dead. But once the old man was gone, David missed him. Gem, however, was quick to push her grief aside, assuming she felt any. Her mind was on one matter and one matter only: money. She suggested that Lilian and David buy out her share of the house. She was sure they would agree, and they did. It was the first and last time the three of them agreed to anything with alacrity. Gem took her money and vanished within days. David and Lilian supposed that Gem had gone west, since she had mentioned Los Angeles, but they couldn’t be sure. Indeed, they didn’t much care.

  The day we laid Daddy in the ground marked the last day we stood in the same room together. Not that we planned it that way. Not that we would’ve ever guessed it would turn out that way.

  He and Lilian returned to their respective universities: He to Howard law in Washington, D.C.; she to study French literature as a Cornell undergraduate in Ithaca, New York. She would earn a Phi Beta Kappa key. Whether or not their chauvinist father had wanted to admit it, Lilian was the family brain. Gem had had the talent to develop into a gifted and memorable if radical poet, but she had dissipated her ability. After two years of cutting the rug and doing the bumpity-bump, dancing her semesters away, she’d quit her studies at the University of Southern California.

  But if Gem failed to live up to Daddy’s hopes, then so did I.

  Standing in his room that March evening, he felt a familiar surge of shame. Yes, he had kept his promise to Augustus, but it had been to the letter—not in the spirit—of the old man’s wishes. Over the past four years, he’d wandered far from his father’s mansion. Could he find his way back? He had no choice. He had to, if he was to understand Lilian’s death and regain control of his father’s house.

  David closed the closet door. He went to the window, parted the curtains, and looked out. The street seemed deserted, except for an old man walking his Doberman. David stood there thoughtfully for a minute or two, then let the curtain drop, went to the door, and left. A few steps to the right and down the corridor and he was in front of the master bedroom. He put his hand on the doorknob, but then hesitated. This was the room in which it had happened. He dreaded the sight of it. Yet he felt compelled to view it. Perhaps standing in this room would help him accept the reality of her death ... her suicide. He twisted the knob very gently and slowly pushed the door open.

  The strong smell of fresh paint rushed out from the closed room, stinging his nostrils. Catching his breath, he paused on the threshold. He didn’t know what he had expected to feel, but it wasn’t the odd sensation that overcame him. He felt as though he were standing before a museum diorama set up to replicate Lilian’s room. This subdued, muted place could not be real. It lacked the familiarity, the hominess of Lilian’s room. It could not be the genuine article. But it is, he told himself.

  In the cold light of that March evening, the room was dim. Lilian’s combs, brushes, and hand mirror were laid out on the dressing table. Her hairpins were neatly aligned on a little mirrored tray. Delicate perfume bottles by Lalique were arranged to one side. The bed’s counterpane was obviously new, as were the curtains at the windows. On the night table next to her bed lay her Bible, closed but with strips of red, yellow, and blue ribbon inside it to hold her place. Family photographs of their parents and of her with Gem and himself were artfully arranged atop the chest of drawers opposite the foot of her bed. A sad smile touched his lips. Even a picture of a stray puppy Lilian had adopted as a child was there.

  He let his eyes drift over the dresser top once more and frowned. Something was missing
. At first he didn’t know what it was. Then it hit him. All those photographs of Lilian and the family, but not one of her husband. Why not? Why, if she’d loved him—if they’d had a good marriage—were there no photos of him on display with the others in her room?

  “Mr. Jameson moved out after it happened,” said a voice behind him. David turned. It was Annie. “He took another room,” she said.

  David nodded. He could understand that. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to continue to sleep in a room in which his wife had bled to death. He took a few steps into the room. Annie followed him, and they paused at the foot of the four-poster bed.

  “Is this where she did it?”

  She nodded. “Mr. Jameson had a new mattress brought in.” She gave a little shudder and hugged herself. Her gaze went to the base of the windowsill. “Sometimes … sometimes I ask the Lord why I had to be the one to find her. But I suppose it was better me than someone who didn’t love her. I was there when she came into the world. It was only right that I be there when she left it.”

  Bending down, David brushed his fingertips over the new counterpane. A pale ivory, it would have pleased Lilian. He turned to Annie. “Tell me about it, about how it was when you found her.”

  Annie paused, then said: “She suffered a bad death, Mr. David, a real bad death. They say you shouldn’t never touch nothing, so I left the knife right there on the bed where it was, but I did close her eyes. And I laid a blanket over her. Then I called the police. And sat down in the room to keep that last wait with her. I thought about all the years gone by and the thousands of kind things Miss Lilian done for me. I’da never imagined her going like that. She was such a lovely young woman, so very sweet. She was a lady, a real fine lady.”

  David’s gaze went again to the photos. “That, she was ...”

  “Them cops sure took their sweet time coming. It was just the death of another colored woman to them. They didn’t know nothing about how wonderful Miss Lilian was. And they wouldna cared. Me, I didn’t mind the wait. I didn’t like seeing her that way, but I knew it was likely the last time I’d see her at all.”

  “The funeral, was it nice?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She smiled. “It was sumptin’ to see. And so many people showed up, so many. They had to close the doors to Saint Philip’s to keep the peace. But that was to be expected. Seeing as how your family is so known and all, that was just to be expected.”

  “I wonder ... how many of those people actually cared about her.”

  She was thoughtful. “You know how people can be, Mr. David. You know how they can be. Lotsa folks who didn’t have no time for her when she was sick, and lotsa others who never knowed her—well, they all just had to come ... just had to come an’ see when that sweet child died.”

  2. Harlem On My Mind

  David paused on his doorstep, pulled his hat down lower, and wrapped his coat tighter. He would take a walk. To stretch his legs. To see how Harlem had changed. And to forget what Annie had told him. A lot’s done happened since you been gone. He shuddered and forced his thoughts in another direction. His gaze traveled up and down the street, registering the familiar homes of his neighbors. After a minute, he turned up his collar, went down the front steps, and started toward Seventh Avenue.

  It was a curious sensation to be back. There was, above all, a sense of the surreal; that sense, once more, of time having stood still. The trees appeared a mite bigger, but nothing else on the block had changed. It was still serene and immaculate. No matter the weather or the light, the trim, neat houses of Strivers’ Row looked regal and well-to-do. As they should. After all, they were designed for the affluent. That the homes should land in the hands of blacks was a development that David H. King Jr., the original builder, had probably never foreseen.

  When in 1891 King commissioned New York star architect Stanford White to design the series of houses along the north side of 139th Street, King envisioned homes for wealthy white families. At first, that’s what they were, homes for white millionaires, such as the first Randolph Hearst. But a depression hit Harlem’s inflated real estate market in 1904 and opened the way to black residency. By 1920, a good number of New York’s most prominent blacks—the Rev. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., James C. Thomas, Charles W. Anderson, and others—had moved to Harlem. Already by 1914, even modestly affluent blacks could afford to buy Harlem real estate. By 1917, white brokers were begging for white investor interest in Harlem by advertising how cheap property had become. And by 1920, superb properties such as the King Model Houses had begun to pass into the hands of black professionals. As black families moved in, white ones moved out. The houses along what would be known as “Strivers’ Row” went for a song.

  “A twelve-room house. Fit for a king. For nine thousand dollars,” Augustus beamed in announcing his purchase. “Nine thousand dollars. It was worth it.”

  The McKays were the sixth family to arrive. Dentist Charles H. Roberts and Dr. Louis T. Wright, Harlem Hospital’s first black doctor and later its chief of surgery, soon became the McKays’ neighbors. Then there was Vertner W. Tandy, widely recognized as the first black architect to be licensed in New York State, and Lieutenant Samuel J. Battle, Manhattan’s first black police lieutenant. Eventually, Strivers’ Row would become a popular address for black theatrical stars: composer Eubie Blake, orchestra leaders Fletcher Henderson and Noble Sissle.

  Back courtyards, gardens, and fountains connected by an interior alleyway ran the length of the block. The houses on the north side of 139th Street, including the McKay house, were neo-Renaissance, made of thin, reddish Roman brick. The pale cream-colored houses running along the south side were neo-Georgian. All displayed the same spare but expert use of classical details. All were set back from the pavement to emphasize privacy. And all had rear entrances that kept the unsightly business of housekeeping where it belonged—out of sight.

  The residents of Strivers’ Row were a proud lot. They strove for excellence; hence the street’s nickname. They kept their trees neatly tended and their hedges closely clipped. Entrance railings and balustrades were painted, windows and front steps washed, brass doorknobs and knockers polished.

  Over time, the Row had become a tiny oasis of spacious ease and prosperity surrounded by a desert of danger, despair, and decay. When David stepped around the corner of 139th Street and Seventh Avenue, he entered a world of poverty, of rotting garbage and ragged children. The juxtaposition of rich and poor never failed to give him a jolt.

  Seventh Avenue, that broad thoroughfare that slashes through the heart of Harlem, was well-peopled even that cold evening. Tall trees with thick trunks spread their gnarled branches over the wide dark street. Beige and brick-brown tenement buildings, four and five stories tall, rose up on either side, like mammoth shadows in the evening light.

  He headed downtown, taking long, even strides, doing his best to appear at ease. He walked neither quickly nor slowly. His expression was neither curious nor indifferent. His eyes examined everything but dwelled on nothing. He saw a world of cracked pavements and battered trash cans. He passed rows of dilapidated buildings and he knew, without having to enter them, what they looked like inside: Dark, dirty hallways. Broken windows. Rusted pipes. No heat. No hot water. Rats and roaches, ticks and water bugs. Many of the folks who lived in those buildings slept ten to a room.

  Most of black Harlem’s residents had originally fled Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and other points south, seeking jobs and safety from the pervasive threat of the lynch man’s noose. They’d come north, dreaming of the Promised Land, and ended up living a nightmare. Some people could barely afford “hot beds,” mattresses they switched off with other shift workers. Many couldn’t even find jobs. Harlem’s biggest department stores depended on blacks as customers but refused to consider them for hire.

  Seeing the myriad ebony, brown, sepia, and amber faces that now peopled Harlem’s streets, it was odd to think that not so long ago, Harlem was white. Only about thirty years earlier,
in the late 1800s, it was Russian and Polish Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe who had given Harlem its color. Even as recently as fifteen years earlier, Russian Jews had dominated the census figures. Then, there were the Italians—the area from Third Avenue to the East River was “Harlem’s Little Italy”—and the Irish, the Germans, the English, the Hungarians, the Czechs, and others coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Harlem did have a smattering of Native Americans and a small but stable black population—the descendants of freed slaves—but by and large, the neighborhood’s complexion was pink.

  All that had changed, seemingly in the blink of an eye, and Harlem was now indelibly brown. Years later, people would forget that Harlem was ever white. Those few who remembered would sometimes still wonder what had happened.

  King’s decision to build the homes on what would become Strivers’ Row was part of a turn-of-the-century construction boom in Harlem. The anticipated building of new subway lines into Harlem had turned the neighborhood into a target for speculators. Developers snapped up the remaining farmlands, marshes, garbage dumps, and empty lots that still constituted a good part of the area. Between 1898 and 1904, brownstones rose up on every corner. But by 1905, the party was over. There were too many apartments and too few renters. Even after the Lenox Avenue subway was completed, high rents discouraged the anticipated influx of new residents. The real estate market broke and people panicked. They needed tenants and needed them badly.

  Meanwhile, downtown in mid-Manhattan’s miserable Tenderloin district, the construction of Pennsylvania Station was destroying the area’s few all-Negro blocks. Colored families being forced out of their homes wondered: Where to next?

  In stepped Philip Payton Jr., a Negro real estate broker. His Afro-American Realty Company brought the white owners of Harlem and the colored families of the Tenderloin together. White owners might not have been thrilled to rent to blacks, but they preferred it to ruin. Some decided to take any Negro tenant who would pay the high rents being demanded. Hundreds, then thousands of blacks moved to Harlem. The neighborhood swelled with poor people burdened with inflated rents they couldn’t afford and grand apartments they couldn’t maintain.