by Robert Coles
“We got here, we did,” a man from Kentucky’s mountains could say, three years after he arrived. And then comes, with a shudder one moment, a look of fierce pride the next, an account of what it was like to get there, to see those streets and try to fathom them out, master them: “I near turned back — so near I almost shake thinking about it. I saw the city from a distance, you know, and I thought I was having myself a dream. I said to my wife, it’s not true. She said that it is, and we’ve seen pictures on television to prove it. I said I never believed those pictures. She said it was true, what we’d seen, and there’s the proof over yonder. Well, we got closer and closer, and all I could think was that we were going to die, once we got right in the middle of the city, and probably God Himself would be there, waiting to judge us, like He does. So, I said to myself we’d better just keep right on going, and let what happens happen. And we did. I had a piece of paper with an address written down; it was given to me by our minister. And I had another piece of paper with another address, kin of my wife’s. I kept stopping and asking. I asked the police. I asked the people in gas stations. I asked someone walking down the street, and then someone else, and finally we got there. We got to our kin, and we got to the mission, where they helped us find a place to stay and some work for me.”
He goes on. He tells about the sad times he had, the low times, and later on the better moments. At one point he thought he might have to move yet again: “I was stalled. I couldn’t go back to the mountains, I knew that, and I couldn’t stay here and sit around and sit around. Hell, I hate that. I’d die if that’s all there was for me, the rest of my life. Maybe there’s another city, I thought — where I could work.” He found work, though. He didn’t have to move. But the point is that he was prepared to do so. At times an observer can find him sullen, morose, resentful. At times he gets irritated, indignant, flushed with anger. He snaps. He looks daggers at people — including his own wife and children. He grinds his teeth. He quivers with rage, and his wife fears he will explode, pack them all up, make for the hills, the hills he loves and talks about and dreams about, the hills whose beauty he cannot get out of his mind, the hills whose praise he sings all the time, it seems — to the point that his younger children get cross and a little contemptuous. “That’s silly,” says his seven-year-old son, and then he tells why: “We’re here. We’re living here, and look how we have the food to eat, every day. I have good friends here. I like it. I’d like to go back, but I’d like to stay here until we know if there’ll be anything for us back there.” And the father nods his head, agrees, even manages a smile for himself and a pat on the head for his seven-year-old son, who is now a Chicagoan.
He has stayed because, as his son points out, there wasn’t “anything” back home for his family and many thousands of other families. For all his bitter moments he is a man of moral courage. As he describes himself holding those two pieces of paper and asking, asking again, continuing, following directions, getting more directions, one can sense in him the self-possession, the self-reliance, the self-command he has always had, however petulant and brooding he sometimes is. People like him somehow got to the cities in which they now live. It is less apparent to us that their arrival was preceded by an act of will, by intention become a deed — and that to stay meant to resolve something, to settle something in one’s mind as well as to settle down in an apartment house. A black man in Harlem describes what he, like the white mountaineer just quoted, went through as he arrived in New York City: “I came by bus. All I had when I got on the bus was a box, a box made of cardboard, and it had a rope around it to hold my things together. I had some socks and underwear, two pairs of each, and a picture of my wife and my kids that we took in a five-and-ten store in Macon, Georgia. I’d only been in Macon two or three times in my life, so New York was more than I could believe. I just couldn’t believe it. How could there be a place like that? Of course, I’ve been here five years, so it’s hard to tell you what was on my mind back then, but so far as New York is concerned — how I felt when I saw it for the first time — I can tell you, because there are some things in your life that you just don’t forget, never. How could you?”
He works himself up to the description of his first thoughts and feelings in New York by doing what a good novelist or historian would do. That is to say, he goes back and makes sure that his listener is thoroughly aware of, reminded of, what preceded that arrival: “Now, you have to picture our place back there in Georgia. Oh, it was something! Today I can’t figure out how we did it, live there. It’s no paradise up here, but like my wife tells me when I get down in the dumps, a day doesn’t go by that we don’t take something for granted up here that back there we believed we’d never, never live to have. That’s the truth. It was bad for us down South, and getting worse all the time. Some of my family, they went into Atlanta; and even there they couldn’t find work. They stood around and sat around. They tried to find jobs. Then they gave up. They came back here and they told me that if I wanted to get out, I’d better go all the way and leave the whole state of Georgia. So, I did. I went to New York because we had an uncle here. Then I sent for my wife and kids, and after a while we sent for my cousins, too. They said they’d been in Atlanta, but compared to New York, the whole state of Georgia was just a little town, that’s all it is.”
How did he manage, though, during those first minutes and hours of his arrival North? How did he come to terms with Harlem? Where did he go? Whom did he initially see, talk with, ask for help? No world-shaking psychological and sociological conclusions will come out of whatever answers and thoughts and memories he manages to give to someone like me. Nevertheless, he himself says that he lives to this day with, will always live with “a little bit of that first day in me.” Now what does that mean? What unforgettable drama unfolded then? The answer is that nothing terribly shocking or melodramatic took place. He simply wants it known that “you don’t just move up here and find a room in Harlem and send for your family, no sir.” If not that, then what? Oh, a lot, he will say, tossing the ball right back. It is hard for him to put some things into words, and he isn’t really interested in doing so. But he has memories, a number of them, and as he keeps on saying, something seems to come up all the time that makes one or another of those memories assert itself in his mind; “I’ll be walking down the street and my eye will catch a junkie, and I’ll say to myself: Louis, remember the time you saw your first junkie? And then I’ll say to myself: Louis, you are here; you’re no longer down South; you’re here.”
With such a remark he can be through with talk, or on his way to a long marathon of it. The fact is that he has become a taxi driver, and so he knows his Harlem. He can take a visitor on a street-by-street tour. He knows that city within a city well enough (if not inside out, which is what he only sometimes claims) to qualify as a guide: “Some people said they wanted a few of us to take the whites on a tour and show them a lot of places. I said sure, sure I would. Maybe it was a mistake, but their white eyes were opened, they were; and you know, that’s the same thing that happened to me. My eyes got opened when I came up here.”
When he first saw New York he had one thought: how could he get together the money necessary for a return ticket? For one whole week his mind was almost obsessed with that question. He got off the bus and asked the driver if it cost the same fare to go back South. When he got to his uncle’s house he asked his uncle if he could loan him the money for the trip back. Yes, but stay, the uncle said repeatedly. No, he would not stay. The city hurt him. His eyes watered when he walked the streets of Harlem — and no, it wasn’t because he was crying. Well, maybe “on the inside” he was, but he was also crying because things would unaccountably get in his eyes. Things don’t get in his eyes now — and that, he says, is because “you learn to close your eyes a little up here, you learn to protect yourself.” Nor were his eyes the only problem he had. His ears had never heard so much, so many different kinds of noises. He felt like the squirrels he used to s
hoot: “They’d always be sitting and trying to figure out where to go, which tree to climb, which way to turn. The same with me. I’d leave my uncle’s place and I’d have my eyes watching all over, and my ears as open as they could be — and the result was I didn’t know what to do. It seemed that every direction I would go would only mean trouble, trouble.”
He goes on. He describes all the “trouble” he met up with and came to understand — and not to fear quite so much. He describes the things he gradually took for granted: those junkies, the soot in the air, the roar of buses and garbage trucks and freight trucks and the elevated railroad and the machines being used to build or tear down or repair buildings. He describes gutters and hydrants and lampposts and automobile meters; they are all part of the city, part of the streets of Harlem — and it was only when his family did at last come up, and when he saw them noticing all those things, and complaining about any number of other things, it was only then that he realized what he had gone through: “My boy asked me about the hydrant. After I told him, he wasn’t satisfied; he wanted to know where the water comes from. You see, back home we used to walk three or four miles every day to get water and bring it back to the house. We went to a little pond, it was. Don’t ask me if the water was clean! I don’t want to think about the germs I got into me over all those years. My little girl comes home and talks about vitamins and minerals in her food, how she needs vitamin ABC and XYZ. I tell her: look, Sally Mae, your daddy lived on grits and the water in that pond, back in Peach County, Georgia. He didn’t die. He lived on it, you hear!”
The little girl is, of course, surprised, and she doesn’t really know what to say in reply. All right, all right, so he did manage to live on grits and that dirty water. What is she supposed to do? She was two when she came to Harlem. She is a New Yorker. Her daddy is no desperate, dispossessed sharecropper. Her daddy is a taxi driver. Her daddy knows a lot; in fact, he knows most everything there is to know about New York City, or at least the only New York City she, Sally Mae knows about — so why does he every once in a while bring up “all that South business”?
Sally Mae’s father agrees with her. Why go back to what is over and done with? Yet he does. He recalls things nostalgically, bitterly, and with a touch of envy directed at others who lack his kind of memories. Most of all he recalls things with decreasing frequency and increasing self-consciousness. And almost invariably he finds that when he lets his mind go back, when he dwells upon the past, he ends up remembering not the South but himself as new to the North, new to New York City and Harlem and those streets he now drives over, all over — to the extent that sometimes his wife will wake up in the middle of the night and hear him reciting them, their numbers, their names, their origins, their endings. During the day he also says a lot of things out loud. Doesn’t he have to make himself heard above all those sounds? Doesn’t he have to remind himself by talking at the top of his voice that with so many people on those streets, he is himself, a person, and no one else? The time was that he could walk miles and hear no one’s voice, see no one’s face. He walked on red earth, grew tired, and sat down on that earth, maybe under a tree or beside some bushes or on some grass. The time was that he’d come home and do some more sitting: there was the sun to watch as it slowly seemed to settle itself down from the sky — and then all of a sudden disappear; there were the sunflowers to look at and shower with a little water; there were the dogs to play with, throw sticks toward and away from. Now he never looks at the sky. He just doesn’t. He knows about the weather by the feel of things. Is he cold? Is he sweating? Is he getting wet? Does he see whiteness slowly growing and growing, covering up Harlem’s streets, making them look different, making them harder to navigate, making his driving more difficult — and more in demand? And now the trees are practically nowhere, sunflowers are unheard-of, and as for dogs, they are around, yes, they are, but he thinks that is rather a shame; “I wouldn’t bring a dog into the city, not here anyway. It’s unfair to them. We left our dog home. We left her with my sister. The dog is still alive. My sister writes and tells us that Rosemary misses us. I’m sure she does. I miss her. We named her after my younger sister. She got sick and died all of a sudden. She coughed up blood and the next thing she was gone. I wouldn’t have named the dog Rosemary, but my mother asked me to. She said she liked hearing the name Rosemary called again. She said she was sure Rosemary was near us and listening and waiting for us to come and join her.”
As for his mother, she won’t leave Georgia. She wouldn’t think of coming to New York. She was born in Peach County and she will die there. Why is that? Why doesn’t she follow her brother, follow her son? The son Louis has an answer: “She’d be leaving her child Rosemary, and not only Rosemary. She’s lost other children, you know. There’s no Harlem Hospital for us in Peach County. There’s nothing for us there, the fact is, when you stop and think about it. It was awful for her to see Rosemary die like that. It was awful for her to give us children roots to chew on so we wouldn’t get too hungry. But even so, my mother can’t leave. She’s got to stay. She’s got to stay and ‘lock up the store.’ I hear my customers say, ‘I’m glad you came by; I need a taxi; I’m tired.’ They’ve just ‘locked up the store’ after a long day. I guess the good Lord will send a taxi for my mother one of these days, and when He does she’ll get in and be glad. Yes, she will. And you want to know something? She won’t turn around, no she won’t. There will be no regrets. She’ll get in that cab and say, ‘My good Lord, how I’ve been waiting on you! Oh have I!’ and then she’ll be driven to some city, I guess!”
It is precisely a place like Harlem Hospital that lifts this man’s spirit and makes him proud to be living where he is. It isn’t that he is completely satisfied with the care his wife and children have received there for a variety of complaints. It isn’t that he himself has been showered with love and affection and prompt service there. Still, Harlem Hospital has black doctors and nurses. Once, in an emergency, his girl was treated very well, so well that he could only think, again, of Rosemary — and of what it means to be up North and in a big, modern city, for all its drawbacks and troubles: “I took her there, Sally Mae, and she was coughing bad and wheezing, that’s what the doctor told me it was, wheezing. He said her lungs were sick, she had trouble in them, but they had drugs and they’d get her well, they were sure of it. I was reminded of Rosemary, my sister. I thought of her, coughing and coughing, and finally the blood came up, and all of a sudden she was gone. Do you think a poor man down there in Peach County, Georgia, can go to Harlem Hospital and have his daughter fixed up? Do you think even if you’re white a doctor down there will see you if you’re poor? They wouldn’t see a white man’s kid, either! I knew a white kid who was sick; I knew his daddy too, because he worked in the gas station near the bossman’s house. The doctor saw the white kid once and said he was in private practice, that’s what the doctor said. He told the man to take his kid up to Atlanta, someplace like that, where they have money and they have ‘free hospitals,’ something like that. Well, then I could only shrug my shoulders. I thought he was a lucky man, come to think of it! I said to my wife, ‘If he was colored, he never would have gotten to that doctor’s office in the first place. At least this way he knew where he stood.’”
The long and short of it is that he now knows just about where he stands. He lives up North, in America’s most populous and richest city, its first city in many respects. Every day he stands there at a corner, waiting for a fare, talking and joking with other cabdrivers. He leans against lampposts. He leans against the walls of buildings. He leans on parked cars. He has his coffee standing up. He can look out at the street that way. For one thing, he can see anyone who might be tempted to get into his cab and drive off, but just as important, he likes to look outside, look at passersby, take in the scene, “watch the world go by,” he puts it — by no means with a unique turn of phrase, but with obvious conviction and even a trace of excitement. The streets of that city have caught hold of him
, as they have so many others from various classes and races and backgrounds. He is not uncritical of those streets; he sees “a lot of misery every day,” and he wants that known. At times he is so critical that if his mind does not seriously take him and his family back to the rural South, it does indeed prompt him to think of other streets, perhaps in smaller towns. But no, that is not for him; maybe for his children but not for him. Nor is the problem only one of race, though God knows “a black man can’t just decide to move and expect a big reception out there in the big, fat white suburbs.” The fact is that he spends only the very briefest time in the suburbs and he does not know how he would ever get to live in one of them: “Should I take my cab one day and drive out there, over one of the bridges, and go talk to someone about a home? I take fares all over, but I can just imagine what would happen if I tried moving in some of the places I drive through. My kids, they are learning more than I ever dreamed there was to learn in school; so maybe they’ll learn how you get to live someplace else. Black people get out of here, I guess, just like I got out of Georgia.”
He is optimistic at that moment. Sometimes he sees things far less hopefully. At other times he becomes afraid. He hears talk of violence, of revolution. He sees buildings condemned. He sees fires consume buildings that ought never have been left standing. He sees everything as he drives and stops, picks up people and takes them where they want to go: “I’ll hear people talking and I think to myself there won’t be a Harlem left. The white man doesn’t care about these streets here; some black people do, but some have reached the point that they don’t care either.” But he does, he very much cares: “I’m not tired of these streets, not yet. If you asked me what I think of my being here, I’d say I’m glad I came. That poor white guy I told you about, the guy who worked in the gas station — well, you know what? He went to the city, too. My mother told us that. She said he up and left. Maybe he went to Atlanta, or maybe he went some other place — up North, maybe. I understand the whites in the South have been going the same way we have. If the land won’t take care of but a few rich farmers, and the poor people have got nothing to fall back on, except to sit and starve to death, then they’re not going to do that. They’re going to leave. They’ll come up here.”