My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  We hit it off, and a few weeks later, I invited him to join me at a dinner party I was giving at the Spring Street loft of a friend who was a dress designer. I’ve always loved hosting sit-down dinners with multiple courses, a raft of china and glassware, a tablecloth, linen napkins, and place cards. This was one such extravaganza laid out on the working loft’s cutting tables. I’ve long forgotten the menu, but I remember that the dessert was orange givré, a recipe that I’d cribbed from the bill of fare at the Paris Drugstore Saint Germain. There, it consisted of a hollowed-out orange filled with orange sorbet and then refrozen. In New York, there was no sorbet then, and the only sherbet available was raspberry, and it was a vivid blood red that made the result more grand guignol than grande cuisine. It certainly ended the evening with a flourish. To my delight, Sam came, ate and drank well, and behaved well, verbally challenging a few of my friends. At the end of the evening, he even waited to accompany me home. I have a dim memory of Sam starting an argument with my friend who’d graciously agreed to hold the party in her loft, accusing her of being a sellout and not politically aware. That should have been a warning note, but the clanging of those bells was lost in my glow of a successful dinner party, and out I swept on a love-besotted cloud, heading back to my Charles Street apartment with Sam, who’d actually waited for me until after the cleanup was done. That was the beginning. We first slept together that night, finding comfort and companionship in each other in a wine-sodden haze. In time, our nascent friendship turned into deeper affection and then into something stronger, and eventually we were acknowledged to be a couple.

  Sam had the ability to transform the ordinary into the special: transmute the dross of daily life into magical moments of spun gold. He’d taken to occasionally stopping off after work in midtown at the old Russian Tea Room, when he felt like it and was feeling flush, for champagne, blini, and caviar. Owner Faith Stewart-Gordon used to advertise it on WQXR every morning as being slightly to the left of Carnegie Hall, and it was the kind of spot where you could see émigrés, socialites, and the occasional star like Nureyev. Sam arrived like Grant taking Richmond, occupied one of the coveted booths, commandeered the center of the red leather banquettes, and spent the rest of the afternoon regaling his guests with tall tales and quiet confidences. These forays often evolved into dinner at a nearby restaurant. Each day offered another possibility for exploration, expansion, and delight.

  Sam’s apartment at 81 Horatio Street was the downtown hub of activity for the group, and he hosted one and all in his small living room in a permanent floating salon where on any given occasion, you might run into fellow academics Corrine Jennings, Richard Long, and Dolly McPherson; writers Maya Angelou, Louise Meriwether, Rosa Guy, and Paule Marshall; actors Rip Torn and Geraldine Page; and just plain friends like Mary Painter and her French chef husband, Georges Garin, or Baldwin himself, though at this point, he’d been spoken of but I’d yet to meet him. Liquor flowed—the three J’s: J&B, Jack Daniels, and Johnnie Walker Black. Wine never ran out, and if Sam wasn’t cooking, food could be ordered from El Faro up the street. The apartment so bubbled with activity that some of us just referred to it as Club 81.

  Entertainments at Club 81 were usually unplanned and just seemed to happen when someone was in town or there was an event of some sort. We’d gather, drinks would be poured, food prepared or ordered, and it was on to the next stop. If Maya were in town, there would be at least one dinner at Paparazzi on the East Side. The Brasserie was another favored spot that recalled the Brasserie Lipp and others in Paris. The grand staircase that bisected the room was suitable for sweeping entrances and offered a perfect vantage point from which to scope out the crowd. The menu featured such Parisian favorites as steak frites and choucroute, the Alsatian sauerkraut dish that I’d come to love.

  I’m still not sure just how or why Sam settled on me; perhaps my naiveté attracted him. I certainly came from another side of his spectrum. I suspect that some things about my family’s oh-so-aspirational, oh-so-bourgeois lifestyle reminded him of a quieter, more sedate life that he’d perhaps hankered for in his youth in Durham. I was young, but I had all the trappings of a worldly sophisticate. I could keep up a good conversation about world politics. I was a bona fide bluestocking. I’d read the classics and could quote Proust in the original with a Parisian accent. I loved nothing more than his Sunday sessions when whoever had assembled at Club 81 sat around and read “When Malindy Sings” by Paul Laurence Dunbar in full dialect or acted out snippets of plays directed and stage-managed by Sam, especially Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, or read poetry from God’s Trombones by James Weldon Johnson in full-throated voices.

  I can still hear Sam’s stentorian tones, complete with the rich preacher’s cadence of one who has spent more than one Sunday down front on the mourner’s bench in a Black church.

  Weep not, weep not,

  She is not dead;

  She’s resting in the bosom of Jesus.

  I can still see the Angel of Death and hear the horses’ hoofs as he journeyed to Yamacraw to take Sister Caroline home:

  Go Down Death, and bring her to me.

  • • •

  It wasn’t all poetry and parties. Alongside my teaching, I was building a career as a journalist at a string of the newly forming Black magazines. In short, I had been raised by Edwardian-era parents to be perfect midcentury modern wife material: an accommodating helpmate. I loved to entertain, made good conversation, was pretty much game for anything, and as a colleague of Sam’s at Queens College had my own money to spend. Just the kind of girl you could easily take home to Mother. I was also fifteen years younger than Sam and so wet behind the ears that the waterfall sounds drowned out any warning signals there might have been. I was quiet, polite, unquestioning, and very well educated: the perfect clay for Sam to mold.

  Sam, of course, had been presented to my parents, who were not sure what to think of this volatile suitor who was fifteen years older than their much-coddled daughter. They were all too pleased that someone seemed to understand the daughter they had spawned who did not fit into any of the worlds that they knew, but they were decidedly cautious about his temperament and his age. Sam did not attempt to curry favor with them. He knew my mother from Queens College and regarded her as a professional ally in his ongoing battles with the powers that be at the college. He regarded my self-taught, southern-poor-boy-turned-aspirational-bourgeois father with interest, no doubt seeing glimmers of his own life. They shared an affection for telling tales and creating stories, and I remember my horror when at one Sunday dinner, Sam calmly told my father that he “would lie if the truth were in my favor just to keep in practice!” My father was shocked and taken aback at Sam’s audacity but simply nodded and, after some discussion, agreed: indeed, they had both re-created the narratives of their lives, and my father’s adolescent desires had become his adult truths in much the same way that Sam’s had his. A tenuous truce was established, and my folks came to regard us as a couple as well as joining us from time to time at the opera or sitting down to hear Mabel Mercer at the St. Regis Hotel. My mother occasionally joined the crowd at Horatio Street. They were trying to be modern parents and keep up with the progressive and permissive times and made no mention of weddings or commitments. And so it went for a while.

  It was not always about friends and the famous. Sam also had moments when the doors to Club 81 were firmly shut to the world. Like many apparent extroverts and indeed like his best friend, Baldwin, he was a deeply private person and required his downtime to think and renew his energy. In these moments, he would also write, and when he returned to the world recharged, he would occasionally bring a page out of the drawer in his coffee table to read the precious paragraphs that he’d crafted. Writing was not something that came easily for him. It was agonizing, but the results were memorable.

  He had that kind of eye and that ability to transmute the detritus of everyday living into wordsmith’s gold. But the paragraphs were few and far between, an
d for the most part, he’d disappear into his own world—sit and sip scotch and listen to the music he adored: Maceo Woods’s growling organ playing old-school gospel songs like “Peace Be Still,” deep-moaning blues that talked of loss and longing, or full-blast operas to which he would sing along. Christmas was a no-fly zone for friends. Club 81 was always closed for the holiday. Sam remained sequestered and meditated on things while surrounding himself with the plangent voice of Bessie Smith. And so the year went by with the unfurling of events and my increasing acceptance by Sam’s crowd.

  * * *

  * * *

  Caldo Gallego—Galician White Bean Soup

  I first tasted caldo gallego on a trip to Santiago de Compostela more years ago than I want to count. It was love at first slurp: the combination of the slightly spicy chorizo sausage, the bland starch of the potato, and the tang of the greens was perfectly suited to that northern Spanish town where they boast they have made rainfall an art form. I was thrilled to discover it on the menu at El Faro, where many chowed down on shrimp in green sauce and other shellfishy delights. It rapidly became my go-to order: comfort in a bowl. Even today, one spoonful takes me time-traveling back to the scarred wooden booths in the restaurant’s back room and reminds me of my youth.

  – Serves six –

  1 ham hock (about 1/2 pound)

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 medium yellow onion, cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices

  1/4 pound chorizo, cut into 1/4-inch-thick rounds

  3/4 pound Yukon Gold potatoes (about 2 medium), peeled and cut into 3/4-inch-thick cubes

  2 cups small white turnips, roughly chopped

  2 cans cannellini beans and their liquid

  4 cups chopped kale

  Salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Prepare the ham hock by cooking it in water to cover for 2 hours. Reserve the cooking liquid and add enough water to make 10 cups.

  In a large, heavy saucepot over medium-high heat, heat the oil. Add the onions and chorizo and cook until the onions soften and the chorizo starts to brown, about five minutes.

  Add the ham hock and liquid, the potatoes, and the turnips. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer, stirring occasionally, skimming off and discarding any foam that rises to the surface, until the ham, potatoes, and turnips soften, about 11/2 hours.

  Add the beans and the kale and cook until the greens are tender, about 20 minutes.

  Remove the ham hock. Pull the meat off the bone and discard the bone. Stir the meat into the pot. Adjust seasonings and serve.

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  * * *

  AND THE BABY MADE THREE

  If the red-brick buildings of the West Village were where much of this story plays out, it begins earlier in the quiet, tree-lined streets of St. Albans, Queens, for it was there that I grew up in the aspirational world that was the Black middle-class life of the period. (A wiser, older friend once told me that there was no real Black middle class: our standards and aspirations were always upper class. We may have had middle incomes, but our goals and desires were rarely middle class.) My parents could have been poster children for movin’ on up. But unlike the television Jeffersons, it was no situation comedy with canned laughter, but a daily push for acceptance and upward movement.

  When I try to think of what attracted Sam to me, I don’t look at my photographs (when I do, I’m surprised to find that I wasn’t bad looking, and I had a youthful freshness and a direct, fearless gaze). I do look at my upbringing and my education. My mother once told me that I’d been taken to nursery school in a limousine. I certainly hope that the tale is apocryphal, but suspect it is not and know that whatever the truth of it is, the statement sums up the dreams that my parents had for their only child. I’m the product of two people who were the strivers in their families.

  My father, Jesse Brown Harris, came from hardscrabble, dirt-poor folks in Napier, Tennessee, and moved north with his mother and two younger siblings in the Great Migration of the 1930s. His older half-brothers had come first, and when they’d acquired a foothold, they brought their mother and the younger family members. Six foot four feet tall at a time when that was very tall, slender, ebony black, and ramrod straight, he was handsome with looks that transcended race at a time when little else did. When he entered a room, people wanted to know who he was. He walked through life with his head held high in what many assumed was arrogance but was in fact a mask for myriad insecurities too numerous to note. His father had been, among other things, a rag-and-bones man who did everything he could to keep the wolf away from his brood in the dark days of the Depression. The letters that my grandmother kept reveal a caring father who, while away in Birmingham, Alabama, trying to keep his family together by working in the steel mills, worried about his progeny and his wife. They are poignant. Addressed to my father, his eldest son, they reveal anxieties about his family in New York and are filled with promises of sending one dollar in the next letter so that my father could take his mother to the clinic for medical help, and heartfelt apologies for not being able to send more.

  Yet despite his impoverished childhood, my father always had a sense of beauty and of self. His aesthetic sense led him to walk across Brooklyn to attend Erasmus Hall High School because he felt it looked like a school should look. The trade-off was that he had to enroll for a general diploma that held him back from higher learning. (There are two Black students in his graduation picture; the other one, Scovill Richardson, light of skin and straight of hair, is barely discernible in the photograph. In one of fate’s ironies, his daughter and I would take classes together at NYU decades later.) Never defeated, he took college night courses for most of my childhood; threatened me with Heathcliff, not the bogeyman; and read Pushkin and psychology texts for pleasure. He instilled in me the need to read voraciously and gifted me with his memory, which was able to call up any fact that he’d read or heard in detail when it was necessary, and sent me to the very best schools in the country.

  He was a self-taught student of human nature, with a finely tuned awareness of social ironies and a wicked sense of humor that would at times make him literally fall on the floor with laughter. When my college application asked for my grandfather’s occupation, he had only a second’s hesitation and then, no doubt thinking of all of those letters from Birmingham, wrote in the blank “metallurgist”! We all cackled wildly about that one. “Daddy,” as he always signed his letters, wasn’t a numbers runner or a player or an absentee father; he wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer. He was a constant presence, a rock of stability who said grace before every meal, got down on his knees to pray each night before retiring, and marched us off to Westminster Presbyterian Church each Sunday. The one love of his life beyond learning was his wife, my mother.

  While my father was from the hardscrabble South, my mother, Rhoda Alease Jones Harris, was a northern girl; she’d been born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and grew up in Plainfield, where her father was a Baptist minister. His position meant that her family was respected in the community. Her mother had gone to a women’s seminary at the end of the nineteenth century, and her father had trained in theology. They’d met and married, but then slipped up and had too many children, and what would have been idyllic with two or three children on a minister’s salary got increasingly difficult as the babies kept coming. I’m sure I’m an only child because my mother was one of ten.

  She was petite, light-skinned, smart, and had position in the community that my father much admired, as well as an associate of arts degree in home economics that afforded her diverse job possibilities. She’d worked as the dietitian for the Huntington Hartford family, but left that job as her friends and family kept reminding her it was too much like being a maid. She’d been the dietitian at Bennett College in North Carolina, but found the southern social codes too restrictive and finally found her niche in college administration as a secretary and eventually as an administrator.
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br />   They were a fantastic couple: a perfect yang-yin pairing in which one individual dreams big—way beyond the normal—and the other has the financial chutzpah to make it come together and work. Daddy was the dreamer. The poverty of his upbringing was the driving force behind his wanting to get out, and his reading had given him the world to aspire to. Mommy was the pragmatist who could move the world if she could find a place to put her fulcrum. She could rob Peter to pay Paul with the best of them and always come out just fine in the end. Together they were unbeatable at a time when aspirations could become realities if one planned. Plan they did and when, after nine years of marriage, they had me, their only child, they had a raison d’être. Their life became about me, and the energy of the family was centered on we three. As their much-loved only child, I was their major chess piece on the board game that was the American dream, although none of us would have put it that crassly at the time. My success represented their achievement and so it was essential that I be offered every perceived key to success and every opportunity to succeed. There were piano lessons and dance recitals and etiquette classes and very, very good schools.

  To be fair, it wasn’t all aspiration and pragmatism. There was also fun and a fair dose of bohemian madness. My mother had a talent for decorating and entertaining. One year, she wallpapered one wall of our living room a pattern of chartreuse, black, and silver no less and added chartreuse bouclé drapes; it was arresting, and it worked. She gave parties with unusual themes to which her friends all flocked. They arrived at ten in the evening for dessert and drinks and to watch the night-blooming cereus unfurl its once-a-year petals and then wilt as the dawn approached. Another time, she had them come dressed as babies and answered the door in her own homemade Dr. Denton pajamas complete with feet and drop seat. There was the Belafonte-era calypso party with a bartender serving rum punches and a hired calypsonian who sang risqué songs that I was too young to understand; the cabaret in the finished basement with candles in chianti bottles and checked tablecloths; and the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party where dry ice provided smoke underneath the punch bowl and burned a hole in the tablecloth. I watched them all from my perch on the landing halfway up and halfway down the steps until it was time to go to bed and listen to the gaiety from my bedroom. My father had an artistic bent as well; he had taken art classes at Pratt and was fairly talented at charcoal and watercolor, but he left the entertaining to Mommy and devoted himself to living his motto, “Big as any of ’em,” and caring for we three.