My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  When the event had been planned in advance, Sam’s table groaned with homemade pâtés, roasts, southern-style vegetables, and more. At other times, El Faro was called, someone was dispatched down the street, and we dined on shrimp in green sauce and fruit-flavored barbecued spare ribs. El Faro was the public face of this Village location, but the private one was within the confines of Sam’s small place.

  The third locus of Baldwin’s New York was the most public venue: Mikell’s, a jazz club named for its owner, Mike Mikell. Today’s prosperous Upper West Side of fancy boutiques and exotic restaurants is home to a white liberal intelligentsia, but this was not yet the West Side norm in the early 1970s. It was a neighborhood on the rise, but the terrain was a good deal more rugged. For those who veered off the beaten path, it, like the West Village, could be dangerous. New York is an organic city, one that is always in transition. Within a lifetime (often in only a few decades) neighborhoods grow, gain prominence, peak, and return to oblivion.

  • • •

  Blacks had traditionally lived in San Juan Hill, the area south of Sixty-seventh Street, since the turn of the twentieth century. It was demolished in the late 1950s to make way for the construction of Lincoln Center. The hood’s last gasp was even recorded on film as the former old-line tenements with their cramped rooms and their fire escapes did their last public duty before demolition as the sets for the movie West Side Story. Those displaced from the buildings where Maria and Tony, Bernardo and Anita danced their way to an Oscar for best picture moved northward into the burgeoning area that would become today’s West Side.

  Riverside Drive had always been ritzy, although you might not want to cross into the park. West End Avenue’s high-ceilinged, multiroomed apartments also attracted the wealthy, as did buildings on Central Park West, with their stunning park views. The midsection of the neighborhood, with Columbus as the commercial strip and Amsterdam housing smaller shops and low-rent apartments, offered the displaced a place to be. Southern Blacks, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Eastern European Jews made the area home from the 1940s through the 1960s, establishing themselves in the grand apartment buildings that existed among much-reduced surroundings. By the Mad Men era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the area was still the Wild, Wild West. But townhouses were being renovated and apartments slowly being turned into co-ops or condos. The apartments were grand, and the brownstones were bastions of nineteenth-century glory. However, around many corners, drug addicts, welfare hotels, and appalling schools still lurked. Changes, though, were happening rapidly, and gentrification was on the way. On June 30, 1969, New York magazine reported:

  That huge, sprawling, alternate-side-of-the-street society filled with shabby low-rent housing and Oscar Lewis runaways is changing fast. “In five years,” one city planner said, “the only dumpy little shopping bag ladies you’ll be able to find on the West Side will be stuffed and behind glass at the Museum of Natural History.”

  In the year of that statement, Mike Mikell and his wife, Pat, opened a jazz joint on the corner of Ninety-seventh Street and Columbus Avenue. It was around the corner from Park West Village, a government-subsidized urban redevelopment project designed to provide affordable rentals with “fresh air, good light, and attractive landscaped grounds for middle income people.” Greenwich Village had provided green spaces and apartments with reasonable rents that had attracted an earlier generation of writers, artists, dancers, actors, and others who toiled at the impecunious end of fame’s equation. By the 1960s, they were being priced out of the increasingly gentrifying Village, and those who were not quite bohemian enough to relish the true grit of the developing East Village and Alphabet City headed to the Upper West Side, lured by the reasonable rents and the huge apartments, many of which boasted all of the amenities of a bygone era such as maids’ rooms, service entrances, back stairways, and in-house storage.

  The West Side was home for Maya Angelou, Rosa Guy, Louise Meriwether, and Paule Marshall. Guy found an apartment in the newly constructed Park West Village and established a beachhead. When Maya moved to New York, she roomed with Rosa until she got her own place, also in Park West Village. When Louise Meriwether arrived from California, she joined them in the complex that had become a West Side mecca for many of the Black intelligentsia. Amid the townhouses and gentrifying tenements of the West Side, Park West Village’s spread-out, low buildings with grassy common spaces stood out and became part of a West Side hub that attracted many other African American artists and writers to the neighborhood. Bassist Ron Carter and singer Harry Belafonte lived in the same building on West End Avenue. Actor Morgan Freeman, before he became a megastar, was another neighborhood denizen, and Essence’s editor in chief, Marcia Ann Gillespie, bought a place next door to the Dakota. Susan Taylor, editor in chief to be, roosted near Lincoln Center. Gentrification had begun.

  A critical mass of working Black folk with disposable income changed the neighborhood’s social life and resulted in the opening of several restaurants created by and for the new clientele. The Only Child Restaurant on the downtown perimeter of the neighborhood at 226 West Seventy-ninth Street offered not only food but poetry readings by a growing roster of African American writers who were part of the thriving Black Arts Movement. A listing in Black World/Negro Digest for August 1974 informs that previous artists to ascend the podium included writers Tom Weatherly Jr., Lynn Shorter, Mervyn Taylor, Judy Simmons, and Elouise Loftin.

  The Cellar at Ninety-fifth and Columbus, run by legendary Black restaurateur Howard Johnson, was more in the center of the West Side zone. The restaurant catered to the developing new Black intelligentsia and business folk who were part of the neighborhood’s gentrification. It was a meeting point and a focal point and even boasted an interracial, although predominantly Black, crowd. These new restaurants were not soul food joints but relatively expensive white-tablecloth neighborhood venues where menu items included chef salads, shrimp scampi, and, as a touch of Europe, French onion soup.

  Under the Stairs on Columbus between Ninety-third and Ninety-fourth completed the dining triumvirate. It was a neighborhood spot, but for most people, it passed for sophisticated and at any hour of the evening was a hive of energy and activity. The Columbus Avenue strip (albeit only four short blocks) was a veritable Bermuda Triangle of social activity into which more than one unsuspecting young woman got lost running between the three places looking for friends and never quite finding them but usually finding a grand time no matter what.

  Mikell’s, located at the center of this pulsing Upper West Side zone, completed the list of nearby venues and was the third pole in Baldwin’s NYC life. It offered jazz and good stiff drinks, along with some prime people-watching, and had become the place on the music scene and the spot where the evening was guaranteed to end up whether it began in one of the neighborhood places or even down in the Village. Mikell’s was a hub of Black social activity on the West Side and all around the town. On any given evening, folks from nearby Park West Village could be found propping up the bar, along with school principals and medical professionals. There was usually a goodly smattering of beautiful young women in a range of hues. Many were just emerging fried, dried, and blown to the side from El Yunque (later El Yunque Oba), the city’s preeminent Black beauty salon, helmed by Ruth Sanchez and often promoted by Essence magazine—required reading material for any Black woman who wanted to be in the know. The women crossed Mikell’s threshold in search of a partner for life or a warm shoulder for the evening in times before booty calls but after the opening gong of women’s sexual liberation that was sounded by the Pill. El Yunque’s proximity, complete with the models, would-be models, wannabe models, and freshly “done” well-groomed young single women it disgorged into the neighborhood probably explained the number of single—or not-so-single—men who were regulars at the bar.

  Stand-out faces in the crowd included surgeon Leo Maitland, “doctor to the stars,” who had treated Miles Davis and Geoffrey Holder, who was a regula
r, as was school principal, activist, and parents’ rights advocate Ron Evans, who had been at the center of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school conflict between the common school board and the New York City teachers’ union. Timothy Fales, husband of Josephine Premise, father of socialite and culture vulture Susan Fales-Hill, and scion of the Philadelphia family that gave their name and some of their money to NYU, was also often in attendance at the end of the bar, where patrons were usually three deep and people jockeyed for elbow room and prayed for a seat.

  Jazz was the background music, and the club hosted most of the major stars of the period. Stuff, the house band that was formed in 1974, played three times a week. It was considered one of the best bands in the city and created a sound all its own, combining soul, funk, and jazz. The atmosphere was welcoming, the drinks kept flowing, and rumor had it that other substances were available downstairs. The house musicians were so polished and professional that major stars loved to sit in with them. Stevie Wonder might show up one night and Joe Cocker another to polish his “soul chops” with folks who really knew. Whitney Houston made her solo debut there one evening when her mother, Cissy Houston, who was scheduled to sing, tricked her daughter into performing by claiming to be too ill to go on. Later, Whitney would be heard by record mogul Clive Davis of Arista Records during another Mikell’s engagement and offered a contract. Many of the musicians who had appeared as guests on Soul left those studios and headed over to Mikell’s to end the evening jamming with friends. Later, after Soul was canceled in 1972, they would use Mikell’s as a hangout. Paul Shaffer, leader of David Letterman’s late house band, declared Mikell’s “soul heaven,” and indeed for many it was.

  It wasn’t all about music, though. Mikell’s was a literary as well as a musical landmark. Journalists and those whom they were covering, as well as literary lights, all met up at Mikell’s, including Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Novella Nelson, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, and Jayne Cortez. Jimmy and his world also made this spot their spot. In so doing, they made it a cultural epicenter of Black New York life. Writer Louise Meriwether said simply about Mikell’s, “We felt safe there.” Indeed, it was a haven for all.

  Presiding behind the bar, juggling its disparate personalities with the dexterity of a master magician, was Jimmy’s baby brother, David Baldwin. Although Jimmy was David’s half-brother, they, and indeed all of the Baldwin family members, shared a resemblance that was undeniable. (Clearly Mother Baldwin had some strong genes.) With David, it was all in the forehead, the eyes, and the teeth. He was taller and handsomer than Jimmy in a more conventional way. Like his more famous sibling, he was blessed with the gift of gab and an ability to speak with all, which was an undeniable asset to his work as a bartender. He also had some of the quicksilver energy of his older sibling. Yet in each of them, there was something else: a twinkle in their eyes that was backed with an ineffable sadness. Like Jimmy, David had a wicked sense of humor and a kindness that was overarching. He also shared Jimmy’s ability to dance in many different circles and knew how to keep a party going. In their youth, Jimmy, as the older brother, had tried to shield younger David from some of life’s vicissitudes and to smooth the path that he knew awaited him as a Black man, so they were close. If there was any one individual in the world for whom Jimmy would walk to hell and back, it was David. At Mikell’s, behind the bar, though, David Baldwin was a star in his own firmament.

  In the 1970s, Mikell’s was the special hub of that world, where to cross the threshold was to know that something important was going on, something new was being created. Even though it heaved with activity and was a truly happening bar, something else was at work at Mikell’s. The place had a sense of possibility that was palpable. It was a spot where the world was debated and re-created nightly. If Mikell’s was the super circus of the West Side, David was its ringmaster.

  • • •

  For many, the world of the West Side consisted of Mikell’s, the Bermuda triangle of restaurants, and their apartments or those of their friends. For Sam, though, those spots were only one part of his Upper West Side equation. For him, the West Side also meant Lincoln Center and especially the opera. Whether because of the European culture that it represented or through a real affinity for the music (although this was tantamount to heresy in the Black Power 1970s), Sam was a true lover of opera. He was multifaceted in ways that defied description, and I knew he was cantankerous enough to refuse to be put into any one type of cultural box. Christmas, a holiday he despised, was given over to a day of serious scotch drinking, accompanied by maudlin musings pronounced over a soundtrack of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. But he was equally driven to hear soprano Jessye Norman’s debut concert at Alice Tully Hall in 1973, where he hummed along with the Schubert leider and commented knowledgably on the interpretation.

  As one whose culture-vulture parents had subscriptions to all of the theaters at the opening of Lincoln Center and who had cut her Metropolitan Opera teeth in the score desk seats in the Old Met, I was a willing partner in his adventures in the world of classical music. My mother volunteered for the Metropolitan Opera Association and was often given house seats for the performances, so we benefited from those as well. In those days, everything was beautiful at the opera. Folks still dressed up, and the lights were shiny and new and ascended to the ceiling, announcing one’s entry into a world of magic and music. My 1974 date book lists my opera-going selections: Tales of Hoffmann by Sutherland, I Puritani with Beverly Sills, Les Troyens with Shirley Verrett and Christa Ludwig, and Manon Lescaut with Leontyne Price. There were others as well—some twenty-one in all—and so it was a round of opera performances spent listening to the voices of the midcentury: Sutherland, Horne, Pavarotti, Te Kanawa, Milnes, Domingo, and von Stade. There were notable conductors and even James Levine’s Met debut. There were as well the Black divas who were staking a claim and ascending to the operatic stratosphere: Bumbry, Grist, Battle, and the grand divas—Leontyne Price and Martina Arroyo, both of whom Sam knew.

  There, as everywhere else he went in the world, Sam was a friend of the famous. So we went backstage after a performance by Leontyne Price to see her in her dressing room, and I will always remember her kind words to me, “Who is this pretty lady?” I smiled, tongue-tied and floating on air at meeting the diva assoluta. Sam chatted companionably, while I drank it all in: the floral tributes, the champagne, and myriad reflections of the votaries that we were in the dressing room mirrors; the wig stands and costumes, and even the discarded makeup towels soiled with brown greasepaint; the palpable air of glamour and international success counterpointed by the backstage realities of performance delighted me. It was heady air indeed for a former High School of Performing Arts student who had once harbored dreams of performance.

  Then there was Martina Arroyo, the diva from Harlem who’d gone to Hunter High School. She was a closer friend of Sam’s, so there were not only backstage visits but on more than one occasion dinner at her apartment in the company of other opera stars and her mother, who took great delight in deflating Sam and taking my part. The musical divas were kinder to me than the literary ones, perhaps because their emotional attachment to Sam was not as great. In any case, they were balm to my soul that was becoming wounded from flying too close to the stars and breathing air that was too rarefied.

  • • •

  Hanging out with Sam was not all opera and champagne. There were difficulties and hurts and slights from Sam’s quicksilver personality, which could go from warm to icy in the beat of a hummingbird’s wing. I vividly recall being all dressed up to attend Jessye Norman’s Met debut in dual roles of Dido and Cassandra in Les Troyens. My mother had been given tickets. I have no idea why they were available for such a performance, but they were, and for box seats no less, albeit on the side: I was becoming a picky connoisseur. I waited on the plaza for Sam to appear, late and breathless as usual. The bells rang, the doors were closing, and so I scurried up the grand staircase solo, fully expecting that he would arrive later an
d be stuck in the waiting room until the first interval. I fidgeted through the first act wondering what had happened and if he had made it in under the wire in the era before cell phones made everything checkable. When he hadn’t appeared by the second act, I was anxious and disappointed, and hurt and angry (although I dared not even admit it to myself). Finally I realized that I was too distracted and on the verge of tears to enjoy the excitement of the moment. I was in such a state by the second interval that I picked up my program, headed out into the night, hailed a taxi, and went home to lick my wounds in private. When Sam surfaced later that evening after multiple worried telephone calls, he was fine and pugnaciously dared me to say anything other than, “What happened?” That question was met with a temper flair and a cavalier, “I got busy,” with no apology in sight. That, though, was in the waning years of our relationship. When times were good, they were very, very good, but it had been going on like that for more than a decade. I was tired of, but kind of used to, Sam’s mercurial ways, so it got buried with the other slights and wounds and never again mentioned.

  In the good times when Sam showed up and his temper was in check, there was music, possibly a backstage visit, and then usually a post-opera dinner across the avenue at Le Poulailler, Robert Meyzen’s (of midtown’s La Caravelle) West Side venue that was the Sardi’s of the opera world. No less a culinary light than Craig Claiborne had written about the spot: “In the beginning Henri Soulé begat Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque. Le Pavillon begat La Caravelle and Le Poulailler.”

  These restaurants served as the genesis of many, not to say all, of the grand French restaurants in New York in the final third of the twentieth century, so the food at Le Poulailler was splendid and the service impeccable. New York magazine’s restaurant critic, Gael Greene, declared it “the comeliest restaurant within sprinting distance of Zubin’s imperious baton.” It also appealed to Sam and my mutual love of France. The menu offered classic French fare with some lighter dishes on the post-theater menu, and I was especially fond of the gougonettes de sole, divine fish fingers that made for perfect late-night eating as we waited on the red leather banquettes for the singers to enter amid bravos from the diners.