Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  I don’t wear oversize basketball shoes and baggy pants, don’t put my hats on backward. I don’t talk loud unless I’m in an animated argument. I don’t scowl unless the sun shines in my eyes. I don’t demand respect; I just get it.

  The French have an expression, D’être bien dans sa peau—to be at ease inside one’s skin. My father is at ease, I believe, inside his skin. I am at ease inside my own. I am my father’s child.

  But am I, too, Harlem’s child?

  Things are a little different now than they were—certainly thirty, forty, seventy years ago when Harlem, as they say, was really Harlem. It is a long way from those old days to these days, just as it is from midtown Manhattan to Harlem: only an eight-minute ride, but still a world away; only a few years gone, but still a million miles from what it used to be. And remarkably, perhaps sadly, not yet far enough from where it used to be.

  From that day when I first strode 125th Street like I owned the place, like I belonged there, and like I knew where I was going and what I was doing there; from that first day two years ago to my last day in Harlem and to the many days in between, things are a little different than they were.

  Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is Harlem’s aorta. Perhaps it is only a throwback to an earlier era in Harlem, and perhaps 125th Street has always been this way, a visible testament to the life and vibrancy that has coursed through the now mean streets of this neighborhood for as long as Harlem has been black. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is evidence that there is still vibrant life in Harlem, and when you walk down this street you know it, you see it, you hear it, you feel it pulsating off walls, windows, and pavements. Or maybe 125th Street is a throwback all the way to Africa, for Africa is what it initially brings to mind. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is alive with confusion and commerce, noise and commotion and a hell of a lot of energy. It was even more alive that day, my first day in Harlem. Since then things have changed a little. Since then the police have moved in following orders from city hall, and they have curtailed much of the curbside hustle and bustle.

  “It’s what they do, man. It’s what they always do. They don’t care a shit about us until it’s vote-getting time, and then the only ones they care about are the ones they can count, or the ones who can give them money, or the ones who look like they’re on their same side. But the rest of us, you know, the ones of us who are out here struggling every day, trying our best to make it—man, we just get shit on. Especially if we are trying to buy into that American Dream stupidness.”

  That was the angry voice of Eliot Winston. I would not meet him until much later, and if his words were not this day ringing somehow in my ears as I strolled 125th Street for the first time, then this day would in my mind’s eye replay itself later on when I walked with Eliot the day the changes to 125th Street were imposed. On that day, cordons of uniformed police were stationed all along the street. In twos and threes they stood outside the shops. Blue police barricades lined the curbs. Order and, some would say, boredom replaced 125th Street’s normal chaos. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street suddenly became a little more like any other street in New York, or in America—just a little blacker.

  But on this day, my first day, 125th Street was still the old 125th Street.

  I came up from the subway. I let the sun hit me, sit on my shoulders and face, let the sun darken me just a little blacker than I already was. I took a little survey, took a little breath, then I stepped off the curb and into the swelling sea of blackness.

  Harlem. I was in it now. I was home.

  At a publishing party in London, when the notion of living in Harlem was just occurring to me and taking shape, I had a conversation that addressed my chances of surviving Harlem. I was kicking the idea around in my own head to see how it fit, but tossing it around to others as if it were an idea already set in concrete. After all, following Africa and the Deep South, Harlem seemed like the next logical place for me to spend time.

  I was overheard saying that I planned to live a year in Harlem—so I thought at the time, only a year—and that I planned to write about the experience. The woman I was talking to was appropriately impressed. She, I am told, registered something like a look of shock, no doubt projecting herself into my shoes and wondering how Harlem might be for her and whether she could survive it—as if Harlem were some kind of war zone.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right there?” she wanted to know. “Do you think you’ll be safe?”

  She is small, this woman, and white. She could see the world only through those delicate blue eyes of hers. I see the world through the eyes of a man who is black and who is tall and who, when he frowns and stands erect, making himself appear somehow larger, like a grizzly bear rearing up on hind legs, projects a formidable image, belied most of the time by kind watery eyes and a smile that turns his face into a baby’s face. I am a coward, I am sure, but I am able to live and move within the bubble of certainty that not many people would take the risk implied by the image of me. I knew I’d be safe. And I told her so.

  Safety never occurred to me before, nor very often during my time in Harlem. There would be over the course of the two years a few close calls, a few scrapes to call into question the ease and confidence with which I came to move in Harlem. I had been shot at, of course. I had stepped into a few tight spots and found myself in an altercation or two. And before it was all over, there would be, in the street right below my window, a man beating a woman. I had, however, the physical passport always to protect me.

  I was not small, I was not frail, I do not look like anybody’s victim. And more than that, I am black. If nothing else, on first glance anyway, I look like I belong here. These are my people, I kept telling myself. I’ll be at home here.

  But Joseph Carver, who used to live in Harlem, reminded me not to wade too deep into the quicksand of racial identification. He warned me that it would be best not to be too foolish, not to let my guard down completely.

  “Black people do some pretty bad things to other black people,” he said one afternoon over a shared pizza. He had lived in Harlem and his apartment had been broken into too many times.

  “It got so bad,” he said, “I couldn’t leave without worrying about somebody stealing my stuff. So you either worry all the time or you get used to living without having anything. I didn’t want to live the one way or the other. So I left.”

  And then, as if to emphasize, he told me the story of Bill Simpson, a thirty-seven-year-old black man who the previous winter had moved to Vidor, in east Texas. It was a story Joseph had read in the paper or seen on TV.

  The federal housing projects in that part of Texas where Simpson lived were highly segregated, and Simpson’s move was part of a court-ordered integration plan. He was one of only two blacks in his new town, which had been all white before the court order, and he was constantly harassed, he said, because of his race, and constantly on edge. He was all but ready to move back to Beaumont, where he had lived before moving to Vidor, to be back among his people.

  “I don’t want to worry who’s going to do something and what they’re going to do, when it’s going to happen, where it’s going to happen,” he once said.

  So on a Wednesday afternoon he moved back to Beaumont, Texas.

  Wednesday night, he was dead.

  He had been shot five times as he walked along a street in Beaumont. A car had pulled up, the four men inside the car had demanded money. Simpson refused. One of the robbers shot him. The gunman was black.

  Joseph Carver said, “Just because you’re black, you can’t think you’re safe here or anyplace else. You can’t think somebody’s not out to hurt you. Especially if you’ve got more than he’s got or if you’ve got something he wants. And you don’t even have to. You just have to look like you do.”

  I think I heard myself say, and I’m not sure if I said it to Joe or if I was only saying it to myself: Perhaps I ought to be very afraid here.

  But I’m not!

  I knew right then th
at there was no place on earth I would rather be.

  I knew I needed to be here.

  I felt like an orphan reunited with the parents he has not seen since a very long time ago. I felt like my father back once more in the old neighborhood. Elation blended with trepidation, relief commingled with tension, producing in me an intense desire to laugh, to shout, even to dance with the dancing man who stands on a cardboard mat on 125th Street between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—what used to be, before all the name changes, Eighth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. He stands in the shadow of the Apollo Theatre, and instead of begging for money, he dances for tips. If donations from passersby are not forthcoming, he dances there anyway.

  I stopped a minute or two and watched him. He wore a pair of reddish brown boots highly polished to catch the light of the sun. They shone so brightly that the red in them overtook the brown and they shimmered like fire. From every angle his boots threw light into your eyes. He wore a beret, loose black trousers, sunglasses, a string of shells around his neck. He stayed on the cardboard mat and danced, moving very slowly, almost carefully. He seemed unaware of the people who passed. He seemed to dance only for the fun of it, the sheer pleasure of hearing the music and feeling the movement of his body. But if you watched his face and not the dancing, you could catch a glimpse behind the sunglasses and you would see every now and again that he glanced up and took notice from the corner of his eye.

  I smiled at him, but he never acknowledged me. He was in his own world, completely within himself—or at least pretending to be. I left him there and walked on, deeper into the tunnel of darkness, a little further back in time and into a world where is written clearly the history of modern black America—which is of course the history, quite simply, of modern America.

  As I walked the streets that day, my first day in Harlem, I could feel that history—not just on 125th Street but throughout the district. It was like walking through a living museum where someone pushes a button and you hear recordings of sounds and voices and see images of times gone by.

  I felt that I was walking among the ghosts of Harlem’s past, that I was coming here as they had come here, as Langston Hughes had come and Duke Ellington had come, as they all had come: the washerwoman and the seamstress; the heiress and the showgirl; the hard-laboring man and the vagrant; the high and mighty, the lowly and disregarded; the leaders and the followers; artists and intellectuals—coming home, coming to find peace, coming to gain in Harlem a sense of self and a new way of defining oneself, blackness, black culture, black awareness, that was independent of the white world’s limiting influence and strictures and prying eyes. Here they and we and I could live completely within ourselves, in a world all black, all our own and of our own making. Or at least, like the dancing man, we could pretend to.

  I felt the weight of Harlem’s hope and the rhythms of its excitement. They were all around me, in my ears and in my eyes and upon my shoulders. They stirred in my soul like some half-forgotten memory now suddenly awakened. I felt amazingly free, as if I were really and truly free for the very first time in my life.

  At the same time I felt strangely burdened, about as unfree and bound as anyone could be. I felt somehow as if I owed somebody something.

  By 1925 Harlem was already the center of a certain universe, spinning in an orbit all its own, attracting other worlds to itself with the gravitational pull of an immense black hole. The August issue of the Saturday Evening Post that year noted that Harlem was drawing immigrants “from every country in the world that has a colored population. Ambitious and talented colored youth on every continent look forward to reaching Harlem. It is the Mecca for all those who seek Opportunity with a capital O.”

  James Weldon Johnson came to Harlem from Florida, Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay came from Jamaica. W. E. B. Du Bois came from New England, Langston Hughes came from Kansas.

  They came to Harlem from everywhere; people whose names should be on the tip of your tongue, people you never ever heard of. Businessmen came and racketeers came, profiteers and preachers came, the honest and the fakers. Nella Larson came. Madame C. J. Walker came. Pig Foot Mary came.

  These came as they all came: seeking better. Some sought fame, some sought fortune, and some sought only the future. All of them sought the freedom that could not be had anywhere but here.

  They came to Harlem the same as I had come: because Harlem seemed the place to be, the place where you could lose yourself and at the same time find yourself.

  Harlem by then had already become more than a place. It was becoming the metaphor. It was becoming the fiery hot liquid center of black creation, the supernova core of a galaxy in the making.

  For the outside world Harlem was quickly setting the tone of the time, those energetic Jazz Age years when the war to end all wars was over and the Great Depression had not yet begun. It was a time of enormous excess. Life seemed good and was getting better all the time, but after such a war you could never be sure. Better to live for the moment. For those who did, Harlem was nightclubs and liquor and music. For those with a deeper vision, Harlem was the creative spirit of an era. Here, in terms of art and music and literature, was Paris and Berlin of the same era rolled into one, but with one tremendous difference. Here at last were the as yet unknown and unheard voices, not of a generation, however lost and suddenly found, but of an entire people stumbling on untested legs and falteringly learning to walk, squeaking and squawking to find a voice and then to find something to say.

  And I was walking among their ghosts. I felt indeed as if I owed them something.

  This was Harlem in those long-gone days. It was more than the place to be, it was the place you had to be if you were black, the place that called you and where your heart was, even if you never set foot there. It was a movement at the center of which was the search for a place of equality in American society, equality based on pride and what W.E.B. Du Bois called uplift. Harlem was the seat of the black search for an artistic and intellectual self, the search for identity that emerged during what we now label the Harlem Renaissance, the emergence of black culture to find its soul.

  Blackamerica’s mission in creating the center of its universe in Harlem was not only to build a black city, a mere place. Its purpose was to make possible this search for a new identity. As Alain Locke once said so plainly, “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul.”

  And so they came to find it or to forge it—a new black identity.

  It was the reason Langston Hughes was drawn here. “Harlem,” he said, “was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual, pulling him from everywhere.”

  It was the reason Claude McKay found himself here. He came to achieve, he said, “something new, something in the spirit and accent of America.”

  They came all of them with the best of intentions. They came to participate. They came to contribute to Harlem’s growing glory and to benefit from it. What no one considered, however, and what no one realized at the time was that they all came sowing the seeds of Harlem’s very destruction—and perhaps all of Blackamerica’s as well.

  I too ignored those seeds of destruction already sown, already taken root, already sprouted. In my eagerness to be in Harlem, to find or maybe to forge a new black identity of my own, I could feel the weight only of Harlem’s former glory and of its former hope and promise.

  It is promise of a bygone era, promise that by now perhaps has been denied, promise that perhaps has faded, but from the vantage point of 125th Street that day, it was promise only that had been altered and that had shifted but that had not yet died. Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was alive. Harlem was alive.

  They were just as alive that day—Harlem and 125th Street—as they had been in 1923 when Duke Ellington first came here; differently alive, to be sure, but alive and throbbing with pace and excitement. The Duke is said to have practically roared with enthusiasm. He said of Harlem that here was the world’s most gl
amorous atmosphere, exclaiming at the time, “Why, it’s just like the Arabian Nights.”

  I don’t know about the Arabian Nights or about the streets being particularly glamorous, but the excitement, the pace, and the noise were undeniable.

  On this day, as on every day except Sunday, Saturdays being the worst, from St. Nicholas Avenue right the way across to Third Avenue, 125th Street was clogged with traffic. Cars and buses sped whenever possible, inched along most of the time, and drivers took out their frustrations in a symphony of horn honking that was mostly ignored except by those wishing to honk back. The effect was negligible on the movement of traffic but very great on the ear until you got used to it. Then the horn noise and traffic noise merged with the other sounds of 125th Street—the music blaring, the laughter rising above the streets, the children crying for one more piece of candy, one more hot dog, one more minute to look at something—and helped to carry you along. And you needed every aid, for the pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk was every bit as intense as the car and bus traffic in the street.

  From practically one end of the street to the other, on both sides of the street, 125th was jammed tight with shoppers and strollers and people just standing, looking, and listening. Soapbox orators drew crowds on one corner or another as preachers and prophets railed against the wages of sin, urged you to seek Jesus or Allah, or simply attacked the white man and his ways. Street vendors sold on folding tables everything from souvenir T-shirts to compact discs and videocassettes, to books and barbecued chicken. As you walk you are bombarded every few steps by examples of the music for sale, first jazz then reggae then rap, all of it blasted at megavolume so you are sure not to miss any of it, and trying to compete with the loud music are the voices of the vendors shouting at you, trying to draw your attention to this table of books or that table of incense and crystals, photographs, paintings, clothes. It is noisy and hectic, and anyone trying to walk in a hurry along the street is just out of luck. And anyone trying to enter any of the shops on 125th Street needs extra determination, for to try and cut across the current of this mighty river of people moving first one way and then the other along the sidewalk is like trying to canoe upstream on the Old Man Mississippi River itself. It’s no wonder the shopkeepers here constantly complained about the street vendors. It was enough trouble just getting inside the shops. What’s more, the street vendors sold much of the same material and, without the overhead of the shopkeepers, at much lower prices.