Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  Practically every street reeks of ruin, poverty, and despair, and you cannot move without the sense of danger forever present around you. The danger itself may come and go, may not even be real, but the sense of it never vanishes. As in the minds of the white folks too scared to venture this far uptown, Harlem might very well be the darkest, dirtiest, and most dangerous place on the face of this earth. If Harlem was ever once a paradise, it is certainly no longer that same paradise, certainly not in reality, but not even in the imagination.

  Oddly enough, however, the myth remains somehow and somewhat intact. Mysteriously Harlem, both the word and the place, still resonates with magic in the ears of many.

  There is a woman, Olivia Maxwell, who even now sits in her kitchen in a Chicago public housing apartment and romanticizes about a Harlem that once was, envisioning a place she never knew, a place that was long ago. Its mission, its raison d’être, was in part to give concrete hope to people like Olivia who live lives of nothing but hope—and dreams unfulfilled.

  She is a very large woman taking care of two small grandchildren. Her daughter, their mother, is a cocaine addict who professes for the ninety-ninth time that she is trying to kick the habit—for real, this time, she says. In the meantime, Olivia takes care of the children in a small apartment where we once sat in the kitchen and drank tea.

  It was wintertime, fiercely cold outside. The wind that lashed in from Lake Michigan was biting enough to tear your flesh, wicked enough to rattle the windows in Olivia’s apartment and to sneak in through the cracks. With each new gust of wind came a whistling sound and a draft. The kitchen was by far the warmest room in the apartment. The door was kept closed, and all four gas burners on the stove were lighted for the heat they gave.

  “I would offer you some cake to go with the tea,” she said, but she never completed the thought. She didn’t need to.

  This was life in a Chicago tenement, cold and cakeless. The furniture in the living room was old and ugly and had the look of a secondhand store showroom. Even at half the price it would have been too expensive. The kitchen table was part of a cheap dinette set that ought not last much more than a season or two beyond this one, but that had probably been around for ten and would probably go for ten more. The chairs did not match.

  In the cupboard were rows and rows of canned soups, canned stews, canned vegetables, bags of potato chips, boxes of presweetened cereal. You can look in the cupboards of poor people all over the country, and this is what you will find. And most of it paid for with food stamps.

  A roach crawled up the wall. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a mouse. Or worse.

  Although Olivia’s apartment was kept clean, the building itself was foul. It was a twenty-story high-rise. There were two elevators. They were old and slow. You could easily wait ten, maybe fifteen minutes for an elevator to come—if they both happened to be working. By then a small crowd would have gathered, and the elevator would be packed.

  Better crowded than empty, for there was a decidedly dangerous feel to the place, especially to the elevator. Not only was it old and slow and run-down, and you felt all the while that it was about to break down, you also got the feeling that something else was about to happen. I don’t know what. I don’t know why. But there was the same sense of imminent danger that you feel often on the streets of Harlem. The lobby was crowded with many people just hanging around, many people coming and going, and there was a security guard stationed at a desk by the front door. He somehow added to the presence of danger when he should have alleviated it.

  This is but one picture of black life, but an all too common one, and perhaps the picture that sticks most in the mind and becomes too often the representation of the whole of black life. It was definitely this image that Harlem as the new Jerusalem was supposed to alter or erase.

  It was what the idea of Harlem once promised, and although I knew Harlem would not be as it had once been, in some vague way I was hoping for it—not necessarily the old image of Harlem as paradise, but the old feeling of Harlem as refuge. I felt the same going there, I think, as Olivia Maxwell might have felt.

  When we spoke of Harlem, Olivia’s eyes brightened for the first time.

  “Why?” I asked her. “What is it about that place?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But I have always wanted to go there. If I ever get the chance to travel and if I could ever get to New York, the first thing I want to do is go to Harlem. ‘Mister,’ I would say to that taxi man. ‘Take me up to Harlem.’”

  “To do what?”

  “Just be there,” she said.

  She admitted she knew nothing about Harlem but what she had seen in the movies and on TV, and what she had read and had been told. She knew it was rumored to be a very dangerous place, a poor place, but none of this mattered. It was a black place, a magic place, a place full of wonderful history.

  “Just once before I die,” she said, “I would like to go there and see it.”

  Such is the enduring myth of Harlem.

  Something all our own. Something magical, full of wild possibilities, full of promise. Harlem. There has been nothing like it anywhere since.

  This, I guess, was why I came. But in the widening light of dawn, things take new shape. Feelings change.

  I have a vague sense suddenly of how I feel now when I walk these streets. I cannot yet articulate it, but it is a feeling that sneaks up on me each time I leave my apartment and stroll the neighborhood. If I tried right now to put it into words, the explanation would be lost in meaningless hysteria and hyperbole. I think I’ll wait, for to answer is to call into question my being here at all.

  Down the street from where I live, a car has been destroyed. The windows were shattered, the seats and the dashboard ripped out and tossed into the avenue, the car set on fire. Nothing remains but the burned-out shell.

  You look at this burned-out car, you think you are looking at a crime. What you are seeing is only the result of the crime.

  Three minutes’ walk away, down to the corner of 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, you can see the back side of a former apartment building that either reminds you of the car you just saw or makes you think of a war zone. The windows have all been blown out or boarded up. The entire face of the building is streaked with the scars of a fire. It is but the shell of a building, in front of which lies a fenced-in vacant lot covered with rocks and weeds, strewn with trash.

  This, they tell me, is the nicer part of Harlem.

  A few minutes from there, a walk down Manhattan Avenue leads you to row upon row of apartments where people live in units right beside units that have been gutted and boarded up. Young men stand on the front stoop steps and smoke dope. Down the street on another corner, money changes hands. Quite out in the open, drugs are sold in a flash of money unfolded, passed from one to another, a vial of cocaine slipped into a pocket. As you pass, your eyes meet the eyes of a man rocking on his heels in front of a building where people live—bad enough, but where children live too, and play. He mutters something. You think it’s a greeting. You nod hello. Then his mumbling registers.

  “Get you some, man, get you some right here.”

  Drugs for sale.

  In a second-floor window a little child sits and watches it all as if she is watching a television. A young woman approaches, looks up, and shouts.

  “Get out that window.”

  But she is only playing with the little girl, not concerned for the child’s safety—not enough for my liking.

  “Get out that window and go get your mama,” the woman shouts.

  The child still doesn’t move. The woman screams up again in a voice big enough to rise above the noise on the street.

  “Hey. Somebody up there throw me down a drill. I need me a drill.”

  To the window where the child still sits someone finally comes and gets ready to throw hand tools down to the street. There seems little worry about the child sitting in an open window two floors above the ground, li
ttle concern from the apartment where the child lives, just as little from the street below. The child is just pushed aside.

  Street after street, more and more of the same. All you see are the weeds winning over the neighborhood. You never stop to wonder how the weeds came to be planted or how long ago the seeds were sown. You only shake your head in disgust. You see what you think is a shame, but what you see really is the result of the shame.

  I ask myself as I walk east across 111th Street: Is this what I came here for? I could be in the south of France, I said. I could be hiking the north Yorkshire moors. I could be living in Paris, for God’s sake.

  In fact, the season before I came to live in Harlem, I had spent in Paris, in London, and in Yorkshire. The season before that one I had spent in a seventeenth-century house almost as old as Harlem itself, and about as far removed from here as you can possibly get. It was in a little village called Montpeyroux in the southwest corner of France, the kind of place where you don’t have to lock the front door. In fact I never locked up when I was away from the house. The only time I locked the door was when I was home and didn’t want the neighbors, who when they dropped in for a visit would often enter without knocking.

  I think back to my time in Montpeyroux; lazy days and even lazier nights, the biggest danger coming from the possibility of getting run over by a teenager on a moped. Quite possibly that is how life is supposed to be, safe and quiet and calm. Just as possibly, for me it was too calm. Perhaps I need a certain tension.

  I had all the world to choose from. In fact I had chosen much of it, had traveled extensively and really seen the world, had lived in some of the world’s greatest cities and felt at home in far-flung places and situations, had enjoyed bits and pieces of what many might consider “the good life”; why, then, would I want to live in Harlem? Why would I voluntarily choose to limit myself, I who had up to now done everything I could to extend my reach and broaden my horizons?

  When you’re black and American and aware of much that blacks ought to be aware of, for the sake of the others perhaps you cannot afford that kind of luxury for too long, the luxury of tranquillity. It is too easy to let your guard down. Too much comfort, too much easy living, can cause you to forget your pain, most certainly the pain of others. Too much comfort, and you might soon believe there is no pain.

  I came to Harlem, it can be said, to put in my tour of duty on the front lines. To do what with the experience, I don’t know. But at least to have it.

  I had found the Harlem apartment where I wanted to live. It had been no easy task. Landlords and leasing agents would make appointments with me and then not show up. Or else they would show me apartments that were absolutely unsuitable for living in: filthy apartments, many of them, trash in the hallways, roaches living in bathroom sinks, wires exposed and hanging from holes in the ceiling. And this is not the condition of Harlem apartments scheduled for repair after years and years of use and misuse; these are very often the Harlem apartments they expect you to move into.

  The landlords, most of them, don’t live in Harlem, of course. They aren’t going to be your neighbors. They don’t care about you. They don’t care how or where you live. They don’t care about the apartments. Why should they? If you don’t rent this place, someone else will—someone a bit more desperate perhaps than you, but someone, someone who will pay just as much as you.

  Not much has changed in Harlem since its creation as a black ghetto. Then—as now, as probably always throughout Harlem’s history as a black community—rents have been higher here than in most other parts of the city for apartments of the same size. Even if what you spend is less than what you might spend for an apartment elsewhere in the city, you end up with very little for your money—or anyway less than what you might have if you lived farther downtown, all things considered. Often what you get in Harlem is not worth any amount of money.

  I was once shown an apartment that rented for less than half what I ended up paying for the apartment I ultimately settled on. But no matter how much less, it wasn’t enough less. It was in a decaying building on a decaying street not very far from the street where I finally came to live, but not nearly as nice. Its carpet was mildewed and smelled like rot, the walls were dingy, paint peeled from the ceiling, the apartment had no windows. It was a small one-room affair with a tiny bathroom off to one side. There was no kitchen. A small stove and a rusting refrigerator had been set up in the main room, but placed right behind the front door in a space so small you had to be careful when you entered. There was nothing else in the room but a back door that opened onto a rear courtyard—or it would have opened onto the courtyard if the back door had actually opened. The door was made of steel and had been welded shut for security.

  The apartment could easily have passed for a prison cell, the building for some kind of halfway house. The main outside door was also made of steel, dented and bent on its hinges and difficult to open. It was scarred with a thousand names and initials carved with something sharp through the paint and into the metal.

  Some of the people who lived in this building were sitting on the front stoop on the evening I came to look at the apartment. They had nothing better to do but fan themselves in the heat, sit on the steps, and smoke. A man who did not live there, I don’t suppose, was banging on the heavy metal door and trying to get in. No one on the steps did or said anything to help him or to discourage him. The man showing me the apartment said nothing to him either. He, the landlord, just opened the door with his key, and we went inside. He didn’t seem to care that the man banging on the door had followed us in.

  But, as expected, the landlord didn’t live in that building, didn’t live in the neighborhood, didn’t live anywhere near here. Why should he care what goes on in his building as long as he gets his rent—and gets it on time? He made it very clear that he disapproved of rent checks arriving late. He said he didn’t like to have to come way uptown to hassle people about money. He lived, of course, somewhere downtown. He wouldn’t tell me where.

  Similarly, the man who owned the building where I eventually came to live did not live in the neighborhood either. He too, I presume, lives somewhere downtown, or out on Long Island, or in the upstate suburbs of New York. He doesn’t live in Harlem, though. This I know, and I doubt if he comes up here very often.

  He is a downtown lawyer, and his name is Levine. I know nothing else about him. I dealt only with his agent, a management company with offices on the Upper East Side. I went there only once, although. I have often wondered if theirs is one of the buildings I can see from the window of my apartment as I look into the distance, to that other world down and across Central Park.

  My normal dealings with them came only once a month when I sent them the rent check. Although I know firsthand that they don’t easily tolerate late rent checks either.

  TAKE NOTICE: THAT YOU ARE JUSTLY INDEBTED TO THE LANDLORD OF THE ABOVE PREMISES IN THE SUM OF $750.00 FOR RENT OF SAID PREMISES WHICH YOU ARE HEREBY REQUESTED TO PAY ON OR BEFORE THE EXPIRATION OF THREE DAYS FROM RECEIPT OF THIS NOTICE, IN DEFAULT OF WHICH THE LANDLORD WILL EXERCISE HIS LEGAL REMEDY, THE COST OF WHICH MAY BE ADDED TO YOUR BALANCE DUE.

  Halfway through my first year in Harlem I received this notice in my mailbox. I had been out of town and had sent the rent from wherever I was. Either it took longer to reach the office than I thought it would take, or else the check was received but not recorded because I hadn’t included the computerized invoice I was supposed to send along with my payment. Regardless, the check couldn’t have been more than a day or two late. But here came the notice and threats of legal action.

  I in reply wrote a biting letter of my own, pointing out that this was no way to deal with a tenant, since the rent had not been late before, and I wondered why they should panic so quickly now. If they were going to be so worried about my ability to pay—justly, as it later turned out—perhaps they shouldn’t have rented the apartment to me in the first place. I also wondered why they would jump straight
away into threats of legal action instead of sending a letter of inquiry, a gentle reminder perhaps that I was delinquent, or why not wait a few days to see just how late the check would arrive?—if indeed it would arrive.

  By the time I got the notice, my check had appeared. And they had already cashed it. I told them that I naturally expected an apology, knew of course that I would not get one, and so told them into which of a series of lakes they could all go and jump. I told them as well just where they could shove their notices, their writs, and all manner of threats they cared to send. I also said in the letter that I wished them a nice day.

  I heard nothing back from them. Nor was I pestered ever again when I was late with the rent. And I did not feel particularly guilty when my money finally ran out and it was a struggle to pay the rent at all, whether on time or late.

  I did not work for pay while I lived in Harlem. As much as possible I wanted to live the life I saw around me, wanted to be one of the men I saw with nothing to do, nowhere to go. I wanted to live the black experience that has become the cliché, the black experience that I had come to believe. I don’t know why I believed it. It was far from any black experience I had ever known—at least up close—but I had come somehow to believe it, and I wanted to live it. So I allowed myself to become poor, desperate for money, and without the means of easily getting my hands on more—not anytime soon, anyway.

  In my diary I find this entry:

  I have lived in Harlem so far now for almost one full year.… Mice and roaches are conspiring to take over my kitchen and nothing I do seems to help. They can’t be after food; there is nothing here to eat. There is nothing in the refrigerator, only staples on the cupboard shelves: rice, beans, flour for biscuits, cereal for breakfast, a chicken frozen in the freezer. Winter this year promises to be especially long and severe. As its approaching shadow lengthens and expands, my money supply continues to shrink. I have $1,293 in the bank; no immediate prospects for more. $1,293 is not much money in New York City. The rent is more than half of what I have and due in eight days. And there are other bills to pay. Do I pay the bills or do I pay the rent? Or should I buy groceries? I know I am not, but these days I feel very very poor.