Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  To him who has heard me cuss only once before, and now twice, I said, “Hell no, Pop. I do not regret the life I have lived.”

  (But I should have said instead: I do not regret the life that you have given me.)

  He looked at me with that strange expression he sometimes gets, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. In the excitement of a few perilous moments, it seems he had forgotten already that he had asked anything at all—or was pretending to. I, on the other hand, could not forget. The question was hot on my mind the rest of the night and the rest of that early morning, the rest of that day and every day in fact thereafter, always when I walked the streets of Harlem, and anytime I let my memory drift over the tour of duty I had done there.

  The question and the answer were on my mind still two years later, when on another late night and early morning I looked from the window of my apartment and saw in the street below a man trying to beat submission into a woman.

  It was Johnny Cannon all over again. We haven’t come very far at all.

  All this time I thought I had escaped, as if escape were ever possible, as if you can climb out of your skin, make a decision, and have it so. You believe somehow that by simply wanting a thing and by thinking a thing you can therefore have the thing. And then you wonder why others have not and cannot make the same decision, and why they cannot have the same things.

  I got out; why can’t they?

  Why can’t they?

  Wait a second, wait a second!

  Did I just say that?

  I got out; why can’t they?

  There! That feeling was upon me that I now call the Pig Foot Mary twinge, only this time it was no twinge. This time it was a sharp stabbing pain, as if someone were kicking me hard in the ribs.

  I was listening still to Antonio Morales as he led the way to Malcolm X and 114th. “Yeah,” he was saying. “We are some bad men.” But instead I heard myself speaking. I got out; why can’t they?

  I sounded like an ex-friend of mine who has said to me many times: “I did it. Why can’t they?” She had not been talking about escaping from Harlem, but she might easily have been—if she had been black—and I sounded just like her.

  Worse, though: I thought I sounded too much like the old lady in Cleveland who, having read my previous book, wrote me this letter:

  I am a white woman, 70 years of age. I read your book to try & understand your race better. I was raised in the north but spent 2½ yrs in the deep south with my husband during W.W.II. He was in the service. I was Catholic & lived (room and board) with many families & never had a problem. I didn’t try to convert anyone. To be accepted by any group, social etc you must be accepted first & conform … I live in an integrated neighborhood, been here 25 yrs. The blacks move here & bring the crime with them. An apartment at the corner sells out every three years & starts over again. Apts are destroyed, garbage in yard, kids out at all hours, loud music, drug dealing, drinking. Yes, we all know they (blacks) are in the neighborhood. You can see & hear them day and nite. Do I speak to them—NO. Why should I. I don’t want to know this kind of inconsiderate neighbor who lowers property values. Why do blacks think we have to accept them, just because you’re black. Your race has to learn to obey rules of society to be seen as civilized. Sure we fear you because you commit so many crimes & especially crimes against each other. Blacks are not safe in black neighborhoods. Why don’t they improve a neighborhood instead of destroying it. The Blacks destroy their own back yard. Housing projects have been built & destroyed by themselves. They complain of garbage in yards—it’s their own, not mine. Time & again the govt has tried to help. You must help yourselves. I am Irish & married an Italian when an Italian was one step above a nigger (50 yrs ago). I was considered a pig shit Irish (there were lace curtain Irish also). My husband was a dirty Guinea or dago. We raised 3 kids, worked hard, moved into neighborhoods, keep our property up, raised our kids to respect church, school & neighbors’ rights & were always accepted because we were assets to the community not liabilities. People living today never owned slaves. Some today work as hard as slaves to survive. We still have “white trash” & hillbilly persons but many have worked hard & own homes & have moved up. There are others who will always remain white trash & feel sorry for themselves. The mines (coal) closed 50 years ago & they stay on welfare waiting for the mine to reopen. Public education is available to all. All you have to do is use it. I’m sure you received government loans for your education. It is available to all in need if you have maintained your grades. When my daughter planned on going to college (I & her father are 11 grade educated) she was required by law to have a foreign language, algebra, chemistry etc. We have lowered the standards for college entrance for blacks to be eligible. We have lowered the standards for high school graduation so more blacks can get a diploma. Welfare (up to now) has been expanded by President Johnson to fight the war on poverty. It has only been abused. Everyone has to work to better themselves, it can’t be gotten by just demanding it. You cannot demand respect either—you earn it. I got your book at the library, so you make no money on me. If you’ve read this far maybe you will see the other side of how white people feel. Your people have been here longer than mine. You want it all your way instead of integrating into society. You want to take over. A civil war will again be fought in this country.

  No name or address.

  You might come & shoot me.

  I might go and shoot her. Hmm. Sometimes I think that might not be a bad idea.

  I used to laugh at this old bird. I used to think she was funny. My two years in Harlem have erased any amusement I might have found in her. Now I can see in how many ways she and women like her perpetuate a bad situation that is not getting any better. And it will get no better as long as she refuses to recognize and accept, as does my ex-friend, as I myself sometimes do when I am being stupid and cannot see, black reality for what it is.

  The white woman in Cleveland, the ex-friend, the many many others who cannot see the limitations that exist, or refuse to believe them, refuse to believe in them, refuse to let them alter a sacred point of view: we have been, all of us, blinded by our resistance to other people’s realities, perhaps even to reality itself.

  Because I am not black, the white woman in Cleveland might have said, I cannot know black folks, cannot know what black folks know, nor can I feel what black folks must feel. Therefore I am lost.

  Instead, refusing to put herself in someone else’s shoes for a moment—and I mean as far into those shoes as she can squeeze herself—she can only see the result of the crime, the result of the shame, as when you walk down the street I live and see the burned-out car, the gutted abandoned buildings, the children pushed aside and ignored; she cannot see the shame itself. She cannot see that perhaps there is a reason behind it all. She cannot see that there is a difference between her life and the lives of her black neighbors. She cannot see that there is a difference between her life and Harlem. Nor can the woman who used to be my friend.

  “I did it,” she has often said—the same as I just said it. “Why can’t those people?”

  She had gotten pregnant when she was nineteen. She got married, she got divorced, she finished college, she found herself a decent job. Now she points a finger at herself.

  “Why can’t they do what I have done?” she argues. “Why don’t they have enough initiative to break the cycle, to get off their rear ends and educate themselves, get good jobs, and take care of their children? Why can’t the men stop selling drugs and stop shooting each other?”

  I have asked her in reply, as calmly as I can, for I am prone to shrieking these days when white people start talking like white people: “What if they have no choice?”

  “But there is always a choice!” she says.

  You hear it all the time, from well-intentioned folk and from fools: “Those people have to take responsibility for what they do.”

  And she is right. At the same time she cannot see the safety net that was there
to catch her when she fell: the fact that a man was there ready to marry her, that a job was waiting for him, that there was the support of two families—hers and his—in the wings just in case. And the biggest safety net of all: hope, based on the past. Without hope, there is nothing.

  “I did it,” she has said to me too many times. “Why can’t they?”

  She thinks she did it all on her own, and she cannot see how the hand of history has stacked the deck in her favor.

  In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke a letter in which Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

  Newton could see that his achievements were built on the foundational work of the many thinkers who had preceded him.

  If we, like Newton, can applaud this notion that beneath the feet of every genius there are generations of thought upon which he stands, that there is a foundation of brick and wood and stone beneath every solid building, that behind every story of success there is a legion of forces that have made success possible, why can we not see just as clearly the pyramid of pain?

  The white barber refusing to cut a black child’s hair.

  An old woman in Cleveland.

  How many more of us see the isolated events of our lives as just that: isolated? We do not care to see, most of us, how the kind of disadvantage and atrophy that exist here in Harlem and wherever there is pain and problem do not just happen overnight. This kind of despair is generation upon generation in the making. The children born into it inherit more than a condition; they inherit a way of life, a way of living, a way of being. You can see the results of it every day in this neighborhood.

  Most people outside the neighborhood do not care at all about this neighborhood nor about its sister-hoods. Even the ones who do care, do not care enough. Mostly we on the outside simply refuse any connection between this hood and our own, between these ills and ours. We refuse even to see the links in the chain, refuse to see the origins of this suffering, refuse to acknowledge our complicity in the perpetuation of it. We dodge the guilt we ought to feel and ignore the necessary steps that would help to end the suffering.

  That’s just the way it is, or the world wouldn’t be the way it is.

  What was done a long time ago has continuing and tremendous effect on the way things are today. What we do today and what we don’t do today will take us a long way on the path toward heaven or hell.

  Perhaps it takes a moment’s reflection.

  “Take away all of your kid’s choices,” I once said to the ex-friend. “All of them. Take away all possibilities and remove all hope. How do you think that kid will do?”

  She replied without hesitation: “He’ll do well in school, he’ll work hard, he’ll pull himself up.”

  She sounds an awful lot like that old white woman in Cleveland.

  Though in truth I do not know what she sounds like, this woman with no name or address, I could hear her voice. Her voice was the voice that day of Antonio Morales.

  “Yeah,” Antonio was saying to me. “We are some bad men.” And he said it with not just a little pride in his voice. I don’t know if he intended it, but I think I also heard the mellowing edge of regret. “We do some bad things. Me, I’ve done a lot of evil shit but, man, I tell you, none of it as bad as what the people out there are doing to the people in here.”

  He was talking, quite naturally, about the people of Harlem, but when he spoke—and I don’t know if he meant this either—he touched his chest, the way men do in Harlem, for emphasis, but he touched himself gently this time, without the heavy thump, and the way he looked when he spoke, I had the feeling that when he said “in here” he wasn’t just talking about the physical confines of his neighborhood.

  “But they just don’t care,” he said. “It’s somebody else’s problem. And the somebody elses of this world never seem to care.”

  And here again was that Pig Foot Mary twinge.

  Try to imagine now, just for a second, how it felt at that moment to be who I am, how it felt to be as black as I am, as tall as I am, as broad as I am, a man who has seen a bit of the world now and who cowers in the face of very little, a man who can look nearly as fierce, when necessary, as anyone on these mean streets and who for all I know may even be as fierce as they are—nearly, perhaps, but not quite, for even as I was trying to project an image of manliness, of being streetwise and tough, of walking that walk that says Don’t fuck with me, all the time there were tears in my eyes.

  Try to imagine, then, how it felt wanting to show how strong you are, how unmoved by all of this you are. At the same time you want to cry. You want to put your arms around this guy, this man who has done so much evil, this Antonio Morales, because he is hurting, this man who has sold drugs to children, who has helped to ruin people’s lives, who has possibly taken more than a few.

  But then imagine his reaction if you did put your arms around him, if you said to him, “Man, somebody cares, Antonio; I care.”

  He would look at you and sneer, look at you and scoff, look at you and say, “Man, get the fuck away from me.”

  He would punch you hard in your chest with both fists at the same time—if he had two fists—and push you into the street, turn his back on you, and say, “Man, you crazy. Nobody cares about us. We don’t count here, and you know it. You’re just a fool.” And he would never speak to you again.

  Maybe I am a fool. Maybe Antonio would be right if he said those things to me. Maybe nobody else does care—nobody but Wilson Clark and me—and that’s not true, I know.

  But I know too that Antonio is likely to be dead before too long.

  Good riddance! the world will say, one less piece of scum floating on the cesspool of Harlem, one less worry for the rest of us. One less headache. One less human soul for anyone to care about.

  God almighty! What are we saying? Antonio Morales used to be someone’s son! His mother labored thirteen hours in the backseat of a Chevy so he could be born. She would have sold her soul for him, if she hadn’t lost her soul already, given her life for him, if she had had much of a life to give. But so much already had been taken from her, she had little left. As the mother was denied, so too the son. As the mother gets discarded, so too her son. We just can’t see it.

  It’s not just Antonio and his mother. It’s Henry and Jolene. It’s Nicky-No-Arms and his mother. It’s the countless boys of countless women.

  God, even Nicky-No-Arms was someone’s son, someone who cuddled him in the cold and counted with him his fingers and his toes and never thought for a single second that on a particularly bad day some particularly bad men would take an axe and lop off his limbs and toss his arms and his fingers into a rubbish bin.

  The boys doing the hacking that bad day, they too were someone’s sons. Their fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriends, these discarded mothers-to-be, they were someone’s daughters. And the children who get discarded along with these young mothers: they are not just someone else’s children but the young men’s own, and the cycle never ends but goes on and on because this is what they have learned about life and love and caring for one another. This is what they have learned from us. This is what we teach them daily. The violence they know is the violence we taught them.

  Yes! What they live and what they realize each day is what they have learned from the rest of us. Perhaps, then, discarded and uncared-for as they are, they are the sons and daughters of all of us, and this is how we have raised them.

  I’m not trying to lay blame here …

  (Like hell, I’m not. I just don’t know where to put it. There are too many places where it fits the puzzle.)

  But what if no one is to blame? Suppose what we see here in Harlem is nobody’s fault. What then?

  Perhaps it is all the result simply of the way we are somehow as a nation now, perhaps as human beings, and because there is no one to blame, there is therefore everyone to blame, just as it is everybody’s problem—or soon will be.

  Or maybe, as is too often he
ard, this is just the way things are. Maybe, as that look in Johnny Cannon’s eyes suggested to me long ago, this is how it is and this is how it’s supposed to be and this is how it will always be, truly and simply, and—I don’t believe it, of course—there’s nothing we can do about it, until … until … until it’s too late.

  No, I’m not trying to lay blame here. I think I’m smart enough to know that pointing a finger is the surest way to get a finger pointed back. Everybody has a thousand excuses for why things are the way things are. Everybody has a finger to point, and there are plenty of places to point it. When Pig Foot Mary is troubling me most, I even point the finger at myself.

  I get the sense too that my father was pointing the finger at himself as well when he wondered if we had done things the right way, when he hinted at feeling somehow responsible. When he asked if I ever regretted the life I’ve lived, I wonder sometimes now if his question wasn’t an accusation.

  I stopped Antonio then, right there in the middle of the street as we crossed Malcolm X Boulevard. I didn’t put my arms around him, though I wanted to, but I touched him on the shoulder just above the atrophied stump that used to be his right arm and I turned him toward me, purposefully, so he could see the tears in my eyes, and I said, “Somebody cares, Antonio. I care. That’s why I’m here.”

  Something happens to those manly men on the streets when you corner them. Either they will enter with you into a confrontation and you will try to stare each other down, or they cannot meet your gaze and hold it. They will look everywhere but right back at you.