Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  Antonio stiffened and shifted his regard from whatever was behind my left shoulder to whatever it was over my right. He looked up, he looked down, and only when I refused to let him look anywhere else did his eyes finally meet mine. I don’t know if he meant what he said next or if he just said it so we could get out of the street and go on up to 114th and Malcolm X, but he said: “I know it, man. I know it.”

  But I don’t know if he really knew it.

  Either way, it made me feel better.

  Then again, he never asked me, as if to say that caring is not enough, But what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do with this life you’re so happy with?

  A thousand times I have asked myself what it is I am doing here, wondering from time to time if this is some effort on my part to somehow save the world, and answering: God, I hope not.

  It could be that I have been hoping only to save my own soul, and living in Harlem this short while has been no more than a feeble gesture.

  Or it could be that I am simply trying to be Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic diplomat during World War II—not a Jew—who, when the world refused to believe the rumors about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in Poland, had himself smuggled first into and out of the Warsaw ghetto, and then into and out of a Nazi concentration camp, so that his firsthand testimony might be listened to and believed where the same stories from Jews were taken as too self-serving to be heard and so for too long were ignored.

  No. I don’t really know why I am here. I only know this: Rather like Jan Karski, and unlike Nicky-No-Arms or Antonio Morales and now certainly unlike young Henry, I can always get smuggled back out again. Prisoner though I may be here, I can always leave.

  It doesn’t matter that I made a commitment to live here for one year that turned into two, no matter if I had come to stay for ten years or forever, still—and this changes everything—I can always leave.

  Too many times I did leave, I suppose, to take trips—some long, some short—to get away from the city, to see something different, to experience something new. It is a luxury many Harlemites cannot afford, nor can one who wants to pretend to live the Harlem experience. Worries for my safety, worries that I might not fit in and therefore might never get beneath the surface of Harlem, these were the concerns others had about my coming here. For me, this ought to have been the biggest misgiving: that I might not do Harlem justice, might not spend as much time here as I should, for mine is a restless soul and I have not been known to stay in one place for very long. Since I was eighteen years old, my Harlem address has been my longest-kept address.

  My friend Ann Plymouth chided me about this. She said I was too often gone from here, either out of town or simply away visiting friends who lived downtown and wouldn’t come up.

  “Being here part time is not enough,” she said, and surely she was right, but no matter how many days and nights I spent here in a row, I could never know what they who live here know, nor truly feel what it is they feel.

  I told Ann this, and she threw up her hands.

  “Then why come here at all?” she shouted at me. “This ain’t no sideshow so you can go back waving your arms around and telling your downtown friends, ‘I’ve seen it, I was there, yippee, and I survived.’ We can suffer plenty without you pretending to be some great humanitarian from the Red Cross or something. This ain’t no game for you to come up here and play at.”

  It wasn’t funny, what she was saying, and of course she was right; we had had this conversation many times already. But when she is mad at me and shouting like that she has a way of making a fist with her tiny hand and holding it at her side as if she is waiting for me to do or say something stupid so she can smack me. And I always do. But she never does.

  She has the smoothest skin, I think, I have ever seen. To hold her hand, caress her face, or to touch her arm is to know the physical equivalent of innocence. And when she smiles she can brighten any dark room or dismal situation. But when she is mad at me and her face is a scowl, she is at once a tantrum-throwing three-year-old and a weathered old woman you’ve cut in front of at the supermarket checkout, all wrinkles and fury and venom. The smoothness vanishes from her face, and she is rage.

  I tried not to laugh. I couldn’t help it, quickly moving to defend myself.

  “It’s not you,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you. Honest, this time. It’s just that you remind me of somebody.” And I told her this story.

  One night I took a bus home from downtown to Harlem. I had spent most of the afternoon and evening in Chelsea. I had cadged a meal from my friends Mat and Pam and had stayed late but didn’t want to spend the night. In the early midnight hours, I jumped onto the M-11 and rode the bus up to 133rd and Amsterdam.

  The bus driver was a fellow named Gus. He is, or at least he was that night, one of those chatty drivers who, probably to avoid the boredom of routine, talks a lot into the PA system and announces each stop or each landmark as he approaches it. Jacob Javits Center. Forty-second Street. John Jay College. Lincoln Center. Seventy-second Street.

  From Midtown into the eighties the crowd on the bus was a New York City crowd, black, white, Asian, Hispanic. But as the bus climbed into the nineties, the lighter colors got off. At Ninety-ninth Street, Gus made this droll announcement: “One Hundredth Street coming up next. Time for all you good white folks to jump off now and hurry on home.”

  He said it to be funny, but only slightly. The blacks and Hispanics who would ride the rest of the way to Harlem recognized the truth in what he was saying, nodded at one another, and laughed, but clearly there was irritation in Gus’s voice. Gus is a black man.

  Sure enough, one by one, street by street, the white folks did all get off. By 113th Street, blacks and Hispanics were the only ones left. But at 104th Street there were still four young white people on the bus, only four, the four of them friends. They had been talking and laughing the whole way up since 66th Street and making a lot of noise on the bus as if it were theirs, and now as three of them stood to get off they began making plans to get together again. When the bus stopped, two jumped off right away. The third lingered too long, saying good-bye to the fourth. Gus grew impatient and refused to wait. When the doors closed, Gus would not open them again and the bus pulled away.

  “Hey, hey! Wait a minute. I want to get off.” There was just the touch of panic in his voice, even though his friend was still on, probably a student at Columbia, and even though he would have only two blocks to wait and walk back.

  Gus muttered loud enough for the folks in the front of the bus to hear.

  “I got a schedule to keep,” he said. “I can’t be waiting for you to do all that hugging and kissing back there. This is the bus to Harlem. This ain’t no ride at Disneyland.”

  The blacks and browns who were left laughed. And I laughed too, was laughing at Gus in fact when I laughed at Ann. She saw the connection but didn’t think it was funny.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? Nobody wants to be here.”

  She glowered at me.

  I knew she was not lumping me into a category with the white folks on that bus. Still, she had accused me many times before of playing at some game—or worse, of being like (in my estimation) Pig Foot Mary: here today, gone tomorrow, profit in my pocket.

  I could have asked her what she would have me do instead, if I should turn my back forever on Harlem and not care at all, just go on about my business, but I already knew what she would say. I already knew what she wanted—without her ever having said it.

  What she had said to me more than once was: “No. You can’t turn your back. You need to be here. I don’t know what the reason is, but there is a reason for you to be here. You’re supposed to be doing what you do, here today, somewhere else tomorrow, feeling life, feeling this particular life—for now. Maybe you’re here to be a witness, to record all this stuff for some reason. I don’t know.”

  She made me think suddenly of my father, who als
o, I have imagined lately, sees me, now that he takes my writing seriously, as the same sort of witness, someone who will tell what needs to be told, for nothing lives on merely because it once happened; lives vanish without a trace. It is the storytellers who remember and tell their stories, the writers who re-create them and keep them alive. And the story of Harlem, like the story of my father, like so many other stories, needs to live on so that Harlem’s children and our children and our children’s children will one day know just how much was endured, and how much was overcome for their sake. Thus they may one day draw strength from the strength of those who went before them, and pride from pride, courage from courage.

  For this reason, if for no other, I felt I needed to be here.

  “But remember,” Ann said, before she left me that day. “It’s one thing to come here, another thing to really be here. You can’t have the real thing just by living in Harlem a while and pretending to be poor.”

  It is true that in wanting to have the true black experience I had allowed myself to become poor. In somehow buying into the myth that life in an inner-city ghetto is the only real black experience, that you have to be poor and desperate to be truly black, that you have to be on welfare to understand what goes on here in the black community, and in my feeble effort to really care, I have taken no jobs while I’ve lived in Harlem. In my effort to be like them, I earned no money. I spent every cent I had, then borrowed and spent some more. The pressure of living in debt increases for me daily. Even so, my experience can never be what they experience. I can always change the shoes I stand in, and instantly with them change my circumstance.

  My father, in asking if I regretted the life I had so far lived, was wondering the same thing: What now? And what for?

  For a long time after I moved into Harlem, I had no telephone. Again, it was an exercise in being poor. I don’t know if Harlem is so different in this regard from the rest of Manhattan, from the rest of the country, but you need never travel far in search of a pay phone here. Very often the public phone on this corner or the next one, or the phone in front of the bodega up the street, inside the laundromat, or at the grocery store, very often these are not just instruments of convenience or of last resort. The pay phone here is primary. That’s why there are so many of them. It seems cheaper to pay as you go, rather than shelling out a big sum once a month whether you use the phone one time or ten or two hundred. In New York City you pay for each call you make from your home. When you’re very poor, the pay phone in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, probably seems a bargain.

  I tried this for a long time in the beginning of my time in Harlem, having for my telephone only the public phones on the streets. It wasn’t too bad at the start. At least I didn’t have to run up and down the stairs each time I needed to use the thing. Whenever I had to make a call, I only had to look from my front-room window. I could see the phone down at the corner of 131st. I rarely had to wait in line. I could see if the phone was being used. I could not tell, however, if someone had ripped the handset away. It happened frequently. When that phone had been destroyed, there was always the grocery store half a block away on Amsterdam Avenue. It was a corner that was usually crowded. I often had to stand there and wait.

  To what end all of this, I do not know. Trying to be like them, I suppose, trying still to know, still playing at being one thing or another until at last I tired of the inconvenience. It was the same as the living in Harlem: I could always leave, always change my circumstance. If I wanted a phone in my apartment, I could have one. Finally I did.

  It was a combination of things that led me to get my own phone. I could never receive phone calls, for one thing. For another, the harshness of that first winter finally set in, and I decided I didn’t very much like standing outside in the cold. If these reasons weren’t enough, when night fell, of course, there were always the rats.

  “Pop, Pop,” I yelled once into the phone as I talked to my father about one thing or another. “Guess what, man, guess what. I just saw a rat as big as a Buick. It wasn’t running, it wasn’t even scampering. Man, it was just out for a Sunday stroll to the garbage and then back home.”

  “That’s nothing,” he said. “Brother, until you’ve seen a rat stand up on its hind legs, salute hello, and call you by name, you ain’t seen nothing.”

  He didn’t laugh. There was no giggle in his voice. He told it straight, as he did his best stories, telling me about a place he once shared with a family of rats.

  “They used to call me Mr. Harris,” he said. “But after a while I was seeing them so regular they started to get kind of familiar. They started calling me Sam.”

  Practically every time I used the phone after that, I spotted a rat or two or three. Nearby was the pickup point for someone’s garbage. Just opposite, there was a chink in the stone wall. Rats went with ease and boldly from one to the other. I seemed to be the only person on the street even slightly unnerved. But the sight of rats will do that to me. Rats make me shudder.

  I was walking home late one evening. If it was not quite the witching hour, it was certainly the hour of the rat. Convent Avenue that night was a rats’ playground: rats on the trash cans, rats in the gutters, rats scurrying along the curbs.

  At the corner of Convent and 128th, there is a vacant lot. A thousand rats must live there. The lot is overgrown with thick weeds that shuffle from time to time and rustle as if they are caught in a breeze. It is the movement of the rodents living there and stirring beneath the brush.

  Out of the growth this night and onto the sidewalk strayed a baby rat. The adult rats in this neighborhood grow quickly into bold savages large enough to intimidate cats and small dogs—and me, of course. The baby rat was small enough that I continued on. I wanted to see where it would go, what it would do. I walked almost directly behind it. Directly behind me came the shrieking mother rat. She was large enough to scare me, and enraged that I seemed to be threatening the little one. She ran after me, nipped at my heels, and had me hopping and dancing a few seconds before I broke into a full sprint and ran to the end of the block. When I stopped to look back, the mother rat was still coming.

  When I got clear, I stopped. I wanted to laugh. There was nothing so very funny about it.

  “It’s like I told you, man,” said Eliot Winston when I told him about it. “We just get shit on.”

  On the day he said this, we were walking down Park Avenue, Eliot Winston and I, telling each other stories. I was telling him the rat story. He didn’t find it amusing. He was telling me a horror story of his own, about his brother. He didn’t find that story amusing either.

  Suddenly he shouted.

  “Just once, goddamn it! Just once I would like to know what it’s like to be white in this country.”

  It is one of his favorite things to say when he is especially frustrated, but I wondered this time if maybe he hadn’t meant to say “rich.”

  It was the morning rush hour and it was springtime, so the sky was still a little bit dark. The air was cool and crisp. Eliot took a deep breath. There were tears in his eyes, I thought from the bite of the cold air.

  We had walked from 125th down into the nineties, and the landscape had changed completely. Tall buildings rose up all around us. Gone were the shabby storefronts with their barred windows, the four- and five-story tenement buildings, and the boarded-up shells in Harlem that nobody seems to own. Gone too were the vacant lots. The real estate in this neighborhood is too valuable to be wasted, to lie empty, or to be used for ugly housing projects. There are none here. Instead Park Avenue is lined on both sides with elegant high-rise apartment buildings that give way to the towering office buildings of Midtown. This is a part of town where beauty counts, where it matters how things look.

  Eliot and I stopped there on the corner and looked in both directions, up Park Avenue toward Harlem, down Park Avenue toward the rest of the world. The railroad that runs aboveground in Harlem has gone underground by the time it reaches Ninetieth Street. The elevat
ed tracks have gone from the center of the avenue. The rest of the way down to the forties, the center of the street is taken up by islands of grass and flowers. Park Avenue here has the look and feel of an urban paradise. It is a long way from Harlem.

  Park Avenue that morning, as every morning, was crawling with cars that looked to me like some kind of molten lava spilled from the volcanic tops of these tall buildings, poured into the canyon floor below, and creeping slowly downtown. The lava glowed red taillights, white headlights, dimming as the day brightened, and yellow. Most of the cars were taxis. New York City, from this view in the middle of this street at this time of the morning, is a beautiful place. It is a different world from the world fifteen blocks away.

  “Naw, man,” Eliot said. “If I’d have meant rich, I would have said rich. I said white, and what I meant was white. Money ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

  He had a look around and reassessed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Maybe money’s got a little something to do with it.”

  I remembered then a story my brother Tommy had told me the previous summer.

  My brother lives in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City. He is one of the millions who ride the trains into the city each day, who come in to their high-priced jobs and then go out again, who encounter places like Harlem usually only in passing, if at all. But on a hot Saturday afternoon my brother got a big dose of Harlem out in the suburbs where he lives.

  It was the first summer after I moved to Harlem. Tommy and I had met, as we often did, for lunch at a Japanese restaurant near his office in Midtown. I was telling one story about rats, and another story about a man I had once seen shot (in New York City, but not in Harlem). I was complaining about how long it had taken for the ambulance to come. The one cop who finally did arrive stood around doing nothing but waiting like the rest of us. It was a story that came up because of a car accident I had recently seen in Harlem, where it always seems to take forever for an ambulance or for the police to come when you need them.