Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  On the corner of 125th and Amsterdam sits a huge housing project named for General Grant. It is tall and massive and made of yellowish brick. It takes up two of the four corners and spills down Amsterdam for another block or so.

  On many occasions I have stood on that corner and tried to count the people who live there—not one by one, of course, but counted the windows, counted the numbers of floors, guessed at how many apartments there might be on each floor, and multiplied by a reasonable four people per apartment. By my crude calculations there must be over thirty thousand people living in this housing project—if you can call it living. Certainly those who dwell here consider it living. It is home to them. It has become what they know. But there are more people living on this corner than in the whole of the suburban hometown where I grew up.

  Lashae Anthony lives in a housing project just like this one, but on the east side of Harlem. It is the only world he knows, the only home he has. He says he likes living there because his housing project is better than the other projects: cleaner, safer, nicer.

  In what way nicer? “Just nicer,” he would say, in that shy way he had then. He was only thirteen years old at the time.

  It was, of course, and certainly to the untrained eye, no better, no worse, than any of the other housing projects, but it was where he lived. It was his. It was home. And he had only one project against another upon which to base his comparison.

  It is amazing the things we can get used to when we force ourselves. It is perhaps still more amazing what we get used to if we allow ourselves even a moment’s complacency. And quite simply it astounds me the things we will settle for and take comfort in once we convince ourselves, This is ours! No matter what the this is.

  In the blood rush of recent memory, in the four seconds before I walked over and stood face to face with Eliot, the mind races and I cannot disregard the conflict that stirs within.

  On the one hand I can understand the impulse for separation.

  On the other hand I see it as little more than surrender, little more than the kind of blind acquiescence that Eliot once spoke to me about, a kind of self-inflicted isolation that plays right into the applauding hands of those who seek the separation and who profit somehow from it.

  It is to me surrender, but of course I see the world from a particularly advantaged vantage point and think, rightly or wrongly, that there is nothing I cannot have, do, or be.

  Similarly, there is in San Diego a woman of European complexion who struggles with this same question. She is in law school there, and she joined the Black Law Students’ Association. She was told she was not welcome there, that she did not belong.

  Likewise, a university professor who is white is repeatedly given a similar message. She teaches black studies, she teaches the writings of black authors. It was not easy for her to find a job. Oftentimes students and faculty have resented her presence. The same sentiment is at work here: This area is not hers; she does not belong here.

  If this is true, if the one can’t be part of a black studies program and the other can’t join a group of black students, how in theory can a complaint be raised against black exclusion from the country club, from the halls of power, from the chambers of the boards of directors, from inclusion in general? If we crave this separation and are happy with it, where then the grievance, and why then the desire to share in what some will say is not ours?

  Yes yes yes! I can already hear the argument that there is a difference. And perhaps there is, the difference having to do with a history of exclusion, a history of being oppressed, a history of all the time knocking on doors and never being allowed to enter, and now finally we have something that is ours, and we want to keep it for ourselves and for us alone: a place where we can let our hair down and for once not have to deal with white people, a place where we can go and be on our own, prosper on our own, celebrate ourselves, define ourselves, and meet our own needs.

  Perhaps, then, there is a value in the ghetto—not only in this ghetto, but in ghettos of every kind: places where people of like mind and similar experience, people who look alike and think alike and share the same ideals and goals, the same ideas, the same dreams, desires, and ambitions and the same culture, can come together and live in peace away from all the others—whoever the others might be.

  Perhaps there is value indeed in living in a ghetto, but the arguments we use to ghettoize ourselves are the same arguments the others use when they wish to exclude us and keep the treasures for themselves. Just as Eliot does, I wonder who ultimately comes out the big winner.

  All I have to do is remember the walks I have taken. There is life on these streets, there are children playing, people laughing, lovers courting, and ball players shooting hoops on the playgrounds. There is music that streams from the apartments on the route from my apartment to Riverbank Park where I sometimes go to hit tennis balls, and music that booms from cars parked on 135th, music pouring from the shops on East 116th. But amid the life and the music, there are people standing around with nothing to do and nowhere to go, too much trash on every street, houses boarded up, buildings burned out, and housing project after housing project, named for someone named Grant, named Carver, named Robinson, named Lincoln, named for famous blacks or for people in history who were sympathetic to the black cause.

  I looked at Eliot, I looked up and down the nearby streets, I waited to see what the next step might be.

  I recalled in those few moments of stillness my first days in Harlem, those heady, electrifying days when I could feel Harlem’s history upon my shoulders and the burden seemed such an easy one to bear, when I was more than happy to be trapped here in the ghetto, when I was in fact thrilled to be here, here in what once was the center of the black universe, here where in former times had come the many others who dreamed of creating the kind of haven that would serve as shelter where black folk could celebrate themselves, define themselves, cultivate themselves before they sprang forth into the wider world.

  And so they came to Harlem—many in body, many in spirit only—from out of the South and from all corners of the black world: the businessmen, the educated, the politicians, and the skilled workers—to live in this ghetto that they might not have to live in some other ghetto.

  And they came sowing the seeds of disaster, for it can be said that they who migrated north from the Deep South abandoned in many ways those blacks who remained there and left them bereft of shining example, left them too, it can be argued, bereft of leadership.

  They came as well the slackers and the vagabonds and the ruffians, the unskilled, the under- and the uneducated who were left behind with the simply unlucky and once again found themselves bereft of shining example, bereft of leadership when they flew away, those who could fly from here. Pig Foot Mary. My father. I, myself.

  Those who remain can claim pride of ownership, yes, can settle in and be content with what they have and can keep others out. But what they fight so hard to maintain as their own seem so often and in so many ways leftovers at best, and more often the sweepings of the street piled high off to the side or in some corner, discarded crumbs and refuse that really aren’t ours but rather the giveaways, the throwaways, what has been picked over and what remains—not ours because we don’t lay claim to it until it is already given to us.

  “That,” Eliot said, “is what I mean when I say the black man is finished.”

  I had turned around, and I had thought long enough now about which was the right move to make. I knew, of course, which would have been the easy thing to do, but easier is not always right, not always better.

  Many were the nights during my time in Harlem that I came up from the subway at St. Nicholas and 125th and walked the rest of the way home. Many were the nights that I walked to Sylvia’s to get a bite to eat, or went over to La Famille on Fifth Avenue to listen to music, or sometimes even I was just out for a stroll. When the weather was warm enough—and it didn’t really have to be so very warm, just not so frigid—somewhere along
the way of my walking I always came across men bunched together in groups on one street corner or another.

  I don’t know what any others think or feel when they encounter these same groups of men blocking the sidewalk, but always inside me buzzed a little electric tingle of apprehension, almost fear, and always always there was the thought that I should go around them, cross the street maybe, find another route to take. Always always I chose to walk straight toward them. If they were blocking the sidewalk, I would walk right into the middle of the pack and part them, touch one of them on the shoulder or on the back, and say “Excuse me, fellows.”

  It seems such a simple thing to do, perhaps not an easy thing, but a simple one. And you can see what it says: that I’m not afraid; or that if I am afraid, I’ll not show it, I’ll not act like it. But it says one thing more, and this one thing may be the truly important part: that those men on the corner, those men standing in a crowd on the corner—they are not to be deferred to, they are not to be treated as if they are to be avoided and feared and kept at a distance. In other words, I would not let them change my path, my thinking, or my way of being. I would not, in fact, let them change me, for to change would be all too easy.

  If I were to act any other way, then like that other writer visiting Harlem I might as well buy the clothes that would make me fit in here, try to camouflage myself, walk the way a ghetto child is supposed to walk, talk the way a ghetto child is supposed to talk, and buy into the image as projected, the image as perceived and accepted. Then once more I would be wearing that look of surrender that confesses how much I believe what I have been told about them—and about myself.

  I choose therefore not to believe all that I have been told. I prefer to see for myself. My father long ago had given me that choice. It lay in his mandate that I create for myself a world of my own, one that not only would make sense for me but that I could put my faith in. And I simply cannot believe in a world that seeks to diminish me or to erase me completely. So I preferred not to alter my walk, my talk, the way I look, or the paths I take.

  Of course there was that one time not so long ago when I was left questioning the wisdom of my beliefs, my certainty, and my stubbornness.

  I had taken an afternoon stroll and was walking along 149th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. A young man was talking to his girlfriend. He had that look of romantic bravado about him, and he took up more space on the sidewalk than he needed or had a right to.

  She sat on the short stack of steps in front of her building. He sat on a box a little left of center along the path. Behind him, in one of those shallow wells that passes for a planter, a skinny tree tried to grow. The girlfriend was leaning back, resting on her elbows and arms, her legs stuck out straight, crossed at the ankles. The young man leaned forward over a tiny table where they had placed the two cans of soda they were drinking. They took up practically the entire sidewalk. Two other young men and a young woman stood nearby.

  The boy looked up at me as I approached and then turned away nonchalantly. Without a word, he was speaking to me and telling me how this was to be played out; clearly I was supposed to go around them both. He didn’t care that I would have to step either off the sidewalk and into the street or into the muddy little well. His only worry was that I not disturb him.

  I wonder what I might have done had he been older, bigger, and looked stronger. I wonder what he might have done if the girl and a couple of his pals had not been there and he had been alone.

  I knew what I was supposed to do and I did it. I stepped past this young boy and his young girl, stepped over her outstretched legs and tipped the little table with my knee. I excused myself as I passed through, held my hands out in a gesture of peace, and apologized for almost knocking the table over. It wasn’t enough.

  The boy jumped up. Everybody else froze. I kept walking.

  “Hey,” he shouted at me. I had gone but three steps. I stopped and turned. He was glowering.

  “Yeah, man, what?”

  “Why don’t you go around?” he said. “You don’t be stepping through my shit like that.”

  Again, I said I was sorry. Still it wasn’t enough. Now he had a point to prove, and I could tell he had a point to prove by the way he kept looking at the friends around him.

  “Naw, man,” he said. “Sorry don’t cut it.”

  I walked straight to him then. I stood over him and he who had felt himself in command now was nervous.

  “What’s it going to be then?” I asked him. “What more do you need?”

  He didn’t say a word. He felt the threat I posed and skipped any intermediate stages that might normally have filled the next few moments. He went straightaway far from the realm of reason. He lifted the bottom of his sweatshirt and revealed to me the pistol he had stuck in the waistband of his baggy pants. He never pulled the gun. He simply showed it to me—as if showing it would be enough.

  It is one of the gestures, it seems, of the streets nowadays. I had first seen it from the window of my apartment. A fight had broken out in the street below, and I had stuck my head out to listen more closely, and of course to watch the action. I have no idea what the fight was about, don’t know who won. Possibly there was no real winner. There was no real action. There was only a lot of shouting until one young man lifted the tail of his shirt and showed the gun.

  “Come on, then,” he shouted in his final series of taunting. “You want some of this?” That’s when he exposed himself. That’s when he showed the pistol.

  The other man backed down, backed away, turned away, walked away.

  I thought at the time that, if ever facing a similar situation, a similar pistol stuck in a similar waistband and a similar offer to back down, I would have backed down too. It was the prudent thing to do, the easy thing to do. But when my turn came, I all of a sudden didn’t think anymore that the easy way was the best way.

  Perhaps after all, when my turn finally came, and it was upon me now, I simply stopped thinking, wasn’t thinking at all, in fact. I was just feeling.

  I looked at the pistol. I looked at the man behind the thing. He was just a boy. He was, like my young buddy Henry, far too young to die, this youngster, this young gangster, this child who was some mother’s son and far too young to die in the wars that raged nowadays in these streets. He would never live to be an older man if someone didn’t teach him a different way.

  It didn’t have to be me who taught him. I would have preferred that it not be. I would have preferred not to have been on that street on that particular day, when and where a boy too young to have a legal drink in a bar had the power of serious injury and even the power of life and death over me. I would have preferred to have been at home, an iced bucket of champagne beside my bed, a little osetra caviar and smoked Nova Scotia salmon to tide me over until dinner. But there I was. I had been chosen to teach him.

  It didn’t have to be much. He merely had to learn that he had a choice.

  I wasn’t thinking any of this at the time. Of course not! You don’t have but a second and a half to come up with a course of action before one is thrust upon you. It is better, I have found, to do the thrusting yourself.

  “What are you going to do with that thing?” I said. “Are you going to shoot me? Or are you just trying to scare me?” He only glowered.

  “Look, man,” I said. “Any pussy with a pistol can scare somebody. Hell, any pussy with a pistol can shoot somebody too. It’s no big deal.”

  I took the last step toward him. He stepped back.

  “What else you got?” I asked him. “Is this what you’re about? Is this all you’re about? What do you do when the gun’s empty?”

  Until now this youngster perhaps had never been asked to consider. Maybe he had never been offered any choices, and he did what he did and he was who he was in large part because the world seemed so ordained for him, so circumscribed. He did what everyone around him did—no more, no less.

  Perhaps there had been no one to tell him that his
world did not have to resemble an anthropological study, and that it did not have to devolve into some kind of Darwinian microcosm in which impulsive violence reigns almost as a survival tool: an avenue, it can be said, to status.

  A shot at survival: that seems to be, in an anthropological sense, what it is all about, all of it, a chance to survive. We’re talking here about a type of survival that is different from personal survival and has to do more with something that is locked away in our genes, a tendency toward survival of the fittest—which is not to say best or brightest or strongest or bravest, but which has to do entirely, it seems, with the attainment of those almost arbitrary things of a given place and era which afford an increase in mating opportunities. By mating often, anthropological man and the apes exhibit what lie deeply embedded in the genetic makeup: the desire and perhaps the need to survive to the next round. The genes that survive are the genes of this game’s winners.

  The triumphant, of course, are those men who win in the competition for reproductive success. That’s what it is all about: access to women, genetic survival. Plainly put, then, life among men is a contest for women, and the winner wins not with muscle, money or might, although these might be part of the equation and at various times certainly have been. The winner wins with status.

  In every human society, as in the society of chimps, males compete with one another for status. To gain and guard respect are among the desperate desires of men and manhood, and a man will go very far indeed to be a Man, to exhibit his manhood, to earn respect and to counter and avenge any signs and acts of disrespect directed at him. This in large measure explains the threat of violence that seems to hover forever near in the interaction of men, violence that cannot always be labeled and brushed aside as social pathology. It is what men do. Reproductive success depends on it.