Still Life in Harlem

by Eddy L. Harris

  I keep thinking of Hans Hegeman. I think of Wilma Bishop too, sitting on the front stoop, watching, caring, showing those children playing that she cares. Someone has to care, she told me. Someone has to stay and watch over them.

  And I think of Ann Plymouth, who, so she says, likes to have me and my funny clothes around.

  “It’s not just the clothes,” she told me. “It’s you and where you’re going, it’s you and where you’ve been. When you come around, you light up my child’s world with the stories you tell. You let her know that the world she sees every day is not all there is.”

  Ann had reprimanded me once for my coming here and pretending to be poor.

  “No, that is not your value here,” she said. “We already know how to be poor. We don’t need somebody from the outside coming here and feeling all sorry for us and everything. We don’t need somebody coming up here to tell us that the world out there doesn’t mean anything and that we shouldn’t want what we don’t already have. What we need is somebody to show us that there is a world out there and it’s our world too and that we should not settle so easily and so blindly for this one. That’s what I need you for. That’s what my child needs you for. Otherwise we are doing just fine without you.”

  Ann Plymouth opened my eyes, and when I looked more closely I could see that all is not death and dying in Harlem, all is not surrender. Harlem has other heroes too who have remained and continue to fight, or who left and returned. Harlem has other patron saints who stand on the pedestal beside Pig Foot Mary. There are the thousand stories you hear of men and women like Bessie Delany, a Harlem dentist who during the Great Depression gave food to those of her patients who were hungry and had no money, and who in twenty-seven years as a dentist for the poor people of Harlem never once raised her rates; and the many others like her, some that we’ve all heard of, the countless others who are nameless to us. They all, like Pig Foot Mary, had a choice. Bessie Delany elected to stay.

  Hans Hegeman had the same choice as Bessie Delany, the choice to leave or stay. He got out. He had been born in Harlem and raised in Harlem, but he had gotten onto the pathway that leads out and away from Harlem. He had gone to an elite boys’ academy called Collegiate School, and went on to Princeton University and to law school at Columbia. He got a job as a corporate lawyer, he worked in the district attorney’s office, he worked for the public defender. None of these jobs, however, fit who he was. After a while none of them, he said, made any sense. It wasn’t what he felt comfortable doing, so with his brother Ivan he came back to Harlem and started an after-school program in the yard, in fact, of the very building where he and Ivan had lived as boys.

  The program was initially designed to give kids in the neighborhood a place to be instead of on the streets with the dope sellers and the users. Eventually it grew into an alternative school program. There are more than just a few of these programs in Harlem, attempting, all of them, to do what the public schools have failed to do. They call them storefront schools.

  I asked Hans Hegeman to give me a job. He did. He gave me a chance to do what little I could. It wasn’t much, but it was the finest thing I have ever done.

  Two times a week I went to help out in the after-school program. Most of the kids stay until the early evening. The extra two hours gives them a little more time in a safe place, less time on the streets, still more time to learn something new. I offered a writing class to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds and helped them find ways to express themselves on paper.

  When I first got them, three or four lines of writing was all I could coax out of them. By year’s end, it was difficult to get them to stop when each session was over.

  It was to this school, East Harlem School at Exodus House, that I was headed when I met Eliot Winston for the first time. Now when I think of Eliot, I think always of Hans Hegeman.

  “Our mission,” Hans told me, “extends beyond formal education. Our roots are here in the community, so we know the narrowness of this world. A lot of these kids would never think to go below Ninety-sixth Street just to walk around or have a look or go to a museum. It’s got to be a school trip, and that’s only a once-or-twice-a-year thing. To them it’s a completely different world down there below Ninety-sixth Street, another strange group of people they’ve had no opportunity to figure out. They don’t bother us, so we don’t bother them: that’s how they feel. Most of them don’t go into any type of analysis, wondering how the people downtown affect the situation up here. They don’t have the luxury and they don’t have the desire to engage in that kind of thinking.”

  And it seems the folks downtown don’t have the desire either.

  “People downtown only think about these things at election time or when there’s a problem,” Hans said. “For most people downtown, the people up here are the others. These are sweet wonderful kids, but the folks downtown don’t make the effort to find them. The folks downtown don’t go out of their way to do anything for them. Unless somebody cares—unless we care—they’ll all just get lost.”

  He seems not to be a sentimental man. He makes deals with the drug dealers on the street so the kids can walk to school unmolested.

  “If these kids had some way of finding out about the wider world out there, they might get the shot at it,” he said. “But man, it’s hard. It’s incredible to me the hoops I have still to jump through at the age of thirty-five with two Ivy League degrees just to get anything accomplished, and it’s scary to me knowing what they’re going to have to face. And they’ll need every single advantage they can possibly get.”

  Hans Hegeman. Ann Plymouth. Wilma Bishop.

  There is a choice to make; there is always a choice.

  We like our choices and decisions to seem like great battles that rage within us, as if what we write are epics to last the ages, as if by what we do and think we carry the weight of the universe upon our shoulders.

  I look from my window and I think that maybe it’s true, that maybe white silk trousers are important, that maybe what I am about to do will have a huge impact on the destinies of mankind. So I would like to believe, but we do what we do, I think—no matter what we tell ourselves and one another, no matter what we pretend—we do what we do to save our own poor souls. We do what we do because it’s who we are.

  I looked from my window, that night of nights, and it all crystallized before me, and the darkness provided for me a moment of calm, despite the jumble that had been made of my thoughts and feelings, despite all I had seen and done, heard and felt, despite what I knew I was about to do. The darkness provided for me a moment of utter clarity. I looked out through the shadow of that late night and early morning, and for a long second there was rage—rage enough to be blinded by.

  A man was beating a woman.

  In the few moments of my indecision I told myself that enough was enough, told myself that I wanted no longer to be black if this is how black men behaved, told myself that I wanted nothing more to do with a world without beauty in it, and that cared not for beauty. It had been beautiful and joyful once, but this—this man beating this woman—this is what we’ve let it all come down to: this man beating this woman, the drug dealers lining too many streets in the neighborhood, women willing to sell themselves for a pittance and men willing to buy them, the rats and the roaches, the joblessness, the fatherless children and the mothers who do not care, the far too many people who do not seem to care.

  I told myself that I refused to be black—as if I really could, as if I am black because of the color of my skin, because of the things I do, and not instead because of the ways in which the world sees and reacts to and treats that color.

  I refused to be black, as if there were freedom in that refusal, as if by rejecting I could likewise reject any responsibility I might have, as if I were an island not at all connected beneath the surface to the lands all around me.

  I refused to be black because suddenly I could no longer see the beauty that is out there, the beauty in Wilma Bishop’s ca
ring, the beauty in Ann Plymouth’s smile and in the way she wants me for her child, the beauty in all that Hans and Ivan and Bessie Delany have done and are doing and will ever do.

  But the water boils and the bubbles burst across the surface, and I open my eyes and I look into the street below and I can see more clearly.

  My father asks if I regret the life I have lived, and I answer him. He asks what I intend to do with this life I am so happy with, and for this one I have no reply because I am caught, the same as we all are caught, between our two lives, our two histories: the ones we’ve lived, and the ones we might have lived; and caught as well between the world of theory and the world of practice, our public selves and the selves we live with in private.

  When I open my eyes, the man is still beating the woman. When I open my eyes, I cannot close them again until I decide who I am.

  There are ways of coming back. There are ways to make a presence known and felt. Perhaps to someone a visible presence might count for something.

  It is awfully naive of me to think that my coming back to Harlem means anything to anyone but me and perhaps to the few people whose lives have touched mine, naive to think that my white-silk-trousered presence makes any difference at all, that Harlem would not be what it has become if I had stayed. Perhaps it is the opposite that is true, that I would not be who I am if I had remained here. My sensibilities would be different, and all that I have seen along these streets and from this window would seem normal to me. There is beauty in Harlem, much beauty in being black, but my vision has been clouded by the outside world I have seen and become a part of. I have trouble seeing the beauty sometimes.

  No, it is not outside my window this night. There is nothing lovely in one man stabbing another, no joy in a man beating a woman, but beauty does exist on these streets somewhere, and the only way to find it, perhaps, is simply to look for it, perhaps even more simply to create it.

  I could turn my back, of course, could indeed refuse to be black, could even refuse to care and just go back to bed, flee once more to the suburbs or go back to the south of France, but that would be too easy. And perhaps in time that is what I will do: take my rightful place in the world of all men and women and settle for nothing but that which speaks to my own individual soul, and win the battle fought by my father and by Eliot Winston’s grandfather and by the countless nameless black men and women. Perhaps in time I can indeed refuse to be black, refuse to give blackness more relevance than it deserves, refuse to see myself in such narrow terms, and refuse to let others decide for me who I am and the course of my actions. Perhaps in time the things done by other black men will cast no shadow onto me and no reflection and I will not see myself in what they do.

  One day, perhaps, but not this night. This night I am here. This night I am black and I am in Harlem and I have no choice but to be in this moment and make of it what I can. I have to be who I am, who I was that night, split in two once more and torn between what I want to do and what I ought to do, and that night I could wait no longer for the police or anyone else to come.

  Quickly, then, I slid into my jeans and slipped a T-shirt over my head. I put on my socks and shoes and I went downstairs.

  I ran into Herbert Washington a few days later. He was smiling that old-man smile of his, which turned into a big grin when I told him about the other evening and how my heart had quietly thumped as I went down to the street. I had surprised myself. I had been a little nervous but unafraid. Still, I had taken my time getting dressed, hoping that by the time I reached the street the quarreling couple would have left. When I arrived, they were still there. I crossed the street slowly and approached them.

  “You should have been shaking like crazy. I would have been,” Herbert said. “Too many people these days got guns. Too many people don’t mind using them.”

  That same thought had crossed my mind more than twice as I left the apartment, went down the stairs and out into the street. Certainly I wanted to be a hero; it is how I see myself. I was in no mood, however, for heroics.

  “What do you want then?” the man said. He barked when he spoke. His voice, high-pitched and weak, snapped sharply.

  “You want a piece of this,” he said, meaning the woman, “or you want a piece of me?”

  What I wanted I could not express. What I wanted, I was not sure myself. I wanted to be back in bed, that much I did know. I wanted the clock turned back, wanted not to have been disturbed from my sleep. I would have known nothing, would have had to make no decisions, take no action. Once awakened, I had to decide who I was, who I wanted to be, who I was going to be.

  “I don’t want a piece of anything,” I said. “I just want to be left alone.”

  “What you doing here then? What you want? What you looking at?”

  “I’m just looking at you,” I said.

  Everything I did, I did deliberately. I was trying to figure out what to do. I spoke slowly and softly. I separated each sentence by a pause that seemed minutes long.

  “I’m just watching you, just watching what you do. I want to know what you look like. I want to remember your face.”

  “Get on away from here,” he shouted. “Ain’t nobody messing with you.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “You know how it is.”

  He was softening, showing a touch of fear. He could see that I was not going away. Although I couldn’t see if he had a gun, he would have at least shown it by now if he did have one. Nonetheless, I stood behind a car. He had backed away from the woman, and all of his attention was on me now. I stayed in the street and used the car as my shield. He took a step in my direction.

  “What are you: brave?”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything to you. I’m not even going to try. I just want to be here while you do what you do. I want to witness it. That’s all I can do. I want to see if you’re as pathetic as you look, so pathetic you don’t care about anything. I want to know if you can keep it up with somebody looking on. I want you to see the disgust in my face. I want to remind myself and I want to remind you that there’s nothing about you that I want to be like, and nobody else wants to be like you either. I already know it, but I want you to know it too.”

  Herbert Washington grinned broadly, his milky eyes wide open, his head tossed back a little. He had about him that know-everything aspect of an old man, as if he knew everything before I said anything—and more than that, as if he had somehow been the cause of it all.

  “You said all that?” In his voice was a mixture of amazement and admiration. “You must be crazy.”

  “Yeah, I must be,” I said. “But what would you expect me to do: pretend I didn’t see what was going on, toss my hands up, and give up on them both just like that?”

  “That’s what I would have done,” he said. “That’s what most people would have done.”

  “Yeah, well.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Then what happened? What did he say next?”

  “The usual,” I said. “He threatened to kill me. He said if he ever saw me again he was going to pop me.”

  He had wanted to pop me right then, he had said.

  “If I’d be strapped I would have popped you by now,” he shouted. He was moving on down the road now, the woman moving right along with him. He was screaming and cussing all the while, now at me, now and again at the woman. I followed along until they had stumbled down to 130th Street and over to Amsterdam Avenue. Beneath the bright lights on that corner, they calmed down. He was still scowling at me, but he put his arm around the woman’s waist and held her up. She was holding on with both arms. He reached out his left hand and pointed down into the street. A gypsy cab stopped; the man and the woman fell inside and shut the door.

  “I’m going to remember you,” he said. “I better not ever see your ass around here. If I see you again, I’m going to kill you.”

  “And then what? And then what?” Herbert said. He was like a child caught in the twists of a good b
edtime story.

  “Well,” I said. “I guess I’m still here.”

  He smiled and settled back against the wall of his building.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you are.”

  He looked up and down the avenue. Then he looked at me with such expectation that I knew it was my turn to speak.

  “Are you going to tell me now?” I asked.

  “Tell you what?” Now he was nonchalant.

  “You know. You said you would tell me what I needed to know about Harlem, what’s wrong, what’s right. You said you would tell me all the answers.”

  “I did?”

  “You did,” I said. “You said you would tell me what I needed to know.”

  “Ach!” he said with a broad slow wave of his arm. “You don’t need me to tell you anything; you already know it.”

  I scanned head and heart to see what he meant, what I might possibly have known or could have learned. All I could think of at that moment was a man I met one time on a train to Chicago. He too had lived in Harlem and had gotten out—escaped, he said, through hard work and perseverance. He got into the real estate business, made a lot of money, bought low, sold high, and moved out of Harlem.

  “All the time I lived there,” he said, “I never once believed I would be trapped there. I never believed that Harlem was all there was to life, and I wanted a piece of what was out there in the great wide world. Just because I’m black does not mean I’m supposed to be satisfied. It’s a white man’s country, a white man’s world only if we allow it to be.”

  There was another man who once said that although he lived in the ghetto, the ghetto did not live in him. It is a line I have heard many times before and is, I imagine, a way of saying that you can overcome physical circumstance with a state of mind. I suppose that’s true, but I wonder sometimes how you can separate where you’ve been from where you are from where you’re headed. I’m not sure you should even want to.