Once again I ask myself if I ever really left Harlem and now have been trying to get back. Or was I simply never able to leave in the first place?
There is, I know for sure now, no way out. Once you have experienced anything so deeply, there can be no going back, no forgetting, no way to live without its being inside you. You can leave it, but you can never get away. You may rise above the ghetto. You may tell yourself—and probably should—that you live in it but are not of it, but although attitude is important, I know it is not the only thing. You cannot ignore the bars and walls of your personal prisons. Otherwise there would be nothing to rise above, nothing to overcome.
Nor can you live within the walls of any culture and not be a product of that culture, unless you live encased completely in a cocoon. How can you deny the influence of the world around you, deny that it affects you or that it in some way shapes you? How can you separate who you have become from the forces that made you, even as the world around you attempts to reduce you to the stereotype of your smaller world and treat you accordingly?
In a sense, then, we carry Harlem the way we carry our blackness. There is no escaping either one. The ghetto lies within.
Ralph Ellison once said that Harlem has a way of expanding, that it goes where black folks go. He was not talking only about the physical boundaries of place. He lived technically in Washington Heights, the next neighborhood up from here, but as many did then and still do, he called it Harlem because there were so many black people there. Wherever sufficient numbers of blacks gather to live, there Harlem is. Perhaps it is Harlem with only two, perhaps with only one.
I have lived in Harlem, I guess, since I was a little boy.
* * *
On the street one day I spoke to the man from the apartment across the way. He had stopped me to bum a cigarette and we started talking about the noisiness of the neighborhood. I told him about a couple across the little courtyard from me, told him about the drunken arguments, and laughed at how each fight ends with the man getting thrown out.
“Always, always,” I said. “Then he’s back for more the next time.”
I recognized him then even before he said anything. He lowered his eyes and was embarrassed.
“That would be me,” he said.
We chatted a few minutes more about the weather and about baseball, and finally I could pretend to ignore his secret no more and I asked him.
“You guys get drunk every weekend night. You spend hours and hours hollering at each other. It’s a wonder you haven’t killed her yet.”
“Or that she hasn’t killed me,” he said.
“Every time she throws you out.”
He nodded.
“Every time you come back.”
He nodded, just as gravely, but there was a tiny smile creeping into his lips.
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you keep coming back?”
He almost laughed, but the smile disappeared and he was very serious.
“Because I love her,” he said. “We’re in this thing, and we’re going to stay in this thing until we figure it out. I guess you could say we’re trapped, prisoners of love, I suppose.”
Now he laughed. He tossed his head back and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed. I laughed along with him until he turned away and walked down the street to try to bum from someone else the cigarette I did not have.
I watched him go. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction, feeling unbearably light-headed and strangely at peace.
Me tenant comme je suis,
Keeping myself as I am,
un pied dans un pays
one foot in one country
et l’autre dans un autre,
and the other in another,
je trouve ma condition
I find my condition
très heureuse,
a very happy one,
en ce qu’elle est libre.
in that it is free.
—RENÉ DESCARTES
ALSO BY EDDY L. HARRIS
Mississippi Solo
Native Stranger
South of Haunted Dreams
The author of four critically acclaimed books, Mississippi Solo, Native Stranger, South of Haunted Dreams, and Still Life in Harlem, EDDY L. HARRIS has generated the kind of attention and praise that attends the rise of only the finest talents. As America’s premier African-American memoirist and travel writer, he has written with emotional depth and courage about the Mississippi River, Africa, the South, and Harlem respectively in these books. A graduate of Stanford University, he also studied in London and has been a screenwriter and journalist. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
“Eddy L. Harris isn’t your everyday tourist. His travels almost always have a purpose, and that purpose is to write about not only what he sees, but what he feels.”—USA Today
Henry Holt and Company
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Copyright © 1996 by Eddy L. Harris
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ISBN 0-8050-4852-9
First published in hardcover in 1996 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
First Owl Book Edition—1997
eISBN 9781466885721
First eBook edition: October 2014
Still Life in Harlem Page 22