B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  I went through all the books, he told me. I’ve read every book that you’ve read.

  After that day, we seemed to understand each other. Our conversations take the pattern of a strange dance: he leans in too close and I step back, trying to look as though I am not in retreat; I step in, and his attention is carried off by someone else passing by or by some drama unfolding down the block. Often, Julius Bobby Nelson says something that makes me throw my head back in laughter, only just now I cannot remember any details to pass on the jokes. When I came back after a year’s absence, I saw Julius Bobby Nelson and we picked up precisely where we had left off: the gypsies, I built this, I know everybody.

  Julius Bobby Nelson is not the only one with stories to tell. When I meet Ms. Minnie at the door of our building, she is often alone. She goes out early in the morning to get fresh air. As soon as winter comes, she scolds me for not having enough clothing on. She does not want to see even a triangle of skin between the top button of my coat and the scarf wound about my neck, because she says the tiniest gap is enough space for a cold to get in. If I am bundled up when we meet, she takes equal note—I have heeded her suggestions.

  Often our conversations veer back toward her home. Without any specific motivation, she will tell me how they used to make soap out of lye and lard in a cauldron in the backyard and how she used to pile into cars with her girlfriends and drive from South Carolina to Georgia to go to dances. Mostly our conversation happens out of doors, though once—when I passed her standing at her threshold on my way upstairs to my apartment—we spoke and exchanged our usual greetings, and she brought me inside her place. She showed me her collection of precious objects that included delicate Chinese pieces and carved wooden sculptures and heavy antique irons, the kind you’d heat on a wood-burning stove. As she showed me each item and explained its provenance, I was in awe of this unexpected intimacy that rarely accompanies alliances made on the street.

  Often Ms. Minnie’s stories have the quality of a sudden revelation: we are talking about something that happened yesterday and end up a few decades in the past, back in South Carolina; we are exchanging polite greetings and I end up in her apartment looking at some of her most treasured possessions. Once when I passed her and she asked me about my day, I produced my own unprompted intimacy. It was the birthday of my dead grandmother, Cora. Ms. Minnie, noting the date, March 17, said it was a good number. I was headed inside, but I told her I wanted to show her a picture of my grandmother, so I dashed upstairs, collected it, and then came back down. Someone else was there, so I explained again that it was my grandmother’s birthday, though my grandmother was dead. Ms. Minnie looked at the picture and said, Still, we celebrate.

  She warns me of certain unsavory characters on the block. She says that to get this information you must sit and watch, stop and stare. When she declared that she was street smart, I asked her if she’d always been that way, even when she was new in New York. She said that she had been. Often now, when stopped on the street writing down some detail in fear that it will not be there when I return, I think of Ms. Minnie gathering her information and telling me to stop and stare.

  Then there is Monroe. For a long time I did not know his name, so in my head I called him Mr. Mississippi, because he is always asking me, When are we going to Mississippi? He asks this because I am always saying I want to go there, and he is always telling me about his home. He is from a place called Yazoo City, near the Mississippi River. Although I have been on that river in New Orleans (staggered by its breadth, its murk, its riverboats advertising a journey back to that more graceful time when Cotton was King, Sugar was Queen, and Rice was the Lady in Waiting), in my imagination I’ve always pictured that when the Mississippi rolls through Yazoo City it is a mere creek, a bit of water trickling through. This might be because Monroe once told me that to get to the house where he grew up you have to cross the river. Something about the way he told it made me think that this was a crossing made as easily as I sometimes jump over puddles by the curb. I later learned that even in Yazoo City, the Mississippi River is still mighty. One day I intend to see that place. Monroe told me that after the river you have to cross railroad tracks. It is a white house on the hill, impossible to miss, and there is a great plum tree there. I like to think that by these particulars I could find my way through Yazoo City to the setting of Monroe’s stories, like the time he was trapped in an empty country church as a boy; how he’d gone and sat at the mourner’s bench where sinners are supposed to confess and disbelievers are encouraged to abandon the fate of certain damnation. There, he told me, he was attacked by a horde of wasps that descended from the rafters, and he said they’d never before made a sound during Sunday services, when the church was full. As he told it, the story seemed to deliver a great unspoken parable, whose lesson I could not determine. He tells me he knew Emmett Till, and that he used to ride the rails, never venturing too far from home. He left for New York on a truck heading for the strawberry fields upstate, but eventually he made his way to Harlem and did not go back to picking.

  One day I ran into him and my simple question of how he was doing was met with a dark glower. It was a bright morning in late summer, but he said he was in the middle of a storm, and that it don’t feel good, and that he was trying to push it back.

  He was all alone, he said, and it had something to do with people in North Carolina. I didn’t understand the reference to North Carolina, since he was from Mississippi, but as soon as I expressed my confusion, he changed the subject.

  I dreamed of my home, he said. My home must have been a devil’s town.

  He’d seen a field of cotton, and the cotton heads, the bolls, looked like the heads of snakes. Then, he said, the plane came and killed the cotton. I did not know what he meant. It killed the cotton?

  Don’t you know about the boll weevil? he asked. Do I have to tell you the boll weevil story? He did not seem to want to tell the boll weevil story, but I knew that the boll weevil had its part in the history of Harlem, because when southern cotton crops were overrun by this scourge that had come from Mexico, many sharecroppers gave up and came north. I didn’t mention this, I simply asked with some enthusiasm for him to tell me the boll weevil story.

  It’s too long, he said. That’s a long story. He gave me the short version. The boll weevil eats the cotton. The plane comes to kill the cotton. Without any further explanation, he returned to the scene of his dream. The cotton was lying down. Miles and miles and miles, he said, of cotton laying down. He was in the back seat of a car with two people. They must have been the devil’s disciples, he said.

  That was the end of his dream, or the end of his telling it. He said it made him worried—maybe there would be a hurricane. I told him I wanted to go Yazoo City. He misunderstood me. You been?

  I told him I hadn’t been, yet. He said, You better go before it’s gone. The river is right there! The Mississippi River is right there. This shadow of destruction was overtaken by another. It’s thick with white people. You got to go to a certain part to see black people. I asked him if it had always been that way, and he said it had been, as long as he’d known. He said the black part was full of black people shoulder to shoulder, like blackbirds flocking. You ain’t seen the blackbirds flocking, he said. They fly in and take over the whole space. I would like to see it again.

  That’s a long story. Once, my neighbor Ms. Barbara was telling me about growing up in South Carolina on land owned and farmed by her grandparents. She was on her way there to attend the annual family reunion and said the best thing about going back was that all the family still lived on the land, in different parcels nearby, so she didn’t even have to get in a car during her whole trip, they just walked back and forth visiting with each other. Ms. Barbara told me I should join her at the reunion one year, and I said I would very much like to. She told me how her grandfather used to own a lot more land and that they’d never had to work for white people, but he had sold it off for $150 per acre. Because she used
to help him with his business by doing the receipts, she had suggested he sell for $500 per acre. He had not taken her advice, but he had only sold to blacks.

  During the course of her telling me all this, and about which cousins would try to flirt with me at the family reunion and about all the things they used to grow on the land, Ms. Barbara mentioned in passing that she had been born in Harlem but taken back to South Carolina as an infant to be raised by her grandparents, and that she’d come back here as a young woman. It was related as a minor detail, but the thought of Ms. Barbara being born in one place, carried away as a tiny baby, and then returning sounded like an epic.

  There are other stories I have forgotten because I didn’t write them down, and if I lived on a different block I would be told different stories. This fact strikes me when passing a corner that is not my own, where, in front of the liquor store or the bodega there stand arrayed a group of men—strangers to me, but familiar in disposition. They warily eye my advance until I broach a hello, inviting a chorus of returned salutations. If I tarried a bit longer or invented a reason to pass those other spots with regularity, I might gain a new set of friends and a new set of stories. Another writer might have done just that, trawling each gathering of streetcorner men as doggedly as Arthur Schomburg once searched dusty bookshelves. But I say hello and continue, thinking to mind my own business, thinking I should not turn my daily life into a hunt for “material,” and knowing that I could never linger long enough on enough different corners to hear all that everyone had to say.

  Once, I was far from my usual circuit—“far” being 127th Street near 8th Avenue as opposed to 133rd and Lenox. I was not walking slowly; I was not looking for a story. Despite carrying on at a normal pace—with a normal attention to my own business—I heard an old man tell a short yet complete, and completely staggering, tale: He kicked me in the head and I stabbed that cracker in the heart and he died. My daddy brought me here in the back of a truck.

  It’s a long story, indeed.

  At times I go to the library on a daily basis, so that when I pass the neighbors on the way—calling out Good morning or Good afternoon—certain ones of them ask, Going to the library? and most of the time I am. My researches there have grown only slightly more focused, so that when I am on assignment and need to learn everything about the history of Liberia in a week’s time, or all there is to know about the Haitian Revolution, I spend some days at the library.

  When I am bored with my own efforts there is much else of interest. High above the main reading room are the four mural-sized paintings by Aaron Douglas. They portray various stages in “the black experience.” The figures are all in silhouette; they don’t have faces, and their bodies are dark and angular. But this characteristically modern lack of expressive features does not detract from the anguish of the scene of Africans being kidnapped into bondage, the scene in the cotton fields, or the muscular striving in the scene of blacks moving into the industrialized cities. In the painting depicting slavery, a figure stands apart from the rest. He reaches out with his arm and points into the distance. There are no cardinal directions in a painting, but it is safe to assume that he is pointing north—he is indicating: Onward! He leads the way to freedom, and also progress. So when I am discouraged by my own progress, I am reminded to take some of his initiative, look back down at my work, and carry on.

  Once, I was looking for information about the numbers game because I never understood my neighbors’ attempts to educate me about Harlem’s clandestine lottery. On finding me a hopeless pupil, one neighbor abandoned the effort, adding that I didn’t need to know about the numbers anyway. This is why I was at the library with Rufus Schatzberg’s Black Organized Crime in Harlem: 1920–1930 open on my desk. Schatzberg, a former New York City police detective who in his retirement acquired a PhD in criminal history, gives an account of petty crime in Harlem as

  a three-way standoff in which the white policeman, racketeer and politician standing on Harlem street corners find themselves at the very center of a silently contemptuous world. There was no way for them not to know it: few things are more unnerving than unspoken hatred and hostility. Thus exposed, they retreat from their uneasiness in only one direction: into callousness and violence that become second nature.

  My study effort about the numbers racket was accompanied by other research fulfilling a separate line of inquiry, an article I was writing about the national movement seeking reparations for slavery. So, aside from my extracurricular investigation, among the books which I’d called down that afternoon was We Charge Genocide. The book compiles the effort, led by Harlem-based Communist Party leaders William Patterson and Henry Haywood and endorsed by Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, among many others, to enumerate the crimes committed against black people in America, from lynching and other forms of mob violence to police harassment and brutality. The 1951 document of grievances was presented to the United Nations to lodge a case on human rights violations in the United States.

  I must have been moving from one train of thought to the other when a name in the litany of abuses and abusers jumped out at me. One episode mentioned in We Charge Genocide was the May 4, 1950, case of a Mrs. Charles Turner of New York City, prominent proprietor of “Mom’s” restaurant. Mrs. Turner was beaten by officer Rufus Schatzberg and other unidentified police when she and a very fair-complected Negro man companion, Melvin Barker, were leaving her place of business after closing time. Schatzberg was suspended. The information stunned me. I could not make any sense of it. There was not any sense to be made. Yet it seemed to suggest an order within the library. Its design was unfathomable and inaccessible from any catalog system—a great labyrinth whose center could only be reached by walking steadily, blindly, with one foot placed in front of the other. One book held the key to another, though it solved a riddle I had not been trying to answer and provided information I did not know how to use. What other mysteries might be unraveled the more often I came and the longer I stayed?

  I heard a man ask the librarian for a map of Africa with the whole thing on it: Tanzania… and Khemet. I heard a different man ask the librarian for a book that would show him a secret underground city in Egypt. The librarian did not know the place and probably suspected, as I did while listening to their exchange, that this secret underground city did not exist. When he insisted, she tried to direct him to the well-known subterranean carved churches of Ethiopia. A library patron who was also a Rastafarian once filled the reference section with his booming lilt. He complained that he shouldn’t have to speak softly, or not speak at all, in a library devoted to the culture of black people, because we were originally an oral people whose histories and stories were preserved by speaking. At the microfilm machines I looked over the shoulder of a man who had a fist pick stuck in the back of his Afro: he was looking through reels of old issues of the Black Panther newspaper. I noticed that he paused at certain articles, including “In Defense of Self-Defense,” “Breakfast Programs,” and “Eldridge on Black Capitalism.” The man must have been observing me as closely as I observed him, because later he approached and invited me to attend the weekly meeting of the New Black Panther Party. He said that in preparation I would need to visit www.newblackpanther.com, study the Ten Point Platform, the Nine Objectives, and consult a list of study guides. Because I didn’t want to engage him in a long discussion, I accepted his card and nodded when he told me a name I would need to mention at the door, like a password, which I have since forgotten.

  It was also at the library that I made the acquaintance of a man who said he was a member of the original Black Panthers, which means, for clarification, more original than the ones from Oakland, and certainly more original than the ones who meet these days in Harlem, under cover of secret codes. As a token, he gave me a copy of the item he had come to the library to find. It was an article in the New York Times, in which he himself was quoted. He had marked the quotation with blue asterisks in the margin. The headline said City Proposal to Rebuild
Harlem Gets Stony Community Response. The dateline was February 3, 1983. One speaker, David White of United Harlem Growth, described the proposal as “another game trying to get us out.”

  He also gave me a photocopied poem called “The Protector (about David White).” The author of that poem was not credited on the page, but a footnote mentioned that

  David White was a founding member of the original Black Panther Party started in Harlem, N.Y. Summer, 1966, which had spun from the Loundes [sic] County Freedom Organization in Alabama…. This was pre – Huey Newton whose California group had received its orientation from the NYBPP, then developed its own separate agenda.

  One section of the poem was pertinent to the newspaper article, describing the forces against which protection was needed:

  Flashing through the streets

  covering kickbacks

  documenting the process of deals made

  to demonize the rightful rulers who seek

  to grow the community

  documenting the process of deals

  dealing away what we want and never get

  Rape of our village

  Rape of our landmarks

  Rape of our future

  the minds of the children

  of all things near and dear

  to the underpinning of what sustains

  a people filled with hope

  I am sometimes distracted by what goes on at the library, but Arthur Schomburg anticipated all this activity in his contribution to Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, “The Negro Digs Up His Past.” It is worth quoting at length.