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He stopped working, patient with my intrusion. He didn’t know anything about Alexander Gumby, but I must have the wrong place because this space had been a lamp-repair shop for many years, and before that it was a hardware shop. When I told him I was certain it was the same address, and that Alexander Gumby had lived upstairs, he said, Nope, no way, and went back to his business with the upended table. I conceded that maybe I had the wrong place, and thanked him for his time. I told him I liked the jazz he was playing through the speaker above the door. He smiled at that, and then my friend and I were gone.
Not long after, I passed 2144 Fifth Avenue again. The lamp shop was closed, as it had been so many times I’d passed before. But things were different. The windows of the upper floors—including the large plate-glass window which had been Gumby’s Book Studio—those windows whose darkness had halted my approach—were all covered with wooden boards.
Recently, I began to record my dreams. It was not an effort at self-help or psychoanalysis; the idea was to have a catalog of the realms I sometimes visit at night, often repeatedly. The landscapes in my dreams combine certain elements of some places I’ve been: the gently undulating hills of the English countryside; the winding waterways of southern India; the steely gray and rich green of the Scottish highlands; the angular spires of cypress trees in Tuscany; and the flat horizon and open skies of the West Texas high desert—where one isn’t able to hide. Added to this topography is a distorted version of my everyday scenery. Of this territory I wrote in my notebook, I arrived in a dream Harlem. Things were much different.
In this dream Harlem, I visit a library whose magnificent architecture is a more appropriate shrine to Schomburg’s endeavor than the forbidding red brick fortress where I spend so many waking hours. It is located on one corner of a dream version of Marcus Garvey Park. The hill of Mount Morris still commands the center, but the plaza formed by the streets around the park resembles some squares where I’ve lingered in London’s Bloomsbury. Inside the dream library is a magic volume that solves all the enigmas that follow me from the real library into my sleep. In this dream Harlem, the avenues are even wider and more grand. I visit elegant lounges that have mahogany fittings and floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the avenue—striped silk curtains billow in the breeze. In that dream Harlem, that nowhere Harlem, I reach the campus of City College by ascending the face of a ragged cliff many times more treacherous than the steps of St. Nicholas Park. In these settings unfold various plots of which I am not exactly the author.
In the morning, before the tyranny of daylight has imposed itself, when the dream world and the real world are still entangled, some images from the night’s travels are still available. More often, they slip back toward the dark, toward the blackest of mysteries; perhaps to be visited again in a future passage, perhaps to be altered, perhaps to be lost.
The collision of real world and dream world may tell me something about the choices made by the writers I have loved. When I was young, their words introduced me to Harlem and to writing. Their challenges were not so different from the fevered operation by which I try to record my dreams before they are exiled from the dominion of voluntary recall and rational thought—that rush to transpose a dream into words, at once preserving the vision and altering its reality. This nowhere, between dream and reality, between what one sees and what one imagines, between what is happening and your attempt to describe it, is the territory we wander while awake. It forms a montage of deferred dreams that couldn’t be transcribed accurately before disappearing into the dark.
Soon after arriving in Harlem, I heard a man giving a talk at the museum on 125th Street. In an aside quite removed from the rest of his subject matter, he exclaimed, Harlem is a city of dream books! I didn’t know what he meant, but I was intrigued by the sound of it. Later, when I came to know about the numbers racket, I learned—from my neighbors and from the library—about the books that make symbols of dream imagery and daily happenings and attach them to numbers. One book offered the following “Harlem Hunches” for the year 1944:
Colored woman calling first thing in the morning 655
Colored man calling first thing in the morning 622
White woman calling first thing in the morning 852
White man calling first thing in the morning 258
Black cat crossing path 142
White cat crossing path 318
Dog barking at you 466
To meet a cross eyed colored man 659
To meet a cross eyed white man 752
To meet a cross eyed white woman 775
To be approached by a beggar early in the morning 336
Carrying stick around Black Jack game 668
To hear a man play the dozen 912
To hear a woman play the dozen 012
To see a car hit a colored man 312
To see a car hit a colored woman 621
To see a car hit a white man 972
To see a car hit a white woman 749
To meet an old girl friend 133
To meet an old boy friend 355
To see cats fighting 345
To see dogs fighting 545
To see a funeral procession 371
To see a wedding 234
To see a mule 555
To see a crowd 882
To see a riot 222
To see a gang fight 228
To see cops chasing bandits 299
To see a hold-up 613
To see a fire 424
To see fire engines rushing 302
To see two men fighting 797
To see two women fighting 798
To see an automobile accident 112
To see a trolley car hit a person 511
To see an Elks parade 888
To see a communist demonstration 615
To meet your sweetheart unexpectedly 757
To trip while walking 481
To shout for joy 327
To meet a colored number runner unexpectedly 718
To meet a white number runner unexpectedly 757
To meet a circus parade 711
To meet a colored actor on the street looking for work 510
To see an organ-grinder 103
To pass a person smoking reefer 028
To have a barber cut your face 367
To see a man thrown out of a speakeasy 641
To see a woman thrown out of a speakeasy 580
To see a crap game on a street corner 238
To see a speakeasy raided 679
These numbers are said to be extra lucky because they are bolstered by prophetic power.
You could say: I dreamed I was trapped in a house with a gargantuan wild beast pacing hungrily outside the window, and I raced around that house slamming doors behind me while running through a series of rooms that were arrayed in a circuit. Then I dashed to the top of a winding staircase where there were no more floors to ascend. Or, I dreamed I was in a house where the floor kept falling out from beneath me, caving in without giving way completely, so it seemed as if I was sinking and gaining ground simultaneously. Or, I dreamed I was visiting friends in a house on a dream version of Striver’s Row, when suddenly it started tumbling around so that we were not inside a house after all, but locked within a sphere whose movements we could not control.
Consultants of a dream book would not use those details to venture an interpretation or diagnose an affliction. Instead—by fixing my dream images with certain numbers—they’d invent a diversion to bring temporary release. Upon hearing such scenes a knowledgeable person might say, without hesitation: One. Two. Five.
5
Messages
I GREET MY neighbors in the street. I come from a place where you speak to people when they cross your path, stranger or friend. I had to learn the particular greeting common to this place, as I have done in other places. On the streets of the Faubourg Tremé in New Orleans, there is a luscious formality: one says Good morning and Good afternoon and Good evening; your salutatio
n is a sundial that tells the time of day. Walking country footpaths in England, I learned to proclaim All right! cheerfully, authoritatively even. It is at once a query and a declaration, but there’s never enough of a pause to discover if things are, in fact, all right. Here, I learned a greeting more familiar, almost intimate. You say: How you feel? Or, How you feeling? This question seeks out the inner state. Said in a certain languorous tone, it leads one to pause on the sidewalk exchanging minor confidences. It is not a question from which you can rush away.
There are other manners of speaking that are not so easy to adopt. For instance, when a person refers to the street toward which they are walking, or the street where they have just been, or a place where a third party can be found, should any of those streets be located above 110th Street, in Harlem it is customary to make a graceful abbreviation. 133rd Street would be called ’33rd, 125th Street, ’25th, and so on. This manner is not easy to mimic. A stranger should not try to emulate it.
But a stranger to this place can take comfort in knowing that even the locals were once strangers, too. Where is your home? I have often asked. Or, Where are your people from? The answer will be someplace in Alabama or Georgia, the Carolinas or Mississippi. From asking such questions I have come to learn the names of small towns throughout the South that I never had cause to know about or think of: Scotland Neck, North Carolina; Denmark, South Carolina; Yazoo City, Mississippi. At first, I hoped that, being from a place not so far away, I’d be met with slightly less suspicion. In the course of such conversations, my tongue slides across the meridian toward those places we call home. The rhythm of speech is a password; shared laughter sweeps you across the threshold.
Crucial facts of my existence raise eyebrows and alarms. You’re up here all by yourself? Or, You’re not married yet? Or, You don’t have any children? And, You don’t belong to a church? The questions I ask—Where is your home? Where are your people from?—search out origins. The ones people ask me seek to establish my position in the present order. My answers reveal that I am decidedly adrift.
A stranger stops to ask if I require directions. I have lingered too long before stepping into an intersection, or I look uncertain as to where I am headed. The reason is this: I am looking up at a building or down the avenue or scrutinizing a sign that refers to some place no longer there. I shake my head no, insisting I am not lost, or even very far from home. I offer thanks for their kindness, then resume staring or hurry along in imitation of someone with a purpose.
Often enough, my attention is carried off by something I have not sought. Walking west on 125th Street approaching Seventh Avenue, I hear garbled sounds carried by a bullhorn and wonder if there’s a rally at African Square. I arrive to find an evangelist occupying the median in the shadow of the Hotel Theresa and calling out in Spanish, ¡Jesus viene! Further up the avenue, I notice that the address of the headquarters for the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, known as Mecca in Harlem, is 2122 Seventh Avenue. The address bears auspicious numerology: when added up, the building’s number equals seven; the street name is seven; and, according to the Five Percent philosophy of Supreme Mathematics, the number seven represents Allah. Perhaps it is just a providential sign confirming the supremacy of the poor righteous teachers, the five percent who know. I saw a street vendor squatting close to the ground beneath a red, black, and green flag on 125th Street. I thought he’d be hawking revolutionary tracts, but he was selling packs of batteries.
There are churches that used to be synagogues, churches that used to be casinos, churches that used to be movie theaters, churches that used to be bank buildings, and churches that used to be houses. Many churches are locked during the week, throwing open their doors on Sundays to parishioners who live in other boroughs and tourists from Europe and Japan. On 134th Street sits a small church built of slate-colored stone. It looks as though it should be in the Welsh countryside, atop some craggy moor, not in Harlem next to an abandoned lot. It has a red door, and its steps are covered in green Astroturf. The doors are usually locked. There is a mural on the side of the church next to the lot, which says The Open Door, invoking John’s vision in the Book of Revelation about the establishment of New Jerusalem. (I saw a door standing open in heaven, and the same voice I had heard before spoke to me with the sound of a mighty trumpet blast. The voice said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things.”) The mural shows a group of people with Afros standing in two lines awaiting entry. The doors in the mural are red, just like the ones at the front of the church, but unlike the actual doors of the church these are crowned by the variegated colors of a stained-glass fanlight. A dazzling light draws the faithful through the doors, but the artist offers only a mystical suggestion of what lies beyond. Other than the lettering invoking The Open Door, the only writing on the mural is a dedication that begins: To the memory of… You cannot read in whose memory this work was made—the facade is crumbling and a great chunk of plaster has fallen off the side of the building. Remnants of that name must be concealed by the thicket of weeds in the abandoned lot below.
I used to walk by that church regularly, imagining what was inside. I pictured an austere, formal interior to match the cool gray stone. When I finally did enter, the occasion was a political meeting. We didn’t use the sanctuary. Its doors were closed, and I pressed my face against a diamond-shaped window but could not see anything in the dark. The preacher let us use a basement meeting area that looked like it normally hosted postworship luncheons: there were folding tables festooned with red plastic party tablecloths, arrangements of fake flowers, and a number of decorative plates lining a display shelf against a side wall. The preacher said the building was a hundred years old but they were going to tear it down because the structure was no longer sound. I have passed there since; they have not started the demolition. A sign advertises the fund-raising activities of a building campaign.
For a long while, two lampposts just in front of the church bore signs whose message related to what the seekers would find beyond the open door. MAP TO HEAVEN, the signs read. But the Map to Heaven isn’t a map at all. The shape of heaven is not described by a sphere or a spiral or an island of clouds hovering above the earthly realm. There are no streets, mountains, or rivers. The Map to Heaven is a series of Bible verses. A brief summary is given for each item of the list, along with a reference to the necessary chapter and verse: All have Sinned (Romans 2:23) and God’s Pay check is Death (Romans 6:23) and God loves you (John 3:16) and The Gospel saves (Romans 10:9) and Receive Christ today (John 1:12). A passerby in search of salvation, redemption, or deliverance from peril, but faced with the chain around the red double doors, could find guidance from those two signs, like pillars at either side of the strait gate.
Other signs nearby show how to take a day trip to Atlantic City, how to reach your full earning potential as a self-employed travel agent, how to make life easier by engaging the services of dog-walkers, babysitters, or handymen, or how to join a medical study if you are a crack-addicted female. In the summer’s heat I note an increase of signs in search of the disappeared—Alzheimer’s patients and teenage girls—but also invitations to hip-hop rooftop parties and yoga classes in the park. There are signs advertising apartments for rent—lately it seems these are not in Harlem, but in the Bronx. You will see signs that say Se renta cuartos. The phrase is at once straightforward and in code: the language and the words tell quite a lot about what kinds of rooms are being rented and to whom. Recently, a photocopied sign with ornate lettering appeared. It publicized an open house and proclaimed an incredible real estate bargain: the price of a town house on historic Striver’s Row had dropped by $400,000. The new, discounted price was $2,550,000. All are welcome.
A cell phone company that must have hired a culturally sensitive advertising firm promoted itself with the following corny ode:
Harlem You Rule. How do you stay so fly? From the old heads in the fedoras to the shorties rocking uptowns, Harlem, you never disa
ppoint. Culturally no one has given us as much as you have. From music, to art, to dance, to literature, you’re a renaissance community. You’ve changed the world. We’ve followed your lead by offering cell phone plans without annual contracts. Just use one of our plans with unlimited 7 pm nights and weekends to get at us. Like everyone else, we just want to be in the place to be.