Not far from there, a less coherent appeal cries, HARLEM UNITED. Scatted sided of 306 Lenox Avenue and North General Hospital Need to be Investigate for discrimination with the latinos. I got wistnesses -n- evidence Colón, M. From a bus crossing 116th Street I saw a sign that said DANGER, but I did not go back to that spot to investigate. There are signs to free the Jena Six, signs for a people’s tribunal on the government’s role in Hurricane Katrina, signs to stop the war in Iraq, signs to stop a war from beginning in Iran, signs for a new 9/11 commission. Around Thanksgiving appeared this impassioned plea:
Come Help Me Capture the Water and the Fire, So it Will Not Overflow or Burn When We Slip Through to feed the Hungry, Needy, Children and Forbidden. FOR “Thou Walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned neither shall the flame kindle upon thee” ISAIAH 43:2.
Before Christmas, I saw a sign for a food and clothing drive sponsored by the New Black Panther Party, a benign implementation of the original ten-point party platform, with which even Boy Scouts or the Junior League could agree. A more militant articulation could be found on the sign advertising a boycott that never gained much support: The Peoples Committee says to BOYCOTT JIMBOS: McDonald’s, Burger King, White Castle Hire Blacks in Harlem. Why not JIMBO’s?
Other signs ask other pressing questions. A document of several pages was posted to a lamppost on my block. The first page was titled BLACK INVENTORS… EXTRAORDINARY INVENTIONS. The subsequent pages contained a list detailing those inventors and their inventions. At the end of this dossier, as if the names were evidence at some tribunal of what used to be called “racial feeling,” there was a plea that was both damning and sorrowful: WHY ARE THE GRANDSON’S OF THESE PEOPLE NOT EVEN WORKING IN THEIR COUNTRY???
The very last page was either a cryptic answer to the question, or “exhibit A” in a separate charge. It was a poorly reproduced photograph of a lynching; amidst the crowd of spectators, a little white girl in a white frock flanked the charred and mutilated corpse. She was squinting, looking at the body with her head cocked to one side.
WHY DON’T YOU LOOK AT ME? Thus began a screed posted on 125th Street, the work of an anonymous latter-day pamphleteer:
Attention New Residents of Harlem (AKA Washington Heights etc) please be aware that you are contributing to the active displacement of the historic Harlem community. YES gentrification, which is a pretty word for modern day colonization.
You cannot blame the politicians or real estate brokers as long as YOU are willing to pay exorbitant prices for the same residential property that was once affordable. As you see more white, Asians, and others of economic advantage you will see less Blacks and Hispanics. Economic racism, are you the problem or the solution? There is no neutrality.
BUT do you see us? Because this is a neighborhood (specifically I refer to where you are reading this sign) we look at each other here and even greet the people we see daily. WHY aren’t you looking at us? IS it guilt, are you purposely ignoring me are you afraid of me? This is often seen as a sign of disrespect and if you are afraid it would behoove you to look at people. How will you know who is an actual threat to you? Learn about and respect the places you decide to live!!! BUT even better would be for you to DECIDE to live elsewhere because where are we supposed to go?
Those advertisements, indictments, and supplications are rained on or ripped down or covered up or ignored. At the base of the same lampposts someone has stenciled messages in spray-paint. All along Lenox Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Eighth Avenue are reminders of a struggle that elsewhere has gone underground: WE DEMAND REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY and THEY STOLE US THEY SOLD US THEY OWE US. REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY. NOW! NOW! and THE HUEY P. NEWTON READER: THAT’S WASSUP!! and WE DEMAND UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE AS REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY and WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY and WHY ARE YOU SCARED OF REPARATIONS? These near-permanent ciphers have begun to fade, covered with layers of grime. They have the effect of a subliminal message, quickly flashing at the edge of consciousness. You must be looking down to see them, or be otherwise disconnected from your surroundings. They are quick enough to read as you are just about to step into a busy intersection. (Now! Now!) But there is no information about how the goal will be achieved or how to join the cause. Some are exhortations, some are demands, and the placement of the signs at various intersections in Harlem suggests that the audience of the exhortation and the target of the demand is the same, or overlapping, or otherwise indeterminate.
Once, I crossed 139th street as an alternate path, walking that way just in order to see the street. It was a street in which I had no business, and this was obvious as soon as I entered the block. I looked down and saw at the base of yet another lamppost a sign that was not an exhortation or a demand or some part of a ten-point platform, but a message altogether more mysterious. It was also written in spray paint, but the words were scrawled by hand. LOOK OUT, this lamppost warned. I did look out, edgy and vigilant, until I reached the end of that block.
But by the time I received their notice, the words at the base of that lamppost had likely fulfilled their mission. The message had already been delivered—from and to emissaries of a realm whose boundaries are not visible by the light of day, or, perhaps, of a realm that exists only in the mind of a solitary spray-can scribbler. My eyes falling upon those words, and my mind later racing to attach some unverifiable meaning—or the eyes of another scanning the same spot without taking notice—all this was an unintended, meaningless consequence.
On Lenox Avenue, someone has taken to sending messages that are more direct but offered in a less permanent medium. It was late summer when I first saw the sidewalk messages, elaborate communications written on the pavement in brightly colored chalk. Every few days, in locations up and down Lenox Avenue, these messages appear.
Hi, Little People
Life is no joke
1) Love yourself and respect others
2) Love your family
3) Care more and hate less
4) Try to THINK better so that you can act better
5) EDUCATION,
6) Trains your mind
7) Knowledge builds things
8) Reality will outlive you
9) Learn to have respect, good training and discipline in your life
10) Bad thinking will cause you to do bad things to others and especially yourself THINK WELL
From the carefully rendered lettering and the artistic flourishes (hearts and flowers and sparkles shining out from certain words), I presumed the writer was an old woman, a retired schoolteacher, continuing her educational mission with these sidewalk signs. New ones appeared on a near-weekly basis:
Youngsters can you print and spell?
1) I love myself and my family
2) Believe in school
3) Respect older people
4) Study and practice
5) Life is not a joke
6) Listen and pay attention
7) Think better to be a better person
8) Give more and hate less
9) Your life is worth saving
I would stop and get out my notebook to copy down these messages, adding them to pages of notes from political meetings and transcriptions of signs posted on lampposts and windows. I wished I could reproduce in my lined notebook and with my imprecise hand the careful design of the words, the fanciful swirls and embellishments. I wished that I carried around crayons to reproduce the chosen color scheme. I would stop and write these messages down whenever I saw them: even late at night or in the rain. At least once when I was copying the sidewalk messages a man stopped, wanting to speak with me. Because I did not pay him any attention, but continued with my task, he stopped to read what was on the sidewalk. Then he said he was going to write it down, too.
EVILNESS DOESN’T LOVE YOU!
LOVE YOURSELF!
Little People Can You Read?
1) Life is not a joke
2) THINK! Well
3) Think better to become a better person
4) Bad thinking leads to bad things
5) Love yourself, family and respect others
6) Education is the right step to move ahead
7) You must value your life
8) Knowledge makes things work
9) Think always and think safely
10) Make your life mean something
STUDENTS
ALWAYS LOVE YOURSELF
EDUCATION
1) You must have it
2) You must WANT it
3) Do not be afraid to learn
4) Love your family
5) Respect other people
6) Respect your teachers
7) THINK! POSITIVE
STUDENTS! PUT LOVE IN YOUR HEART
EDUCATION
1) Love yourself
2) Love your family
3) Respect others
4) Your mind needs knowledge so you can become more intelligent
5) THINK. Try to be more positive
6) Schooling is very serious
7) Life is no joke
8) Do not take a person’s life if you want to live your life
HI! LITTLE FOLKS
1) Love yourself always
2) Love your family
3) Respect others
4) Let school be your best friend
5) Practice your reading
6) Study as much as possible
7) Challenge arithmetic (don’t be afraid)
8) Being good is better for you
9) Being bad is not good for you
10) Respect senior citizens
LIFE IS NO JOKE. THINK.
Other versions of the messages offered academic lessons, as if the street were a classroom chalkboard. Spelling lessons had letters eliminated, challenging students to fill in the blank; arithmetic problems asked passersby to complete equations. The other messages repeated variations on an unchanging theme: Life is no joke. Read. Be good. Think better. Respect others. Love yourself. Your life is worth saving. Reality will outlast you. These were commandments, on a tablet significantly less enduring than stone. They were the kind of thing that might be affixed to a classroom bulletin board in bright paper letters at the beginning of a school year. Here on the street, there was even less opportunity to gauge their effect. And although they were designed to be destroyed, I felt compelled to preserve them. Often when I stopped to write, someone would walk across the words, temporarily obstructing the view.
When I met Sister Doris Littlejohn, she told me she was also known as Pastor Dorcas Lynn, but that her name was now James because she was married, and before James she was married to a man called Cook, until she found out he was a bigamist. I was walking east across 125th Street with my notepad in hand when I paused to write something down. I had reached the row benches in front of the State Office Building at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. In weather fine and foul people gather there to exchange news, talk politics, or stare into the street. I was already seated when I noticed the woman next to me, sitting with a notepad and pen already in use. After I saw the notebook I noticed her feet: they were bare, her toes were cramped, and her toenails were long and dirty. The skin on her feet and shins was covered in a gray dust.
Some time passed, me scribbling in my pad, she in hers, before we looked up at each other and smiled. She asked if I was a writer, and I said yes. I asked her the same, and she said yes. We both smiled again, and laughed, and she told me her name and its variations. She told me that she wrote poetry and music about spiritual things and about political things. She asked whether I liked political things, and I said yes, so she flipped a few pages in her yellow legal pad and explained that the following concerned the condition of alienation in our community and was addressed to people of means, people like Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and certain singers and sports celebrities. First she began to read it aloud, and then she stopped to ask if I wouldn’t prefer to read it on my own. By the time Sister Doris Littlejohn and I had begun our exchange, I had stopped taking notes, so I cannot tell you any details at all of her piece of writing. I only remember that her words ran across the page like fugitives from sense while at the same time possessing a power by which some meaning pierced through. Eventually, this feeling of comprehension and confusion receded, and I was able to grasp her bigger meaning.
A man came up to the row of benches and began dashing back and forth in front of us, and then into and out of the street. He was dressed in athletic clothes and possessed by a remarkable purpose: he was shadowboxing while delivering rhyming couplets. The dexterity of the jabs and blows to his invisible sparring partner was matched by the staccato cadence of his words. Sister Doris Littlejohn and I laughed, and then we got out our notebooks and began writing. A boxing poet! she exclaimed, and began recording his antics. Her feet danced as she wrote; she dangled them with the flicking movement of a delighted child seated at water’s edge. I felt somewhat comforted by her, writing down the same thing I was observing. We must have formed a strange picture, both looking up and out and into the world and then looking down into our pages. The result might have been books that were mirror images of each other.
When the boxing poet had gone, Sister Doris asked if I would like to hear one of her songs. She began to clap out a dirgelike rhythm. The only lyric that I can remember was a paraphrase of scripture: You are more than a conqueror. This line was repeated in an unchanging chorus, though Sister Doris did not seem to tire of singing or accompanying herself with clapping hands. When her song was complete, we chatted about her songs and poems, and at some point I asked her whether she lived in Harlem. She said she lived in the streets. After this revelation, she gave me a history of how that had come to be so. It involved the men whose names she had borne in succession, and also the interference of a treacherous mother-in-law connected to the church Sister Doris had belonged to until recently. This church was the scene of rampant factionalism, and Sister Doris had been its victim due to jealousy over her own ease of communication with the higher power. The cause of this strife in her personal and ecclesiastical life was not surprising to Sister Doris. She told me that a lot of territorialism exists in the physical and spiritual realms right now, an observation that caused our talk to veer from the personal to the world-historical, with Sister Doris giving her opinion on spiritual territorialism as demonstrated by the wars in the Middle East.
The imminence of warfare in both the spiritual and terrestrial realms prompted Sister Doris Littlejohn to produce a phone number on a wrinkled sheet of paper and press it into my hand. It was the number of a prayer line, and she said I should call it at any hour when in need of assistance, and that I should not mention her name. This discretion was necessary because the number belonged to the same church that she had just told me was persecuting her, the scene of the spiritual factions and territorialism.
We had been together for some time, mostly facing the street, Sister Doris talking while I listened, when she turned to face me squarely and declared that our meeting had been the working of a providential power and that she wanted to tell me that there are such things as angels. After this speech, she asked in words more exact than any I had seen written on her pages what I had gained from this time with her. I stammered something utterly unequal to our encounter and said I was glad that we met.
Not long before we parted, I asked, in the most delicate way possible, whether she was in need of shoes. I had decided that we would get up right then and go to the nearest shoe store. But she said she had shoes, and that she had only removed them because her feet ached. She gestured to the bag she was carrying as if to confirm the existence of the shoes.
We said good-bye and agreed that we were sure to meet again. And we did. When I saw her next, it was on Lenox Avenue in front of the Mormon Church. It seemed like a great sign that we should meet again so soon. And whether or not it actually was a sign, the crucial thing is that we were both willing to see it as such. This time our conversation did not include the existence of angels or
field reports from the front line of spiritual battlefields. Sister Doris needed money. She did not ask. She managed to express that need without explicitly making a request, and I gave her two dollars, all that was in my purse. She reached into her purse and gave me two pieces of paper. On each was printed a prayer. It seemed like an unequal exchange, with my contribution being of lesser value. I was not buying the prayers, and she was not selling them. She had given me what she had to offer.
I presumed that would be the beginning of a series of encounters between us. The reason for this expectation is simple: such is life on Lenox Avenue. There is some predictability as to whom you will meet and when. As always it is necessary to stop and speak, to collect the latest bulletin or a hug. It is not possible to pass from an exchange such as the one I had with Sister Doris Littlejohn back into anonymity.
But I never saw Sister Doris Littlejohn again. The weather changed; I was going out less and staying inside more—and that was not entirely to do with the weather. When I did go out, it wasn’t to amble along Lenox Avenue or 125th Street, and I did not stop with my notebook at the benches near the State Office Building. I went out only to rush onto the subway and go downtown, or to walk a few blocks and into a political meeting (often enough, these were inside the State Office Building). My thoughts returned occasionally to Sister Doris. I wondered why we had not met again, not knowing whether her disappearance had to do with spiritual warfare or whether, owing to her intimacy with the esoteric domain, she had disappeared in order to avoid being written about.
I had seen the sign: Come Help Me Capture the Water and the Fire, So It Will Not Overflow or Burn When We Slip Through to Feed the Hungry, Needy, Children and Forbidden. Most likely, her disappearance had to do with the reality of living in Harlem—on the streets—as the weather grew cold. It is possible that we did meet again, but perhaps one or both of us had not noticed the other. Perhaps I had been in a hurry to get downtown, or in a hurry to get to a meeting. Perhaps, because it was winter, one or both of us had been tightly bundled and therefore unrecognizable.
B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK Page 14