There must have been sources other than the Dickens novel for the idea of running away; the notion was always in the air, along with the conviction that one was really an orphan. Since I resembled no one except, in a remote way, my mother, this made thrilling sense and explained why nothing I did came out right: I was laboring hopelessly under a prenatal prejudice that nobody would acknowledge, at least not to my face. I simply did not belong to this family. In pulp novels and movies and comic strips, boys left home with a notched stick from which hung a napkin containing all their earthly goods plus, probably, a sandwich. Such runaways disappeared for many years, finally returning under new names, rich, handsome, powerful, and magnanimously prepared to forgive their properly chastised parents. In the Horatio Alger stories—by no means a joke as yet—the solitary boy was generally, and certainly in my mind too, a capitalist-to-be. The truculent desire for freedom of Huckleberry Finn seemed not a fantastic and literary creation but a realistic version of my own state of mind.
Instead of a raft I had only my bike, and for the Mississippi either Central Park to the south or Lenox Avenue and Harlem to the north. I chose Harlem. I left no note to embarrass me in case I changed my mind and decided to return home; besides, leaving with no explanation would hurt them all the more. Of course I had to finish school that day and didn’t get home until a little past three, but there was still enough daylight left to put plenty of distance between myself and this hated house before dark. Sadie, whose kinky red hair stood up like springs, was boiling some linen in the kitchen, which made it impossible to secretly make myself a sandwich, so I casually asked her to make me one, which she was happy to do as there was nothing she enjoyed more than to see me eating. Folding the sandwich in a linen napkin, I made my way out, and in short order I was on the road. I had no notched stick, there being none on 110th Street, and to go into the park to cut one off a bush risked getting myself clubbed by a cop, so I hung the sandwich on the handlebars.
Runaway boys in stories were soon picked up and adopted by millionaires whose carriages had almost run them down, but the farther north into Harlem I got the less likely it was, I realized, that I would be running into rich people. I had never ventured beyond 116th Street before, except with my family, to eat in one of the restaurants on 125th or to attend a track meet along with my brother in one of the grammar schools uptown. Beyond a small apprehension as to what I would do once darkness fell, I felt no fear as I rolled along the side streets off Lenox Avenue winding my way uptown, even though I knew that between the black people and us there was supposed to be some foggy hostility. But I had had no conflicts with black kids in school. They seemed softer and quicker to react and readier to laugh than some other kids, especially the Puerto Ricans, who were tense and constantly chattering in their incomprehensible language. Still, one of my best friends was a boy named Carillo, whom I envied because he would be leaving school at twelve or thirteen to learn the glazier’s trade. I would have loved to cut glass even while I felt superior as one of those heading for the “Academic” courses that led to college. The system was unabashedly class-conscious, which seemed perfectly natural and practical. Our myths were already in possession of our minds, our roles and even our costumes laid out into the far future. My one caution as I coasted through Harlem was not to stray east of Madison Avenue, where the Italians lived. Unlike any other group, they were ferocious for some incomprehensible reason, always carrying a challenge. It would be possible to be knocked off my bike in East Harlem but not very likely west of Madison.
The farther uptown I went, the more black faces there were on the streets and stoops; there was a kind of crowdedness that one never felt downtown. I could not yet know that in this superdensity lay the secret of Harlem’s degeneration into a slum. A few years hence, even my father would be angered that fine apartment houses all around ours were being “broken” by landlords renting single apartments to two and three black families. When we moved to Brooklyn in 1928, our landlord was happily planning to lease our six-room apartment to two families, thus increasing his take, regardless of the inevitable deterioration of the building.
If menace was not with me as I pedaled past 130th Street heading uptown, and if the few black people who paid me any attention seemed warm and affable, it in no way meant that I felt they and I were alike. Since I had had fights with white boys but never once with blacks and had never been robbed or threatened by them, I felt safer among them than in a white neighborhood where I was the stranger. But black people were mysterious nonetheless. For one thing, I found it hard to understand their speech and as a born mimic had often found myself exaggerating it comically. In the movies, of course, they were always stupid, lumbering creatures rolling their eyes in terror of ghosts but certainly never dangerous. This last was the perverse contribution of Hollywood to my image of the Negro—he totally lacked menace, a figure apart or beneath the white people. A rich friend of my father’s had a Negro servant wear his new shoes to break them in, and I thought that as funny as he did.
On one of the streets above 130th I stopped to see why a small crowd of people had gathered, and saw a black man lying on the sidewalk with his head twisted toward a stream of dirty water flowing along the curb, his tongue stretching out to it. Someone said the word gas, and I thought he must have inhaled some from his stove inside his house and been made so terribly thirsty by the fumes. His red tongue was only an inch from the water, but nobody was helping him to get closer. They stood there quietly staring down at him, watching him struggle for a drink. I rode away under the overarching boughs of the trees, past the clean stoops and washed windows of the black people’s houses, which looked no different here than they did downtown, except that there were more people in them.
Remembering my sandwich, I stood straddling the bike and eating as dusk began to fall. I had forgotten my anger. At that hour the streets were filled with older black women shopping for dinner. So many of them were heavy and seemed to have painful feet. There were a lot of kids running around with no shoes on, not, I thought, because of poverty but because in the South where they came from they were used to running barefoot. Or so they had told me. Calmed by Harlem, I had a leisurely ride home, and by the time I got my bike parked in our foyer I was looking forward to meeting my mother again and finding out what was for dinner. The runaway linen napkin I slipped back into a drawer.
Nearly fifty years later, in the seventies, I left the campus of City College, where I had given a lecture, and found myself strolling alone on Convent Avenue on a lovely spring afternoon at about half past four. I had come close to this hill on my runaway bike ride. After my lecture, student actors had treated me to several scenes from my plays, and I had been surprised and moved by a remarkable performance of a scene from A View from the Bridge played by a Korean Eddie, a Jewish Beatrice, a black Marco, and a Chinese as his brother Rodolpho. The raw force of their acting was still with me as I walked away from the imitation Tudor campus where for about two weeks in 1932 I had tried to begin my night school education but had had to quit because I could not stay awake after eight hours on a job in an auto parts warehouse. My memories of City College were of falling asleep at a chemistry lecture, and once even while standing up in the jammed main library with an open reference book in my hands. Every seat in that immense library was filled, every space at the deep sills of the leaded windows where one could rest a book and write one’s notes. I was among the late arrivals who could not even get to a windowsill. It was nearly midnight, and I had been up since six, had traveled an hour and twenty minutes by trolley and subway from Brooklyn to my job on Sixty-third and Tenth Avenue—where Lincoln Center would one day stand—and was now in Harlem trying to memorize facts about the Versailles Treaty. That was the night I returned the reference book to the librarian and walked out into the darkness knowing that I could not make it.
Now I was walking out of City College again, but this time enjoying the memory of the scenes I had watched and admiring that elevated area
whose apartments provide some of the most striking views of the city. I came to a corner and stood looking around for a sign of a taxi. There was remarkably little traffic, merely a car or two, and not many people on the broad streets either. My eye moved upward toward the clear, cloudless sky, and I noticed that in several apartment windows people, all of them black, were observing me. A group of four or five young black men in their early twenties came toward me, talking intensely among themselves. Seeing me, they went instantly silent, looks of near shock passing over their faces as they parted ranks to walk past me. I turned and saw them glancing back at me. What was up? Why was I such a curiosity? Now two middle-aged black women approached from the direction of the college. They were nicely dressed, neatly turned out, and smiled as they neared me.
“Looking for a subway?”
“I thought I’d catch a cab.”
“A cab? Up here? No, no, you can’t find cabs up here.”
They worked at administrative jobs at the college, had attended my lecture, and had watched the scenes the students played for me. Beforehand they had looked up my 1932 academic record and laughingly reported that I had made all D’s for the two weeks I had been, at least bodily, present. We chatted for a while, but I noticed a tenseness in their smiles—they were not eager to relax with me on the corner, and after only a brief exchange one of them offered to escort me to the subway a few blocks away. Stout black women had always been good to me. I thanked them, embarrassed at the idea of their protecting me even as I guessed that they were tougher than I was, as middle-class and overweight as they appeared to be.
“I think I’ll stick it out for a few minutes. But thanks anyway,” I said.
They walked off, their anxiety undisguised now. Alone again on the corner I glanced up at the windows where the black faces were still watching me, waiting no doubt for the chicken to be plucked. I knew, of course, that I was caught in the remote past when as a boy I had sweated up these grades on my bike in order to coast down. It may also have been that I still associated the facades of many of the apartment houses, the emblems on cornices and window frames, with a certain upper-middle-class stylishness (some are similar to the buildings in the Sixteenth Arrondissement in Paris, that elegant if boring neighborhood). In any case, I could not penetrate my unwillingness to face facts and flee, nor can I now. It was as though I was home on that Harlem street. If I have a psychic root it is sunk in those sidewalks, and those facades still emanate a warm and enfolding energy toward me. How could I run from them like a stranger, an invader? Nevertheless, as I realized that I had been standing there for more than fifteen minutes and that the sun was going down, I thought of returning to the college to try to call a cab. And I belatedly realized that the two women had not only been offering to lead me to the subway but to accompany me downtown, where they said they also were headed, implying that it was even unsafe for me to enter the subway alone.
Now I saw what appeared to be a taxi three blocks away, moving slowly in my direction; it had a broad white stripe around its middle and was painted brown, not a taxi color in New York, but there was a broken sign on the roof that I assumed had at one time read “Taxi.” As it came closer I saw the cracked side window, the wires holding the fenders on, and the absence of a radiator grill, and I saw that the driver was a black man. The car slowed to a stop in front of me. The passenger in the back seat paid the driver, then opened the door and stepped out, one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my life. As she straightened up, her grocery bag clutched to her side, I exchanged a glance with her. A model, I thought. Her chocolate skin and straight teeth, the wit in her eyes, her mink hat and beige cloth coat—her soaring femininity caught me by the throat. I was enslaved then and there.
With a slightly arched eyebrow and a grin of mock amazement she asked, “You getting in there?”
I laughed. “If he’ll let me.”
“Huh! I have now seen everything.” And she walked off in the spikiest heels I had seen since the fifties, on a thrilling pair of legs.
I leaned in to the driver, a small bearded man in his thirties who was folding up his money and barely glancing at me, so unwilling was he even to begin a conversation.
“Can you take me downtown?”
“How am I going to go downtown?”
“Why not?”
Now he looked at me, his money stashed. “Where downtown you goin’?”
“Well”—I thought quickly—“you can go as far as Ninety-sixth Street, can’t you?” This was a gypsy cab, unlicensed and technically illegal, I knew.
“I can, but I probably be stuck down there. I won’t get nobody coming back up.”
The hard border between the two civilizations is Ninety-sixth Street; I had known this for years, of course, and had simply put it out of mind. Something in me still refused to admit how definite the frontier was.
“How about you take me down,” I said, “and I’ll pay you double so you won’t lose getting back up here?”
He turned and stared through the windshield for a moment and then agreed. I got in. The seat was situated on the floor some distance from the backrest, and I wrestled it into its more or less correct position, but it was still uncomfortably low. Rubber foam was sticking out of the upholstery as though chickens had been plucking at it. One door had no handles at all. We drove slowly downtown. I was happy.
“Quite a car,” I said.
“This? This is not a car, this is history.” The remark seemed more educated than I had expected. “What are you doing up here?” he asked suddenly, an edge of suspicion in his tone.
There was on his skin a kind of powder-gray dust. And I saw now that he seemed terribly tired. His fingers were as long as pencils, his nails were long flat yellow ovals and very clean. He wore two cable-knit sweaters and drove with both hands clutching the wheel as though he expected the front end to twist off the road any minute.
“I gave a talk at the college,” I explained.
He drove on in silence for a block. Then he asked, “Talk about what?”
“About the theatre. I write plays for the theatre.”
He drove another block in silence. “Ever give a talk at Columbia?”
“Actually, yes, a few years ago. Why?”
He said nothing for another block or so, then decided to speak. “I was a teaching fellow in sociology.”
Then I was right not to have fled!
“The government cut the program I was involved with, so I’m doing this.”
“You making out?”
“It slows the decay a little.”
“What program were you on?”
“A study of Ethiopians in New York—I’m Ethiopian.”
“Born there?”
“Yes. I’m only staying on here because I’ve got rank in the army and they’d have their hands on me the minute I stepped off the plane.”
“But how long can you go on driving the cab?”
“That’s it—I don’t know. I don’t really make enough. But I’m not going back to that senseless war.”
“What’s it all about? I haven’t kept up.”
“Officers like wars, that’s all. They get to be important and rich.” His voice was soft, like a light breeze.
When we got to Ninety-sixth he offered to take me all the way to Twenty-third, to the Chelsea Hotel, and then we had a beer at the bar next door. I asked him if I had been foolhardy to stand on that corner all alone. He had grayish eyes and a narrow face, an ascetic air. He looked down at his drink and then up at me with a shrug and a silent shake of the head, as baffled as I was, as reluctant to give up a deeply held faith, and at the same time as incapable of belief, as morally paralyzed. The ultimate human mystery may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.
One lovely evening not long afterward, my wife Inge and I came out of a theatre and decided to walk home to the Chelsea instead of tak
ing a cab from the West Forties theatre district. Below Forty-second Street life thins out around midnight, but south of Thirty-fourth there is nothing at all at that hour, hardly a car on Seventh Avenue, the fur district deserted, and not a single pedestrian. Apart from the occasional newspaper delivery truck or cruising cab there is no movement, and you could pitch a tent without being disturbed on that broad thoroughfare, which in daylight is jammed with commercial traffic. We were strolling southward, chatting about the play we’d just seen, when I noticed three or four men standing on the corner of Twenty-seventh Street. Half a block distant I heard a burst of laughter that had, I thought, the loosened clang of drink. I drew Inge closer, and we passed the group. They were black and young, in their twenties, but a quick glance was vaguely reassuring—their hair was rather neatly clipped. On the other hand, they had gone silent as we passed. We continued walking, and I could not help looking down the avenue for possible help in case we needed any. There was nothing, a dark empty boulevard. And yet it was not fear I felt but a curious suspension of soul, a kind of dying of life inside me. I supposed that to really fear them at this moment I would have to feel some hatred, but hatred, along with all other feeling, was absent. Now I heard running behind us. Several pairs of feet were slapping down hard on the pavement at high speed. I moved Inge toward the curb, thinking that our only safety might be to draw them into the middle of the street rather than be thrust into a doorway.
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