New York in the '50s (18 page)

Louie, Ray, and I went out for beers, and they asked me what writers I liked. I started talking about Dostoevsky. Ray and Louie had never read his work but he sounded cool to them, and they wanted to know if I'd recommend something Dostoevsky wrote, and if they read it would I talk to them about it? The next thing I knew we had a reading group going, and to really introduce the guys to literature I invited them to come to the Village and I'd take them to the White Horse Tavern.

I introduced Ray and Louie to Sam Astrachan, who I knew was another great Dostoevsky fan, and the four of us drank pints of arf 'n' arf in the back room of the Horse and talked about the novel I'd assigned us all to read,
The Possessed
. We agreed that although it was, on the surface, a political novel, it was really about the human passions that underlay politics, the real stuff that made people tick, that drove them to action or madness. Louie asked how you pronounced the word “nihilist,” and I said I thought it could either be “nee-hilist” or “ny-hilist.”

“Man,” Louie said, shaking his head in a show of appreciation, “them
ny
-hilists was really
on
to somethin'!”

We all broke up laughing and ordered more pints.

Like many young people caught up in the first excitement of
ideas and art, Ray and Louie wanted to start a newspaper. They got some money for printing from the East Harlem Protestant Parish and asked my help. I wrote an article and Ray solicited an editorial cartoon from Ted the Horse, who used to draw for his college paper. Ray wrote a short story, and other friends from the parish and the neighborhood contributed to the first issue of the
Edge
, which also proved to be the last. As Ray says now, looking back on our misguided effort, “It was supposed to be for the people of the neighborhood, but I think it was over everybody's head.” We had made the mistake of addressing it to ourselves—we White Horse “ny-hilists”—rather than our intended audience.

Still, we had put out a newspaper, and it seemed part of the hopeful ferment of the time, along with the new “social” Conservatives, the victory of the protest that led to the addicts' ward at Metropolitan Hospital, the flow of people and ideas to and from Harlem. A talented novelist, Warren Miller, came up to the neighborhood, hung around the streets, and got out of it a novel that young people like Ray and Louie admired, and so did I, called
The Cool World
. There was talk of its being made into a play and a movie, and a few years later an excellent black-and-white film of it was made, directed by Shirley Clark and produced by Frederick Wiseman.

For a brief time it seemed that we, like the nihilists in Dostoevsky, were, as Louie put it, really
on
to somethin', and that these bright cool kids from East Harlem were going to be artists who spoke for their culture, as all of us contributed to the greater mainstream of the city. It was during that time, the spring of 1959, that I took James Baldwin up from the Village to meet Norm Eddy on 100th Street.

Baldwin had liked my book, wrote a blurb for it, and was curious about this white minister and his family I had written about who had come from the suburbs of Connecticut to live in East Harlem. He was also interested in the work of the narcotics committee and the whole subject of addiction. He had written a powerful short story, “Sonny's Blues,” about a Negro jazz musician from Harlem who was an addict, that came out first in the summer 1957 issue of
Partisan Review
. Norm Eddy knew Baldwin's work and admired it, but he didn't want to talk literature; he wanted to talk about, well, what he always talked about, those Big Questions.

Baldwin and Norm hit it off right away, and I sat back and listened to their conversation with the rapt appreciation of a record producer who has brought together two musicians he admires and now gets to hear play together for the first time. They spoke freely and openly, and Norm said something I had never heard before when Baldwin asked why he had come to live in that neighborhood. Norm leaned forward with intense concentration and said it had nothing to do with saving souls or doing good or any of the stock assumptions people who visited (at least white people) often made. It might sound grandiose, Norm said, but the truth was, “I want to help create Plymouth Colony in East Harlem.”

“Yes,” Baldwin said immediately, “I understand.”

Norm tells me many years later, “Baldwin was the first person I shared that vision with who knew what I was talking about.”

It was a time of hope, of new beginnings, of colors mixing and complementing one another, as in the new abstract expressionist paintings being done in lofts down in the Bowery by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and others, the same crowd of artist friends who gathered at the Five Spot after work to hear jazz groups. The musicians were sometimes of mixed colors, white David Amram playing with black Cecil Taylor or Charlie Mingus; black Sonny Rollins, who wrote “Freedom Suite” in 1958, hiring white guitarist Jim Hall in 1961 as part of a group that marked Rollins's return to public performance after a self-imposed exile. Although hiring a white musician drew criticism from some black activists, Rollins said, looking back years later, “I thought it was a healing symbol, and I didn't have any qualms about doing it.” During this period Nat Hentoff and other friends in the Village collected money to help a talented young Negro poet who was short of the rent one month. The poet was married to a white girl then, and his name was still Jones (before he became Amiri Baraka).

It was not the racial millennium, understand. Miles Davis was busted outside Birdland, beaten, and taken to jail. Baldwin himself was beaten up at an Irish bar in the Village because he was sitting in a booth with two white friends, one of them a woman. So it was still a dangerous time for blacks, but there had been those exceptions, what seemed like lights going on, an offbeat, bebop kind of occasional, hopeful harmony.

It was a time when Norman Mailer and his second wife, Adele, went to rent parties in Harlem with their maid on Saturday nights and got to know her boyfriend, who couldn't read or write but had an enormous sophistication, and Mailer says, “That's where I got my understanding about hip and hipsters that led to my essay ‘The White Negro.' That was a period I look back on with affection. Blacks and whites were moving toward one another. There was a marvelous sense of optimism.”

These were the early days of the civil rights cause, and
The Nation
sent me south to cover school integration. I heard the stirring oratory of the young Reverend Martin Luther King and, shedding any pretense of objectivity, sang with the protesters, “Black and white together, we shall overcome.” Up north among liberals I knew of all colors the goal was integration—not as it would later become, another kind of separation, when “Negroes” became “blacks” and wanted not just rights but power.

I am speaking of a time when Bayard Rustin, the scholarly black man with the Oxford accent who had worked with A. Philip Randolph of the AFL-CIO, studied with Gandhi, and advised Dr. King on nonviolence, let me in free to a benefit concert for the movement in New York because I was broke at the time. When I walked in and said, “Bayard, if it wasn't for you I wouldn't be here tonight,” he threw back his head and laughed and said, “Oh, Dan, we are all here by the grace of God.” Even though I didn't believe in those days, I felt a tremor of the eerie wonder of life.

It was four years before Baldwin would write
The Fire Next Time
, which shocked white liberals with the warning of the conflagration to come—and did come, as Baldwin predicted, in Watts and other city ghettos across the country. It was four years before I got into an awful argument with Baldwin over whether a teenage white girl could suffer as a black girl like his own sister had suffered, and in anger he said something that hung like a sword over all interracial friendships: “You're just like all the others.” It meant, of course, the other whites, the ones who didn't understand. It meant: I thought you were different but I was fooled again, deluded again, you are one of Them after all.

Four years had gone by when I ran into Louie Melendez, in 1963, and we started by kidding about our old admiration for “them
ny-hilists” in Dostoevsky, but before the evening was over it felt more like
we
were the nihilists. Louie told me he was working as a subcontractor. I assumed he meant a construction job, but he said he was dispensing drugs—not really a pusher, more like someone who simply was delivering packages of what had already been paid for.

I went with him to a run-down apartment on East 102nd Street, where a nervous young guy was eagerly waiting while his tough-looking teenage girlfriend lay on a bed. She was reading a comic book and chewing gum. The customer got out his works and asked Louie to fix him. Louie nodded but first went to a record player where a Modern Jazz Quartet LP was playing. I think it was “Cortege” from the album
No Sun in Venice
. Louie lifted the arm off the record and said, “John Lewis, you're too sad for me.” Then he went to the waiting customer, who had already rolled up his sleeve.

I left New York that fall of 1963, and I don't think I went back to East Harlem until February 9, 1986, to attend a celebration of Norm Eddy's sixty-sixth birthday at the Church of the Resurrection, on East 101st Street. I'd renewed my friendship with Norm a few years before, when I let him know I'd returned to church in 1980, joining King's Chapel in Boston. Now I wanted to give him due credit for never having tried to recruit or convert me during my passionate atheistic years. On his birthday Norm spoke about “acts of prayer.” I remembered with a jolt that when I first knew him and heard him say the Lord's Prayer, I used to substitute the words I learned from Hemingway's story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …”

There were two choirs at the birthday celebration, one from the church and one from a neighborhood drug rehabilitation center, and the sanctuary was full, with people from the neighborhood where Norm had lived and served for nearly forty years, and people from all across the country who had worked in his parish as volunteers, and a New York City councilwoman and representatives of religious and political groups from all around the city who had come to honor Norm and his vision and his work.

Norm spoke of the counseling and activism of the narcotics committee being a prelude to the sixties, of going to meet Martin Luther King in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956, and being convinced he
was the man to lead the nation in the civil rights struggle. It turned out King's driver was a former addict from 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, “in those days when addicts were all considered beyond hope,” and this convinced Norm of King's trust in individuals to grow and change. That is the faith Norm lives by, and perhaps is why I and so many others have been drawn to him over the decades.

I had altogether lost track of Ray Grist, the aspiring painter, until Norm gave me his number in the spring of 1990. We meet at the Hunan Balcony restaurant on Broadway, and Ray is carrying a copy of a publication called
Jump
, subtitled “A Forum for New World Culture / A Voice for Us.” As well as being a working artist whose paintings have been shown in Harlem galleries, Ray is the editor in chief of this paper. I say it looks very impressive, and he grins and says, “A little nicer than the
Edge
. Remember the
Edge
?”

I laugh and recall our high hopes for that long-forgotten publication.
Jump
already has a longer life. It was started by a group of black artists who called themselves the Pow Wow Group, who got together to talk about how to get their work shown, reviewed, and sold.
Jump
is part of that effort, listing galleries that show the work of black and Third World artists, and giving dates of exhibitions.

Ray says he has kept in touch with Norm Eddy over the years. “Norm and the other ministers of the East Harlem Protestant Parish nurtured us. They were very important to me—they woke up a whole intellectual curiosity. They asked questions like ‘What is God?' and ‘Do I have a social responsibility?'”

Ray remembers other people who came into the neighborhood back then: the donor who set up the art classes, the dancer Geoffrey Holder, Warren Miller and his novel
The Cool World
. We talk about our trips to the White Horse Tavern, and Ray speaks of meeting Sam Astrachan and James Baldwin there. “All these people gave us a sense of exposure to the world. We absorbed everything out there, and now we're putting it back as our experience, a new reality.”

I ask if he's seen Louie Melendez lately, and that's a sore subject. Louie stayed with Ray awhile, going in on another big deal that didn't come off, one of the many he was trying to put together in later years, not with drugs but assorted high-risk business projects, like exporting fruit from the Caribbean in winter (a shipment was
ruined by an early frost). These schemes seemed cursed and never quite materialized, and in the midst of a deal that started to fall apart, Louie, who was living on credit and Ray's hospitality, suddenly disappeared. I try on my own to track him down, but finally I'm told by someone from 100th Street that Louie left the country. He's living in Santo Domingo, they say, tending bar.

I think of our discussions about Dostoevsky, and the days when going from 100th Street in East Harlem to the White Horse Tavern in the Village to talk about nihilism seemed like the promise of some new sort of understanding that would make us triumphant and wise.

SIX

Home to the Village

RAISING A STANDARD

Whether I was coming back from Spanish Harlem or Indianapolis, Greenwich Village seemed like home. From the first time I saw it, as a student at Columbia, I was drawn to the place, entranced by it. You could tell the Village was special simply by looking at the map of Manhattan, where the ordered grid of avenues and streets went suddenly crooked, twisting and turning in an unruly whorl. Small lanes looped and stuck out at angles like so many secrets in a neighborhood where the regular compass of rules went defiantly, rebelliously awry.