Still Life in Harlem (14 page)

I was thinking about what he said: that whatever has happened here, we did it to ourselves, and that even if we didn't do it all, we certainly had a hand in it.

I was thinking that by moving his family away from the black community, he was responsible—or felt he was.

I was thinking too much, and my thoughts were a cloud. I wasn't concentrating on my driving. I was no longer listening to my father. I heard him, but I didn't know what he was saying. I was getting sleepy, dreaming a little, dozing at the wheel. My head bobbing snapped me awake. It was the only thing that kept my eyes open.

Then out of the corner of my eye I saw it. Great brown eyes bulging in panic. A moment of gray caught in the headlights.

I heard the scream before I heard the impact, didn't know the scream was my own. The scream, more like a grunt, came after the thud, came after my life flashed before my eyes, not as a prelude to death but in answer to my father's unlikely question. I didn't realize I had heard it, but at the very moment we were slamming into a deer as it tried to cross the highway, my father was asking me: “Do you ever regret the life you've lived?”

 

 

Personne n'a le droit d'être heureux tout seul.

No one has the right to be happy all by himself.

—Raoul Follereau

 

 

To come home after a long time away is to feel the heaviness of a place's history, the weight of time that has passed, of the yesterdays you have missed. Even if the hands don't tremble, even if the knees don't weaken, there is a certain anticipation that feels a little like dread, a little like relief, and that stokes the imagination. Trepidation mingles with delight. A fire built of questions burns beneath your skin. Nostalgia moistens the eye, quickens the heart. There is triumph and there is doubt, and a vague sense of sorrow shapes your smiles as you make your way back home. Slowly—slowly the significance sinks in.

The significance has as much to do with the setting as it does with the actual return, for here suddenly before you is this place that is indeed home—or used to be—but that now is foreign ground. You know it, but you don't. It has made you, shaped you, gone with you from here to there, this place called home, fueled your dreams, warmed your thoughts. Wherever you roamed, you carried home inside, the way a warrior off to battle carries home and family and friends. But when you left it, you really left it. You left it all behind. You were not here when yesterday became today. You were not here to know it.

To be part of a place—any place—and to know it, you have to be there. As Herbert Washington says, you have to see the seasons change.

Here beside you now stands the sibling whose pulse beats in unison with your own, whose blood is similar to the blood that fills your heart, whose past is very much
your
past but whose history now is not your own. This avenue we travel is not a two-way street. Its single track leads instead to a fork in the road, which leads to a fork in the road, which leads to yet another fork. Where once there might have been one story, two histories and more diverge.

The markings are somewhat the same. The influences that frame your place in the world are similar to those that shape the world of the ones who stayed. That much is easy to see, and if you walk backward along your path you will find where your road meets these other roads; retrace further, and you will find the starting point. It is this place, the starting point, that once was home, and would be still if you had stayed, but that you don't know anymore—no, not fully—and that doesn't know you.

We pretend. We hope. We dream. No matter. It is no longer home.

And yet many many things are as familiar as if they were yesterday, so familiar they seem right; so familiar they seem good.

These are what we take along when we leave a place. They soften the smiles of strangers in strange lands; they make tolerable their ways. They warm the cold nights. These are the things that remind us of home and how it all used to be here. And these are the things that one day call us back. And when at last we see them once more, that's how we know we have come home again.

My memory is crowded with these markers of Harlem, these things I have done without, that I once turned my back on, that I have missed without realizing. They are what I remember from a time long ago when being black seemed a very fine way to be. It seemed, in fact, when I watched my father, that being black was indeed a lot of fun. It was hard work; it has always been hard work, but the task at hand gave us something to rally around, to close ranks against. It made the music louder. It made the laughter richer. There was nothing wrong then with living in a black neighborhood. Anyway, we had no choice. And anyway, we kept the neighborhoods mostly safe. And anyway, that's how I remember it. But then again, I left a long time ago, and I was very young.

I remember, I remember, I remember.

When I walk the streets of Harlem now, having moved, in a way, back home, I am flooded with memories of my youth, as if I were an old man. That is one of the great powers of place: to get you thinking, to get you feeling.

There are the obvious things, of course: friends not quite forgotten and food that has been replaced with more elegant fare but that now seems to taste even better than I recall, better after a few nights, I guess, in memory's cooler. I never knew how much I loved sweet potato pie until I came to live in Harlem, or how much I missed black-eyed peas and candied yams. We ate these things often when I was a kid, but we ate them, I thought, because we had to, because we were not the wealthiest folks on the block and eating a mountain of beans each week or two tons of collard greens was how to stretch the money. Nowadays, when I don't feel like cooking, I often wander over to Sylvia's on Lenox Avenue to stuff myself with what have become in my mind the delicacies of my youth. They don't do them as well there as Michael Simms's mother did them and probably still does them, but they remind me, as they are supposed to do, of what I have been missing. They remind me that I have been away and that I have come home.

All of a sudden nostalgia fills the blank spots in a memory, and no matter how good that food and those days really were, now of course everything
then
seems somehow better than it was or more than it was—or even worse than it was, which in a nostalgic sense is still better. You are an old man remembering when, wondering where the good old days have gone.

You come out of Sylvia's with a belly full of nostalgia. You stand on a street corner and everything seems familiar. You're home at last. The realization brings a satisfied smile.

But something is not quite right. Something is so familiar it is disturbing, and that smile of recognition fades away.

There is something about the way American black men walk that marks them in the world—not all, but many. They move with a certain swagger, as if to be seen, as if to make known a presence: a sexiness, a strength, a fearlessness. I myself walk with this same show-offy walk; I don't think I do it consciously, but it must come from the same place in my being, for it speaks the same meaning:
Look at me, see me; I am here.
When I see other black men walk, I see myself.

And there is something about the music that pours from the windows of Harlem, fills the air, booms from the big boxes on street corners and from passing cars. It is not the same music I grew up with, not the music my father's age would want, but in a way his music and my music and this music are very much the same music. At times it has been joyful and sad, by turns proud and prayerful, now angry; all of it music that attempts to soothe a soul in anguish. And if the music has changed, it is because the souls themselves have changed, responding, as does the walk, as does the rich rich laughter, the loud talk, as do the backs that still bend and the tired black faces that have not changed much since I was young and probably even since my father was a boy, responding to a situation that likewise has not changed. And when you stand on a Harlem street corner, with your tummy filled with nostalgia, your eyes smiling remembrance and recognition, then you will see how much of this place has remained the same, how after all this time so much is so very familiar—too much, in fact—that it seems as if time has stood still.

While this may make home feel at first like home and seem all the more recognizable, it underscores—for me at least—how histories have diverged, even while remaining entwined, and how home has become an unfamiliar place.

It is no longer the world I know, not the life I now have gotten used to. It is not a place I would care to remain. It is far too bleak now.

As of the very day I moved into Harlem, out of a population of over 250 million Americans there were 31 million blacks who by statistical definition were that day and are still seven times more likely than whites in America to die by homicide, who are three times more likely to contract AIDS, who are twice as likely to live in central cities and four times more likely to be born out of wedlock. Compared to white Americans, blacks are half as likely to have college degrees and three times more likely to live in poverty, three times more likely to be unemployed, seven times more likely to serve time in prison. One out of every three black men in his twenties is in jail. As much as we hate to admit it and try to skirt the manifestly obvious, skin color counts for much in this country, and despite what I believed as a child, despite what I still naively hope, that I could be and can be anyone I choose to be, achieve anything I want badly enough, and live any life I very much desire, being black is defined by certain statistical realities and by the narrower realm of possibilities.

The median worth of black households in America on that day was $4,169; of white households, $43,279.

This is not an average. This is to say that half the white households in America have a net worth of over forty thousand dollars, and that half the black households in this country are worth less than four thousand.

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong. Things are definitely not as they ought to be, not what they could be.

Being black in America has always been a less than easy task. Although I myself have been extremely lucky, for some, perhaps for many or even most, being black never seems to get any easier. In many ways it has never been harder.

“That,” said my friend Wilson Clark, “is because this is a different America than the one that pretends to believe in fairness and equality. This is the America that we in the outer world know nothing about, pretending even that it doesn't exist and that if it does exist, it exists the same way the prison world does: because of the poor choices of the inmates—because of something they did. They could, the thinking goes, have been anything they wanted, lived any life they wanted, but this life in one way or another is what they chose.”

Wilson is right. People have often asked me why the people who live in Harlem, if life is as bad here as it seems, don't just move away from here—as if they could, as if they had someplace else to go, as if for most people in Harlem living here has been a choice.

For some people it
is
a choice. For me these days, and for Wilson Clark, who came, he said, driven here by that woman with the baby stroller on the A train. These were not his words, of course. He never saw her. He had not been on the subway with me that summer day, but when I told him how she looked, he knew without another word the panic that widened her eyes. He had seen it already a thousand times, he said, and that's why he had come to Harlem: to get away from it.

“To escape,” he said. “To escape that look in white folks' eyes.”

Like Olivia Maxwell in Chicago, and like myself, I guess, though I never would have suspected it beforehand, Wilson Clark had fallen under the spell of Harlem and into the trap.

“I didn't realize it when I came,” he said. “I was just so thrilled to be coming here and then to finally get here. Man, that's all I thought I needed was to get here. But now I know that when I let that look—
you
know that look—when I let that look finally get to me, drive me almost out of my mind, when I let that look force me to come to live in Harlem, now I know I was letting the white folks win. I was giving up the game. And I was letting my grandfather down.”

We were sitting in a dark bar on 125th Street, just off the corner of Morningside Drive. From where we sat, even if we had sat by the window or if we had been outside, we couldn't see it—and if you didn't know it already, you wouldn't know it from where we were—but we were sitting in the shadow of Columbia University.

If you walk a little farther down Morningside you will come to a park that starts in the flats but then climbs up a towering hill. This park, this hill, is the beginning of a line that separates two worlds. At the top of this hill sits one of the mainstays of the one world, the Columbia University complex, which, along with the other institutions that buttress and buffer it—Barnard College, Teachers College, Jewish Theological Seminary—remains a constant reminder of the privilege and opportunity the one world dangles before but then ultimately denies this other world. Columbia University is in Harlem, on its westernmost edge but undeniably clustered well within the confines of the neighborhood.

Along this corridor, from 114th to 120th Streets, the two worlds come together in the same way that cultures meet in those buffer zones that separate border towns: softly, the one always vaguely aware of the other and yet in a way completely oblivious, for life goes on and the twain rarely meet; so close and yet so far apart they might as well be on different planets, so close that the spires of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, which sits high atop this hill, can be seen from the flatlands below wherever there is a gap in the tall buildings.

It is easy enough to walk there, into that world, to sit across from the cathedral and have a coffee or a pastry in the Hungarian café on Amsterdam Avenue, easy enough to pass through the heart of Columbia's campus and cross over from Amsterdam to Broadway, out of what seems the delirium and despair of Harlem, whose glory days have clearly passed, and into a world that is all hope and opportunity and pointed toward the future, a world linked as if by some magical pipeline to the City of Gold, the rest of Manhattan and the rest of the world, a pipeline that clearly doesn't open onto the rest of Harlem.