Still Life in Harlem (18 page)

“They get crazy when they get trapped like that,” the man said.

My father trembled a little and frowned.

Now suddenly I heard the question for the first time. I don't know why—maybe the fragility of life suddenly made all too clear, maybe the thought of being trapped myself, I who so far had been so free, I believed, and knowing how crazy I would get if I were ever similarly trapped—don't know why it hit me then, but it did.

I realized now that I had heard it as we were hitting the deer. I realized too that in the instant of the accident I had seen selected glimpses of my life flashing in front of me.

These flashes came not accompanying death, as myth says they will. They came as part of the question I was only now conscious of having heard. They came as part of the answer.

From the flashes you start to grab randomly, close events first, then ones from farther away. You start to play silly scenarios in your head, a game of what-ifs. What if we had gotten a hotel in Columbus and had slept away the rest of this night? What if we had been driving a little faster? A little slower? What if we had been five miles—or more—from the nearest town instead of five minutes?

What if when I was ten years old I hadn't kicked Donna Quirk in the thigh for ripping up a paper airplane I had just made; what if I hadn't gotten into so much trouble that day? She was a white girl. It was a mostly white school. What if the trouble had been worse?

What if I had married my college sweetheart? She was a white girl. What if her family hadn't raised such a ruckus?

So many ways I could have avoided being on that road that night. So many little avenues, twists, and turnings that had put me there. So many reasons in fact that I had to be there—if only to hear my father's stories one more time. So many reasons for why Harlem, and why now.

And so many ways the accident could have been a disaster.

If I had never realized it before, if I never think the same way again, I knew all of a sudden that I had been blessed with a charmed life. There have been a multitude of missteps and mistakes, each one followed, it very often seems, by a miracle. I have walked a balancing act that leaves my fearless brother nervous and amazed. I have sinned and I have grieved for things I've done and I have wept at the loss of dear friends. Many things I wish I had never done, many things I wish I could do over. But after all the sorrows and all the triumphs, there is no one else or no way else I would rather be. And not a thing, nothing in this world, would I trade away for being in the car that night with my dear father.

To him who has heard me cuss only once before, and now twice, I said, “Hell no, Pop. I do
not
regret the life I have lived.”

(But I should have said instead: I do not regret the life that you have given me.)

He looked at me with that strange expression he sometimes gets, as if he had no idea what I was talking about. In the excitement of a few perilous moments, it seems he had forgotten already that he had asked anything at all—or was pretending to. I, on the other hand, could not forget. The question was hot on my mind the rest of the night and the rest of that early morning, the rest of that day and every day in fact thereafter, always when I walked the streets of Harlem, and anytime I let my memory drift over the tour of duty I had done there.

The question and the answer were on my mind still two years later, when on another late night and early morning I looked from the window of my apartment and saw in the street below a man trying to beat submission into a woman.

It was Johnny Cannon all over again. We haven't come very far at all.

All this time I thought I had escaped, as if escape were ever possible, as if you can climb out of your skin, make a decision, and have it so. You believe somehow that by simply wanting a thing and by thinking a thing you can therefore have the thing. And then you wonder why others have not and cannot make the same decision, and why they cannot have the same things.

I
got out; why can't they?

Why can't they?

Wait a second, wait a second!

Did I just say that?

I got out; why can't they?

There! That feeling was upon me that I now call the Pig Foot Mary twinge, only this time it was no twinge. This time it was a sharp stabbing pain, as if someone were kicking me hard in the ribs.

I was listening still to Antonio Morales as he led the way to Malcolm X and 114th. “Yeah,” he was saying. “We are some bad men.” But instead I heard myself speaking.
I got out; why can't they?

I sounded like an ex-friend of mine who has said to me many times: “I did it. Why can't they?” She had not been talking about escaping from Harlem, but she might easily have been—if she had been black—and I sounded just like her.

Worse, though: I thought I sounded too much like the old lady in Cleveland who, having read my previous book, wrote me this letter:

I am a white woman, 70 years of age. I read your book to try & understand your race better. I was raised in the north but spent 2½ yrs in the deep south with my husband during W.W.II. He was in the service. I was Catholic & lived (room and board) with many families & never had a problem. I didn't try to
convert
anyone. To be accepted by
any group,
social etc you must be accepted first & conform … I live in an integrated neighborhood, been here 25 yrs. The blacks move here & bring the crime with them. An apartment at the corner sells out every three years & starts over again. Apts are destroyed, garbage in yard, kids out at all hours, loud music, drug dealing, drinking. Yes, we all know they (blacks) are in the neighborhood. You can see & hear them day and nite. Do I speak to them—NO. Why should I. I don't want to know this kind of inconsiderate neighbor who lowers property values. Why do blacks think we have to accept them, just because you're black. Your race has to
learn
to obey rules of society to be seen as civilized. Sure we fear you because you commit so many crimes & especially crimes against each other. Blacks are not safe in black neighborhoods. Why don't they improve a neighborhood instead of destroying it. The Blacks destroy their own back yard. Housing projects have been built & destroyed by themselves. They complain of garbage in yards—it's their own, not mine. Time & again the govt has tried to help. You must help yourselves. I am Irish & married an Italian when an Italian was one step above a nigger (50 yrs ago). I was considered a pig shit Irish (there were lace curtain Irish also). My husband was a dirty Guinea or dago. We raised 3 kids,
worked hard,
moved into neighborhoods, keep our property up, raised our kids to
respect
church, school & neighbors' rights & were always accepted because we were
assets
to the community
not liabilities.
People living today never owned slaves. Some today work as hard as slaves to survive. We still have “white trash” & hillbilly persons but many have worked hard & own homes & have moved up. There are others who will always remain white trash & feel sorry for themselves. The mines (coal) closed 50 years ago & they stay on welfare waiting for the mine to reopen. Public education is available to
all.
All you have to do is use it. I'm sure you received government loans for your education. It is available to all in need
if
you have maintained your grades. When my daughter planned on going to college (I & her father are 11 grade educated) she was required by law to have a foreign language, algebra, chemistry etc. We have lowered the standards for college entrance for blacks to be eligible. We have lowered the standards for high school graduation so more blacks can get a diploma. Welfare (up to now) has been expanded by President Johnson to fight the war on poverty. It has only been abused.
Everyone
has to work to better themselves, it can't be gotten by just
demanding
it. You cannot
demand
respect either—you earn it. I got your book at the library, so you make no money on me. If you've read this far maybe you will see the other side of how white people feel. Your people have been here longer than mine. You want it
all your way
instead of integrating into society. You want to take over. A civil war will again be fought in this country.

No name or address.

You might come & shoot me.

I might go and shoot her. Hmm. Sometimes I think that might not be a bad idea.

I used to laugh at this old bird. I used to think she was funny. My two years in Harlem have erased any amusement I might have found in her. Now I can see in how many ways she and women like her perpetuate a bad situation that is not getting any better. And it will get no better as long as she refuses to recognize and accept, as does my ex-friend, as I myself sometimes do when I am being stupid and cannot see, black reality for what it is.

The white woman in Cleveland, the ex-friend, the many many others who cannot see the limitations that exist, or refuse to believe them, refuse to believe
in
them, refuse to let them alter a sacred point of view: we have been, all of us, blinded by our resistance to other people's realities, perhaps even to reality itself.

Because I am not black, the white woman in Cleveland might have said, I cannot know black folks, cannot know what black folks know, nor can I feel what black folks must feel. Therefore I am lost.

Instead, refusing to put herself in someone else's shoes for a moment—and I mean as far into those shoes as she can squeeze herself—she can only see the result of the crime, the result of the shame, as when you walk down the street I live and see the burned-out car, the gutted abandoned buildings, the children pushed aside and ignored; she cannot see the shame itself. She cannot see that perhaps there is a reason behind it all. She cannot see that there is a difference between her life and the lives of her black neighbors. She cannot see that there is a difference between her life and Harlem. Nor can the woman who used to be my friend.

“I did it,” she has often said—the same as I just said it. “Why can't those people?”

She had gotten pregnant when she was nineteen. She got married, she got divorced, she finished college, she found herself a decent job. Now she points a finger at herself.

“Why can't they do what I have done?” she argues. “Why don't they have enough initiative to break the cycle, to get off their rear ends and educate themselves, get good jobs, and take care of their children? Why can't the men stop selling drugs and stop shooting each other?”

I have asked her in reply, as calmly as I can, for I am prone to shrieking these days when white people start talking like white people: “What if they have no choice?”

“But there is always a choice!” she says.

You hear it all the time, from well-intentioned folk and from fools: “Those people have to take responsibility for what they do.”

And she is right. At the same time she cannot see the safety net that was there to catch her when she fell: the fact that a man was there ready to marry her, that a job was waiting for him, that there was the support of two families—hers and his—in the wings just in case. And the biggest safety net of all: hope, based on the past. Without hope, there is nothing.

“I did it,” she has said to me too many times. “Why can't they?”

She thinks she did it all on her own, and she cannot see how the hand of history has stacked the deck in her favor.

In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke a letter in which Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Newton could see that his achievements were built on the foundational work of the many thinkers who had preceded him.

If we, like Newton, can applaud this notion that beneath the feet of every genius there are generations of thought upon which he stands, that there is a foundation of brick and wood and stone beneath every solid building, that behind every story of success there is a legion of forces that have made success possible, why can we not see just as clearly the pyramid of pain?

The white barber refusing to cut a black child's hair.

An old woman in Cleveland.

How many more of us see the isolated events of our lives as just that: isolated? We do not care to see, most of us, how the kind of disadvantage and atrophy that exist here in Harlem and wherever there is pain and problem do not just happen overnight. This kind of despair is generation upon generation in the making. The children born into it inherit more than a condition; they inherit a way of life, a way of living, a way of being. You can see the results of it every day in this neighborhood.

Most people outside the neighborhood do not care at all about this neighborhood nor about its sister-hoods. Even the ones who do care, do not care enough. Mostly we on the outside simply refuse any connection between this hood and our own, between these ills and ours. We refuse even to see the links in the chain, refuse to see the origins of this suffering, refuse to acknowledge our complicity in the perpetuation of it. We dodge the guilt we ought to feel and ignore the necessary steps that would help to end the suffering.

That's just the way it is, or the world wouldn't be the way it is.

What was done a long time ago has continuing and tremendous effect on the way things are today. What we do today and what we don't do today will take us a long way on the path toward heaven or hell.

Perhaps it takes a moment's reflection.

“Take away all of your kid's choices,” I once said to the ex-friend. “All of them. Take away all possibilities and remove all hope. How do you think that kid will do?”

She replied without hesitation: “He'll do well in school, he'll work hard, he'll pull himself up.”

She sounds an awful lot like that old white woman in Cleveland.

Though in truth I do not know what she sounds like, this woman with no name or address, I could hear her voice. Her voice was the voice that day of Antonio Morales.