Still Life in Harlem (28 page)

I could turn my back, of course, could indeed refuse to be black, could even refuse to care and just go back to bed, flee once more to the suburbs or go back to the south of France, but that would be too easy. And perhaps in time that is what I will do: take my rightful place in the world of all men and women and settle for nothing but that which speaks to my own individual soul, and win the battle fought by my father and by Eliot Winston's grandfather and by the countless nameless black men and women. Perhaps in time I can indeed refuse to be black, refuse to give blackness more relevance than it deserves, refuse to see myself in such narrow terms, and refuse to let others decide for me who I am and the course of my actions. Perhaps in time the things done by other black men will cast no shadow onto me and no reflection and I will not see myself in what they do.

One day, perhaps, but not this night. This night I am here. This night I am black and I am in Harlem and I have no choice but to be in this moment and make of it what I can. I have to be who I am, who I was that night, split in two once more and torn between what I want to do and what I ought to do, and that night I could wait no longer for the police or anyone else to come.

Quickly, then, I slid into my jeans and slipped a T-shirt over my head. I put on my socks and shoes and I went downstairs.

 

 

 

I ran into Herbert Washington a few days later. He was smiling that old-man smile of his, which turned into a big grin when I told him about the other evening and how my heart had quietly thumped as I went down to the street. I had surprised myself. I had been a little nervous but unafraid. Still, I had taken my time getting dressed, hoping that by the time I reached the street the quarreling couple would have left. When I arrived, they were still there. I crossed the street slowly and approached them.

“You should have been shaking like crazy. I would have been,” Herbert said. “Too many people these days got guns. Too many people don't mind using them.”

That same thought had crossed my mind more than twice as I left the apartment, went down the stairs and out into the street. Certainly I wanted to be a hero; it is how I see myself. I was in no mood, however, for heroics.

“What do you want then?” the man said. He barked when he spoke. His voice, high-pitched and weak, snapped sharply.

“You want a piece of this,” he said, meaning the woman, “or you want a piece of me?”

What I wanted I could not express. What I wanted, I was not sure myself. I wanted to be back in bed, that much I did know. I wanted the clock turned back, wanted not to have been disturbed from my sleep. I would have known nothing, would have had to make no decisions, take no action. Once awakened, I had to decide who I was, who I wanted to be, who I was going to be.

“I don't want a piece of anything,” I said. “I just want to be left alone.”

“What you doing here then? What you want? What you looking at?”

“I'm just looking at you,” I said.

Everything I did, I did deliberately. I was trying to figure out what to do. I spoke slowly and softly. I separated each sentence by a pause that seemed minutes long.

“I'm just watching you, just watching what you do. I want to know what you look like. I want to remember your face.”

“Get on away from here,” he shouted. “Ain't nobody messing with you.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “You know how it is.”

He was softening, showing a touch of fear. He could see that I was not going away. Although I couldn't see if he had a gun, he would have at least shown it by now if he did have one. Nonetheless, I stood behind a car. He had backed away from the woman, and all of his attention was on me now. I stayed in the street and used the car as my shield. He took a step in my direction.

“What are you: brave?”

“Not me,” I said. “I'm not going to do anything to you. I'm not even going to try. I just want to be here while you do what you do. I want to witness it. That's all I can do. I want to see if you're as pathetic as you look, so pathetic you don't care about anything. I want to know if you can keep it up with somebody looking on. I want you to see the disgust in my face. I want to remind myself and I want to remind you that there's nothing about you that I want to be like, and nobody else wants to be like you either. I already know it, but I want you to know it too.”

Herbert Washington grinned broadly, his milky eyes wide open, his head tossed back a little. He had about him that know-everything aspect of an old man, as if he knew everything before I said anything—and more than that, as if he had somehow been the cause of it all.

“You said all that?” In his voice was a mixture of amazement and admiration. “You must be crazy.”

“Yeah, I must be,” I said. “But what would you expect me to do: pretend I didn't see what was going on, toss my hands up, and give up on them both just like that?”

“That's what I would have done,” he said. “That's what most people would have done.”

“Yeah, well.” I couldn't think of anything else to say.

“Then what happened? What did he say next?”

“The usual,” I said. “He threatened to kill me. He said if he ever saw me again he was going to pop me.”

He had wanted to pop me right then, he had said.

“If I'd be strapped I would have popped you by now,” he shouted. He was moving on down the road now, the woman moving right along with him. He was screaming and cussing all the while, now at me, now and again at the woman. I followed along until they had stumbled down to 130th Street and over to Amsterdam Avenue. Beneath the bright lights on that corner, they calmed down. He was still scowling at me, but he put his arm around the woman's waist and held her up. She was holding on with both arms. He reached out his left hand and pointed down into the street. A gypsy cab stopped; the man and the woman fell inside and shut the door.

“I'm going to remember you,” he said. “I better not ever see your ass around here. If I see you again, I'm going to kill you.”

“And then what? And then what?” Herbert said. He was like a child caught in the twists of a good bedtime story.

“Well,” I said. “I guess I'm still here.”

He smiled and settled back against the wall of his building.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you are.”

He looked up and down the avenue. Then he looked at me with such expectation that I knew it was my turn to speak.

“Are you going to tell me now?” I asked.

“Tell you what?” Now he was nonchalant.

“You know. You said you would tell me what I needed to know about Harlem, what's wrong, what's right. You said you would tell me all the answers.”

“I did?”

“You did,” I said. “You said you would tell me what I needed to know.”

“Ach!” he said with a broad slow wave of his arm. “You don't need me to tell you anything; you already know it.”

I scanned head and heart to see what he meant, what I might possibly have known or could have learned. All I could think of at that moment was a man I met one time on a train to Chicago. He too had lived in Harlem and had gotten out—escaped, he said, through hard work and perseverance. He got into the real estate business, made a lot of money, bought low, sold high, and moved out of Harlem.

“All the time I lived there,” he said, “I never once believed I would be trapped there. I never believed that Harlem was all there was to life, and I wanted a piece of what was out there in the great wide world. Just because I'm black does not mean I'm supposed to be satisfied. It's a white man's country, a white man's world only if we allow it to be.”

There was another man who once said that although he lived in the ghetto, the ghetto did not live in him. It is a line I have heard many times before and is, I imagine, a way of saying that you can overcome physical circumstance with a state of mind. I suppose that's true, but I wonder sometimes how you can separate where you've been from where you are from where you're headed. I'm not sure you should even want to.

Once again I ask myself if I ever really left Harlem and now have been trying to get back. Or was I simply never able to leave in the first place?

There is, I know for sure now, no way out. Once you have experienced anything so deeply, there can be no going back, no forgetting, no way to live without its being inside you. You can leave it, but you can never get away. You may rise above the ghetto. You may tell yourself—and probably should—that you live in it but are not of it, but although attitude is important, I know it is not the only thing. You cannot ignore the bars and walls of your personal prisons. Otherwise there would be nothing to rise above, nothing to overcome.

Nor can you live within the walls of any culture and not be a product of that culture, unless you live encased completely in a cocoon. How can you deny the influence of the world around you, deny that it affects you or that it in some way shapes you? How can you separate who you have become from the forces that made you, even as the world around you attempts to reduce you to the stereotype of your smaller world and treat you accordingly?

In a sense, then, we carry Harlem the way we carry our blackness. There is no escaping either one. The ghetto lies within.

Ralph Ellison once said that Harlem has a way of expanding, that it goes where black folks go. He was not talking only about the physical boundaries of place. He lived technically in Washington Heights, the next neighborhood up from here, but as many did then and still do, he called it Harlem because there were so many black people there. Wherever sufficient numbers of blacks gather to live, there Harlem is. Perhaps it is Harlem with only two, perhaps with only one.

I have lived in Harlem, I guess, since I was a little boy.

*   *   *

On the street one day I spoke to the man from the apartment across the way. He had stopped me to bum a cigarette and we started talking about the noisiness of the neighborhood. I told him about a couple across the little courtyard from me, told him about the drunken arguments, and laughed at how each fight ends with the man getting thrown out.

“Always, always,” I said. “Then he's back for more the next time.”

I recognized him then even before he said anything. He lowered his eyes and was embarrassed.

“That would be me,” he said.

We chatted a few minutes more about the weather and about baseball, and finally I could pretend to ignore his secret no more and I asked him.

“You guys get drunk every weekend night. You spend hours and hours hollering at each other. It's a wonder you haven't killed her yet.”

“Or that she hasn't killed me,” he said.

“Every time she throws you out.”

He nodded.

“Every time you come back.”

He nodded, just as gravely, but there was a tiny smile creeping into his lips.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you keep coming back?”

He almost laughed, but the smile disappeared and he was very serious.

“Because I love her,” he said. “We're in this thing, and we're going to stay in this thing until we figure it out. I guess you could say we're trapped, prisoners of love, I suppose.”

Now he laughed. He tossed his head back and he laughed and he laughed and he laughed. I laughed along with him until he turned away and walked down the street to try to bum from someone else the cigarette I did not have.

I watched him go. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction, feeling unbearably light-headed and strangely at peace.

 

—R
ENÉ
D
ESCARTES

ALSO BY EDDY L. HARRIS

Mississippi Solo

Native Stranger

South of Haunted Dreams

The author of four critically acclaimed books,
Mississippi Solo, Native Stranger, South of Haunted Dreams,
and
Still Life in Harlem,
E
DDY
L. H
ARRIS
has generated the kind of attention and praise that attends the rise of only the finest talents. As America's premier African-American memoirist and travel writer, he has written with emotional depth and courage about the Mississippi River, Africa, the South, and Harlem respectively in these books. A graduate of Stanford University, he also studied in London and has been a screenwriter and journalist. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.