B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (20 page)

In the morning, before the tyranny of daylight has imposed itself, when the dream world and the real world are still entangled, some images from the night’s travels are still available. More often, they slip back toward the dark, toward the blackest of mysteries; perhaps to be visited again in a future passage, perhaps to be altered, perhaps to be lost.

The collision of real world and dream world may tell me something about the choices made by the writers I have loved. When I was young, their words introduced me to Harlem and to writing. Their challenges were not so different from the fevered operation by which I try to record my dreams before they are exiled from the dominion of voluntary recall and rational thought—that
rush to transpose a dream into words, at once preserving the vision and altering its reality. This nowhere, between dream and reality, between what one sees and what one imagines, between what is happening and your attempt to describe it, is the territory we wander while awake. It forms a montage of deferred dreams that couldn’t be transcribed accurately before disappearing into the dark.

Soon after arriving in Harlem, I heard a man giving a talk at the museum on 125th Street. In an aside quite removed from the rest of his subject matter, he exclaimed,
Harlem is a city of dream books!
I didn’t know what he meant, but I was intrigued by the sound of it. Later, when I came to know about the numbers racket, I learned—from my neighbors and from the library—about the books that make symbols of dream imagery and daily happenings and attach them to numbers. One book offered the following “
Harlem Hunches
” for the year 1944:

These numbers are said to be extra lucky because they are bolstered by prophetic power.

You could say: I dreamed I was trapped in a house with a gargantuan wild beast pacing hungrily outside the window, and I raced around that house slamming doors behind me while running through a series of rooms that were arrayed in a circuit. Then I dashed to the top of a winding staircase where there were no more floors to ascend. Or, I dreamed I was in a house where the floor kept falling out from beneath me, caving in without giving way completely, so it seemed as if I was sinking and gaining ground simultaneously. Or, I dreamed I was visiting friends in a house on a dream version of Striver’s Row, when suddenly it started tumbling around so that we were not inside a house after all, but locked within a sphere whose movements we could not control.

Consultants of a dream book would not use those details to venture an interpretation or diagnose an affliction. Instead—by fixing my dream images with certain numbers—they’d invent a diversion to bring temporary release. Upon hearing such scenes a knowledgeable person might say, without hesitation: One. Two. Five.

I GREET MY
neighbors in the street. I come from a place where you speak to people when they cross your path, stranger or friend. I had to learn the particular greeting common to this place, as I have done in other places. On the streets of the Faubourg Tremé in New Orleans, there is a luscious formality: one says
Good morning
and
Good afternoon
and
Good evening
; your salutation is a sundial that tells the time of day. Walking country footpaths in England, I learned to proclaim
All right!
cheerfully, authoritatively even. It is at once a query and a declaration, but there’s never enough of a pause to discover if things are, in fact, all right. Here, I learned a greeting more familiar, almost intimate. You say:
How you feel?
Or,
How you feeling?
This question seeks out the inner state. Said in a certain languorous tone, it leads one to pause on the sidewalk exchanging minor confidences. It is not a question from which you can rush away.

There are other manners of speaking that are not so easy to adopt. For instance, when a person refers to the street toward which they are walking, or the street where they have just been, or
a place where a third party can be found, should any of those streets be located above 110th Street, in Harlem it is customary to make a graceful abbreviation. 133rd Street would be called
’33rd,
125th Street,
’25th,
and so on. This manner is not easy to mimic. A stranger should not try to emulate it.

But a stranger to this place can take comfort in knowing that even the locals were once strangers, too.
Where is your home?
I have often asked. Or,
Where are your people from?
The answer will be someplace in Alabama or Georgia, the Carolinas or Mississippi. From asking such questions I have come to learn the names of small towns throughout the South that I never had cause to know about or think of: Scotland Neck, North Carolina; Denmark, South Carolina; Yazoo City, Mississippi. At first, I hoped that, being from a place not so far away, I’d be met with slightly less suspicion. In the course of such conversations, my tongue slides across the meridian toward those places we call home. The rhythm of speech is a password; shared laughter sweeps you across the threshold.

Crucial facts of my existence raise eyebrows and alarms.
You’re up here all by yourself?
Or,
You’re not married yet?
Or,
You don’t have any children?
And,
You don’t belong to a church?
The questions I ask—
Where is your home? Where are your people from?
—search out origins. The ones people ask me seek to establish my position in the present order. My answers reveal that I am decidedly adrift.

A stranger stops to ask if I require directions. I have lingered too long before stepping into an intersection, or I look uncertain as to where I am headed. The reason is this: I am looking up at a building or down the avenue or scrutinizing a sign that refers to some place no longer there. I shake my head no, insisting I am not lost, or even very far from home. I offer thanks for their kindness, then resume staring or hurry along in imitation of someone with a purpose.

Often enough, my attention is carried off by something I have
not sought. Walking west on 125th Street approaching Seventh Avenue, I hear garbled sounds carried by a bullhorn and wonder if there’s a rally at African Square. I arrive to find an evangelist occupying the median in the shadow of the Hotel Theresa and calling out in Spanish,
¡Jesus viene!
Further up the avenue, I notice that the address of the headquarters for the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, known as Mecca in Harlem, is 2122 Seventh Avenue. The address bears auspicious numerology: when added up, the building’s number equals seven; the street name is seven; and, according to the Five Percent philosophy of Supreme Mathematics, the number seven represents Allah. Perhaps it is just a providential sign confirming the supremacy of the poor righteous teachers, the five percent who know. I saw a street vendor squatting close to the ground beneath a red, black, and green flag on 125th Street. I thought he’d be hawking revolutionary tracts, but he was selling packs of batteries.

There are churches that used to be synagogues, churches that used to be casinos, churches that used to be movie theaters, churches that used to be bank buildings, and churches that used to be houses. Many churches are locked during the week, throwing open their doors on Sundays to parishioners who live in other boroughs and tourists from Europe and Japan. On 134th Street sits a small church built of slate-colored stone. It looks as though it should be in the Welsh countryside, atop some craggy moor, not in Harlem next to an abandoned lot. It has a red door, and its steps are covered in green Astroturf. The doors are usually locked. There is a mural on the side of the church next to the lot, which says
The Open Door,
invoking John’s vision in the Book of Revelation about the establishment of New Jerusalem. (
I saw a door standing open in heaven, and the same voice I had heard before spoke to me with the sound of a mighty trumpet blast. The voice said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things
.”) The mural shows a group of people with Afros standing
in two lines awaiting entry. The doors in the mural are red, just like the ones at the front of the church, but unlike the actual doors of the church these are crowned by the variegated colors of a stained-glass fanlight. A dazzling light draws the faithful through the doors, but the artist offers only a mystical suggestion of what lies beyond. Other than the lettering invoking
The Open Door,
the only writing on the mural is a dedication that begins:
To the memory of
… You cannot read in whose memory this work was made—the facade is crumbling and a great chunk of plaster has fallen off the side of the building. Remnants of that name must be concealed by the thicket of weeds in the abandoned lot below.

I used to walk by that church regularly, imagining what was inside. I pictured an austere, formal interior to match the cool gray stone. When I finally did enter, the occasion was a political meeting. We didn’t use the sanctuary. Its doors were closed, and I pressed my face against a diamond-shaped window but could not see anything in the dark. The preacher let us use a basement meeting area that looked like it normally hosted postworship luncheons: there were folding tables festooned with red plastic party tablecloths, arrangements of fake flowers, and a number of decorative plates lining a display shelf against a side wall. The preacher said the building was a hundred years old but they were going to tear it down because the structure was no longer sound. I have passed there since; they have not started the demolition. A sign advertises the fund-raising activities of a building campaign.

For a long while, two lampposts just in front of the church bore signs whose message related to what the seekers would find beyond the open door.
MAP TO HEAVEN,
the signs read. But the Map to Heaven isn’t a map at all. The shape of heaven is not described by a sphere or a spiral or an island of clouds hovering above the earthly realm. There are no streets, mountains, or rivers. The Map to Heaven is a series of Bible verses. A brief summary is given
for each item of the list, along with a reference to the necessary chapter and verse:
All have Sinned
(Romans 2:23) and
God’s Pay check is Death
(Romans 6:23) and
God loves you
(John 3:16) and
The Gospel saves
(Romans 10:9) and
Receive Christ today
(John 1:12). A passerby in search of salvation, redemption, or deliverance from peril, but faced with the chain around the red double doors, could find guidance from those two signs, like pillars at either side of the strait gate.

Other signs nearby show how to take a day trip to Atlantic City, how to reach your full earning potential as a self-employed travel agent, how to make life easier by engaging the services of dog-walkers, babysitters, or handymen, or how to join a medical study if you are a crack-addicted female. In the summer’s heat I note an increase of signs in search of the disappeared—Alzheimer’s patients and teenage girls—but also invitations to hip-hop rooftop parties and yoga classes in the park. There are signs advertising apartments for rent—lately it seems these are not in Harlem, but in the Bronx. You will see signs that say
Se renta cuartos.
The phrase is at once straightforward and in code: the language and the words tell quite a lot about what kinds of rooms are being rented and to whom. Recently, a photocopied sign with ornate lettering appeared. It publicized an open house and proclaimed an incredible real estate bargain: the price of a town house on historic Striver’s Row had dropped by $400,000. The new, discounted price was $2,550,000.
All are welcome
.