B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (21 page)

A cell phone company that must have hired a culturally sensitive advertising firm promoted itself with the following corny ode:

Not far from there, a less coherent appeal cries,
HARLEM UNITED. Scatted sided of 306 Lenox Avenue and North General Hospital Need to be Investigate for discrimination with the latinos. I got wistnesses -n- evidence Colón, M.
From a bus crossing 116th Street I saw a sign that said
DANGER
, but I did not go back to that spot to investigate. There are signs to free the Jena Six, signs for a people’s tribunal on the government’s role in Hurricane Katrina, signs to stop the war in Iraq, signs to stop a war from beginning in Iran, signs for a new 9/11 commission. Around Thanksgiving appeared this impassioned plea:

Before Christmas, I saw a sign for a food and clothing drive sponsored by the New Black Panther Party, a benign implementation of the original ten-point party platform, with which even Boy Scouts or the Junior League could agree. A more militant articulation could be found on the sign advertising a boycott that never gained much support:
The Peoples Committee says to BOYCOTT JIMBOS: McDonald’s, Burger King, White Castle Hire Blacks in Harlem. Why not JIMBO’s?

Other signs ask other pressing questions. A document of several
pages was posted to a lamppost on my block. The first page was titled
BLACK INVENTORS… EXTRAORDINARY INVENTIONS
. The subsequent pages contained a list detailing those inventors and their inventions. At the end of this dossier, as if the names were evidence at some tribunal of what used to be called “racial feeling,” there was a plea that was both damning and sorrowful:
WHY ARE THE GRANDSON’S OF THESE PEOPLE NOT EVEN WORKING IN THEIR COUNTRY???

The very last page was either a cryptic answer to the question, or “exhibit A” in a separate charge. It was a poorly reproduced photograph of a lynching; amidst the crowd of spectators, a little white girl in a white frock flanked the charred and mutilated corpse. She was squinting, looking at the body with her head cocked to one side.

WHY DON’T YOU LOOK AT ME?
Thus began a screed posted on 125th Street, the work of an anonymous latter-day pamphleteer:

Those advertisements, indictments, and supplications are rained on or ripped down or covered up or ignored. At the base of the same lampposts someone has stenciled messages in spray-paint. All along Lenox Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Eighth Avenue are reminders of a struggle that elsewhere has gone underground:
WE DEMAND REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY
and
THEY STOLE US THEY SOLD US THEY OWE US. REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY. NOW! NOW!
and
THE HUEY P. NEWTON READER: THAT’S WASSUP!!
and
WE DEMAND UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE AS REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY
and
WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY
and
WHY ARE YOU SCARED OF REPARATIONS?
These near-permanent ciphers have begun to fade, covered with layers of grime. They have the effect of a subliminal message, quickly flashing at the edge of consciousness. You must be looking down to see them, or be otherwise disconnected from your surroundings. They are quick enough to read as you are just about to step into a busy intersection. (
Now! Now!
) But there is no information about how the goal will be achieved or how to join the cause. Some are exhortations, some are demands, and the placement of the signs at various intersections in Harlem suggests that the audience of the exhortation and the target of the demand is the same, or overlapping, or otherwise indeterminate.

Once, I crossed 139th street as an alternate path, walking that way just in order to see the street. It was a street in which I had no
business, and this was obvious as soon as I entered the block. I looked down and saw at the base of yet another lamppost a sign that was not an exhortation or a demand or some part of a ten-point platform, but a message altogether more mysterious. It was also written in spray paint, but the words were scrawled by hand.
LOOK OUT,
this lamppost warned. I did look out, edgy and vigilant, until I reached the end of that block.

But by the time I received their notice, the words at the base of that lamppost had likely fulfilled their mission. The message had already been delivered—from and to emissaries of a realm whose boundaries are not visible by the light of day, or, perhaps, of a realm that exists only in the mind of a solitary spray-can scribbler. My eyes falling upon those words, and my mind later racing to attach some unverifiable meaning—or the eyes of another scanning the same spot without taking notice—all this was an unintended, meaningless consequence.

On Lenox Avenue, someone has taken to sending messages that are more direct but offered in a less permanent medium. It was late summer when I first saw the sidewalk messages, elaborate communications written on the pavement in brightly colored chalk. Every few days, in locations up and down Lenox Avenue, these messages appear.

From the carefully rendered lettering and the artistic flourishes (hearts and flowers and sparkles shining out from certain words), I presumed the writer was an old woman, a retired schoolteacher, continuing her educational mission with these sidewalk signs. New ones appeared on a near-weekly basis:

I would stop and get out my notebook to copy down these messages, adding them to pages of notes from political meetings and transcriptions of signs posted on lampposts and windows. I wished I could reproduce in my lined notebook and with my imprecise hand the careful design of the words, the fanciful swirls and embellishments. I wished that I carried around crayons to reproduce
the chosen color scheme. I would stop and write these messages down whenever I saw them: even late at night or in the rain. At least once when I was copying the sidewalk messages a man stopped, wanting to speak with me. Because I did not pay him any attention, but continued with my task, he stopped to read what was on the sidewalk. Then he said he was going to write it down, too.

Other versions of the messages offered academic lessons, as if the street were a classroom chalkboard. Spelling lessons had letters eliminated, challenging students to fill in the blank; arithmetic problems asked passersby to complete equations. The other messages repeated variations on an unchanging theme:
Life is no joke. Read. Be good. Think better. Respect others. Love yourself. Your life is worth saving. Reality will outlast you
. These were commandments, on a tablet significantly less enduring than stone. They were the kind of thing that might be affixed to a classroom bulletin board in bright paper letters at the beginning of a school year. Here on the street, there was even less opportunity to gauge their effect. And although they were designed to be destroyed, I felt compelled to preserve them. Often when I stopped to write, someone would walk across the words, temporarily obstructing the view.

When I met Sister Doris Littlejohn, she told me she was also known as Pastor Dorcas Lynn, but that her name was now James because she was married, and before James she was married to a man called Cook, until she found out he was a bigamist. I was walking east across 125th Street with my notepad in hand when I paused to write something down. I had reached the row benches in front of the State Office Building at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. In weather fine and foul people gather there to exchange news, talk politics, or stare into the street. I was already seated when I noticed the woman next to me, sitting with a notepad and pen already in use. After I saw the notebook I noticed her feet: they were bare, her toes were cramped, and her toenails were long and dirty. The skin on her feet and shins was covered in a gray dust.