Harlem Redux (5 page)
Authors: Persia Walker
“Is this where she did it?”
She nodded. “Mr. Jameson had a new mattress brought in.” She gave a little shudder and hugged herself. Her gaze went to the base of the windowsill. “Sometimes … sometimes I ask the Lord why I had to be the one to find her. But I suppose it was better me than someone who didn’t love her. I was there when she came into the world. It was only right that I be there when she left it.”
Bending down, David brushed his fingertips over the new counterpane. A pale ivory, it would have pleased Lilian. He turned to Annie. “Tell me about it, about how it was when you found her.”
Annie paused, then said: “She suffered a bad death, Mr. David, a real bad death. They say you shouldn’t never touch nothing, so I left the knife right there on the bed where it was, but I did close her eyes. And I laid a blanket over her. Then I called the police. And sat down in the room to keep that last wait with her. I thought about all the years gone by and the thousands of kind things Miss Lilian done for me. I’da never imagined her going like that. She was such a lovely young woman, so very sweet. She was a lady, a real fine lady.”
David’s gaze went again to the photos. “That, she was ...”
“Them cops sure took their sweet time coming. It was just the death of another colored woman to them. They didn’t know nothing about how wonderful Miss Lilian was. And they wouldna cared. Me, I didn’t mind the wait. I didn’t like seeing her that way, but I knew it was likely the last time I’d see her at all.”
“The funeral, was it nice?”
“Oh, yeah.” She smiled. “It was sumptin’ to see. And so many people showed up, so many. They had to close the doors to Saint Philip’s to keep the peace. But that was to be expected. Seeing as how your family is so known and all, that was just to be expected.”
“I wonder ... how many of those people actually cared about her.”
She was thoughtful. “You know how people can be, Mr. David. You know how they can be. Lotsa folks who didn’t have no time for her when she was sick, and lotsa others who never knowed her—well, they all just had to come ... just had to come an’ see when that sweet child died.”
David paused on his doorstep, pulled his hat down lower, and wrapped his coat tighter. He would take a walk. To stretch his legs. To see how Harlem had changed. And to forget what Annie had told him.
A lot’s done happened since you been gone.
He shuddered and forced his thoughts in another direction. His gaze traveled up and down the street, registering the familiar homes of his neighbors. After a minute, he turned up his collar, went down the front steps, and started toward Seventh Avenue.
It was a curious sensation to be back. There was, above all, a sense of the surreal; that sense, once more, of time having stood still. The trees appeared a mite bigger, but nothing else on the block had changed. It was still serene and immaculate. No matter the weather or the light, the trim, neat houses of Strivers’ Row looked regal and well-to-do. As they should. After all, they were designed for the affluent. That the homes should land in the hands of blacks was a development that David H. King Jr., the original builder, had probably never foreseen.
When in 1891 King commissioned New York star architect Stanford White to design the series of houses along the north side of 139th Street, King envisioned homes for wealthy white families. At first, that’s what they were, homes for white millionaires, such as the first Randolph Hearst. But a depression hit Harlem’s inflated real estate market in 1904 and opened the way to black residency. By 1920, a good number of New York’s most prominent blacks—the Rev. Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., James C. Thomas, Charles W. Anderson, and others—had moved to Harlem. Already by 1914, even modestly affluent blacks could afford to buy Harlem real estate. By 1917, white brokers were begging for white investor interest in Harlem by advertising how cheap property had become. And by 1920, superb properties such as the King Model Houses had begun to pass into the hands of black professionals. As black families moved in, white ones moved out. The houses along what would be known as “Strivers’ Row” went for a song.
“A twelve-room house. Fit for a king. For nine thousand dollars,” Augustus beamed in announcing his purchase. “Nine thousand dollars. It was worth it.”
The McKays were the sixth family to arrive. Dentist Charles H. Roberts and Dr. Louis T. Wright, Harlem Hospital’s first black doctor and later its chief of surgery, soon became the McKays’ neighbors. Then there was Vertner W. Tandy, widely recognized as the first black architect to be licensed in New York State, and Lieutenant Samuel J. Battle, Manhattan’s first black police lieutenant. Eventually, Strivers’ Row would become a popular address for black theatrical stars: composer Eubie Blake, orchestra leaders Fletcher Henderson and Noble Sissle.
Back courtyards, gardens, and fountains connected by an interior alleyway ran the length of the block. The houses on the north side of 139th Street, including the McKay house, were neo-Renaissance, made of thin, reddish Roman brick. The pale cream-colored houses running along the south side were neo-Georgian. All displayed the same spare but expert use of classical details. All were set back from the pavement to emphasize privacy. And all had rear entrances that kept the unsightly business of housekeeping where it belonged—out of sight.
The residents of Strivers’ Row were a proud lot. They strove for excellence; hence the street’s nickname. They kept their trees neatly tended and their hedges closely clipped. Entrance railings and balustrades were painted, windows and front steps washed, brass doorknobs and knockers polished.
Over time, the Row had become a tiny oasis of spacious ease and prosperity surrounded by a desert of danger, despair, and decay. When David stepped around the corner of 139th Street and Seventh Avenue, he entered a world of poverty, of rotting garbage and ragged children. The juxtaposition of rich and poor never failed to give him a jolt.
Seventh Avenue, that broad thoroughfare that slashes through the heart of Harlem, was well-peopled even that cold evening. Tall trees with thick trunks spread their gnarled branches over the wide dark street. Beige and brick-brown tenement buildings, four and five stories tall, rose up on either side, like mammoth shadows in the evening light.
He headed downtown, taking long, even strides, doing his best to appear at ease. He walked neither quickly nor slowly. His expression was neither curious nor indifferent. His eyes examined everything but dwelled on nothing. He saw a world of cracked pavements and battered trash cans. He passed rows of dilapidated buildings and he knew, without having to enter them, what they looked like inside: Dark, dirty hallways. Broken windows. Rusted pipes. No heat. No hot water. Rats and roaches, ticks and water bugs. Many of the folks who lived in those buildings slept ten to a room.
Most of black Harlem’s residents had originally fled Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and other points south, seeking jobs and safety from the pervasive threat of the lynch man’s noose. They’d come north, dreaming of the Promised Land, and ended up living a nightmare. Some people could barely afford “hot beds,” mattresses they switched off with other shift workers. Many couldn’t even find jobs. Harlem’s biggest department stores depended on blacks as customers but refused to consider them for hire.
Seeing the myriad ebony, brown, sepia, and amber faces that now peopled Harlem’s streets, it was odd to think that not so long ago, Harlem was white. Only about thirty years earlier, in the late 1800s, it was Russian and Polish Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe who had given Harlem its color. Even as recently as fifteen years earlier, Russian Jews had dominated the census figures. Then, there were the Italians—the area from Third Avenue to the East River was “Harlem’s Little Italy”—and the Irish, the Germans, the English, the Hungarians, the Czechs, and others coming from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Harlem did have a smattering of Native Americans and a small but stable black population—the descendants of freed slaves—but by and large, the neighborhood’s complexion was pink.
All that had changed, seemingly in the blink of an eye, and Harlem was now indelibly brown. Years later, people would forget that Harlem was ever white. Those few who remembered would sometimes still wonder what had happened.
King’s decision to build the homes on what would become Strivers’ Row was part of a turn-of-the-century construction boom in Harlem. The anticipated building of new subway lines into Harlem had turned the neighborhood into a target for speculators. Developers snapped up the remaining farmlands, marshes, garbage dumps, and empty lots that still constituted a good part of the area. Between 1898 and 1904, brownstones rose up on every corner. But by 1905, the party was over. There were too many apartments and too few renters. Even after the Lenox Avenue subway was completed, high rents discouraged the anticipated influx of new residents. The real estate market broke and people panicked. They needed tenants and needed them badly.
Meanwhile, downtown in mid-Manhattan’s miserable Tenderloin district, the construction of Pennsylvania Station was destroying the area’s few all-Negro blocks. Colored families being forced out of their homes wondered: Where to next?
In stepped Philip Payton Jr., a Negro real estate broker. His Afro-American Realty Company brought the white owners of Harlem and the colored families of the Tenderloin together. White owners might not have been thrilled to rent to blacks, but they preferred it to ruin. Some decided to take any Negro tenant who would pay the high rents being demanded. Hundreds, then thousands of blacks moved to Harlem. The neighborhood swelled with poor people burdened with inflated rents they couldn’t afford and grand apartments they couldn’t maintain.
David had spent more than half his life in the rat-infested Tenderloin and clearly remembered his family’s move to Harlem when he was nineteen. He understood the hope that Harlem had represented to New York City’s black residents. It was their chance to build a community—a respectable, decent community. Now, as he gazed at the tenements around him, he wondered how far that dream had been realized.
Harlem’s residents were caught between low salaries and high rents, yet many people saw it as the largest, most dynamic black enclave in the United States. And in fact, the community was alive with success stories and colorful characters: bootleggers and racketeers, literati and blue bloods, barefoot prophets and uniformed liberators.
As David waited for a streetlight to change, his gaze drifted over the street life around him. There were so many half-forgotten, familiar sights. Mamas tired after a long week’s work dragged toddlers with one hand and hugged grocery bags with the other. Tail-wagging dogs strained against leashes to gain the nearest fire hydrant. Stray cats with scarred faces and ripped ears huddled alongside the entrances to alleyways. Hip young men with cool ambition in their eyes hustled by. Others, with deadened dreams, sat on stoops or leaned languidly against street lamps. Street vendors hawked toys, perfume, dresses, stockings, and watches. Their goods spread out on torn blankets, they proudly displayed a profusion of glittery items one might desire, but would never use. And an abundance of dreary items one could use, but would never desire.
He’d been away a long time. What he saw was both familiar and foreign. Part of him was baffled and bewildered. But another part, a deeper part, understood and accepted, without doubt or dismay. He walked for hours. Nostalgia slowly drew his unwilling soul into her lonely embrace. These were the streets he’d roamed, the alleys where he and his friends had played. He remembered the days when 134th Street was the northern boundary of Negro Harlem, when a black man knew never to cross Lenox Avenue, no Negroes lived on or near Seventh, and none dared to appear unarmed on Irish Eighth. He remembered so much, but realized he’d forgotten even more. This was indeed his town, but it was no longer his home.
What he needed, he decided, was a drink. What about Jolene’s? It was a lap joint, not far away. Back in his first days home after the war, when he and his friends wanted a break from the cabarets, wanted something a little dingier, dirtier, and down-to-earth, they would hit Jolene’s. Gem had sung there sometimes, living out her fantasy of being a torch singer.
Jolene’s was a dive on the edge of Harlem’s “low-down” district, on 135th and Fifth. It was run through the back door of a grocery store. A body could stroll into that store any night until five in the morning to find Birdie Williams perched on his stool behind the counter. Signs in the window advertised five-pound bags of sugar for twenty-two cents, half a pound of bacon for a dime, and three cans of dog food for thirteen cents. You could also buy a bottle of Pepsi for a nickel, but if you were a regular or knew the right words, Birdie would let you go downstairs, where you could get happy with some hooch. If you thought you could get in because you were a Somebody, then you were wrong. Birdie kept a sling razor ready just to show you how wrong you could be.
