Still Life in Harlem

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Begin Reading

Also by Eddy L. Harris

About the Author

Copyright

 

I came up from the subway and into the bright light of day. I felt a little of what Langston Hughes must have felt when he first arrived in Harlem in 1922. It was a bright September afternoon that greeted me, a bright September afternoon that greeted him. And as he was happy and thrilled to be here, so was I, though probably not as much, for in 1922 Harlem was still young and new and its magic had yet to be tarnished. Langston Hughes was so delirious on coming here, he later wrote, that he was never able to capture on paper the excitement even of riding the subway uptown.

“I went up the steps,” he said, “and out into the bright September sunlight. Harlem! I stood there, dropped my bags, took a deep breath and felt happy again.”

I was happy to be here too.

 

To Inge Rew Hanson, whose love and support sustain me.

Thanks as well to Clare Alexander, who saw what I could not see, and to Araminta Whitley.

 

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

    
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

    
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

    
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

    
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

    
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

    
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

—Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy”

 

 

Toward the end of my second year living in Harlem, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a woman's voice screaming inside my head. The panic in her shouting came echoing faintly as if from out of a dream. I tried to shake myself loose from this dream, but the screaming would not stop. When I realized it was not a dream, I sat up in bed, listened for a minute, then tried once more to go back to sleep.

Many times I had heard wild rantings such as these coming through an open window. Nearly every weekend in fact, from somewhere in my apartment building or in the building across the way, a drunken couple would spend hours deep in the night hurling abuse at each other. She would end each session by throwing her lover out. He, having had enough, would always leave. Somehow, though, he would be there again the following night and the next weekend too, drunk the two of them and at it again.

When I awoke a second time, a brief minute or two later, I realized there was nothing I recognized in the shrieking. I wasn't so sure now that it came from the couple across the courtyard.

At first I tried to ignore it. I couldn't. Groggy but fully awake, I tried again to listen. I had no idea where the fighting was coming from.

There is a strange way sound bounces around outside my windows and enters the apartment. The windows in the front room open onto the street. Then comes the room where I sleep, a bedroom in the center of this long but narrow four-room apartment. The windows in the bedroom open onto a courtyardlike space between this building and the building next door. When you first hear sounds coming from the outside, very often you cannot tell if they enter the apartment from the courtyard or if they come from the street. I had to get up to find out.

I went to the bedroom window and heard nothing. I went to the front room and did the same, stuck my head out the window, and again heard no voices.

I could see nothing through the glare of the street lamp that stood just outside my front-room window. I shielded my eyes from the light but still saw nothing, no sign of struggle, nothing but a picture-perfect night in the city.

The night was cool. Autumn was coming on. There was no moon, no stars, no clouds. All was still and quiet along the street. The only sound came from the papers and the leaves that rustled in the slight breeze that now gathered and drifted gently.

A few seconds later, there it was: the screaming again. The moment of calm was splintered. I shielded my eyes once more. Now accustomed at once to the darkness and to the harsh glow from the street lamp, I could see all I needed to see. There in the shadows across the street was the beginning of the end of my life in Harlem.

The beginning of the end too, I told myself, of my being black. After this, I had had enough. I wanted no more of it.

It was quite a moment, that moment of calm, that moment of clarity when everything seemed to crystallize, a moment of utter serenity turning into utmost rage, that moment when the water boils.

I remember thinking only seconds before what a beautiful place Harlem must have been at one time and wondering where the beauty went. To be fair and honest, there is beauty here. There simply isn't enough of it to counterbalance what has become so lifeless, so tired, and so ugly. There is still life in Harlem, certainly, but there is a barrenness to it.

Up the street from where I live stand a handful of magnificent stone buildings.

Down the street from where I live, a man the other day was killing rats.

And across the street from where I live, a man this night was bashing a woman against a stone wall. He was exhibiting his power, pounding out of her the respect the world had pounded out of him, demanding with each well-placed blow the same submission from her that had been demanded of him; to demonstrate to this woman and to himself that here in these shadows, if nowhere else, he was in control and had some control over his life and somebody else's.

The man was black. The woman—she was black too.

And what in the world was I supposed to do? I felt as helpless as I had been those many many years before, when I had taken my first backward steps out of the darkness that was becoming the world of blackness.

How long—how long it has been and how far I have gone in trying at the same time to come closer and to put distance between my world and that world, both to remember and to put the memory out of my mind. Even now the memory is painful, and it makes me wince.

When I was nine years old I watched one black man stab another black man. Nothing I had seen or ever heard up until then could possibly have prepared me for the senselessness of this act, for the man doing the stabbing did what he did just for the fun of it. His victim had already been stabbed in a fight with someone else. Then along came this Johnny Cannon, a neighborhood toughie who had been in and out of reformatory and prison several times already and who later would steal my watch at a party.

Johnny Cannon had watched the fight. He might even have egged it on, but he had not been part of it. Nevertheless, he got into it now.

When the fight was over, the loser was dragged out of Kirksey's Confectionary, where the argument had taken place. He was laid on the front steps. He had already been stabbed once in the belly, and as this man lay there bleeding, Johnny Cannon knelt down beside him, pulled out a knife, and plunged it into the other man's chest. Then Johnny pushed and twisted the knife until the blade snapped off and remained buried in the dying man's body. Then Johnny laughed.

I should have cried, I guess, but I did not. I should have run, gone home, buried my face in my mother's lap, and sobbed as she stroked my head to soothe me. She would have offered me oatmeal cookies with which to erase the acid taste rising in my throat, and perhaps I would have forgotten all about the horror and stupidity I had just seen. But I did not go home. I got no cookies. And I never ever forgot.

I stood there transfixed, so stunned that I could neither move nor turn my eyes away. I watched every move anyone made and committed to memory these components of a world I decided even then, at this early age, that I wanted no part of.

I heard the sirens of police cars approaching from the south. A small crowd had gathered, blocking my view. I had to squeeze to the side in order to watch what was going on. From there I could see the eager faces of those gathered as the bleeding man's limp body was loaded into the backseat of a car. Someone shouted, “Put his head in a plastic bag.” Just before they sped away, cops on their tails, tires smoking, squealing, burning rubber, the two men who had done the stabbing, Johnny Cannon and the other fellow whom I had never seen before and have not seen since, looked in my direction and caught my eye.

As I think back now, I search my memory for an appeal in their eyes, a plea for me who had seen it all to keep silent. There was no plea. There was no pain no joy no look of satisfaction. There was nothing at all, an emptiness devoid even of desperation.

It was a look of resignation and of surrender.
This is how it is,
they seemed to be saying. This is how it is.

From my Harlem apartment that late night and early morning I was too far away to see much of anything. Shadows were shoving shadows, that's all, and being shoved in return. But if I could have seen the face of the man that late night, I am sure that in his eyes would have been the same expression, some rage perhaps, for he was certainly angered, but with the rage the same look of surrender and resignation even as he tried to force this woman to submit to his will.

“Leave me alone,” she cried. “Leave me alone!”

Over and over she pleaded, the same words, the same shriek, the same shrill voice, until the man hit her once too hard and she dropped from her arms whatever it was that he wanted her to give him.

Now he was outraged even further, and he demanded that she pick it up. When she would not, he smacked her head and shoved her hard against the wall. I heard her feeble moan as the wind was knocked out of her.

What was I supposed to do? Surely this was not the time nor the place for heroics. I had seen by then too many guns in too many hot hands in Harlem. I had been shot at, though only once, and I had been lucky. That one time was more than enough. I did not want there to be a second time.

I dialed the emergency number for the police. Then I waited for them to come. There was nothing more I could reasonably do. I was trapped—as trapped as the woman who could not escape, as trapped by what he was doing as the man who was beating her, as trapped by what had been done to him.

Though I could not see it, I could feel this look of surrender in his eyes. I had seen it enough to know that it was there.

Harlem.

Down the street from where I live, I watched a man the other day killing rats. In front of his apartment building there are no trash cans for the people who live there. Instead they put their garbage in the three black plastic bags that hang from the chain link fence. The fence blocks off the vacant lot next door.