THE BOXER'S LAMENT

The 4th part...

Not that I usually do these things, but there may be some language that is offensive. Not maybe, it is. It’s offensive, and if it bothers you, skim over it.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Harlem in the late forties was far removed from what it is today. I may be old, but I'm not naïve enough to think it wasn't the same on the street corners then, that it is today. But it used to come alive at night, as my my late husband used to say, and it was the heartbeat of the city—the very essence of soul. White people used to drive in from the city for a night of entertainment back then—not as many as there were twenty years before that, but they came out all the same. It was because Harlem was a cultural mecca where Blues and Jazz, and the Big Band sounds of Count Bassie and Duke Ellington used to filter through the night.

It was a far cry from the Harlem Renaissance of my Daddy's day. But there was Louis Armstrong, and Ella; Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday; there was Charlie Parker, and Dizzy too, just to name a few. I was never a big proponent of Jazz, or the Mississippi Delta Blues like my husband was, or my two oldest sons, so there was never any urgency for me to make my way down to The Main Stem—which is what they used to call 125th Street back then. To me, and people like me, Harlem was Niggertown. It was Chinatown where the Chinese lived, Little Italy for the Italians, and Spanish Harlem for the part of town where the Puerto Ricans lived. It was just a name they used to call it. I knew all about its history: George Washington and The Battle of Harlem Heights; how it used to be plush farm land as little as fifty years ago.

Harlem was a fashionable district once, with summer homes for the rich and semi-rich who wanted to get away from the city. With the financial panic of the 1890's, property owners decided that renting their homes to blacks filing into the city after the Civil War was the easiest way to avoid ruin—especially for those living along Lenox Avenue. By the end of the First World War, everyone was calling it Niggertown; they said they needed one place where they could keep the blacks, and as the area grew, the surrounding neighbourhoods did what they could to keep the area isolated. The homes that were once the pride of the rich, were turned into apartment buildings, but the overcrowding was never addressed; they simply left the blacks alone, and promptly forgot about them, hoping that if they ignored them, the problem would go away.

I never liked Harlem as much as my husband did. I liked the Village. It had a Bohemian lifestyle I felt more suited to, with writers, poets, and intellectuals I could talk to. After all, I was an educated woman I used to tell myself. But now even that has changed. My husband used to say the one thing you can't avoid is change, and once we couldn't avoid it any longer, we knew we had to change ourselves. But there was a part of me that never wanted to change; I wanted the familiarity of the old days.

I went to see Uncle Sam three days after meeting Lahey. I woke up feeling great that morning; nothing was going to take away that feeling of anticipation. I took the subway into Harlem. It was a beautiful spring morning. I walked to the subway station, and instead of the noise of cars and trucks, I found myself listening for the sounds of children. The sun was out, the sky was clear, the temperature warm. There was a freshness in the air because of the rain falling on and off the week before. Spring blossoms were poking out, the streets looking like something out of a movie with people strolling along the sidewalks and enjoying the morning. I thought about Fred Astaire and Judy Garland for some reason, and even began humming to myself. The flowers, the shrubbery, and the blossoming trees, made everything come alive with colours I'd always taken for granted; after a few days of rain and dreary clouds, you notice things like that and begin to appreciate them anew. New York really was a beautiful city then—and still is—for something as large as it is.

On the subway, I noticed the differences gradually, eventually becoming aware that I was in the middle of it. The first thing I noticed was the people riding with me, and the way they carried themselves. And once we were above the streets where everything seemed clean, bright, and orderly at a distance, I saw subtle changes; the streets narrowed; the alleyways looked darker; the buildings more rundown, until finally, I was surrounded by squalor and wondered how it had happened so quickly.

The buildings had an old, dirty look to them I was unprepared to see. The red and cream coloured bricks looked like they were bleeding into each other—like water colours spilling across a wet page—giving way to older buildings with plywood siding that should've been torn down a generation earlier. Most of the single houses along the streets were squeezed in between factories and warehouses, looking like shanties with thick moss growing on wooden shingles, and rain-slick lichen streaking down the outside walls like dirty, green, tears.

The streets were full of people hawking things in front of small grocery stores, and family businesses—there were barber shops and dry cleaners, pizza shops and furniture stores—all of them trying to catch the attention of the passers-by. There was a mad sense of urgency to everything—the same mad press of people pushing, and shoving, and traffic that didn't seem to move—the same congestion I saw mid-town, and down in the Village. But the buildings weren't scratching up against the sky like they did in Manhattan. Oh sure, I saw cranes in the distance, like giant insects silhouetted against the open sky because there were buildings being built—but it was too little, too late, as far as I could see. The streets looked like a mixture of warehouses and stores, as well as tenements—none of the buildings looking like they were over ten stories high, although I'm sure they were—and everywhere I was looking, I saw black men and women staring at me, as if they knew I didn't belong.

As I walked along the sidewalk, I held my purse under my coat. There were clotheslines sagging under the weight of wet clothes crisscrossing the streets overhead. There were water drops on the streets that spotted the cars underneath like a summer shower. Sometimes, pigeons landed on the clothes, leaving bird droppings on old bed sheets and faded bath towels. It was nothing I hadn't seen before. I watched pants and shirts flutter in the breeze, reminding me of those limp, triangle shaped flags I once saw at a used car lot. A parade of children played stick ball around me, and tag—running through busy streets lined with overstuffed garbage cans fallen over and scattered along the sidewalks; the wind picked up, bowling old newspapers through streets and alleyways like crumpled tumbleweeds in a movie.

I first went into Harlem telling myself I already knew what I was going to find, and because I told myself that's what I was going to find, that's what I found. If you tell yourself you're going to see prostitutes, drug addicts and thieves, the chances are you will. Only now do I understand that my personal prejudices tampered with my thoughts; nothing was going to change my mind.

In reality, Harlem's no different than any other neighbourhood. Little Italy has a reputation of being a base for the Mafia, but it isn't; Spanish Harlem is known for Latino gangs--but who told me that? The Lower East Side was the worst of them all before it became fashionable. But I’m a black woman, and I was a successful black woman, and I didn't see how anything was going to change my mind.

I find this attitude in people unforgivable now. I grew up in worse squalor, and I was looking down at them? For what? Because I’d somehow removed myself from it? At least they had running water. Sure, they lived in a certain amount of misery, but there was pride, and a sense of neighbourhood, more than there ever was in Vermont Falls.

There was culture here, a sense of society, and growing opportunities. Vermont Falls had nothing to offer: no electricity, no running water, no flush toilets—and no hope for the future once the Cannery shut down in 1963. The Harlem way of life might have been hard, and rough, but it was a time when people had a chance to get out and make something of themselves, and a great many of them did.

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