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The Harlem I Knew (1967)

Back in 1962, just after we married, my then-wife and I moved into the Grant Houses, a low-rent city housing project on the edge of Harlem on the east side of Amsterdam Avenue, just south of 125th Street. The place attracted us because it was reasonably near Columbia, where we would both be graduate students; its spaciousness included five closets, a kitchen with sufficient cabinets and facilities, and two bedrooms, one of which we could convert into a study. The rent was attractively cheap, $55 or so per month; and both utilities and maintenance came gratis. We had met other graduate students, who were likewise Caucasian; and they recommended it.

Although our backgrounds were commonly suburban and middle-class, my wife and I felt independent enough to live in a place different from what our parents might have chosen for us. We considered ourselves liberal, but we had hardly in the past cultivated the friendship of Negroes. After a few doubts reflecting possible robbery, personal safety, and racial composition (roughly 70% Negro; 25% Puerto Rican; 5% white), we moved in, living there for four years. A Negro friend suggested that, having resided in Harlem for so long, I should write a memoir about how I got out. “Who knows, it might sell as many books as Claude Brown’s [Manchild in a Promised Land (1963)].” Actually, we escaped from Harlem the same way that Brown did--by moving elsewhere. Like Claude Brown and James Baldwin, as well as other ex-Harlemites, I presently write from memory of an experience, at least recently past.

In retrospect, I recognize how long it took me to overcome certain unfortunate stereotypes. I came to the Grant Houses with the impression that city projects were unattractive places. Hadn’t James Baldwin declared in Esquire (of all places) that: “The projects are hideous, of course, there being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as cheerless as a prison. They are lumped all over Harlem, colorless, bleak, high and revolting.” Admittedly, from the outside they do look cold and forbidding high red-brick structures, absolutely unadorned. However, one should not judge insides solely from the outsides or accept another’s judgment of a place without checking its interior.

Once inside, I discovered that every room but the bathroom had an outside exposure; all the rooms were filled with sunlight for most of the day, since the closest other building was over fifty yards away across the street, privacy was assured. The apartment’s sturdy metal door and frame could probably resist everything short of a battery of crowbars: and as the fireproof building did not require fire-escapes, illicit entrance was nearly impossible. The concrete walls, lacking both fixtures and molding, were hardly pretty, but they were such efficient sound-bafflers that even a loud television in the next room was hardly audible. If the Puerto Rican neighbors down the hall were having a boisterous party on Saturday night, as they often did, and the doors to our respective apartments were closed, the racket would not be heard at all. Everything came painted in an institutional light green and light yellow not too different from our dormitory rooms at a residential college; however, the housing authority did not object to our repainting our living room orange and our bathroom pink. The ceiling, likewise concrete, was perhaps too low at eight feet; and the floors had hard black asphalt tile, which could give you shin splints, if walked on for several hours, and which some residents covered with soft carpets. The Grant project provided all the heat, hot water, and electricity one needed as well. The plumbing was efficient; the maintenance, reasonably quick and delightfully gratis. Most of the administrators were polite and generous, and the exterminator came often, both on call and on his regular rounds. Both roaches and rats were scarce. The entire project, which housed about seven thousand people, had its own police force, most of whom were friendly with the tenants. The insides of the apartments were so amenable that I once suspected that the New York City Housing Authority kept its exterior ugly to avoid public protest of a renter’s bargain. There were other rather minor flaws, but where I live now--in the East Village, in four rooms, two flights up, at over twice the rent--the apartment is physically not as nice as ours in the Grant Houses.

Just after we moved into the Grant Houses, an editor of a liberal magazine told me that the elevator would be continually full of urine and walls obscenely defaced. Though that popular notion had been “reported” in his pages, it simply was not true in the Grant Houses. Indeed, the maintenance men made any mess quickly disappear. Every morning they cleaned all the elevators and lobbies, and every afternoon, they mopped all the hallways. I smelled more disinfectant than human waste. What mess there was--chewing gum wrappers, etc. was largely a product of kids under twelve, who behave pretty much the same regardless of race or class.

Whereas some New York apartment houses either forbade children or placed restrictions on their activity, Grant Houses provided a nursery playground, a larger play area (rather unimaginatively designed and inadequately equipped), a recreation room; and nearby were handball courts, basketball hoops, and an asphalt surfaced baseball-football field. (Perhaps there is merit in Paul Goodman’s proposal that each project should have a kids’ dormitory, for those who would prefer to spend the night away from their brutal homes.) Because selection procedures screened out people with criminal records, without jobs, or without families, most of the tenants were responsible people; and as most jobs require early rising, the building was quiet by 11:00 p.m. every night but Saturday. Admittedly, its composition was hardly a cross-section of Harlem; but Harlem has more sections than any criss-cross image might suggest.

One myth about Harlem that I heard often was that whites were not welcome there. One day, even a New York Post columnist, in the course of interviewing LeRoi Jones, wrote that any white walking on 125th Street would be spit upon, if not stoned. Well, no myth could be more false for me. I walked from my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue to the subway at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue--two long blocks--several times a week, at all hours of the day and night. Not only was I never attacked or threatened by anyone, but nobody ever called me anything either. True, I am six feet tall, young, somewhat stocky, and modestly bearded; and my appearance probably betrays the fact that I rarely carry more than ten dollars. Perhaps, too, my face became so familiar that people knew I lived there. Even during the “Harlem Riots” of 1964, nothing unusual happened to me; I suspect that rioters were more interested in revenge against exploiting white businessmen than whites in general. The more you walk a certain street, I have discovered, the safer it feels. A black friend driving to my house told me that a young man lounging (“hanging out”) on the street had “spotted” him as an outsider and that he feared that his car might be vandalized. “He and his cohorts won’t bother anyone whom they know lives around here, like you, because you’ll know where to find them in the course of your normal activities and point them out to the police.” Such irresponsible remarks as the bold New York Post reporter’s only unwittingly make violence against whites more legitimate in the minds of certain Negro readers--if everyone is doing it, why shouldn’t they? Even so, safety in New York, or anywhere, is a matter of degree. Every neighborhood in New York City is plagued by incipient violence; and even if Harlem is, say, twice as bad as the East Eighties--a hypothetical percentage--it is still not suffering from constant violence, not even on Saturday night. Negroes or friends-of-Negroes who portray Harlem with such negative stereotypes, regardless of their motives, are not just lying but betraying the integrity of the community.

Similarly, what little anti-Semitism I saw on Harlem’s walls was directed against specific businessmen rather than invisible forces. The only “incident” I can remember occurred in an Indian restaurant on 117th Street and Lenox, when one black called another a “Jew,” I guess in response to his stinginess. Four of us whites at the other side of the room quickly looked at him, and the man said, “Oh, excuse me.”

Downtown magazine editors twice asked me to write about the anti-Semitism they heard was emerging in Harlem, and the discrepancy between their information and my reality leads me reluctantly to believe that this “new development in black radicalism” was invented downtown, rather than up, probably by people who wanted, for whatever dubious reasons, to undermine traditional allegiances between Negroes and Jews. (The “evidence” subsequently publicized came from lone psychotics, rather than acknowledged responsible leaders.)

I also noticed in myself that the more you live among colored people, the less likely you are to recognize the color of people. I am probably still conscious of whether the person sitting across from me is Negro or not, but I cannot remember, for instance, if the store I shopped in yesterday had many colored customers or not. When we went to London for a spell, we happened to choose a flat in the Brixton area, south of the Thames. Later some friends from the more fashionable North informed us, with some horror, that Brixton was “a coloured slum.” We looked again; and sure enough some neighbors were indeed West Indians and others Indians from Asia. We quite simply had not noticed their race before. Our neighborhood was no more “coloured” than the average New York City subway car.

Like all young intellectuals who have dipped into “the literature” about Blacks, I came to Harlem with certain generalizations about Negro life that I now doubt. Here, I must admit, I am talking less about my own experience than my observations of other people; and I regrettably did not get to know as many of my neighbors as I would have liked. (One of the perils of doing at home work that requires concentration and long stretches of undisturbed time is that I try not to become too accessible to people living around me.) Nonetheless, I would say, first of all, that most Northern Negroes are not oppressed by their color, contrary to what Professors Kardiner and Ovesey discovered in the purportedly in-depth interviews reported in The Mark of Oppression (1951); nor is race a prime topic in their conversation. Race still brings discrimination in jobs and exclusion from certain turfs, no doubt; and white people do respond to a person’s color, albeit in different ways. However, race does not necessarily shape a person’s relations with his wife, or his children, or his peers; for in these dimensions of experience that go on largely inside the home (and are partially shaped by the quality of its condition), a man makes as he will. Indeed, I would now regard all theories of racial determinism, whether manufactured by Negroes or whites, as having little basis in reality and contributing to a needless defeatism. Secondly, Harlem presents a greater sense of community than most New York neighborhoods. I noticed in my own building that neighbors would more readily greet each other in the elevator than they do, say, further downtown. I saw more signs of friendship in the drugstores, in the taverns; the mothers watching their kids in the playground all seemed to know one another. Thirdly, even in Harlem, most people prefer the acquaintance of people similar to them--in background (which includes race), in age, in interest, in income, and in marital status.

The more you know Black Harlem, the more surely you realize that it is hardly a monolithic entity. Actually, within it are several clearly discernible communities, identified by class, status, and ethnic background. As each community has a distinctive character, so each one preserves a distance from the other. Wealthier Negroes gravitate toward areas north of 150th street, or to the high-rise private projects such as Lenox Terrace between 132nd and 135th streets, or the houses either along Central Park or Riverside Drive; the poorer concentrate between Eighth and Fifth Avenues. Then, within these class lines, there are ethnic and religious groupings. The religious Negroes separate themselves from the non-religious, just as the Pentecostals are distinct from the Catholics and Episcopalians. As the West Indian Negroes have their own allegiances and customs, so Harlem has a French-speaking Haitian community with its own identity. The fact that it is hardly monolithic makes all talk about organizing Harlem into a solid phalanx faintly ludicrous--as difficult, say, as organizing all the Jews in New York City to support a Jewish candidate for Mayor.

Likewise, the notion of Harlem as “a ghetto,” though codified in books by respectable scholars, has little substance. The term, we remember, is based upon, first, the Jewish communities in Western Europe and then upon the immigrant neighborhoods in America’s cities. The term presumes that one group has a culture--language, religion, customs, dress--so alien to the area’s majority that the minority is forced, either by law or circumstance, to live separately. However, New York’s Blacks hardly resemble, even metaphorically, the Jewish immigrants. Negroes speak the same language as white America; as they read the same Bible, so most religious Negroes pray to the same Christian God. They see the same movies, watch the same television shows, hear the same records, wear the same clothes, have pretty much the same aspirations for their children, observe the same laws, succumb to the same advertisements, adhere to similar values; and unlike the classic ghetto dweller, most northern Negroes have daily contact with the white community. Despite all the hokum about Africa, native-born Blacks are as indubitably American as any Americans can be. Harlem is not a ghetto but a racially segregated replica of white America.

What makes the concept of “ghetto” pernicious, then, is that it places the burden of adjustment upon the wrong foot. If the immigrant Italian, say, had to adjust to American ways--to learn English, for one thing, as a prerequisite to cultural survival--the Negro’s problem is that America has yet to adjust to his presence here and to his natural status as a fellow human being. For these reasons, a more accurate analogy is between Negroes and American-born women, who have likewise been excluded from certain jobs and social possibilities for which they were equally capable. Even then, however, analogies betray the truth that the Negro’s predicament in America is distinctly sui generis. What is wrong, then, with such books as Manchild in the Promised Land is that publishers and critics (invariably white) portray the author’s experience as typical. In fact, not only is Brown’s memoir irrelevant to the experience and problems of most Negro young people, even those who lived in his own neighborhood, but it paints an image of Harlem life that only confirms those familiar white stereotypes of Negro life as continually violent and endlessly sensual. Therefore, Manchild offers the white reader not a new insight into Harlem but an old image with new names and more detail. The equivalent would be a book about New York’s Jews that portrayed them all as wholly avaricious and utterly philistine, or today, as neurotically scrupulous and suavely intellectual. Most of us know enough Jews to dismiss both these sets of stereotypes as completely fallacious; but few of us know enough about Harlem to say that Claude Brown’s Manchild is as untrue about New York’s Negroes as Shakespeare’s Shylock is about Jews. Such a book, therefore, creates among white readers needless fears about driving or walking through Harlem, visiting Negroes or living in city projects. Overcoming these popular images, I found the Grant Houses a relatively desirable place to live; nothing else in New York City offers so much comfort for so little money, provided that you are poor.