‘Where’re you going?’ he said. ‘You’ll miss “Terminus”.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I’ve been there before. It’s where I get off.’
He looked at me. ‘You British and your sense of humour,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘Personally, I never went for it. But, by God, I guess you need it, huh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess we do.’
The man who owned the papershop came out onto the pavement and watched me copying down addresses from his board. He didn’t say anything; he had been studying me from inside the shop for a long time; I’d seen his eyes in the slit between the halfdrawn blind and the Coca-Cola sign.
I took down half a dozen names and numbers and closed my notebook. He stepped forward.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, a little hesitantly. He was a short, tubby, midfortyish negro in a pinstripe blue suit, white shirt.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Look buddy, maybe it ain’t none of my business, but you sure – I mean, like absolutely sure – you wanna look up them addresses? What I mean is, you wanna live there?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Y’ain’t looking up for somebody else, maybe?’
‘No. For me.’
He plucked a small cigar from his breast pocket, picked a hair off it carefully, struck a match on his window, and lit up, watching me through the smokeclouds.
‘We – ell –’ he said, soft southern, rolling the word,‘– guess you know y’own mind. Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and would have probed him, but he’d disappeared inside the shop again, and I was left on my blasted heath wondering whether, perhaps, he couldn’t have fitted me out with a quiet little country thaneship somewhere.
Nowhere, actually, could be less like a blasted heath than Harlem; it is perhaps the most undeserted area in the world, if you know what I mean. Sixlane avenues are whittled down to alleyways by the permanent overflow from the pavements, solid, sluggish streams of people, whose reasons for being there at all seem incomprehensible – they walk too slowly to be actually going from A to B; they are too far from the shops and bars to have any possible interest in them; and they never appear to cross from one side of the street to the other; instead, they roll on, as if on some enormous conveyor-belt, with no apparent purpose, and no pause. Naturally, this sort of jaywalking would be treated in downtown New York as an offence located somewhere on the books between child-rape and dope-addiction; but here, a crack regiment would be needed to enforce the laws; it’s left to the motorist to keep up a constant cacophonous alert to save himself from being devoured. It’s an odd sensation to stand in the centre of one sidewalk looking across the slowly passing heads towards the other; the mass of humanity makes the traffic invisible, so that one seems to be cut off from the opposite bank by an open chasm filled with a perpetual honking moan, on either side of which the silent souls trudge on. Once, I thought I saw, across the gorge, Beatrice waiting in the crowd; but I must have been mistaken.
I find Harlem extremely disturbing, this sort of set-aside Negro metropolis, a sophisticated ghetto; although one rarely sees a white face, one constantly thinks one has, due to the fanatic attempts to approximate to the White Condition, through dress, and make-up, and hairstyling, and accent; the shops are stacked with advertised encouragement – with bleaching-creams and hairstraightening preparations and almost-white plaster models in tennis clothes. And the billboards flash products whose saleability depends upon the obvious air of success exuded by the figures depicted; and these are, without exception, the palest of negroes, often with blonde wavy hair, since these, in the hierarchy of shades which operates here, are the Top People. Constantly, the Madison Avenue stage-whisper is: This product will help you pass for White. Everything is angled towards the dispossession of the negro, towards making him a racial and cultural mongrel, towards offering him, in packet-form, an unrealizable dream. One knows that these techniques were developed to work within the tension of class-difference; but this is not the same thing at all.
I had decided to live in Harlem partly because of its proximity to Columbia University, partly to my eviction from my Greenwich Village broomcupboard, an eviction supposed to be temporary, but as the period stated was to allow the Exterminator to rid my room of cockroaches, I decided to forego the option. (I waited to see The Exterminator. I imagined a long cadaverous Kafka-esque terror with a stovepipe hat and a little black bag and an Instrument. He turned out to be two squat toughs from Brooklyn in green overalls, who were, without question, Steiger and Brando down on their luck.)
Anyway, I was tired of the Village; as in Hampstead, or Chelsea, rents rise relative to the immigration of wealthy non-artists hunting for charm, or social cachet, or whatever it is. But here there is no Belsize Park to retire to. I was getting pushed nearer and nearer the Bowery, and since I can do without this sort of pressure to follow my natural predisposition, I determined to get out for good. Harlem is cheap.
After I left the papershop, I tried five of the addresses. I was met with the same responses at each. Surprise (one woman laughed through the gap in the door, and vanished, and wouldn’t come back; but I could hear her laughing in the hall); suspicion (‘Look, fellah, thanks anyway, but we got so much goddam detergent in this house, we use it to stuff pillows!’); and finally, refusal. The room, sorry, was taken. Just this minute.
The sixth address was a tall brownstone, hung with black balcony-rails and fire-escapes, an external skeleton, like a scorpion’s. The door was opened by a tall, slim, grey-haired, well-dressed negro. In his lapel was a N.A.A.C.P. button. He smiled, and it was the first straight smile I’d had all morning.
‘I’ve come about the room,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ He looked past my shoulder into the street. ‘Afraid it’s taken. Guy just left.’
‘Are you sure?’ He looked back at me. ‘Yours is the sixth place I’ve tried, and they were all dated this morning, and they’ve all gone. Odd that, isn’t it?’
‘Kind of.’ He shifted his weight, leaning on the door-jamb. ‘Big demand for rooms, though.’ He looked at me, hard. ‘You English?’
‘That’s right.’
He pushed open the door with his shoulder, and stepped back into the dark hallway.
‘Look, come in for a minute, anyhow. Maybe I can help you.’
I followed him into his living-room. On one wall, a huge photograph of Martin Luther King, and a daguerrotype of John Brown. On a side-table, the latest issues of The Southern Patriot and Ebony. I sat down, and at eye-level in the bookcase were volumes of Baldwin, and Ellison, and titles like ‘The Negro Vanguard’ and ‘The Truth Shall Make Us Free’. The man sat down on the arm of the chair opposite.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I lied. I got a room. It’s still free. Only I’m not so sure I can let you have it.’
‘How come?’
He