62
n west 126 th street, a reverend
stops us on the corner and asks if I’m
aware that I’m in the presence of leg-
ends. Eleanor Kennedy, 78, demurs.
“You’re only calling me a legend
because I’m old,” she teases him. But
moments before, an Australian man
waiting at a nearby stoplight announced that he just had to
introducehimself to Kennedy and Laura Sands, also 78, gravi-
tatingtowardthe charming pair; he left after kissing the ladies’
hands.Later,in the restaurant Lenox Saphire, the owner saw
metakinga picture of Kennedy and asked if he could snap one
ofheras well.
KennedyandSands call themselves sister-friends, and their
overlappingconversations ref lect the intimacy of their 30-year-
longfriendship. The pair met at Canaan Baptist Church on
West116thStreet in 1989 and have since traveled the world,
venturingto France, Australia, and even New Zealand. On the
docketthisyear are trips to Vienna and Budapest. But Harlem
is alwayshome.
Kennedywasborn in Harlem Hospital. She was raised by her
grandmother Eleanora, who arrived in Harlem in the 1930s.
Kennedy traveled frequently during her 30-year-long career at
American Express and later created a travel company that has
helped support her wanderlust. When she was in her early 20s,
Kennedy sang in a gospel quartet called the Harlem Beggars
that toured Europe, sharing a bill with Miles Davis and Sarah
Vaughan. In 1964, she performed in Langston Hughes’s play
Jerico-Jim Crow and has kept the playbill in a memory book
alongside a Christmas card signed by the poet himself.
Sands arrived in Harlem when she was 17 to attend Adelphi
University. She was eager to escape South Carolina. One time
when she was a girl, out picking cotton, she’d seen a plane fly
overhead and wondered why her relatives only visited by train.
She vowed that she would fly on a plane someday, a promise she
has fulfilled many times over—currently, Sands has traveled to
every continent except Antarctica. She collects a bracelet for
each new country she visits, and her wrist glitters with gold
reminders of Italy, Ghana, and Egypt. In New York, she worked
as a special-needs teacher for 30 years, and whenever the
Department of Education tried to reassign her to a school down-
town, she would refuse to abandon the children in Harlem. She
would later win Teacher of the Year twice.
Harlem has never received the respect it deserves, says Ken-
nedy. She points to the neighborhood’s innumerable artistic con-
tributions; in spite of increasing gentrification, Harlem remains
a bastion of black culture. Sands mentions the bustling nightlife,
the friendliness, the sense of community. A stranger on the street
recently pointed out that her shoe was untied and bent herself to
tie it. Sands and Kennedy served together on the board of the
Harlem Hospital and would hear other black people say they
assumed the hospital provided a low level of care because it was
in a black neighborhood. These skeptics do not consider that Har-
lem Hospital would treat gangsters wheeled into the trauma ward
with dignity. Or that Harlem Hospital would hire black nurses for
internships they could not obtain at hospitals downtown. All four
of Sands’s children were born there, and when Kennedy’s water
broke suddenly in a movie theater, she begged the ambulance
driver to bring her to Harlem Hospital. She wanted to birth her
daughter in the same place where she’d been born, the same hos-
pital where the grandmother who raised her died.
“Harlem is the mecca of the world,” Kennedy says. “You haven’t
been anywhere until you’ve visited Harlem.” brit^ bennett
ADAMCLAYTONPOWELL
J R .B O U L E VA R D
AND116THSTREET
L A U R A S A N D S
A N D
ELEANOR KENNEDY
