were the rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men counted out their rolls of large bills,
and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly to themselves.
I took all this as a personal affront, a mockery of my tender ambitions-although, when I brought up the subject with
people who had lived in New York for a while, I was told there was nothing original about my observations. The city
was out of control, they said, the polarization a natural phenomenon, like monsoons or continental drift. Political
discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the
socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and
Brooklyn during the summers-a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or ice-
skating at Rockefeller Center. With a bit of money, I was free to live like most middle-class blacks in Manhattan, free
to choose a motif around which to organize my life, free to patch together a collage of styles, friends, watering holes,
political affiliations. I sensed, though, that at some stage-maybe when you had children and decided that you could stay
in the city only at the cost of a private school, or when you began takings cabs at night to avoid the subways, or when
you decided that you needed a doorman in your apartment building-your choice was irrevocable, the divide was now
impassable, and you would find yourself on the side of the line that you’d never intended to be on.
Unwilling to make that choice, I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I
watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking
for some opening through which I could reenter.
It was in this humorless mood that my mother and sister found me when they came to visit during my first summer in
New York.
“He’s so skinny,” Maya said to my mother.
“He only has two towels!” my mother shouted as she inspected the bathroom. “And three plates!” They both began to
giggle.
They stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my
mother’s had offered them while she was away. That summer I had found a job clearing a construction site on the
Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own. When we met for
dinner, they would give me a detailed report of their adventures: eating strawberries and cream at the Plaza, taking the
ferry to the Statue of Liberty, visiting the Cézannes at the Met. I would eat in silence until they were finished and
then begin a long discourse on the problems of the city and the politics of the dispossessed. I scolded Maya for
spending one evening watching TV instead of reading the novels I’d bought for her. I instructed my mother on the
various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred
dependence in the Third World. When the two of them withdrew to the kitchen, I would overhear Maya complaining to
my mother.
“Barry’s okay, isn’t he? I mean, I hope he doesn’t lose his cool and become one of those freaks you see on the streets
around here.”