In these stories, wherever black and white met, the result was sure to be anger and grief.
The area had never fully recovered from this racial upheaval. The stores and banks had left with their white customers,
causing main thoroughfares to decompose. City services had declined. Still, when the blacks who’d now lived in their
homes for ten or fifteen years looked back on the way things had turned out, they did so with some measure of
satisfaction. On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house notes and car notes, maybe college educations for
the sons or daughters whose graduation pictures filled every mantelpiece. They had kept their homes up and kept their
children off the streets; they had formed block clubs to make sure that others did too.
It was when they spoke of the future that a certain disquiet entered their voices. They would mention a cousin or
sibling who came by every so often asking for money; or an adult child, unemployed, who still lived at home. Even the
success of those children who’d made it through college and into the white-collar world harbored within it an element
of loss-the better these children did, the more likely they were to move away. In their place, younger, less stable
families moved in, the second wave of migrants from poorer neighborhoods, newcomers who couldn’t always afford to
keep up with their mortgage payments or invest in periodic maintenance. Car thefts were up; the leafy parks were
empty. People began to spend more time inside; they invested in elaborate wrought-iron doors; they wondered if they
could afford to sell at a loss and retire to a warmer climate, perhaps move back to the South.
So despite the deserved sense of accomplishment these men and women felt, despite the irrefutable evidence of their
own progress, our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain. The boarded-up homes, the decaying
storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets-loud congregations of
teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block-all
of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not
even last their lifetimes.
And it was this dual sense, of individual advancement and collective decline, that I thought accounted for some of the
attitudes agitating Will when we’d spoken the night of the rally. I heard it in the excessive pride some of the men took
in the well-stocked bars they’d built in their basements, with the lava lamps and the mirrored walls. In the protective
plastic that the women kept over their spotless carpets and sofas. In all of it, one saw a determined effort to shore up the
belief that things had in fact changed, if only some people would start acting right. “I try to avoid driving through
Roseland when I can,” a woman from neighboring Washington Heights explained to me one evening. “People down
there are just rougher. You can see it in the way they keep up their homes. You didn’t see things like that when the
white folks still lived there.”
Distinctions between neighborhoods, then blocks, then finally neighbors within a block; attempts to cordon off,
control the decay. One thing I noticed, though. The woman so concerned with the cruder habits of her neighbors had a
picture of Harold in her kitchen, right next to the sampler of the Twenty-third Psalm. So did the young man who lived
in the crumbling apartment a few blocks away and was trying to make ends meet by mixing records at dance parties. As
it had for the men in Smitty’s barbershop, the election had given both these people a new idea of themselves. Or maybe
it was an old idea, born of a simpler time. Harold was something they still held in common: Like my idea of
organizing, he held out an offer of collective redemption.
barré
(Barré)
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