WITNESS

by Madziwanyika aka billy woods

 
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150th Street in Harlem, New York is a dead end. Or more accurately, east of St. Nicholas, 150th stutters through a series of blind alleys and half blocks before joining the deluge of the FDR Drive. I had lived in Harlem on-and-off for years before I moved onto 150th Street. I started at 123rd and Claremont: a white enclave around Grant’s Tomb where I had to sneak in and out of an apartment we were illegally subletting. Disapproving looks and people asking whom you were visiting were par for the course but this was the Nineties, white people didn’t even try to pretend. In the boroughs, where they didn’t have doormen and a cop on every corner, residents enforced apartheid themselves.  You just didn’t go to certain areas. The spectre of Yusef Hawkins still hung over Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst. Polish people would openly confront you on the street in Greenpoint. When I dated a girl in Italian Williamsburg, her landlord pounded on the door and threatened to evict her. 

So I moved further uptown: 139th, then to a nondescript 4th-floor walkup on 150th Street between Fredrick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell. At that point in my life I had become acclimated to the hood, insomuch as one can be when it is not your home. There was the Section 8 building in Northwest DC where drug dealers broke the locks on our front doors and people would pipe up right on the stairs. The big, beautiful apartment on Edgecombe where gunfire echoed on summer nights and we slept with box fans whirring in the windows. I remember meeting these West African immigrants who lived across the street: four young men, all terrified to leave their apartment once night had fallen. We smoked cigarettes on the fire escape and watched the cops and the street do their dance. By then I had been around a little bit, enough to always be both relaxed and on guard, which is the only way a negro is going to survive in this country anyway. 


But even with that, there was something particularly forbidding about this block. It wasn’t isolation; my new apartment was relatively near two train stations and only a few blocks down 8th Avenue from 155th Street. 155th Street is home to both the legendary Rucker Park playground and The Polo Grounds Housing Projects. The latter stands on the former home of the New York Giants baseball team, although it is hard to imagine Willie Mays looking over his shoulder in 1954 for “The Catch” amidst the glumly towering skyscrapers that replaced the stadium in ’64 when the Giants left for San Francisco. No, the pall that hung over 150th street, while present all over Harlem, was thicker, more concentrated: a palpable despair in the air that was stronger than I had ever known.


We found the apartment in the newspaper and the landlord met us outside the building the day we were supposed to move in. It was a decently-sized two-bedroom for $800 a month, which felt like we were getting ripped off at the time but we were desperate. I just looked it up and that same unit is $2,400 right now. The landlord had demanded three months’ rent up front and once the check hit his palm, the guy jumped in his Cherokee with Jersey plates and took off at top-speed. I got the feeling he didn’t like Harlem too much. He didn’t return any of our calls for the rest of the lease.


Uptown has changed in ways that would have seemed unfathomable in 1997. For one, the weed spots are gone. Obviously, there is still weed in Harlem but we used to have actual retail weed stores. The basic version was a bodega or Variety store, windows to the street obscured by stacked inventory. Inside there were your usual food-desert items but it always felt very sparse compared with an actual corner store. The dealer, usually Jamaican, sat behind plexiglass and served up pre-bagged nicks, dimes and twenties. If you had an option it would be between “chocolate” and “skunk”, the differences between which were crucial at the time but could not be more meaningless now. They were both terrible, but we just didn’t know any better. Then there were upscale spots where you usually had to be buzzed in, and the business front was far more sophisticated: a video rental spot or a clothing store. These were the spots where you could get $50 jars of hydro, which was probably 2.5 grams at most. There was a cluster of weed spots between 116th and 118th that I used to go to because it allowed you some comparison shopping. Plus, if the cops hit one of them, you knew one of the others would be open and doing brisk business. I passed by that corner the other day and saw an ad for a Medical Marijuana bill. One of those spots is a regular deli now, with a sign advertising organic food. Across the street, the Chinese takeout place—where in the summer we would get sweet iced tea in a pint container for a dollar, two slices of lemon bobbing with the already melting ice—is a neo-Caribbean seafood restaurant. Inside the colors are festive and bright, and the greasy sheet of plexiglass is gone. I had the shrimp. It was pretty good. 


The abandoned buildings are gone too. There used to be blocks where there were more vacant buildings than occupied ones. I remember a row of burned-out buildings on 149th Street, black-blasted shells still standing but the interiors were piled with rubble. In one of them a slender tree was growing, its canopy almost peeking out of the missing roof five floors up. Gone are the empty lots that dotted the landscape, filled with tall grass or broken glass, depending on the season. I remember when [redacted] lived on 116th and Fredrick Douglass and there was a massive vacant lot behind her building that took up more than half the block. Every year a group of believers would show up armed with garden tools and garbage bags and unlock the gates, ignoring the fencing that had been cut and pulled away by the lost souls wandering every block. They would comb every inch of that wilderness, uprooting every scraggly bush, raking up every crack pipe or vial, shoveling every bit of broken glass and when they were finished the tents would go up. Big, white tents were staked into the ground by ropes as thick as your arm, and they would set up the sound system and rig the lights and run their cables. Then the people would come, streaming into this new campground, their clothes white and their skin black and for a whole week they would renew their covenants deep into the night as bugs swirled around the floodlights. I would watch from the fifth floor window, ashing a blunt into the balmy dark as they exalted their God. Then, as quickly as they came, the congregations and their tents and lights and chairs would all be gone, and the night was the Devil’s again. Between 2005 and 2013, hundreds of units of luxury condos would be built on that parcel of land. The average sale price is 1.2 million. 


But that old Harlem isn’t really gone, it’s simply receded in the glare of gentrification and pacification. Old Harlem has abandoned the avenues for the side-streets and alleyways, patiently holding its ground outside bodegas, and inside after-hours. Walk the length of 125th Street at night and as you push east, you will catch it in the bulletproof carousel of a corner store, hear it in the bickering of the addicts and madmen, see it in the dead eyes of a cop. 


I moved to 150th Street with a white man and this was back when it used to be rare to see a white face above 125th Street, unless you were counting cops. We had only been there a week or two when undercovers driving a yellow cab rolled up on him. They assumed he was there to buy drugs and when he insisted that he lived there, they followed him back to our building, making sure the whole block saw him with the cops. Then they advised him to move to Astoria before he got hurt because there was “no reason for a white person to be living [there]”. In actuality, a 6’2” white guy strolling around uptown in those days pretty much led to the assumption that he was a cop, meaning everyone gave him a wide berth. I had different problems. 


Going to the store for some ice cream one night, I was only halfway down the block when a car drove slowly past, the passenger eyeballing me. Aware that I knew nobody on the block and was involved in nothing, I looked straight back at the car, all the better I thought to make sure I didn’t catch a bullet meant for someone else. The car drove slowly past and then suddenly came flying back up 150th in reverse. I was terrified, glued to the spot. Once it pulled abreast of me, a black guy in a hoodie and a white dude in a Jets jersey ran up on me. In a second the black dude had me against a fence, running my pockets, grabbing my crotch, all while asking me what I was doing “on a known drug block”. The white dude said he saw me throw something, and when I tried to look over my shoulder to protest, I was told to look forward. After finding me unarmed and not in possession of any contraband, the black guy started being friendly (although not letting me go) as his partner paced up the block shining a flashlight under cars and into the gutter. I hadn’t thrown shit, but at that moment I was just praying they didn’t come upon someone’s drug stash or a crack pipe or even a gun because I knew whatever the white cop found was going to be what he “saw me throw”. After a few tense minutes, the white cop gave a signal and the black one apologized, lamely claiming he mistook me for a stick-up kid. They let me go with a pat on the back and sped off, radios chattering. The “Street Crimes Unit” would become infamous two years later over a late-night, mistaken-identity with another African man, Amadou Diallo. I still remember the way my heart jumped when they leapt silently from the car, guns in hand, eyes hidden by ball caps and reflective sunglasses. 


It happened on a beautiful day. My roommate was at work and I was waiting for my friend Rami to come through, then we were supposed to go cop some weed. I remember waiting for my boy on the stoop because I didn’t want to be sitting upstairs on a day like that, that’s how nice it was. There was some sort of charity basketball game going on in the adjacent Bill “Bojangles” Robinson Park. A gift from the Rockefeller family to the one-time vaudeville minstrel who became the biggest black entertainer of his time, it was now little more than a drab, concrete playground with a single basketball court next to my building. Robinson had lived across the street, in the sprawling Dunbar Apartments. Named for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rockerfeller built the complex in the 1920s after being approached by the New York Urban League about the inequitable housing available to African-Americans. Rockefeller’s dabbling in housing reform was also an attempt to push back against demands for government intervention in New York’s segregated housing market. The Dunbar Apartments were the first large co-ops built specifically for blacks, with 511 units that took up an entire block between 7th and 8th avenues, which are now Adam Clayton Powell Jr and Frederick Douglass Boulevards. Bojangles was just one of the notable tenants; Paul Robeson, A. Phillip Randolph and W.E.B DuBois also lived in the Dunbar. At first, Rockefeller retained control of the tenants’ board, personally overseeing his experiment and hiring black building managers, but requiring they report directly to him. Then the Great Depression hit and the project fell into arrears. Rockefeller eventually sold off all his below-market housing, including the Dunbar, which was purchased by the Methodist-Episcopal Church. The buildings were opened to renters and managed to remain a relatively desirable location until the sixties, when urban decay and cash-flow problems forced the Methodists to sell. The buildings fell into the hands of speculators, who would then sell to other speculators and so on, until the entire complex had fallen into deep disrepair.  By the time I arrived, the buildings were decrepit: their arched entryways forbidding instead of grand, the courtyard gardens a wild thicket of unkempt vegetation and trash. Fiends came and went, like worker ants retracing each others’ steps. In 2013, Lehman Brothers Holdings, the zombified remains of the financial giant that famously went Chapter 11 in 2008, sold what is now known as Dunbar Manor for $55 million dollars. 


When Rami arrived, we trooped around the corner to the weed spot and copped some blunts on the way back. Rami is an Arab, and with the benefit of a summer tan, he achieves a racial ambiguity that came in handy in Harlem, for me at least. Unlike when any white friends visited, we could walk around together without it appearing that I was hanging out with a cop or, in the case of less-clean-cut associates, selling dope. The “Variety Store” on Clayton Powell was closed so we walked an extra three blocks and he waited outside while I copped from the rastas. We walked back and I remember thinking what a great day it was shaping up to be. I hadn’t been having the greatest summer, having lost my girlfriend and my job, so anything to lift me out of the doldrums was welcomed. Turning the corner onto my block, I saw the crowd around the game was already bigger; there were banners strung, teams in uniforms and even an announcer on a PA system. Little kids were spilling out of the tiny playground and clusters of young cats wearing team colors were milling around the court, repping their squads. 


Upstairs I cracked open a blunt while Rami sifted the seeds out of our dimebag. Once it was rolled, we went out on the fire escape, passing trees in the sun and catching up. People were peering out of their windows in the Dunbar Houses and we watched them watch the game, since we couldn’t see it, and we talked over the cheering of the crowd. Then came a squealing of tires below and screams of a different kind. A livery cab had screeched to a halt in the middle of the block, and a little boy lay motionless in front of its bumper. People rushed from Bojangles Park into the narrow one-way street, swarming the cab, and the driver, panicking, tried to start reversing. That only incensed the mob further, and more young men gathered around the car trying to jerk the doors open and rocking it back and forth. Somehow the driver managed to pull the passenger door shut and lock it but now he was completely surrounded by people pounding on the car. A young kid that I recognized from my building climbed on top of the car, jumping up and down on it; he wasn’t any older than fourteen. The stalemate was broken when a Dominican teenager still in his team jersey came running from the sidewalk swinging a baseball bat. The car window exploded, and in moments the driver was snatched out of the car and disappeared under the swarm. The mob undulated around him like a multicolored jellyfish, moving as one around its prey, who we could not see but there was no doubt he was in trouble. I looked up the street, hoping my roommate would not pick this moment to come home from work; this would be the wrong time to be the lone white person on the block. Rami and I watched along with most of the block, who were craning out of their windows as the young men began to dissipate. As they slipped away in small groups, some people moved in to attend to the child that had been struck. The unfortunate cabbie lay in a pool of blood next to his smashed car, as still as the little boy a few feet away. A woman rushed down the street in her house slippers, wailing, clearly the child’s mother. Even though the precinct was only blocks away, the police didn’t show up for another twenty minutes. When the ambulance finally arrived I remember a paramedic standing over the driver’s body nonchalantly smoking a cigarette.


I had been on edge waiting for my roommate to come home when there was a knock on the door. But it wasn’t him, it was Vordul Mega, who lived about 15 blocks south. I remember explaining to him what happened and telling him that if my roommate had come home during the attack, I would have had to grab a weapon and run downstairs. Vordul looked at me real seriously in that way that he had when he wanted to make sure you were listening, and quietly said, “You don’t want to ever do that. If you not prepared to use it, don’t ever do that out here”. 

I never forgot that. 


Leaving the house the next day, I saw detectives on the block with notepads trying to question people. I put on my headphones and went the other way to the train station. For days afterwards an Orwellian NYPD megaphone van drove up and down the street at all hours, haranguing residents to provide information. I watched the news and learned the child had been relatively unharmed, and that the dead man was a Senegalese immigrant who had borrowed his cousin’s livery cab to make some extra money. I thought of those African guys in the apartment on Edgecombe, trying to make sense of a world that was unfathomable. Even I was only an interpreter, I could comprehend the language of this place but I didn’t truly understand it. 


It was a long summer and by the time I moved out of the building in September, I had seen many things for the first time. My neighbors who had to sleep in the same bed as their children because of the giant rats that literally ate their way through the walls of their ground floor apartment. The first time I heard The War Report I was watching them press broken glass into Brillo pads and stuff them into the ratholes, hoping for a brief reprieve. Or the Puerto Rican guy who showed me the Mac-10 in his closet and let me in on his plans to rob some dealers his brother-in-law had coming by the building. Later he would rob me, but that’s another story. That summer was the first time I saw the Bloods in NY, befuddled by their intricate greeting rituals. But that day stuck with me. It was the first time I watched someone die. At night, I would close my eyes and see the pool of blood widening around his battered head as he lay alone in the street. A few days after the killing I saw the little kid who had hopped on top of the livery cab. He had one arm in a cast, and was smoking a Newport on the steps of our building. He must have broken his arm in the melee. I looked away.