Harlem Notebook - I

By Jimmy Breslin
New York Herald Tribune
Sometime between 1963 and 1967

Inside the church, the heavy air-conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool. Carroll Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went through the doors and into the hot Sunday-afternoon sun. Outside the church, the Salem Methodist Church on 129th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, the people's voices were drowned out by the whir of low-pressure tires on taxicabs which kept passing by. On a weekend, taxicabs are a poor man's game and Harlem is filled with them.

Tyler was in a tuxedo. He was nervous, but he spoke in a quiet voice. He is twenty-four and in the Marines and he has a neat mustache and a strong-looking neck.

"I've got about seven months to go," he was saying. "I'm at Camp Lejeune. That's in North Carolina."

"Where are you going to live when you get out?"

"We have an apartment."

"Is it a neighborhood like this?"

"Well, you know. It's a neighborhood."

"What are you going to do when you get out?"

"I don't know. I'll be a real-estate agent, I suppose. Why are you asking?"

"Oh, I don't know. I was just wondering how you figure out your life or your future or whatever it is on a day like this when you happened to be colored."

"I don't want to know about that now," he said. Then the bride smiled and said thank you and they went out the door and onto the church steps.

There are three small trees, the leaves fresh green, on the sidewalk in front of the church. The well-dressed guests were by the trees and the limousines were parked at the curb behind them. It was pleasant. But the rest of it, the part Tyler didn't want to think about on his wedding day, was there too. Across Seventh Avenue, in the ground floors of the old stone tenements, were the Harlem Swan Fish and Chips, the Dunbar Pawnbrokers, Bea's Hair Styles, and the Vogue Beauty Shop. On the side street, 129th Street, the red sign of the Elks Imperial Bar and Grill showed on a building sitting between two tenements. Across the street from the Elks are the buildings where, the police believe, the young kids who claim they are going to kill white people this summer sit on stoops and stare at police cars.

And from the windows of the stone tenements, the old people leaned out and looked at the young married couple coming out of the church. Tyler did not look up at them while he helped his wife into the limousine, and he did not look at the hock shop of the Elks Club sign, but it was all right in front of him, standing like the couple of hundred years of history and attitudes that this young guy was walking out of church to face.

In Harlem, words like "history" and "attitudes" come down to plain things. To the paycheck mostly. The paychecks Harlem people earn, and their dissatisfaction with being poor and living in slums, produce the speculation that this will be a summer of racial violence in Harlem. But these same paychecks are why general violence almost certainly won't develop at all. The same Harlem people who have the whites frightened about a race riot are too busy working for a paycheck and too tired from years of being poor to start running in the streets.

In Harlem, from 96th Street to 119th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the East River, the average family income is $3797. From 110th Street to 126th Street, between Eighth and Park Avenues, it is a little higher, $4141. In the lower part of Manhattan, where white people live, income in the area from 14th to 30th Streets, between Eighth and Third Avenues is $6892. And, if you want a real contrast, from 63d Street to 96th Street, between Fifth and Third, a
family averages $15,305.

Money makes the way of life, and low money shows everywhere you go in Harlem. In a supermarket on 135th Street, in the middle of a Saturday rush, the totals on the cash registers keep showing $7.30 and $10.58 and $5.97 while, at the same time, in a supermarket in Baldwin, Long Island, the figures were $28.60 and $41.12.

In the neighborhood taverns, the bartender puts three thick-bottomed shot glasses on the wood in front of you when you order a drink. All these local bars sell drinks on a two-for-one or three-for-one policy. In Maxie's Cafe, on 153d Street and Eighth Avenue, rye, gin, vodka, or run shorties are sold for $.50 per single, two for $.90 and three for $1.20. Cognac and better Scotch sell for $.60 a drink. All chasers except water are $.10 extra. Bar etiquette requires the bartender to place the three shot glasses down and the customer names his game, a single or two for $.90 or three for the $1.20.

The low money shows most in the people. There are 450,000 people living in Harlem, and the talk, and the crime-rate figures, have other people afraid of the Harlem people and afraid to go into the area. The crime figures are high, and the brutality of the crimes of late turns your stomach. But 450,000 people do not run around committing crime. Last week, to see Harlem a little better, and to examine this place some have said is just a big time bomb waiting to go off on a hot summer night, we moved into Harlem. James Putnam, a fifty-four-year-old man who is retired from the Pennsylvania Railroad after thirty-eight years as a business car steward for Davis G. Bevans, the railroad's vie-chairman, was kind enough to put us up in his three-room apartment.

For walk-around company we had James Russell, who calls bartenders "say, my man," and who drinks orange slings as a rule, but V.O. in the Pink Angel, where, he explains, he is "in kind of tight with the barkeep." Mr. Russell is a former Golden Gloves bantamweight boxer, and, upon being properly urged, he demonstrates a good, short left hook and gives the impression that he once was a stiff puncher. Also with us was a person known, where he comes from, as "the
First Division." He is called this because of the firepower he keeps in his pocket. He was along because of many warnings from outsiders that Harlem is a dangerous place for a white these days. In five days and nights we didn't draw much more than a stare because people in Harlem are too busy living like people any place else.

This does not mean that trouble isn't there. Pick up a paper and you see that. James Putnam points out that Wednesday-evening services at his church, St. Mark's Methodist on 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, have poor attendance because so many women have been mugged right in front of the church. Throughout Saturday night, riding in an unmarked Police Department crime combat car out of the 32d Precinct, Sergeant Frank Weidenburner kept advising us, at each stop, to get into the building in a hurry because the bad trouble comes from the rooftops.

On 129th Street between Seventh and Lenox, which is the area where a small group known as the Blood Brothers stored ammunition for a war on the police, and where the few remaining members still hang out, Weidenburner became insistent. His car was answering a radio call which said somebody in the tenement at 155 West 129th had called police for help.

"Any call on that block can be trouble," he said. When his unmarked car pulled up, two radio cars were there, and two more pulled in later.

"Don't hang around out there," he said when we got out. "Come inside the building with us."

Inside, a man of about twenty-five was stretched unconscious on a second-floor landing. Two women were with him. They said the man had been beaten and stomped on by kids from up the block. Then the women began to fight over who was going to nurse the beaten man.

You see things like this. And then, with bright morning sunlight coming in from the patio, you sit and talk to a woman like Jane Booker. Bright, and almost overly sensitive because of her intelligence, she sits and has a glass of orange juice in her new high-middle-income apartment, and she snaps out the things that bother a woman who is colored in New York.

"Why is it," she says, "that every time I get into a taxicab downtown, the driver turns around and asks me, 'What's the number today?' Just because I'm not white, does that mean I have to know the numbers game? Does he do that with any white woman that gets into a cab?"

And over all of this, over the people and their habits and their misery, runs the layer of arguments. The Negro crime rate is high, the whites claim. The police brutality must stop, or it will provoke violence, the Negro leaders say. A Negro comedian gets on television and says some nonsense about a conspiracy in the white press to suppress the Negro. The words in the arguments are big and important-sounding and in the meantime Harlem sits there, with 450,00 people who have no heritage in life except poverty. And with this long, hot summer coming up that nobody talks about, some of them may step out and do things. But only some of them. And then only maybe.

"Riot?" the bartender was saying in Maxie's. "Who's got time for that? People have to go to work every day. Doesn't anybody know that?"