Election Night in Harlem

11/4/08 - 11pm

I have just finished brushing my teeth, and am planning to go to bed. But as I shut the TV on Keith Olberman calling the race for Obama, I hear a great roar from outside. I open the window onto 149th, and see one of my neighbors—a young black man—pop his head out the window to shout Obama onto the street. I do the same—calling Obama toward Amsterdam Avenue--and five seconds later another neighbor—another young black man—does the same thing. It will be like this for the next two hours: people popping like whack-a-moles from the windows of West Harlem; cries of “Obama” every 10 seconds. I quickly grab my notebook and head to the street.

Though my last clip was 2 years ago and my last pitch was 12 months ago, I am a reporter. For the past 7 years—since just before my 20th birthday—I have gone everywhere with a notebook, scribbling events psychological and actual as they pass before my brain and eyes. This event is major, so bearing witness is natural.

I move downtown along Amsterdam, where women are gathered on fire escapes and men look quizzically from the stoop of the 24-hour Laundromat. The first person I speak with, at 148th in front of a boarded up church, is unsure of which direction to walk. He gives an Obama shout and I respond with one—this is our greeting as we approach in the dark. He wears copper-colored shades, but it’s clear enough that he’s crying. We hug at some point in the conversation—at least I think we do; if not, then we at least shake hands repeatedly and intently—and he says things are gonna get better for everybody. He points at the back of his hand, which is the color of fallen leaves. “This don’t matter,” he said. “White, black—it don’t matter. We’re all human.” You’re absolutely right, is the best I can muster. He recalls the difficulties of Obama’s campaign, but then blasts them aside with a geyser of pent-up faith. “When the Lord wills something, nothing can stop it!” I gesture furtively toward the boarded up church behind us, and the lonely cross above its door.

When we part he moves haltingly, as if the world is new and he's unsure where to go.

I move down Amsterdam, where the crowds and noise are growing. At 147th, a lone janitor stands in the open door of the school where I’d voted that morning. At 146th, a crew of Latino guys bangs pots and pans against a construction scaffold. At 145th, a Chinese family stands outside their restaurant, which has a “Rangel-Obama” sign in the window.

I turn east on 145th, a main thoroughfare, hoping to take in as much of Harlem as I can. At the corner of St. Nicholas Ave., a woman with a boom box dances to African drum music. She’s joined by a woman in a dress like kinte cloth, and a gathering crowd shouts its approval. “Nice music,” someone yells. “That’s us!” says another. People begin clapping to the drumbeat. I look around to see similar crowds on each corner. This, I decide, is where I should stop. I set myself up on a fire hydrant and begin writing.

“Beep the horn! Beep the horn!” a woman yells, and cars at the stoplight oblige. Most of the cars I’ve seen tonight have been beeping, but at this intersection they increase in volume, frequency, and variety. Now it is a black gypsy cab. In the next hour, police cruisers, out-of-service buses, in-service buses, ladder 28 from FDNY's “Harlem Hilton” precinct, and garbage trucks with sanitation workers hanging off the back will all pass honking. The crowd—now about 150 strong, mostly black but with some white and brown—resounds with cheers. A large man in a black leather jacket dances giddily as he crosses in front of the gypsy. The air smells like a burned out clutch plate.

“Let it rain!” cries the woman with the boom box, as a light drizzle beings to fall. A pair of stout women, one white and one black, arrive behind me with a dog and an Obama-Biden sign. They cheer when the M3 bus stops, honks, and takes on passengers across the street.

I strike up a conversation with the man on the fire hydrant next to me. He has lived in Harlem all his life, and 22 years in the immediate area. Watching the crowds grow in size and joy, I ask him what this means. “It means change,” he says fiercely, with eye contact so intense that John McCain’s old purchase on the word seems newly feeble. I think of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, and imagine that for this man, Obama’s mantra means not just change from 8 years of bad policy, or 30 years of ugly politics, but 400 years of less-than-citizenship. “It means economic possibility,” he continues, pinning his emotion down with nuts and bolts before it flies upward again: “It means a lot of things to a lot of people…so you just want to sink your teeth in, and take a big bite.”

Voices rise from the dancing group behind us. “You know how we celebrate in Harlem. We stay here in the rain! We celebrate to the crack of dawn!”

“Oh, it’s a glorious day!”

I turn back to the man, whose intensity I’m trying to gauge for danger signs. I ask if he ever thought this would happen.

“It took too long to happen. So you just want to” –he inhales deeply, staring into my eyes as though he’s breathing my soul—“breathe it all in.”

Others gather around us, and horns continue to honk. A group of Latino kids approach the curb 10 feet to my left. One of them, light skinned and lanky, hears over his phone about a bar that’s offering free shots. My friend is now engaged in talk with the dancing woman in the kinte dress. She gives him a button featuring Obama’s image looking out behind prison bars, surrounded by the images of iconic black leaders. He is transfixed.

“That’s Malcolm X, that’s Martin Luther King, that one’s Marcus Garvey, that’s Nelson Mandela—and there’s Obama, looking through the prison bars.”

She tells him she has to leave to watch her kids—“Got a little infant to take care of." He finds this outrageously funny.

A Mobil gas truck passes east along 145th, honking. The cars stopped on St. Nicholas are now a significant number, and they volley horn honks back and forth, louder and louder. Cheers rise from the sidewalks, until the din of horns and voices resolves into a three beat cheer: “O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!”

The light changes, and a man on a bicycle with longish braids zips through the intersection and dismounts.

“Let’s go-o-o!!” he screams hoarsely, his face thrust forward and neck cords straining. He sounds like a batter whose team is down by three, but has just led off the ninth with a triple. "Let’s go-o-o-o-o-o!!” The crowd shouts in agreement, and the horns respond. The corner’s voices are connected, now, and everyone’s voice connects to his heart.

I note that the celebration is largely sober, but as soon as I think this I notice two women to my left, drinking red wine from juice glasses. They are a lesbian couple, and we strike up a conversation. One is a dark Israeli whose name I believe is Rotem; her companion is a black American named Myesha--slim, hip, tomboyish, intellectual. I ask them the question I’d asked the man on the hydrant—what does this mean?—and the Israeli is particularly forthcoming. She is proud that her young nephew is witnessing this back in Israel, regardless of the country’s pro-McCain leanings. Her people, she explains, the Sephardim, are in Israel comparable to blacks (her parents are from Yemen and Iraq). She asks where I am from, noting my brown skin, and I say what I always say to this question—“Jersey”—before spilling the ethnic beans: “Mom’s Italian, Dad’s Irish, mostly.”

“No more bullshit!” someone cries behind us. In front of us an Escalade stops at the light. The driver pops exultant through the sunroof.

Our conversation scarcely skips a beat, and I am careful to involve Myesha, lest she think I’m macking on her girlfriend. She says that Obama’s win is “fucking history, man”—not in a street tones, I observe, but with the nasal “man” of the university and the jazz club. As I inevitably do with black people, I ask her home address; I do this to flaunt my familiarity with black neighborhoods. (I not only live at 149th; I taught high school for a year at 161st.) Before we get much past 146th and Convent, though, we are engulfed in the embraces of Myesha’s mother and sister. They assume I am a friend of Myesha or, likelier, Rotem—in my pajamas and a corduroy blazer, I would indeed fit in with a multi-ethnic intellectual crowd—and they laugh when Rotem informs them we’ve only just met.

Myesha’s mother introduces herself as Linda Yearwood, and warmly shakes my hand. I don’t know where our conversation begins—occupation, location, etc.—but she is soon discussing her deep roots in Harlem, and the buds those roots have grown. She grew up in a Harlem as diverse as today’s—before what I imagine to have been a stretch of monochromatic blackness in between—and she recalls with delight the story of registering to vote with a group of Jewish election clerks. They encouraged her involvement, and she never forgot their support, but she laughingly recalls their disapproval when she attempted to register as a Black Panther. “They told me ‘No, no, dahlingk’—you know how old Jewish women always say “k” instead of g?” Rotem smiles and describes something like a Black Panther party in Israel. She then returns to the Sephardic-Ashkenazic divide. Linda is intrigued, and I do my best to help Rotem explain the differences in the Jewish Diaspora. Our eye contact is deep. None of us is either offending or pretending for the others—me with my questions about street address, Linda with her impersonations of old Jews, Rotem with her claims to Israeli minority status. We are simply telling stories about our race-shaped lives.

Linda and I discuss writing. She was a television writer for the Fresh Prince and the Wayans Brothers, among other shows—a career that earned her the brownstone on 146th, which she bought in 1981 and where Myesha grew up. I think better of asking about the property's appreciation since then, and she tells me that writing industry politics are “such bullshit”—not cynically, but with the same cheerful profanity of her daughter’s “it’s fucking history, man.” She notes that with my smile and friendliness, I should navigate the field well, just as her friendliness allowed her to. “Then, after everyone likes you, then maybe slip them a manuscript or two. And they’ll be like, wow, and he can write, too!” I wince, and say that I enjoy writing precisely because it’s a place where I don’t need to be a smiling face, a place where facelessness frees me to go deeper.

The conversation moves to her family. She has four children with her husband of 31 years—the rough length, I note, of my own parents marriage—and she laughs that she’s never broken up with anyone: she’s been with her husband since the 9th grade. She says, “you could write about that! Here’s a woman who’s been married to the same guy for 31 years, had four kids with him. And you know what? She still kind of likes the nigger!” I smile, and imagine similar love growing between Rotem and Myesha. Then we part ways, thanking each other for the pleasure of having met.

The party around us continues. Near the door to the corner store, a short haired hipster girl—white skin, black leather jacket—stands shoulder to shoulder with two tall black men who are not hipsters. One of them is the giddy, childlike street dancer in the leather jacket. Another is lankier, lighter skinned, using a video camera to tape still another white woman in an Obama T-shirt.

“I know I don’t need to ask who you voted for,” he says glowingly. She shakes her head and poses hesitantly for the camera.

The hipster girl smokes a cigarette.

Next to us, the man who said spoke of change and economic possibility, the lifelong Harlemite, repositions himself on a new hydrant, announcing, “I’m gonna sit down and relax myself." He looks down admiringly at the black history button he’d received earlier.

Behind us, someone calls out “Shorty.”

“Who you callin’ shorty?” a middle aged black woman replies. She then comes over to the man who’s just sat. She stands next to two women—a new bi-racial lesbian couple—and moves in to inspect the button. The conversation shifts to electoral votes, and the lesbians join in, mentioning Florida and Ohio.

“You writing this down?” the man asks me. “He got three hundred thirty votes! He won places no one thought he’d win!”

I say that he might get even more than that, and ask the group if he’d won Virginia yet. The seated man says yes.

A dance party erupts across 145th, to funk music playing from an upstairs window. As I get closer, I recognize the song: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” The crowd here is mostly young black men, but it soon merges with another crowd, of young Mexican guys, who come chanting down 145th with Rangel-Obama signs and glasses of brown liquor. One, with a shaved head, bull-thick neck, and light patina of sweat, tipsily screams “Obama!”, then laughs. His unhinged delirium makes me wary of a confrontation, but he is gracious when one of the black men—wiry, dark-skinned, perhaps 21—takes the sign from his hands and rips off Charlie Rangel’s face.

After stomping on the Rangel half, the wiry man holds the Obama half up to a cheering crowd. A young woman says laughingly, “That wasn’t even John McCain!”

“He ain’t shit either!” the man responds.

I’m intrigued by this interest in local politics, so I step forward. Was this young man—and perhaps, others like him—angry about Rangel’s recent public embarrassments, perhaps fearing they reflected badly on the neighborhood? I ask why he stomped out Rangel, and he repeats, “Because he ain’t shit!” But his jubilant defiance is ebbing defensive.

“He ain’t shit compared to Obama, or he ain’t shit in general?” I persist.

“He ain’t shit compared to Obama or in general,” he says more quietly, looking side to side as if to find an escape route. I worry that I’ve made him uncomfortable, that he’s sizing me up as an authority figure or a snitch and wondering whether desecrating Charlie Rangel is a punishable offense. I try to reassure him--not with my own (very real) doubts about Rangel, with a fast-pitch softball question about “what this means to you.” But he’s uninterested in answering. It is his friend—tall but less wiry, lighter skinned but bearded, young but less boyish—who supplies a one word response: “Black.” I wait for more. “He’s black,” he repeats.

The tension is diffused by a middle-aged white man shouting "Obama!" Delirious with joy and drink he teeters well into our personal space, until he's inches from the wiry man's chin. “You are my brother!” he declares in a Mediterranean accent. While the wiry man considers this, the white man—of medium height and stocky build—steps to the corner and begins dancing. The wiry man briefly joins him, as much in mockery as brotherhood, but it soon becomes too much for him and he staggers laughing back to the crowd. When he begins to leave—perhaps to smoke something, for his bearded companion asks “when we going to take this shit to the face?”—I thank him for talking with me. As a measure of good will, and perhaps worried that I'm put off by his friend’s “he’s black" answer, looks directly in my eyes and says "You black."

I respond in the only way I can on this night—euphorically and improbably: “And you’re white.”

He has no idea what to make of this, so I continue, recalling the words of the foliage-colored man by the burned out church.

“Black, white, it doesn’t matter. It all mixes.”

I then turn to my notebook. I write how the man reminded me of all the sadly defensive young black men I've known—men who fear punishment when they’ve done no wrong, who provide denials where they haven’t been accused. I imagine that this man isn’t yet sure of victory’s reality—as if he's worried it could somehow be taken away.

As I do, another man—shorter, less conventionally thuggish, wearing a Yankees hat and a white T-shirt—asks what I’m writing.

I reply honestly and noncommittally: “Everything I see.”


He sees deep sense in this, for he tells his friends, “That book’s gonna be famous, cause never in my life did I expect to see a night like this.”

There are grounds for brotherhood here, in this night unlike any other, but I slip into old habits just as the wiry man had done.

“How long have you lived around here?” I ask. The neighborhood shtick.

“You mean New York? I’ve lived in New York all my life.”

I meant Harlem, of course--“the block”, even--but I keep this to myself. Is it wrong, I wonder, to assume he's from the iconically black neighborhood where we're standing? Maybe not, but it's probably wrong to question him as a representative of that neighborhood. Our brotherhood prospects seem to fade in my hesitation, so I quickly soldier on with my shtick. The must be some value in our potentially shared neighborhood, I decide, racial significations or not.

“I live over at 149th and Amsterdam.”

He seems to like something in this, because he warms to me again.

“Oh! Well it’s nice to meet you. I live right over on 146th and Broadway. My name’s Troy.”

Troy looked to be about 20.

I introduce myself, shake his hand, and then follow him across the street as the light changes.

“So you never thought this would happen?”

“Never,” he replies emphatically. He speaks over his shoulder, happy to talk but eager to move on to his next set of revels. “God forbid, I thought he’d take a bullet before it happened.” And here he pounds his chest, and skips off into the night.

I follow his path north on St. Nicholas. Screams of Obama still cut the air. Marijuana does too, and note that the party’s sobriety is passing.

“You see how all the white folks want to come out?” someone says along the sidewalk.

A man near the subway requests 75 cents. I don’t have it on me.

I duck into St. Nick’s pub, a jazz club a mere half-block from my apartment. I’ve been many times, though not as often as I might. The good music, the cheap drinks, the buffet spread in tin servers over little sterno flames, and the crowd more mixed than any I’ve seen in New York—all of these might make this my regular haunt. But they haven’t. I’ve noticed the crowd growing whiter since I moved in three years ago, and I’ve wondered guiltily if we white folks have upset some crucial balance. It’s whiter than ever tonight, and I look around for exceptions as if to console myself. There’s the black man at the back table whose feet I repeatedly step on when I enter. There’s the man with the cane and the white Kangol-style cap turned sideways over a shaved skull. There’s the woman walking through collecting for the musicians, singing “There’s a ho-o-o-le in the bucket” with nuance and soul.

And then there’s Barack on TV. He seems just to have finished his acceptance speech. His hands are before his face in prayer--a stunning remarkable image--and the closed captions say something about the speech’s lack of “Eb-yoo-lance." The captions report Nick Sarkozy's statement about the moment’s history and power to create hope.

Nonetheless, I spend much of the night talking to a white lefty with a dark view of the future. Maggie, a sucked out theater vet, born in the Village and still living there after 9/11, says Obama’s speech recalled John Kennedy’s.

“Did he call for service?” I asked.

“No so much for service, but for…unity.”

I ask if she thinks we’re up to it, and she bluntly says no. We came together after 9/11, she recalls, “with all the American flags,” but then… And then she rattles off her dark lefty’s pop inflected history: "There were the 50’s, when we had McCarthyism; the 60’s, and that was Vietnam; the 70’s, when everything sucked; then the 80’s, which was Reaganomics and money money money." She can’t recall any time when we’ve been united.

I want to shake her. That was then, I think. Today is different. Hope, dammit! Hope!

I want to say these things, but she tugs the conversation in a different direction. Her theater career has fallen on hard times and her daughter, a hipster standing skinnily near the table, allowed her to move in. She lives in Harlem, and I sense Maggie wants to introduce us--particularly after discovering I’d gone to Duke. I flee as quickly as I can.

On the way home, walking up 149th, a white guy in a gray suit and an open collar exits a yellow cab with a pretty black girl. “Si, se puede!’” he shouts, in response to an Obama cry from St. Nicholas Avenue. Up ahead on Amsterdam, horns still blare.

Walking toward me is a trio of black girls. “O-fuckin-bama!” one of them cries.