Trimmed Way Down...

...but too late for publication. Enjoy.

Election Night in Harlem
11/4/08 - 11pm

I shut the TV on Keith Olberman and open my window. A few windows over, a head pops out and yells Obama. I do the same. Then another neighbor does, whack-a-mole-like. I need to get outside. I grab my notebook and run to the street.

My first conversation, before a boarded up church at 148th, is with a black man whose copper-colored sunglasses betray tears. We shout Obama from afar—this is our greeting —and sensing my enthusiasm he approaches for hugs and testimony. He says that things will get better for everybody. “This don’t matter,” he says, pointing at his skin, which is the color of fallen leaves. “White, black—it don’t matter. We’re all human.” He recalls the campaign’s tenser moments, then blasts them aside with a geyser of pent-up faith. “When the Lord wills something, nothing can stop it!”

Down Amsterdam where Latino men bang scaffolding with pans, I walk past the school where I voted. At 145th I turn east. Horns honk. At the corner of St. Nicholas two women, one with a boom box, dance to African drum music. People clap to the drumbeat. Some 150 are gathered around this intersection: mostly black but brown and white as well. I sit on a fire hydrant to take notes.

The man on the hydrant next to mine has lived in Harlem all his life. I ask what tonight’s victory means, and his reply--“It means change”—makes John McCain’s brief dalliance with the word sees newly ridiculous. He is intense. Change for him means more than change from 8 years of George Bush. But he pins his emotion down with nuts and bolts—“It means economic possibility”—before it flaps 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.”

Drizzle falls, and voices rise behind us. “Let it rain!” “We celebrate to the crack of dawn!” “It’s a glorious day!” Horn honks resound from the street—police cruisers, out-of-service buses, in-service buses, ladder 28 from FDNY’s “Harlem Hilton” precinct, garbage trucks with sanitation workers hanging from the back: all pass honking. The din resolves into a three beat cheer--“O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!”—as man on a bicycle zips across 145th. He dismounts, thrusts his face forward, and lets out a scream. “Let’s go-o-o!” He looks like a batter whose team is down in the ninth, but who’s just led off with a triple. “Let’s go-o-o-o!” Another man in the crosswalk dances like a child. Exultant drivers pop from sunroofs. The air smells like a burned out clutch plate.

To my left two women drink red wine from juice glasses. One is a brown Israeli named Rotem; her companion is a black American named Myesha. Rotem expresses pride that her nephew is watching back home, Israel’s pro-McCain leanings notwithstanding. She explains that Sephardic Jews like her are looked down upon, and asks, noting my brown skin, where I am from. I answer how I always do—“Jersey”—before spilling the ethnic beans.

I’m careful to involve Myesha, lest she think I’m hitting on her girlfriend, so I ask where she lives. I often do this with black people, I realize, as if to flaunt my familiarity with black neighborhoods. Before I can wonder whether this is wrong I am engulfed by Myesha's mother in a side-embrace. When we seperate she talks about her Harlem upbringing, recalling the Jewish election clerks with whom she first registered to vote. They approved, she says, of everythong but her Black Panther affiliation. “ ‘No, no, dahlingk’--You know how old Jewish women always say ‘k’ instead of ‘g’?” Rotem smiles and tells us about an Israeli Black Panther Party, before returning, for Linda’s benefit, to the Sephardic-Ashkenzic divide. She is not offended, nor is she posturing. None of us are—me with my address questions, Linda with her impersonations, Rotem with her claims to minority status. We are simply looking for kinship.

Linda is a television writer—a career that earned her a 146th Street brownstone in 1981—and I forgo commenting on property appreciation to tell her I’m a writer too. She says my smile should steer me through the field, and I grimace: I like writing, I say, precisely because it allows for facelessness. She advises me not to discount the industry’s “bullshit” politics--“then, after everyone likes you, then maybe slip them a manuscript or two"--and then jokingly suggests that her marriage could be my next scoop. “Here’s a woman who’s been married to the same guy for 31 years, had four kids with him…and she still kind of likes the nigger!”

Across 145th funk music plays from an upstairs window: “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.” A group of dancers, mostly young black men, merges with a group of revelers—mostly young Latinos—who come chanting down 145th with brown liquor glasses and Rangel-Obama signs. I fear a confrontation when a wiry, dark-skinned man from the first group takes a sign from a shaved-skulled, lightly sweating man from the second, and rips off Charlie Rangel’s face. But the Latino merely laughs as the black man stomps on Rangel and holds up Obama.

Intrigued by this Rangel stomping—did the wiry man view his congressman’s scandals as a black mark on the community?—I ask his motive. “Because he ain’t shit!” he replies, confident but wary of the question.

“Compared to Obama, or he in general?” I persist.

“He ain’t shit compared to Obama or in general.” By now I sense he’s looking for an escape route, so I try to reassure him with a softball question; I don't want him to think I’m some pro-Rangel snitch. But he won't tell me “what this election means” to him. Instead 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 elaboration. “He’s black,” he repeats.

There is an awkward pause until a middle aged white man, delirious with joy and drink, comes teetering into our personal space. “You are my brother!” he says, in Mediterranean accent, mere inches from the wiry man's chest. The wiry man considers this development, while the Mediterranean man, on to greater joys, staggers to the corner to dance. The wiry man briefly joins him—as much in mockery as brotherhood. Then he doubles over laughing and veers away. I thank him for talking with me, and as he leaves--perhaps worried his friend’s “he’s black” answer has offended me--he looks directly in my eyes and says, “You black.”

I respond the only way I can tonight—“And you’re white.”

He has no idea what to make of this, so I continue in 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, and imagine that for this wiry Rangel-stomper, victory is still in doubt—that it might be snatched away. I think of the sadly defensive black men I've known--men who fear punishment when they’ve done no wrong and give denials even before they're accused.

As I do, a shorter black man—white t-shirt, blue Yankees cap—asks what I’m writing.

“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.”

Neither did I, I realize, and there are grounds for brotherhood here. But I blow it by returning to the neighborhood schtick. “How long have you lived around here?”

“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. Am I wrong to assume he hails from the neighborhood where we’re standing? Maybe not. But if my question is code for “how long have you been black, what does being black mean to you, and how has the election changed this?”—then perhaps I should ask it more directly, or not at all. Since I sense our brotherhood prospects sliding, I opt for not at all. Instead, I stop being a journalist and introduce myself as a neighbor.

“I live at 149th and Amsterdam.”

He seems to like something in this.

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

I give my name and shake his hand.

“So you never thought this would happen?”

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

I walk uptown, past a man requesting 75 cents I don’t have, and duck into St. Nick’s pub. It’s a mere half-block from my apartment, and the live jazz, cheap drinks, nightly buffet, and diverse crowd all might make it my regular haunt. They haven't, though, and the crowd is especially white tonight. It’s been whitening since I moved here, and as always, I wonder if my presence--in St. Nick's and in Harlem--has upset some crucial balance. To console myself I look for black people. There’s the man in back whose feet I stepped on when I entered; the man in the Kangol cap and shaved skull, walking with a cane; the woman collecting for the musicians, singing “There’s a ho-o-o-le in the bucket.” I have nothing for her either.

And then there’s the president elect, on TV, hands closed in prayer after his acceptance speech. His election is a reason for all people to hope, says Nicholas Sarkozy in closed caption; pundits note the speech’s lack of “Eb-yoo-lance.” I turn to the woman next to me—scrawny, white, middle aged—and ask her what she thinks. She says the speech reminded her of Kennedy.

“Did he call for service?”

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

I ask if she thinks we’re up to it, and she bluntly says no. She’d lived in the Village after 9/11, she says, and the unity in that time and place was all too brief. She then launches into a song I’ve heard before, a cynical boomer’s history, told from the left, with a pop culture inflection: "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."

I want to shake her--“Hope, dammit! Hope!”--but I don't, and in the pause she tugs our talk in a different direction. She has just moved to Harlem with her daughter, a hipster standing skinnily nearby. I sense she wants to introduce us, particularly after hearing I went to Duke.

I flee as quickly as I can.

Back on the street, a white guy in a gray suit exits a yellow cab and yells “Si se puede!” toward St. Nicholas. “O-fuckin-bama” answers a trio of young black girls. Up on Amsterdam, horns still blare. Home never felt so sweet.