B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (10 page)

Eventually I did begin to know my neighbors and be known by them, but this process happened by degrees. I came to know Ms. Bessie and some of the others, even those who eyed me with suspicion at first and did not speak unless I insisted on it. Sometimes I would pause when going out or pause before going in; this became my habit, so I was often late to wherever I was going on account of having paused at my door to chat.

I don’t remember if I was going out or coming in the day I met Julius Bobby Nelson. I don’t even remember for certain if what I am about to tell you happened on the day we formally met, or if it is simply a day I remember with some clarity because what he said compelled me to write it down. I would have already known his face by then, and he would have known mine. It was spring. I had probably stopped under the tree to speak with Ms. Bessie or Ms. Minnie when Julius Bobby Nelson got my attention and beckoned me to him with a pull of his eyes and his hand and a flick of his chin. I knew he wanted me to come closer and listen.

To listen well one must come close indeed, for his speech is somewhat impeded. I am not sure of the reason, but the longer I listened, the clearer he became and the more I understood. Sometimes I heard him with a tantalizing clarity, but then a crucial word would disappear into the back of his mouth, never reaching my ear. Before I knew him by name, I knew him by this manner of speaking; in my head I thought of him as the Mumbler. He did not seem bothered by or necessarily aware of my difficulty in understanding him. I never noticed anyone else having this difficulty. When I still knew him as the Mumbler, we had at least one exchange: he told me that he was
a champ,
that he’d been
almost pro.
I never did ask what he was a champion of. I assumed it was boxing, and I assumed that was why he spoke the way he did.

On the day I learned his name, Julius Bobby Nelson beckoned to me and said,
I live here… I grew up here,
and I knew immediately he did not mean the city or even our neighborhood, but the block in which we stood. He is a tall man, and as he stood there, it was like he stood on the whole block all at once. He waved his large hand in a gesture only slightly more dramatic than the one that drew me into his audience. He took the whole block into view, indicating the breadth of his knowledge and the passage of time. He told me that his mother and father had lived in No. 469—the building adjacent to mine—his sister had lived in No. 471, and his school had been P.S. 89, the Douglass School. He pointed out the Douglass School, which was no longer there. We both faced the direction of where it was not, on the southwest corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, directly across from the library, where a tall apartment building now stood.

He mentioned names and characters and happenings without any explicit suggestion of their significance. It was in this way I learned about the
gypsies,
about the
guinea Italian
in the cigar shop who wouldn’t sell him a hot dog, about
Dick’s liquor,
and about
Chicken
Joe
and
the butcher
. It was in this way I learned that
they didn’t kill the white lady at the school.
At the time, these facts hung together in a manner that fails in the retelling, and you will understand that I did not stop him to ask who were
they
or who was
the white lady
or under what circumstances did they not kill her at the school.

To point in a different direction was to land upon another set of disjointed facts. He pointed across the street where Lenox Terrace is now, and he said
I built it
and he said
bricks
and he said
twenty-year lease
and he said
horse and carriage
. As before, I did not stop him to beg for clarification. He told me that his nine brothers had lived across the street, he said something about the
all-boys school
on 119th (he said ’
19th
) while looking down the avenue in that direction. When his eyes came back to rest on me he said,
I live here. I grew up here. I know all of it.

Julius Bobby Nelson told me more of what he knew, and I continued not to understand all of what he told me. He said he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and later, when I went inside and wrote this part down, I noted that
he repeated it with a certain glint in his eye
. He told me about a river, but I did not understand the name of it, and his repetitions did not help. Ms. Barbara was sitting there under the tree with us, and she understood what I did not. He was talking about the Cooper River, she said, and she asked
What about that river?
Whether he answered or what was the meaning, I did not record.
Some importance was attached it,
I noted,
or merely my own curiosity.
He returned to more immediate geography. First he pointed northeast to the Franklin Theatre on 135th Street just off Lenox, which is now a church, then to another theater, the Lincoln, on 132nd Street behind McDonald’s, which is now an empty shell.

He pointed behind me, and for a moment I did not turn in that direction. I knew he was pointing at the funeral home on the next block. He said he was friends with
the man
—I don’t know if he meant the proprietor or the man being buried that day. It was
then he began to present riddles even stranger than before.
Watch the walking, not the dead,
he told me, and I had to have him repeat it.
The ones who are walking, not the ones lying down,
he said. I asked him to run it by me one more time, and then he said something about having
laid a body out.

I am what I am,
he told me.
I am the law.

That was it. Was there anything more to say? Thus did God rebuke the impudence of Moses, when he dared to ask the unspeakable name. I went inside. Later that afternoon I left the house again and I saw Julius again, and he began again:
I am what I am who I am.

Now Ms. Bessie was sitting under the tree. He pointed to her and said he knew her son, her daughter, her daughter-in-law, and a long list of other relatives. Ms. Bessie nodded to affirm his knowledge of her whole family. I did not doubt he could tell me the name of every person who had ever lived on the block.
I know everybody,
he said, and pointed again in the direction of the funeral home, as if to continue the point he had begun earlier. Clearer than anything else he said that day, he asked,
See that hearse over there?

My notes drop off here. I didn’t write down what he told me about the hearse or who was in it. I did write down that Julius Bobby Nelson mumbled something more about the South and about Mississippi, but those were the only words I made out. I did not speculate as to what he meant to tell me,
but I was sure it was something pertinent.
Once, he pointed toward the library but he made sure to indicate that he meant
the old library.

I went through all the books,
he told me.
I’ve read every book that you’ve read.

After that day, we seemed to understand each other. Our conversations take the pattern of a strange dance: he leans in too close and I step back, trying to look as though I am not in retreat; I step in, and his attention is carried off by someone else passing by or
by some drama unfolding down the block. Often, Julius Bobby Nelson says something that makes me throw my head back in laughter, only just now I cannot remember any details to pass on the jokes. When I came back after a year’s absence, I saw Julius Bobby Nelson and we picked up precisely where we had left off:
the gypsies, I built this, I know everybody.

Julius Bobby Nelson is not the only one with stories to tell. When I meet Ms. Minnie at the door of our building, she is often alone. She goes out early in the morning to get fresh air. As soon as winter comes, she scolds me for not having enough clothing on. She does not want to see even a triangle of skin between the top button of my coat and the scarf wound about my neck, because she says the tiniest gap is enough space for a cold to get in. If I am bundled up when we meet, she takes equal note—I have heeded her suggestions.

Often our conversations veer back toward her home. Without any specific motivation, she will tell me how they used to make soap out of lye and lard in a cauldron in the backyard and how she used to pile into cars with her girlfriends and drive from South Carolina to Georgia to go to dances. Mostly our conversation happens out of doors, though once—when I passed her standing at her threshold on my way upstairs to my apartment—we spoke and exchanged our usual greetings, and she brought me inside her place. She showed me her collection of precious objects that included delicate Chinese pieces and carved wooden sculptures and heavy antique irons, the kind you’d heat on a wood-burning stove. As she showed me each item and explained its provenance, I was in awe of this unexpected intimacy that rarely accompanies alliances made on the street.

Often Ms. Minnie’s stories have the quality of a sudden revelation: we are talking about something that happened yesterday and end up a few decades in the past, back in South Carolina; we are
exchanging polite greetings and I end up in her apartment looking at some of her most treasured possessions. Once when I passed her and she asked me about my day, I produced my own unprompted intimacy. It was the birthday of my dead grandmother, Cora. Ms. Minnie, noting the date, March 17, said it was a good number. I was headed inside, but I told her I wanted to show her a picture of my grandmother, so I dashed upstairs, collected it, and then came back down. Someone else was there, so I explained again that it was my grandmother’s birthday, though my grandmother was dead. Ms. Minnie looked at the picture and said,
Still, we celebrate.

She warns me of certain unsavory characters on the block. She says that to get this information you must sit and watch, stop and stare. When she declared that she was street smart, I asked her if she’d always been that way, even when she was new in New York. She said that she had been. Often now, when stopped on the street writing down some detail in fear that it will not be there when I return, I think of Ms. Minnie gathering her information and telling me to stop and stare.

Then there is Monroe. For a long time I did not know his name, so in my head I called him Mr. Mississippi, because he is always asking me,
When are we going to Mississippi?
He asks this because I am always saying I want to go there, and he is always telling me about his home. He is from a place called Yazoo City, near the Mississippi River. Although I have been on that river in New Orleans (staggered by its breadth, its murk, its riverboats advertising a journey back to that more graceful time
when Cotton was King, Sugar was Queen, and Rice was the Lady in Waiting
), in my imagination I’ve always pictured that when the Mississippi rolls through Yazoo City it is a mere creek, a bit of water trickling through. This might be because Monroe once told me that to get to the house where he grew up you have to cross the river. Something about the way he told it made me think that this was a
crossing made as easily as I sometimes jump over puddles by the curb. I later learned that even in Yazoo City, the Mississippi River is still mighty. One day I intend to see that place. Monroe told me that after the river you have to cross railroad tracks. It is a white house on the hill, impossible to miss, and there is a great plum tree there. I like to think that by these particulars I could find my way through Yazoo City to the setting of Monroe’s stories, like the time he was trapped in an empty country church as a boy; how he’d gone and sat at the mourner’s bench where sinners are supposed to confess and disbelievers are encouraged to abandon the fate of certain damnation. There, he told me, he was attacked by a horde of wasps that descended from the rafters, and he said they’d never before made a sound during Sunday services, when the church was full. As he told it, the story seemed to deliver a great unspoken parable, whose lesson I could not determine. He tells me he knew Emmett Till, and that he used to ride the rails, never venturing too far from home. He left for New York on a truck heading for the strawberry fields upstate, but eventually he made his way to Harlem and did not go back to picking.

One day I ran into him and my simple question of how he was doing was met with a dark glower. It was a bright morning in late summer, but he said he was
in the middle of a storm,
and that
it don’t feel good,
and that he was
trying to push it back.

He was all alone, he said, and it had something to do with people in North Carolina. I didn’t understand the reference to North Carolina, since he was from Mississippi, but as soon as I expressed my confusion, he changed the subject.

I dreamed of my home,
he said.
My home must have been a devil’s town.

He’d seen a field of cotton, and the cotton heads, the bolls, looked like the heads of snakes.
Then,
he said,
the plane came and killed the cotton.
I did not know what he meant. It killed the cotton?

Don’t you know about the boll weevil?
he asked.
Do I have to tell you the boll weevil story?
He did not seem to want to tell the boll weevil story, but I knew that the boll weevil had its part in the history of Harlem, because when southern cotton crops were overrun by this scourge that had come from Mexico, many sharecroppers gave up and came north. I didn’t mention this, I simply asked with some enthusiasm for him to tell me the boll weevil story.

It’s too long,
he said.
That’s a long story.
He gave me the short version. The boll weevil eats the cotton. The plane comes to kill the cotton. Without any further explanation, he returned to the scene of his dream. The cotton was lying down.
Miles and miles and miles,
he said,
of cotton laying down.
He was in the back seat of a car with two people.
They must have been the devil’s disciples,
he said.