B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (22 page)

Some time passed, me scribbling in my pad, she in hers, before we looked up at each other and smiled. She asked if I was a writer,
and I said yes. I asked her the same, and she said yes. We both smiled again, and laughed, and she told me her name and its variations. She told me that she wrote poetry and music about spiritual things and about political things. She asked whether I liked political things, and I said yes, so she flipped a few pages in her yellow legal pad and explained that the following concerned the condition of alienation in our community and was addressed to people of means, people like Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and certain singers and sports celebrities. First she began to read it aloud, and then she stopped to ask if I wouldn’t prefer to read it on my own. By the time Sister Doris Littlejohn and I had begun our exchange, I had stopped taking notes, so I cannot tell you any details at all of her piece of writing. I only remember that her words ran across the page like fugitives from sense while at the same time possessing a power by which some meaning pierced through. Eventually, this feeling of comprehension and confusion receded, and I was able to grasp her bigger meaning.

A man came up to the row of benches and began dashing back and forth in front of us, and then into and out of the street. He was dressed in athletic clothes and possessed by a remarkable purpose: he was shadowboxing while delivering rhyming couplets. The dexterity of the jabs and blows to his invisible sparring partner was matched by the staccato cadence of his words. Sister Doris Littlejohn and I laughed, and then we got out our notebooks and began writing.
A boxing poet!
she exclaimed, and began recording his antics. Her feet danced as she wrote; she dangled them with the flicking movement of a delighted child seated at water’s edge. I felt somewhat comforted by her, writing down the same thing I was observing. We must have formed a strange picture, both looking up and out and into the world and then looking down into our pages. The result might have been books that were mirror images of each other.

When the boxing poet had gone, Sister Doris asked if I would like to hear one of her songs. She began to clap out a dirgelike rhythm. The only lyric that I can remember was a paraphrase of scripture:
You are more than a conqueror
. This line was repeated in an unchanging chorus, though Sister Doris did not seem to tire of singing or accompanying herself with clapping hands. When her song was complete, we chatted about her songs and poems, and at some point I asked her whether she lived in Harlem. She said she lived in the streets. After this revelation, she gave me a history of how that had come to be so. It involved the men whose names she had borne in succession, and also the interference of a treacherous mother-in-law connected to the church Sister Doris had belonged to until recently. This church was the scene of rampant factionalism, and Sister Doris had been its victim due to jealousy over her own ease of communication with the higher power. The cause of this strife in her personal and ecclesiastical life was not surprising to Sister Doris. She told me that a lot of territorialism exists in the physical and spiritual realms right now, an observation that caused our talk to veer from the personal to the world-historical, with Sister Doris giving her opinion on spiritual territorialism as demonstrated by the wars in the Middle East.

The imminence of warfare in both the spiritual and terrestrial realms prompted Sister Doris Littlejohn to produce a phone number on a wrinkled sheet of paper and press it into my hand. It was the number of a prayer line, and she said I should call it at any hour when in need of assistance, and that I should not mention her name. This discretion was necessary because the number belonged to the same church that she had just told me was persecuting her, the scene of the spiritual factions and territorialism.

We had been together for some time, mostly facing the street, Sister Doris talking while I listened, when she turned to face me squarely and declared that our meeting had been the working of a
providential power and that she wanted to tell me that there are such things as angels. After this speech, she asked in words more exact than any I had seen written on her pages what I had gained from this time with her. I stammered something utterly unequal to our encounter and said I was glad that we met.

Not long before we parted, I asked, in the most delicate way possible, whether she was in need of shoes. I had decided that we would get up right then and go to the nearest shoe store. But she said she had shoes, and that she had only removed them because her feet ached. She gestured to the bag she was carrying as if to confirm the existence of the shoes.

We said good-bye and agreed that we were sure to meet again. And we did. When I saw her next, it was on Lenox Avenue in front of the Mormon Church. It seemed like a great sign that we should meet again so soon. And whether or not it actually
was
a sign, the crucial thing is that we were both willing to see it as such. This time our conversation did not include the existence of angels or field reports from the front line of spiritual battlefields. Sister Doris needed money. She did not ask. She managed to express that need without explicitly making a request, and I gave her two dollars, all that was in my purse. She reached into her purse and gave me two pieces of paper. On each was printed a prayer. It seemed like an unequal exchange, with my contribution being of lesser value. I was not buying the prayers, and she was not selling them. She had given me what she had to offer.

I presumed that would be the beginning of a series of encounters between us. The reason for this expectation is simple: such is life on Lenox Avenue. There is some predictability as to whom you will meet and when. As always it is necessary to stop and speak, to collect the latest bulletin or a hug. It is not possible to pass from an exchange such as the one I had with Sister Doris Littlejohn back into anonymity.

But I never saw Sister Doris Littlejohn again. The weather changed; I was going out less and staying inside more—and that was not entirely to do with the weather. When I did go out, it wasn’t to amble along Lenox Avenue or 125th Street, and I did not stop with my notebook at the benches near the State Office Building. I went out only to rush onto the subway and go downtown, or to walk a few blocks and into a political meeting (often enough, these were
inside
the State Office Building). My thoughts returned occasionally to Sister Doris. I wondered why we had not met again, not knowing whether her disappearance had to do with spiritual warfare or whether, owing to her intimacy with the esoteric domain, she had disappeared in order to avoid being written about.

I had seen the sign:
Come Help Me Capture the Water and the Fire, So It Will Not Overflow or Burn When We Slip Through to Feed the Hungry, Needy, Children and Forbidden.
Most likely, her disappearance had to do with the reality of living in Harlem—on the streets—as the weather grew cold. It is possible that we did meet again, but perhaps one or both of us had not noticed the other. Perhaps I had been in a hurry to get downtown, or in a hurry to get to a meeting. Perhaps, because it was winter, one or both of us had been tightly bundled and therefore unrecognizable.

Not long after I saw Sister Doris in the second and final instance, and before I stopped going out, I saw a pair of women planted at the intersection of 133rd and Lenox, right near my building. They were preaching and singing, holding a two-woman revival without a tent and without an audience. Their congregants were the people passing by. Their production was broadcast into the night by a microphone and portable amplifier. They are often there on summer nights, so I walked briskly by them, scarcely looking up as I passed. Their song followed me from behind, accompanied by the
tinny syncopation of a single tambourine:
I have a feeling, I have a feeling, I have feeling everything is gonna be all right
. I turned the corner quickly because I did not share the sentiment.

It was springtime when I finally met the creator of the chalk messages. I would like to tell you his name, to tell you about the way he dresses, to tell you about his eyes and the way he cocks his head to one side when he pauses to listen and also when he speaks. But the most important thing about our first meeting is that he didn’t want me to write about him at all. Because I had already been recording the chalk messages whenever I saw them, I had thought it would be a good topic for a local-color story I could pitch to the
Times
or a radio station as an “only in New York” – type segment. Now that I had met the creator, the story had a protagonist. I told him I wanted to write about him, but he immediately brushed me off. He said he did not want to be written about, he did not want publicity. He said he had just met another girl who was a journalism student and wanted to write about him for a school project. He patted the pocket of his trousers and said it was full of cards from people who tell him to call because they, too, would like to write a story about him. I felt a bit rebuked. I wondered whether it was, in fact, a question of “publicity.”

You will ask why I am writing this anyway, only without mentioning his name. I have asked this, too. The man who writes the chalk messages (I will call him the Messenger) perhaps offers the clearest answer to us both. A while after our first meeting, when we had become friends, when I told him that my hands were hurting and I could not write, he scolded me because I had not been to see a doctor. He said that he hated to take a stern tone with me, but he had to because I had to get serious about my business. And once, when I complimented him on what he was doing, and how
the messages were so important and so urgent, he shrugged and said that he was only trying to make his
contribution,
and that this was something we all had to figure out how to do. He often says that he is in touch with the reality of existence, and that this is what compels him to his task.

I’d seen the Messenger once before that first meeting. He was crouched down on the sidewalk working on a new creation, oblivious to anything going on around him, and much of what was going on around him reciprocated the oblivion. This time, he was not in the middle of work; he was perched on a standpipe in front of the hospital surveying something he had just completed. At first, I had passed him by because I was on the way somewhere else and was late, but I stopped and doubled back. Once I’d reached him and we had finished our salutations—we didn’t shake hands, but bumped elbows because his hands were covered in chalk—he said he’d watched me pass and watched me pause and watched me turn around to come back, and that he was glad I had done so.

When we spoke that first afternoon, the Messenger told me some of the things he has again told me since: that he writes his messages because the children have
an emptiness inside,
an emptiness because they are not nourished at home. He says his mission is to share his wisdom and understanding. He tells me about the children he meets who are thrilled by the mathematical problems he writes on the sidewalk, and he also tells me how some of the adults who used to scorn him and make fun of him now offer nods of approval.

The Messenger said he wanted to expand his territory; he thinks of moving over to Seventh Avenue, for instance. But I have only seen his messages on both sides of Lenox Avenue in the blocks between 125th and 136th Streets. The Messenger spoke of a gang member who’d asked him to write a few chalk messages on
his block, to inspire the children there. He decried the attitude of the young man, especially the way he insisted on the territory being
his block,
as if it were his sole dominion. The Messenger said this was evidence of a damaged mentality, but he took up this strange commission anyway, going beyond his normal area on the avenue and into a side street. He planned to write a message on the sidewalk before a small storefront that was boarded up, choosing that spot because it wouldn’t obstruct the traffic of a business. But in the midst of setting his words down, the cops stopped him. He mentioned that it was a black female cop in particular who talked to him like he was a dog. He said he wasn’t doing anything wrong and that if the cops had actually stopped to read what he was writing, they would have agreed with him and congratulated him and encouraged what he was doing. It was another instance of the
damaged mentality
he’d spoken of.

Along with his inspirational statements, the Messenger includes certain symbols that appear repeatedly in his creations. He makes hearts held aloft by wings, shooting stars, and birds that soar over the words. Lately I’ve noticed another symbol among his messages, an embellished cross that resembles an image found by archaeologists in abandoned slave cabins in Texas, among other places. Some researchers have related the sign to the Kongo cosmogram, a “map” of the world that can be traced back hundreds of years to the kingdom of Kongo in West Central Africa. Its lines and quadrants could be mistaken for a simple compass showing the four directions, but in fact they mark the boundaries between night and day, life and death, past and present, male and female, matter and spirit. When the sign was made on the ground, the spot was consecrated; it sealed an oath, made in the presence and under the authority of God and the ancestors. To stand in the center of the circle that surrounds the crossing lines is to stand at the center of the world, safe within the boundaries of the community. These
symbols have been found etched into shell or brick, but many more have vanished, having been etched into dust.