A Walker in the City (15 page)

S
UMMER
was the passage through. I remember first the long stone path next to a meadow in Prospect Park where as a child I ran off one summer twilight just in time to see the lamplighter go from lamp to lamp touching each gas mantle with the upraised end of a pole so that it suddenly flamed. On the other side of those lamps, the long meadow was stormy-green and dark; but along the path, the flames at each lamp flared in yellow and green petals. Then, that summer I first strayed off the block for myself, the stone steps leading up from the lake in Prospect Park had stalks of grass wound between their cracks, were white with dust and drops of salt I thought came from the peanuts whose smell was everywhere in the park. But there was also some sugary taste in the air that day like the glazed wrapper around the crackerjack box—and at the bottom of the box, caught by my sticky fingers, some fife or whistle which I blew that glorious warm Sunday full of cars from all over and the Stars and Stripes over the bandstand and the band in their colored coats and the dust flying up from everybody's shoes as we came over to hear.

Summer was the great time. I think now with a special joy of those long afternoons of mildew and quietness in the school courtyard, now a lazy playground, and of the cool stored-up basketball sweat along the silence of the main hall, where the dust rose up brown as we played quoits against the principal's door. Then of those holidays even on weekdays when my mother would cry out as she suddenly wiped the sweat off her neck, "Oh, how hot it is today!
Too
hot!
Too
hot!" and decide on a day at Coney Island.

It was this pause that gave me my first idea of summer: life could slow down. Walking with my mother to the Ell at the other end of Sutter Avenue, I would stop under the awning of the remnants store to watch the light falling through the holes in the buttons lining the window, and as we went past Belmont Avenue would stare in hungry pleasure at the fruits and vegetables on the open stands, the cherries glistening with damp as the storekeeper walked under his awning lightly passing a watering can over them; I would smell the sweat on the horses pulling the Italians' watermelon wagons—"Hey you ladies!
Freschi
and good!"; and breathe in the cloying sweetness of the caramels and chocolate syrup in the candy wholesaler's, the fumes of Turkish cigarettes from the "Odessa" and "Roumanian" tearooms, the strange sweetness from the splintered discarded crates where blotches of rotted fruit could still be seen crushed against the nailheads.

It was from the El on its way to Coney Island that I caught my first full breath of the city in the open air. Groaning its way past a thousand old Brooklyn red fronts and tranquil awnings, that old train could never go slowly enough for me as I stood on the open platform between the cars, holding on to the gate. In the dead calm of noon, heat mists drifted around the rusty green spires of unknown churches; below, people seemed to kick their heels in the air just a moment before being swept from my sight. With each homey crash-crash crash-crash of the wheels against the rails, there would steal up at me along the bounding slopes of the awnings the nearness of all those streets in middle Brooklyn named after generals of the Revolutionary War. I tasted the sweetness of summer on every opening in my face. As we came back at night along the El again, the great reward of the long parched day, far better than any massed and arid beach, was the chance to stand up there between the cars, looking down on the quiet streets unrolling below me as we passed. The rusty iron cars ground against each other, protesting they might fall apart at each sharp turn. But in the steady crash-crash crash-crash there was a comforting homeward sound as the black cars rocked on the rails and more and more men and boys in open shirts came out on the platform fiercely breathing the wind-charged damp air. In the summer night the city had an easy unstitched look—people sat on the corner watching the flies buzz around the street lamps, or at bedroom windows openly yawning as they stared past us.

Then home again, to the wet newsprint smell of the first editions of the
News
on the stands and the crackle of the hot dogs in the delicatessen windows—back to the old folks sitting outside our tenement on kitchen chairs, biting into polly seeds and drinking ice water out of milk bottles. Red and blue lights wink untiringly at us from the movie's long electric sign at the other end of Chester Street; the candy stores and delicatessens are ablaze. In the sky a blimp like a feebly smoking cigar floats in from some naval base along the coast. The dampness of the summer evening is in the last odors of all the suppers on the block, the salt in the air, the voices storming at each other behind the yellow window shades, the cries of the boys racing each other around the block. In a moment of unbelievable quiet a girl across the way can be heard stickily trying note on note from
Für Elise
on an untuned box piano. The tones buzz against my grateful brain, gather themselves up into one swelling wave before they fall into the theme, then resume like a fly complaining its way up a windowpane. Silhouetted against the window shade in the hard burning whiteness of her kitchen, young Mrs. C., who does not know anyone is watching, stands stripped to the waist at the kitchen sink, washing herself down with yellow soap. Her long black hair trails down her back, and her breasts swell in the light, revealing the life hidden in their nakedness, soft as the heart of a fruit. On the rooftop over the hardware store the boys spring the pigeons from their cages, and against the wisps of smoke in the air colored by the movie sign the pigeons now begin their evening course—racing each other furiously in bobbing circles above their own roof, then widening and widening their flight from our roof to the water tank to the movie sign. Two blocks away, where the Italians begin at the other end of Rockaway Avenue, there is an aged sycamore with withered leaves. The pigeons go round this tree at every other flight, floating up and down as they urge their wings against the air. The flights now grow narrower and narrower each time the pigeons pass our roof; at the last round they alight quietly next to their own cages again, their wings flapping breathlessly against their sides, some diffident hoarse cry muffled in their throats as they are pressed back into their cages.

Across the way a girl lies in bed, lazily scratching her legs as she reads the comics in the
News.
Her young brothers have been bedded in for the night on the fire escape, and wedged between the ladder and the railing, they now crouch in on themselves, their heads bent and their knees up to the chin, like children still in the womb. All along the block children are sleeping on the fire escapes. It is as hot tonight as it was this morning: first scorched, then damp. The thickness of the summer night weighs on us like wet wool. It is hard to breathe, to move. The old folks sit on their kitchen chairs in weary silence, cooling themselves with palmetto fans. The children on the fire escape giggle to each other as Negroes pass down the block on their way back to Livonia Avenue, singing aloud. One boy makes a feint at another, in playful attack. Suddenly a scream bursts out of the street: "Are you crazy? You'll fall to your death! Go to sleep or you'll be put back in the house!" It is near midnight, but no one can bear to go to bed. The rooms smell like burning sulphur. The heat stored up inside all through the day now oozes from the walls and blows its gritty breath on the faces of the sleepless people along the pavement. Hour by hour, the mounds of discarded polly seeds at each chair grow higher. The street is smeared with the blotched edges of ice-cream cones; every time I run around the block, the pavement clinks with empty coke bottles. By one o'clock whole families have gone to bed together on the roof, but the older boys sit on the edge, their feet dangling in the air. On the fire escapes the children hug each other for safety as they feel themselves falling asleep.

 

Summer nights meant street meetings. One night there was even a sudden visitation of Negro Jews from Harlem, who came to Brownsville seeking us out. They raised their platform on our corner, and a gnarled, very tall old man with a long bony face stood on it for hours delivering a passionate address on the ties uniting all children of Israel. I remember how the cheekbones worked in his face and how the gray little Assyrian beard leaped into the air as he threw his arms out in entreaty. The crisp "American" eloquence of his speech bewildered me as I listened to him from the open window of that room, now mine, where our cousin had lived with us for so many years. Not a person on the block walked up to hear him; the old people sat cautiously in their usual places in front of the tenements, staring at him with wonder and suspicion, as if he were a barker calling them to enter his tent. Negroes were the
shvartse,
the blacks. We just did not think about them. They were people three and four blocks away you passed coming home from the subway. I never heard a word about them until the depression, when some of the younger ones began to do private painting jobs below the union wage scales, and when still another block of the earliest wooden shacks on Livonia Avenue near the subway's power station filled up with Negroes. Then some strange, embarrassed resentment would come out in the talk around the supper table. They were moving nearer and nearer. They were invading our neighborhood.

But summer evenings that second year of the depression, when you went up Pitkin Avenue in the usual Friday evening procession to the corner of the savings bank, the young Communists seemed to talk only of
our oppressed Negro brothers
and of the
Black Belt
for Negroes alone they wanted to see in the South. The very way you pronounced
Negro
was a test of your political maturity. Communists came out with the word respectfully and warmly, and with a certain plain indignation held in readiness against those who might even think of saying anything else. The little band of young Socialists with whom I met Sunday evenings in the Labor Lyceum on Powell Street could never seem to say
Negro
with any particular emotion. And as the young Communists said sneeringly to us whenever they came around to break up a meeting and to argue us into joining them, we had no
Negro comrades
of our own.

Sitting on the steps of the Labor Lyceum in that loneliest of all Sunday evenings that came after a Socialist meeting, I could still see high above the chill and dusty tile floors in the entrance the enormous head and thick beard of Karl Marx. The black ribbon of his spectacles lay across a frock coat that seemed to bulge with defiance, and his lapels still shone smooth in the old photograph under glass. Next to him a picture of our dear Gene Debs—his bald head glittering in the light of a single bulb hung over the hallway, his mouth fixed in a shy smile that made me ache to its distant goodness. "
While there is a lower class I am of it, while there is a criminal class I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I cent not free.
" "Poor Parnell!" I would say under my breath. "My dead King!" Inside the Labor Lyceum there had been even on the hottest summer night that peculiarly stale chill up and down the hallway where I could see the dirt black between the tiles and read
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
to the creak of the folding chairs as the meeting droned on to the report of the educational director. But there on the steps, listening to the Communist hecklers through the ringing of the pinball machine and the malted milk frothing in the candy store next door, I pined for those long stale rooms where I had been safe and asleep with my own. Socialists were not deep; they laughed if you read too much; but they were wistful and good-humored and lazy; they told Yiddish jokes in the meeting; I had been of them all my life. They were one big Brownsville family that lived on nostalgic anecdotes of the great days before the Tammany Irishers had gerrymandered the district, when Brownsville had sent Socialists to the State Assembly and the Board of Aldermen. The local leaders were our benevolent uncles who had made good in the outside world as lawyers and dentists and teachers but would always stand up with us,

 

No more tradition's chains shall bind us!
Arise ye slaves! No more in thrall!

 

to press us toward what Norman Thomas, with that clean hearty "American" ring to his voice, always called on such an earnest downsweep of his right arm
the commonwealth of hand and brain.

But the Communists who came after us Sunday evenings in the Labor Lyceum were not cozy at all. They were all somehow a little like Mendy, who was to go straight from Brownsville to Spain—tightly rolled together of surenes and contempt. I remember how the cold white tip of his nose shone in the light from the candy store next door, and how that cowlick that always seemed mysteriously to threaten
me
frothed over his eyes as, patronizing, icy and detached, he denounced the German Socialists who in 1914 had voted for the war credits, the English Socialists who in 1926 had sold out the General Strike, the Socialists everywhere who that summer of 1931 were selling out England, Germany, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The keyword was always
sellout.
History had prepared as to expect great things of the future, but something or someone was always selling us out. "Bevin! Noske! Scheidemann! Hillquit! Sellout after sellout after sellout!"
Sellouts
alone made it possible for us to talk together. What else would the Communist voice on the bank corner have talked about—the callousness of Herbert Hoover? the evictions that now took place on our block every day? the stupidity of the Tammany District leader, that "good Jew" who was Brooklyn's Commissioner of Records and could not read or write? You were a worker or a worker's son; you were poor; you were a Jew—it was more than enough. That voice on the bank corner knew our complaints through and through, wrapped itself around the elemental assent of each body in that crowd. No one really listened. There was life only at the back of the crowd, where it dribbled out into unwearied debates between individual Communists and Socialists. Sometimes the pressure of those arguments would reach around the speaker's stand, push it over, fill up the evening with the unquenchable bitterness between worker and worker. And then the real point of the evening would begin for me as I went round from circle to circle listening to the arguments. Long after midnight you could still see them up and down Pitkin Avenue—two inflamed faces holding the center, a great crowd around them adding to and tensely sharing in each new point made about Germany in 1914, Germany in 1919, England in 1926, Milwaukee in 1931.