C H A P T E R • 1
“Go back to Africa where you came from.”
Typical. And where’d you come from, brown man? I thought as I grabbed a camera. Not because a street fight is news in this town, but because I’m drawn to drama, I love the camera and I needed to fill up some spaces in my father’s newspaper on deadline day.
I had to lean out the window, my body secured against the frame, to take pictures of the beef going down two stories below me on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard where it was noisy with its soundtrack.
My pictures were an aerial view of a pair of African street merchants yelling at a well-dressed dark brown-skinned man who seemed to have lost his mind. He started scooping audio cassettes and video tapes off a folding table into a bag with one arm and pointing a gun at them with the other.
I framed the wide shot and then tightened in on close-ups of the tapes still on the table and those that had fallen onto the wide public space. I recognized some of the movie covers were recent films and saw one that I didn’t think had been released yet.
He holstered the gun and raised the folding table that had been the vendors’ street operation up over his head. His African fez didn’t even fall off when he threw the table.
“I work my ass off,” he yelled at the Africans.
Work your ass off doing what? I wondered.
I pulled back to catch the street vendors scrambling to pick up their inventory and then swung over to the spectators spread out on one wide sidewalk. The crowd was magnetized to pull bits of color from up and down the boulevard to add to its widening edges.
The kids were cheering and were either completely hidden in oversized outfits or strategically exposed like overgrown doll babies.
Their elders were not interfering, my newspaper staff among them in a little knot near the front, where they had no business being on production day.
When the phone rang behind me, I had to ease myself back through the window to run for it.
“You have reached the Harlem Journal. For 40 years, your favorite Harlem weekly newspaper. If you know the extension of the person you are trying to reach, you can enter it now.”
Roger’s baritone made the tired message impressive, but before I could get to the phone, I heard, “Peace and be strong.” And he was finished.
“This is Pearl Washington. Hello? Hello?”
But the caller was gone.
Roger wrote the music for Last Stop Harlem, the latest of the couple of films that milked every drop out of a good idea. The poster for my first movie hung over the front desk where Lt. Summer Knight is aiming at you, wide-legged, hair wild, invincible, wearing brown leather so tight it looks like paint. She’s me in my other life, before I became the reluctant publisher of one of Harlem’s weekly newspapers when my daddy died.
Distinguished Newspaper Publisher Called Home—Charles Washington, November 21, 1925 to October 22, 1990. I love the language of the black press. But I felt like I was flying without a safety net without him. It made me dizzy and I was still too mad at him to cry.
Three weeks ago, each Harlem honk and siren and holler and song snagged me; now it was all a hum. Until I heard, “When I come back, you best be gone.”
It was Mr. Cool and he pulled my attention outside again. I took another picture of him and then swung the camera to catch the vendors and discovered Al Carter, the newspaper’s production manager, was helping gather up their mess where it was scattered all over the wide sidewalk. They could have been family—two young brothers from Côte D’Ivoire and one from 111th Street. They were built the same wiry way and had the same hair. Only the Africans’ heads were neat; Al’s was a riot.
The crowd started breaking up in ones or twos to go find something else to do. Except one woman who walked over to Mr. Cool to say something in his ear that made him laugh. I closed in to get a portrait of the woman. It was my father’s girlfriend, now widow, Mrs. Viola, now Washington.
It had been an off-again-on-again thing, my relationship with Miss Viola, since my father brought the owner of the Kit Kat Klub into our lives. It wasn’t just because the woman was only eight years older than me; it was also because she wanted to be the center of attention and I considered that my role. And when he married Viola at her house on the hill, I wasn’t there. Daddy’s death and our shared grief had finally made a quasi-peace between us.
In the close-up, I recognized Mr. Cool was Bobby Bop, a jazz man whose group was one of the acts coming to the big event at the Apollo later in the week.
When I widened the frame, I caught Mr. Cool with his gun out again, pointing in the direction of Al and the vendors. “You’ve been told,” he said.
He put his weapon away and offered Viola his free hand and walked with her to the street where a red Cadillac convertible was double parked at the curb.
The driver trapped by the double-parked Caddy honked. Viola waved at him and then flipped him a bird twice as he kept honking the whole time it took them to get to Bobby Bop’s car and deposit his bag of tapes into the back, and then continued honking after them while they made a U-turn and squealed away.
When they drove out of my frame, I was left with a wide shot of the people across the street, seemingly oblivious to the action, flowing along at a browsing pace, somehow managing to keep off of each other’s heels and out of each other’s faces. Except my neighbor Cecelia Miller, who walked like she owned 125th Street. She had accessorized her business suit with green and red African fabric folded and tied around her head. Her gelee appeared between a broken line of street businesses at tables heaped with bolts of kente and mud cloth and figured fabric from Mali. She would disappear behind a wall of vendors, then reappear again.
I took a couple of wide shots of her in profile, and when she turned to face me in the middle of the block to cross the street at the light, I zoomed in to catch her face as she looked both ways and then stepped off the curb and into the boulevard. And then her face changed to what turned out to be her reaction to something I had to pull back to include in my viewfinder.
A late model American car was careening diagonally across the street, seemingly out of nowhere, seemingly against the light.
Then the sound of impact filled the space between us. Together we experienced her being catapulted into the air like a rag doll where she hung for a terrible moment before she dropped to the dirty street.
My scream was more of a moan, while I was close, right on top of her, connected through the camera, until I forced myself to swing away to follow the dark car as it bounced off one of the large poles holding up the streetlight. I willed myself to stay with the car, shooting and shooting, trying to get the license plate, as it swerved back into the westbound lane in front of the stopped traffic. When the car was finally gone, I turned back to find a crowd had concealed my girl.