C H A P T E R • 6
I stopped to watch a brother dancing alone in front of Bobby’s Happy House record store to Sam Cooke singing “Another Saturday Night.” But I only watched a few moves before I maneuvered through the folks coming and going to the places 125th Street, Main Street Harlem U.S.A., would take them. It offered a sensory overload. I took some notes because the details needed to be captured in my notebook.
First sounds. I was aware of sounds landing—of the horns and the persistent beat from sidewalk boom boxes and radios in cars speeding across 125th Street to the bridge in the east. Offering a kind of background music on the street, Hammer told us “U Can’t Touch this” and Madonna was “Voguing.” But there were also the sounds of folks preaching on several sidewalk spaces.
“Jesus was blacker than me. It’s in the Gospels. It says he was wooly-headed, as if burnt in a fire.” They were a men-only crowd I didn’t remember seeing the last time I was home. They were dressed for war, in boots and belts and crowns. They were shouting into microphones and videotaping themselves. They warned the brothers to go home because their wives were in bed with other men. They predicted the end of the world and called the shoppers “niggers” or “devils,” depending. Theirs was a spooky and deep theology they assaulted us with.
“Something to read today?” The Jehovah’s Witnesses were still there, occasionally trying to interest one of the passersby in Awake or The Watchtower. But mostly they talked to each other—preaching to the choir.
“My brother, read the good word. Minister Louis Farrakhan has said Allah made the black man. It was the white man who made the nigger.” The Muslims were a familiar presence, fishing for converts, clean in bow ties, hawking the Final Call and stopping anyone, especially men, to talk about it. They sell half a million copies and could not be distracted from their mission like some other newspaper people I know.
I even pulled apart the smells: incense, aftershave, perfume, grilled meat and the exhaust from cars and trucks. It was an indulgence, since smells only figured in the rare newspaper piece about the sewage treatment plant or the herds of diesel buses.