One morning soon after I’d moved, I got on the subway to ride downtown and a black woman was standing near the side of my train car, opposite the sliding doors. She was gently swiveling and placing all her weight on her right hip. Her jaw jutted outwards; her lips were pursed. I thought she was sucking on a Sour Patch Kid, or maybe she had to go to the bathroom. Beside her, a youthful, grungy-looking white guy with his hair in disarray was playing with some kind of electronic device.
Out of nowhere, this black woman began talking to him about Jesus in a thick West Indian accent: “Ya hafta repent to di Fatha for all yuh sins. Him comin back soon.”
She spoke to him with such assertion that I assumed they knew each other and he was intentionally ignoring her. She continued to go on and on about how this white man needed to take heed of Jesus’s imminent return. He rolled his eyes and walked to the other side of the car as the woman continued to warn not only him but now everyone else on the train to get right.
I thought that this woman must be a lunatic. To be fair, I think every person living on the island of Manhattan harbors some degree of madness. We’re all crowded together in small spaces, and we need to claim something out in the open as our own by any means necessary. The vast majority of us are crammed into apartments that we cannot afford, and every day we bunch into the subway, our energies boomeranging off one another. (An Afro-Cuban woman from Brooklyn advised me to wash each night to rid myself of the accumulated energy from all the people I unconsciously interacted with on the subway, and then rub peppermint oil on my skin for good measure.) In the weeks immediately after my move, I would feel exhausted after riding the subway, even if I’d only gone from Harlem to midtown and back on a short errand. Once I saw a man on the 2/3 train talking to himself, very loudly, about all the slaughter and pestilence in the Old Testament. He ended with each sentence with an emphatic “sick.” Then, he snapped back into sanity when he apologized to the woman beside him for hitting her with his belongings. I have seen young men rap aloud on crowded trains; countless people play music on their phones without using headphones. All of these people riding to and from Harlem on the subway—the majority of them black, a small portion Latinx—seemed a little bit unhinged to me.
I had never lived in a predominately black space before moving to Harlem. For as long as I can remember, I have been taught to not embarrass my mother with certain kinds of behavior and styles of dress, and to not act “simple.” She never said this, though, when we were in a black church, at a black cookout, at a black anything. It was only a warning issued when I was going out into the wider white world, in which blackness and all of its inexplicable grooves are suppressed. Unless I was in a space that was totally black, my dialect had to be modulated, my gesticulations moderated, my voice quieted, my hair tamed, my clothes fastened. This is what I considered proper. This is what I considered normal. If I wanted to achieve any kind of success, I first had to recognize that success was a white domain and that if I did not adhere to its rules, then I would never go anywhere. Not in no literary world. Especially not in no New York.
The thing was, when I moved to Harlem, I ain’t know shit, and I was not prepared for how far out of my element I would be there. My brain had assembled images of Harlem like a collage of black history, yet none of these images were congruent with one another. I knew of the Cotton Club and the Apollo, James Baldwin and Billie Holiday, crack cocaine and crime. Having been educated in majority-white spaces, I was guilty of reducing my own culture. These images brushed up against one another, inevitably fraying one another’s edges. I couldn’t get used to the block parties that lasted far past midnight, the arguments underneath my window at two a.m., the rap music blaring on the corners. I couldn’t understand why black men sat on crates in front of barbershops and hat stores all evening, why black women and men sold sweet potato pies and incense on the street at 125th and Lenox if those same items were being sold in stores one block over, why everyone spoke so loudly that everyone knew everyone else’s business. I was the same race as my neighbors, but I was not from the same culture.
In fact, I felt closer to my white, gay, Republican roommate than anyone else—at least I thought I did. Thomas had lived in Harlem for a decade and witnessed our block change dramatically. Former roommates had been robbed at gunpoint, but now I could walk home at two a.m. and find no other entity on the street besides a stray cat. The mantelpiece in our living room was stacked with his books, their authors ranging from James Joyce and Georg Hegel to Harriet Ann Jacobs and James Baldwin. We quickly established a rapport over our shared love of literature and trap music. We spoke frequently about gentrification. He firmly believed that if it weren’t for gentrification, neither of us would be living in Harlem. I began to wonder if perhaps, in a place like Harlem, I exerted the same amount of damage as a white person like Thomas did. If somehow he and I were both gentrifiers because we were college-educated and upwardly mobile.
I was so intrigued by the idea that I could be both black and a gentrifier that I wrote an article about it for the Guardian, which went viral. Some readers praised me for my introspection, and others judged me for being lazy and not contributing to my environment, an accusation that was true to an extent. I had never even gone to a block association meeting. Most of my friends were those whom I’d met at Princeton. Most of the places I frequented were upscale restaurants and bars like Cove Lounge, Corner Social, Sylvia’s, and Red Rooster. I partook in a carefully curated version of life in Harlem.
But I didn’t write the piece out of a feeling of superiority; I wrote it because I felt confused. I became less sure that the people I saw expressing themselves on the subway were unhinged because I realized I had always used white behavior as a reference point. I did not know how to live in a black space. I did not know where to start, or who could teach me. I was trying to learn behavior that should have been instinctive, behavior that I had been conditioned to see as outside of the norm. Now, in Harlem, this behavior was spread across my world like jam on toast. It was forcing me to tear myself apart, a persona that had been forged in my New Jersey upbringing and on trips abroad, and be free. But I pathologized that freedom. In my heated conversations about police brutality and blackness with Thomas, he would always want me to state facts and sources, explain my reasoning, and he would launch into a harangue when my responses were not to his liking. Each time I would walk away feeling as if my blackness had been whittled down like wood. I realized that that closeness I felt with him was duplicitous and in order to see Harlem, to really see and understand her for myself, I had to shut him out.
One of the critics of my Guardian piece turned out to be my next-door neighbor, a black man named Alexander who had lived in the area for almost twenty years. He sent me a private message on Facebook, asking if we could meet up for smoothies. At first, I was afraid. According to his page, Alexander was a part of the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center, one of the leading institutions of black culture in the world. In my article I’d declared that, despite being black, I felt a separation from Harlem, and I assumed that meeting with him would only make me feel more alone. I expected that he wanted nothing more than to eviscerate me, calling my work ahistorical and irrelevant over a nice strawberry-banana smoothie with a wheatgrass shot.