Harlem Shuffle(66)
Some blocks were untouched and it was the Harlem you recognized. Then you rounded the corner and two cars were overturned like fat beetles, a cigar-store Indian stood decapitated before a line of shattered front windows. The entrance of a firebombed grocery store gaped like a tunnel to the underworld. Sable Construction vans idled outside the addresses of their priority customers and dayworkers tossed drywall and fire-hose-soaked insulation into dumpsters. The sanitation department had done a bang-up job of cleaning up the sidewalk trash and debris, which made the stroll more unsettling, as if the ruined addresses had been shipped in from another, worse city.
As Carney walked down 125th, he got to thinking about the grand pavilions in Flushing, Queens. A few miles away, the World’s Fair celebrated the wonders on the horizon. Sure, Carney dug all the gee-whiz stuff in Futurama—the sleek moon bases and slowly twirling space stations, the undersea headquarters—but more amazing were the demonstrations of what humanity had already accomplished. In one room Bell Labs had Picturephones that showed you the face of the person on the other end of the line, in another mammoth computers talked to each other through telephone wires. The Space Park showcased full-size replicas of the Saturn V rocket, the Gemini spacecraft, a lunar landing module. Here were impossible objects that had been to outer space—and come back safely, traveled all that distance.
You didn’t need to journey far, certainly didn’t need three-stage rockets and manned capsules and arcane telemetry, to see what else we were capable of. If Carney walked five minutes in any direction, one generation’s immaculate townhouses were the next’s shooting galleries, slum blocks testified in a chorus of neglect, and businesses sat ravaged and demolished after nights of violent protest. What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.
Harlem was calm again, or as calm as Harlem ever got. Carney was relieved the protests had ended, for many reasons. For everyone’s safety, of course. Only one person had died, a miracle, but hundreds had been shot, stabbed, billy-clubbed, or otherwise smacked in the head with two-by-fours. He’d called Aunt Millie to check on her—Pedro and Freddie weren’t around—and she described the scene at Harlem Hospital as a battlefield. “It’s worse than Saturday-night craziness—times ten!”
Apart from the long shifts she was doing fine, thanks for calling.
And he was glad the riots were done for the sake of his fellow merchants. The obvious targets were raided, decimated: supermarkets, liquor stores, clothing stores, electronics shops. They stole everything and then grabbed a broom to steal the dust, too. Carney knew firsthand how hard it was for a Negro shopkeeper to persuade an insurance company to write a policy. The vandalism and looting had wiped out a lot of people. Whole livelihoods gone, like that.
Most of the destruction lay east of Manhattan Ave; Carney’s Furniture was outside the border. Furniture stores were low on the list of loot-able establishments, given the portability issue—but of course any savvy neighborhood resident knew that Carney sold TVs and handsome table lamps, and what about that irate dude who’d been refused credit and hungered for revenge? Can’t carry a sofa on your back, but you can throw a bottle of gasoline through a front window. Which was why he and Rusty spent four nights in the front of the showroom, cradling baseball bats they’d bought at Gary’s Sports down the block. Security gate rolled down, lights out, on sentry duty in the exquisite embrace of their Collins-Hathaway armchairs, whose virtues the salesmen had not exaggerated over the years, no not at all.
Half the Negroes in Harlem had that story about their grandfather down South, the one who spent all night on the front porch with a shotgun, waiting for the Night Riders to fuck with his family over some incident in town. Black men of legend. Carney and Rusty sipped Coca-Cola and upheld the tradition of the midnight vigil. In most of those stories, the family packs up and flees North the next morning, their Southern term brought to an end. On to the next chapter in the ancestral chronicle. But Carney wasn’t going anywhere. The next morning he pulled up the gate, flipped the sign from closed to open, and waited for customers.
Business was slow. It was a good time to be in plate glass.
Most important, Carney welcomed the peace because he had a big meeting lined up, one he’d been trying to engineer for years: a face-to-face with the Bella Fontaine company. Lord knows what Mr. Gibbs, the regional sales rep, had seen on Walter Cronkite or The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Pillaged storefronts, cops tackling miscreants, young girls with batty smiles chucking bricks at news photographers. Making Mr. Gibbs fight his way through pandemonium was a big ask. Especially given that Bella Fontaine had never taken on a Negro dealer before.
Wednesday morning, Carney had talked Mr. Gibbs out of canceling his trip uptown. Do I sound like I am on fire? We are open for business. Carney was small potatoes; if not for Mr. Gibbs’s meeting with All-American on Lexington, in white midtown, and with some Suffolk County accounts, he never would have boarded the plane from Omaha. Uptown was burning but business in white Manhattan proceeded as usual.
The negro owned & operated sign was still in his window, next to the sun-yellowed time payments negotiable. Carney smiled—from one angle, maybe the two signs went together. Marie had stenciled the “Negro Owned” one and brought it from Brooklyn the Monday after the boy was killed. “So they leave us alone,” she said. When the protests jumped to Bed-Stuy, Carney told her to stay home to look after her mother and sister. He and Rusty could manage. Marie agreed, after a round of sobs and apologies. Thursday appeared to be the end of it and Marie showed up for work the next day on time, as if nothing had happened.