A Boy in Harlem

A BOY IN HARLEM

In the words of Sam Walton, this is a small part of Sam's memoirs - how he felt, lived, and cared about Harlem:

Where I grew up, they told me an El train used to run straight up Eighth Avenue past 137^th Street.  It was gone by the time I was born in 1948.  I was told Harlem had been glittering and sophisticated once, but that had disappeared before I was born too.  What remained was a community falling apart.  From my one-eyed perspective, I saw a place dotted with new sportsmen, those sharply dressed men who lived by their wits.  Harlem was a place that hummed and thrived on drugs.  By the time I was a teenager, drugs had hit my generation hard. By the 70’s, drugs had permeated Harlem, ruining lives and killing people.  I was a boy of the mid-twentieth century, and this is the Harlem I knew – not the fabled Harlem of the 1920’s or the Harlem Renaissance.   This is the Harlem that deserves to be remembered.  I’m telling this story in hopes others will remember, relive, revive, and pass on the knowledge of Harlem’s history to those who will come after.

I grew up in the Central Valley of Harlem, the heart of the community, from 132^nd to 138^th Street, from Eighth Avenue to Fifth Avenue.  This was the heart of Harlem, with rows of nearly identical 4-story tenements,  a place blacks first came to set down stakes.  Whenever I entered the one I called home, it smelled of southern cooking – fried chicken and biscuits on a regular basis.

Miz Lucille, who lived on the second floor, was a heavyset woman with make-up so thick and pasty you could scrape it with a knife.  She wasn’t pretty, but you couldn’t help but notice the peculiar fragrances as well.  It must’ve been the combination of Maybelline and Channel.  She seemed carried aloft on an ocean of perfume and powders, and wherever she went, Miz Lucille left waves of it behind her when she passed.

Our apartment at the back of the third floor had only one and a half rooms, making it feel cramped, dark, and dreary.  The half room sometimes pretended to be a kitchen.  The other room I shared with my mother, and eventually my half -brother, Joe.  My older brother, James Nick, slept in the kitchen, in a bed that could hardly fit his 6 foot 4 frame.  I always looked at the real estate section of the newspaper, dreaming we would move to a bigger place where I could have a room of my own.  It never happened.   Our tenement eventually won the dubious distinction as an urban renewal zone, and lost its battle with a wrecking ball.  Today, the place I called home for so many years no longer exists.