Harlem B&E

The first time I heard a helicopter over my apartment I wondered, did bin Laden come back to life? The helo hovered over our brownstone near Lenox Avenue and I swore I could feel compression from the spinning blades. Other bodies had to feel this, too, on these blocks of brownstones, churches, and bodegas.

Rapper Ice Cube included “no helicopter looking for a murder” as proof of a good South Central LA day. Maybe NYPD tracked a killer, but each flyover affected thousands of people in their homes. Did these war sounds agitate neighbors who’d survived armed conflict? I imagined a veteran terrorized as he waited for the helo to drop its load, or spray death in leaden waves.

I returned to my work, but couldn’t shake the fear.

In June 2016, a black Brownsville youth, 16, jumped a subway turnstile and was arrested by NYPD. At the precinct the boy escaped. This led to an all-night “man hunt”—including helicopters—for a youth from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. NYPD flexed this muscle over fare evasion of $2.75. Or, more likely, over rejection of their authority.

I couldn’t stop thinking of antebellum slave hunters given carte blanche to capture runaways dead or alive. Or Harriet Jacobs’s remembrance from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl of a slave-owner who bludgeoned to death an enslaved man for stealing wine and food.

The helo was gone, but I still felt it overhead.

I loved Harlem but I felt palpable relief when I shut the front door. My family shared this building with tenants. The glass pane centered in the top half of the door was thin. But the door was a border. A damper on the energies of millions that compressed each other in city life.

Many men walked down our tree-lined block from Marcus Garvey Park to Lenox and lingered on stoops and under the corner scaffolding. Most did not live there. One neighbor was friendly but he drank. Sometimes he sat on his stoop. Or next door. Or on the corner. My son ran to him often and the neighbor hugged him and picked him up. I smiled, but eagle-eyed. When he saw me alone he joked: “How is my son?” He watched me as I unlocked my door. Watched me as I locked it. His attention was a power that was neither good nor bad, on its face. He could help me if I’m in trouble. He could be the trouble.

When I closed that door, I felt better. Even if the door was half-glass.

“Five years ago, you couldn’t have lived here,” said my first roommate in 2007, a white man in his 40s from upstate New York. I shrugged him off. I’d lived in Detroit, Washington DC, Los Angeles, New Orleans—but never in those cities’ most dangerous neighborhoods. Would “old” Harlem and its crime rate have done me in? Maybe. A woman didn’t need war zones to feel threatened. Women passed grenades everyday. Dead grenades. Pin-out grenades. Maybe just one grenade. That’s all it took for a volatile man to blow a woman apart.

I walked down Lenox, down Fifth, across 123rd, up ACP, across 145. Sometimes men harassed, but I rarely felt endangered as I switched sidewalks, direction, avoided a street altogether. Maybe I saw two officers on the corner. Cops patrolled all over Harlem. I had to consider how much police presence suppressed bad behavior.

An officer looked my way. I worried about acknowledging him, showing him friendliness that could be misread. Sometimes grenades had badges.

Drummers beat their drums hard outside. Sometimes the drum line played for hours at 125th and Lenox. Sometimes the church band behind us made noise I didn’t find joyful. Nowhere to go in this apartment and not hear them. Rows of brownstones like canyons amplified laughs, hollers, the call of a single voice. Once, Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams led a one-man demonstration on the corner. He protested the hate speech on the ATLAH church...