Fulbright riffs, 1991 — day 70, Wednesday August 7th

My camera stopped working in Washington at the weekend. I take it back to the shop from where I purchased it over a month ago. They examine it superficially and tell me I need to take it to Olympus on Long Island. They insist it’s not the batteries but I buy a new set anyway. Outside the shop, I switch the batteries: instant DIY repair job.

This is good news as I am about to drop myself off in Harlem, starting at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard (or Lenox Avenue). The librarian Juliana shows me around and recommends I use this first trip, of the two that I have planned, to watch the Bill Miles TV documentary from 1981, I remember Harlem.

I cross the street to get lunch at the Paw-Paw. It’s very busy and I am the only white face. I order from the counter and sit down at the end of one of the benches set at long tables. Nobody meets my gaze. As I settle to eat, the waitress accidentally knocks over a glass of water. As it trickles all over my lap and I dab with my paper napkin I remark that this is certainly one way to cool down. She says “Damned lucky it wasn’t hot coffee, man!”. The rest of lunch-hour passes quickly and without further incident.

Rowland and others have been apprehensive about my venturing into Harlem alone but watery accidents apart I feel no more threatened here than anywhere else I’ve been, and certainly feel safer than when I was walking around New Orleans. I feel I am being keenly observed, but if you walk down any English village street with a camera, people will be looking at you. I am in fact more concerned about reports on the radio today about the riots in Tompkins Square. The Square is very close to Howard Mandel’s apartment where I will be staying in less than two weeks time.

The midday heat quickly dries my clothes as I walk up to 139th Street to find Strivers’ Row and enjoy making use of my camera again.

I call in on Val Wilmer’s artist friend Carol Blank [d. 2013] on Nicholas Avenue. She’s made a salad and we drink champale, a New Jersey malt liquor. Carol’s apartment is hung with many fascinating and bizarre paintings. Brazilian music plays on the sound system. Val describes her in Mama said there’d be days like this: at that time (1970s) she was living in Brooklyn:
“Carol was part of a group called Where we at: black women artists, and when I first knew her, painted dramatic canvases in symbolic Ethiopian style… Carol was what black people call down. She was never at a loss for a snatch of survivor philosophy, and had endless patience with and understanding of human frailty…. She could not wait, she said, to move into the role of community elder. Physically, she was not the earth mother type. She was skinny and lithe, with dazzling, thoughtful eyes, and walked with a strut that said ‘Brooklyn!’ and no questions asked”.

I recognise the ‘elder’ role and those eyes instantly: she tells me she thrives on networking. Once again, thanks to Val Wilmer, it feels like I am a community participant, however fleetingly. [Although you can never escape your nurturing, your cultural baggage, which in my case includes horrified amusement reading Lorca’s El Rey de Harlem/ The King of Harlem during my student days. A “great king imprisoned in a janitor’s uniform” might be an apt description of one of the diners at the Paw-Paw. Lorca had a poetic love affair with New York: most outsiders feel sensations that are similar.]

It’s appropriate that I end today’s immersion in New York’s black culture by watching John Singleton’s newly-released Boyz n the Hood at a cinema on East 34th and Third Avenue. It’s a powerful portrayal of prospects for young blacks in Los Angeles, giving the inescapable impression that guns and liquor are made available in such abundance with the idea that, fortuitously, this community will end up killing itself.