FOURTEEN years ago, on a short visit to New York - I was 17 and long-haired and blissfully stupid - I ended up, by mistake, stumbling from a subway train into the heart of Harlem. It was a Saturday night. I moved through a river of dark faces. Even drunk, I got the feeling I shouldn't be there. There was a palpable, intricate sense this place belonged to somebody else. A landscape of extremes - sirens and gunshots and music and loving and living and hating and dying.
A place where a figure in the shadows might look like a knife with a human being tucked into its sock.
I quickly crossed the street and descended to the underground train once more. Later, I lied and told people I had walked all night through Harlem, as if it were some badge of manhood, as if it vindicated me as a person of the people, as if I had gone so far down beneath that river of universal racism to where it was so dark that colour itself was negated.
But horseshit is horseshit no matter which way it's served.
Harlem scares a white man. Most New Yorkers never even see it. Some tourists go in open-top buses and take photos of the Apollo Theatre or the Cotton Club. It's a zoo mentality. Many of us - black or white - live our lives tentatively, as if they are not even ours, fed by television, gossip and, occasionally, books. Harlem, in our imaginations, has jazz notes meeting each other on the air. Or buckets of crack cocaine being lowered down from third-floor windows. Or the chalk marks of bodies being washed away by rain.
For a year I lived two miles south of Harlem and I only really skirted its edges. Fear, to tell the truth. Content with the idea that a white man walking in Harlem was a dead man walking. The seepage of racism into my blood. Telling myself I would go there again if - and only if - I went with an African-American friend. But I was researching a novel and the only way to research a novel is to go somewhere on your own.
Now, I'm still scared by Harlem, but for different reasons.
It was a Sunday morning this winter. The sky was as grey as chromium. This is what I carried: no wallet, a few dollars, a Swiss Army knife, one piece of identification, my Irish driver's licence. The train was noticeably less "white" after we passed 96th Street Station. It shames me to say this, but I was incredibly scared. I felt as if there was a cudgel hammering away beneath my rib cage. There were three ad vantages to the time of day. Firstly, it was morning. Secondly, it was something I thought I had long ceased to care about a holy day. Thirdly, there was snow on the ground. So Harlem would be benevolent, safe, even tender. I came up the steps of the station and the winter sunlight stung my eyes. I was alone even though the streets were in full throat, cars, pedestrians, panhandlers, churchgoers. Never before have I been so aware of my whiteness.
Looking over my shoulder, I shoved one hand inside my jacket Napolean-style - I'd heard from a cop that this was a good thing to do. It makes it look as if you might have a gun tucked away.
At first I saw what I wanted to see women leaning fleshily out of windows; a crack deal in Saint Nicholas Park; an angry game of dominoes between two old men young girls dutch-skipping near a yellow crime scene tape from the night before.
In a famous church I was disgusted to find other white tourists, the red eyes of their video cameras dotted like measles around the pews. I wanted it to belong to me. This was my pilgrimage and I didn't want it to be shared. I went deeper into streets - tenement streets and project houses where buses wouldn't go. My feet crunched the snow. Down off Malcolm X Boulevard. Up to 137th. Around toward the east side. South to Spanish Harlem. Up north again. There was a wild thump within me, a sort of adrenalin rush.
ALL the time I was thinking: white man walking.
Yet, what was most astounding is that nobody cared. Apart from a couple of young men who obviously thought I was a cop, I was the only one who gave a damn. It was disappointing at first, all this adrenalin violated. I walked more or less unseen. It wasn't until later that I realised how lovely this was, how affirming, how alive. At the end of the day I sat on a brownstone stoop on 129th and Lennox Avenue with an old man. He was sanding a fiddle with a piece of garnet paper wrapped around a cork. He'd made fiddles for 50 years. He could sense something in me. Passing a bottle of expensive Scotch, he said: "The only race, son, is the human race."
Later he sang a song, the only words of which I remember, were: "I'm so lowdown, Lord, I declare I'm looking up at down."
Looking up at down is not unusual for African-Americans. Young black men have a lower life expectancy than even a man in Bangladesh; unemployment is twice that of white males; one in four men in their twenties is behind bars; blacks receive longer prison sentences; one third of black families in America live below the poverty line.
Harlem is poor. It is the spirit of the place - volatile and violent and neighbourly and chaotic - that is attractive. In Harlem, even the bricks seem to have music.
ERE, the sign on the door saying: "No crack sold here". There, a yellow Cadillac bouncing on its suspension. Here, tenement houses in lockstep across Upper Manhattan. There, fabulous gargoyles and intricate architecture.
Marijuana in the park. Fabulous libraries. Heroin. Dashikis sold on 125th Street. Young girls turning tricks. A teenager selling red-green-yellow shoe laces. Seedy bars, all wood and broken mirrors. A picture of Huey Newton and Bobby Scale graffitied on a grocery store wall. A barber shop with a bottle of water from the Jordan River on a mantlepiece.
Rap. Soul. Rhythm and blues.
Taunts nigger, honkie, snowboy, jungle bunny, cracker, spade. Church services in basements, with hallelujahs hailed to the sky. A voice in mourning for the fields of Alabama. A shout from a tenement window: Fuck you, motherfucker. A college student holding court on an orange crate, talking about racial imperialism. Pawn shops with teddy bears in the window. A quiet political protest down 125th street, fists raised.
It is everything that the poet Walt Whitman meant when he said: "I am large, I have contradictions."
Harlem is a flux for me now, all the images merge, it is a community, I am closer to its truth than I was before, but I will never know its truth. I am an outsider. And always will be.
It must be said, though, that there's a currency to being Irish in Harlem. Being Irish is nonthreatening, almost hip. Rightly or wrongly, there is an identification with historical oppression. It has gotten me places. More than once I was given a high hand-slap and told: "Hey, man, I'm Irish too." I have gone to bars and been bought free drinks. I have been let in free to jazz clubs. My own early "racism" was not really racism - I realise that now - it was stereotyping, it was the comfort of ignorance.
I go to Harlem often now. I am more comfortable, but I'm scared. I'm scared by myself, my thoughts, my preconceptions. I went into a barber shop recently and was laughed at. But the barber cut my hair anyway. I asked for it to be short. It revealed two crowns of baldness on my forehead. I didn't like it. But I suppose what I was really asking him was: Get rid of the person I don't want to be. Get rid of the person that was.