Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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styles of doorknob—the metal gate.
And the gate, oddly, is what I really want to talk about.
First of all, in those days Mr. Lockley’s was the only store I knew of that had a gate. (We had gates on our back windows at home, in the kitchen and living room behind the ivory and purple draperies, but living with those, day in and day out, I somehow hardly saw them.) Mr. Lockley’s gate had many vertical black shafts, hinged to the numerous diagonals with rollers at their ends, between. If you were out on the street in the morning just as the sun cleared the cornices on the far side of Seventh Avenue, the struts cut the light into gold lozenges webbed with shadow and laid them on the dusty splendor inside.
I guess I was nine.
It was a warm autumn evening, though at six o’clock the sky had lost half its light and doubled the depth of its blue. I watched Albert click the third big padlock to its hasp and turn away toward the stoop to his apartment house. I stepped onto the black metal cellar door, which shifted—tunk!—under my U.S. Keds. I walked to the gate, put my palm against one strut. It was cool and gritty.
I pushed a little.
The gate moved—only it didn’t move like a rigid structure of bolted iron. It rippled, like a curtain. I put my face up against it, looked across it, pushed again. Although the bottoms and tops of the verticals were constrained in metal troughs, the movement across the structure clearly went out in waves. I could see it waving. And I could hear it rattle and watch the waves spread from me out to the upper corners of the window. I put both hands against the metal, my face as close as I could get it, sighting across the gate, which from this angle seemed like a single sheet.
I shook it once.
I waited. I hooked my fingers around the struts and shook it two times.
I waited again.
Then I rattled it as hard as I could. And kept on rattling. The noise hurt my ears. The verticals tap-danced in their trough, and all pattern dissolved in the banging and racketting —
“What in the world are you doing? Stop that!”
I turned around.
“You gone crazy?” my father demanded, as he frequently did these days. He had heard the noise and stepped out of the funeral parlor door to see what his odd nine-year-old was up to. “You stop that and go on upstairs! You’re going to end in the electric chair, I swear,” which seemed to be his most common admonition to me over any and all infractions, minor or major, an admonition his father had used as frequently with him; and since my father had achieved some success under it he felt justified in using it with me—although frankly, to me it was both bewildering and terrifying.
I ran upstairs.
But later, as I lay in my bed on the third floor, listening to the night traffic whisking along Seventh Avenue, I thought again of that gate. Its rigid pieces, some long, some short, were attached in such a flexible way that not only could it fold up during the day at the edge of the store window, but, when it was extended, motion to any part of it was translated across its breadth in audible and visible progression. The motion was passed from juncture to juncture. Each strut took up the motions of the ones that joined its near end and passed a resultant motion on to the ones that joined its far end. No matter how loud the clangor, it was a patterned and orderly process.
My childhood was not a typical Harlem childhood. For one thing, we lived in a private house and had a maid. My father’s business was on the ground floor. We lived on the top two. For another, I attended neither the public school two blocks to the north nor the Catholic school around the corner to the south. During my early childhood, every morning my father, or occasionally one of his employees, drove me down to a private school at 89th Street just off Park Avenue. The school’s population was overwhelmingly white, largely Jewish, and educated the children of enough millionaires, literary lights, government officials, and theatrical personages to keep its name, with fair frequency, in the papers as well as in the gossip of New York folk interested in the osmotic properties of success.
In the ’40s Harlem’s southern boundary was much more abrupt than it is today: 110th Street, along the top of Central Park, delimited it with a sureness I could sense any time on my trip home I had to transfer from the Fifth Avenue Number Four bus to the Number Two, which would take me on up Seventh Avenue—waiting across from the corner of the park under the awning of some closed-down night spot reminiscent of Cole Porter days and the trampish lady who “won’t go to Harlem in ermines and pearls.”
My twice-daily trip from Seventh Avenue and 132nd Street, between Mr. Onley’s and Mr. Lockley’s, to the private school just down the street from the construction then going on for the then-new Guggenheim Museum, the change from the black children of subway workers, hospital orderlies and taxi drivers (my friends on the block) to the white children of psychiatrists, publishers, and Columbia professors (my friends at school), was a journey of near ballistic violence through an absolute social barrier.
I never questioned that violence.
Such violences youngsters accustom themselves to very easily.
But shortly after the incident with Mr. Lockley’s window gate I began to think—as you no doubt began thinking moments ago—of society itself as a structure similar to that gate. Well, not so much a gate, as a web. A net. Each person represented a juncture. The connections between them were not iron struts, but relations of money, goods, economics, information, emotions. Any social occurrence over here invariably moved, via these mediators, across the social net from person to person. This image of Mr. Lockley’s window gate seemed a good model for the life around me on the streets of Harlem. It seemed as well a good model for the life around me at my school. And yet from my position as a nineyear-old going on ten, I wondered just how these two gates, two webs, two nets, connected. In gross terms, the white one seemed to surround the black, holding the black one to its place and keeping it rather more crushed together in less space. But what were the actual connections between them? There was me, who passed from one to the other twice a day, along with the 15 or so other black children who lived in Harlem and, with me, attended the Dalton School—half of them it seemed, at that time, relatives of mine. The economic ties that connected the two webs could even be faintly traced via the white landlords and absentee store owners who took money out of the neighborhood, money that, by and large, was able to come back in only through blacks working either directly or indirectly for whites. Certainly the goods in Mr. Lockley’s store and most of the produce in Mr. Onley’s eventually took money out of the neighborhood. But these still left the ties of information and emotion—without which the economic ties had to remain oppressive.
These ties were not there.
Their absence was the barrier I crossed every time I left for and returned from my school. Their absence was the violence.
What was the ’50s for me?
It began with the electrocution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason. The parents of my liberal white friends were shocked, deeply, at what they saw as a clear emblem of something profoundly wrong in the land, regardless of whether they believed in the guilt or innocence of the gentle Jewish couple.
It was the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till by mysterious and terrifying white men somewhere in the south. From our front window we watched diagonally across the street where, before what had once been the Lafayette Theater (where Orson Welles had directed Canada Lee in Blackbeth; more recently it had been a Harlem supermarket, and was now a Baptist church), Harlem citizens rallied, made speeches, sang, and made more speeches.
It was the Supreme Court decision on integration. It was the first marches on Washington. It was Autherine Lucy. It was Sputnik and Little Rock, reported on the same September afternoon radio newscast. And from my rides to school each morning, I could see out the bus window that Harlem’s lower boundary was not nearly so well defined as it had been. Some information and plenty of emotion had broken through. Some people had even liked what they had learned; but most, on both sides, were more upset with it than not.
The ’50s was also the decade I began reading science fiction.