Just Walk
on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space
by Brent
Staples
About
the author: As he describes in Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and
White (1994), Brent Staples (b. 1951) escaped a childhood of urban poverty
through success in school and his determination to be a writer. Although
Staples earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the
University
of Chicago
in 1982, his love of journalism led him to leave the field of psychology
and start a career that has taken him to his current position on the
editorial board of the New York Times. Staples contributes to several
national magazines, including Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, and
Ms., in which "Just Walk on By" appeared in 1986. In his autobiography,
which won the Anisfield Wolff Book Award,
previously won by such writers as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, Staples remembers how in
Chicago
he prepared for his writing career by keeping a journal. "I wrote on
buses, on the Jackson Park el � though only at the stops to keep the
writing legible. I traveled to distant neighborhoods, sat on their curbs,
and sketched what I saw in words. Thursdays meant free admission at the
Art Institute. All day I attributed motives to people in paintings,
especially people in Rembrandts. At closing time I went to a nightclub in
The Loop and spied on patrons, copied their conversations and speculated
about their lives. The journal was more than 'a record of my inner
transactions.' It was a collection of stolen souls from which I would one
day construct a book."
My first
victim was a woman � white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties.
I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in
Hyde
Park, a
relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished
section of Chicago. As I
swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast
back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man-a broad six feet two
inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets
of a bulky military jacket-seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick
glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within
seconds she disappeared into a cross street.
That was
more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student
newly arrived at the University of
Chicago. It was
in the echo of that terrified woman's footfalls that I first began to know
the unwieldy inheritance I'd come into-the ability to alter public space
in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a
mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was
stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able
to take a knife to a raw chicken � let alone hold it to a person's throat
� I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made
me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was
indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area
from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that
followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime
pedestrians � particularly women � and me. And I soon gathered that being
perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a
foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a
policeman. Where fear and weapons meet � and they often do in urban
America � there
is always the possibility of death.
In that
first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly
familiar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections in
Chicago, I could
cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver � black, white, male, or
female-hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark,
I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people who crossed to the
other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard
unpleasantries with police, doormen, bouncers,
cabdrivers, and others whose business is to screen out troublesome
individuals before there is any nastiness.
I
moved to New
York nearly
two years ago and I have remained an avid night walker. In central
Manhattan, the
near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters.
Elsewhere � visiting
friends in SoHo,1 where
sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky �
things can get very taut indeed.
Black men
have a firm place in New
York mugging
literature. Norman Podhoretz2 in his famed (or infamous) 1963
essay, "My Negro Problem � And Ours," recalls growing up in terror of
black males; they "were tougher than we were, more ruthless," he
writes-and as an adult on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he continues,
he cannot constrain his nervousness when he meets black men on certain
streets. Similarly, a decade later, the essayist and novelist Edward
Hoagland extols a New
York where
once "Negro bitterness bore down mainly on other Negroes." Where some see
mere panhandlers, Hoagland sees" a mugger who is clearly screwing up his
nerve to do more than just ask for money." But Hoagland has "the New
Yorker's quick-hunch posture for broken-field maneuvering," and the bad
guy swerves away.
I
often witness that "hunch posture," from women after dark on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I
live. They seem to set their faces on neutral and, with their purse straps
strung across their chests bandolier style, they
forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I
understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a
hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and
young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators
of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of
alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, against being set apart,
a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid
making eye contact.
It is not
altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two
without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed
to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester,
Pennsylvania, the
small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was
scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings,
and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen
fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear
sources.
Many
things go into the making of a young thug. One of those things is the
consummation of the male romance with the power to intimidate. An infant
discovers that random flailings send the baby
bottle flying out of the crib and crashing to the floor. Delighted, the
joyful babe repeats those motions again and again, seeking to duplicate
the feat. Just so, I recall the points at which some of my boyhood friends
were finally seduced by the perception of themselves as tough guys. When a
mark cowered and surrendered his money without resistance, myth and
reality merged – and paid off. It is, after all, only manly to embrace the
power to frighten and intimidate. We, as men, are not supposed to give an
inch of our lane on the highway; we are to seize the fighter's edge in
work and in play and even in love; we are to be valiant in the face of
hostile forces.
Unfortunately,
poor and powerless young men seem to take all this nonsense literally. As
a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried
several, too. They were babies, really-a teenage cousin, a brother of
twenty-two, a childhood friend in his midtwenties – all gone down in episodes of bravado
played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation
early on. I chose, perhaps even unconsciously, to remain a shadow-timid,
but a survivor.
The
fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a
perilous flavor. The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the
late 1970s and early 1980s when I worked as a journalist in
Chicago. One day,
rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline
story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called
security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine
halls, nearly to my editor's door. I had no way of proving who I was. I
could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew
me.
Another
time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an
interview. I entered a jewelry store on the city's affluent Near North
Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red
Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog
extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of
her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male
journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan,
Illinois, a couple
of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there.
Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police hauled him from his car at
gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried to
book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this
all the time.
In "My
Negro Problem-And Ours," Podhoretz writes that
the hatred he feels for blacks makes itself known to him through a variety
of avenues – one being his discomfort with that "special brand of paranoid
touchiness" to which he says blacks are prone. No doubt he is speaking
here of black men. In time, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so
often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to
madness – via that special "paranoid touchiness" that so annoyed Podhoretz at the time he wrote the
essay.
I
began to take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about
with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to
nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when
I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a
building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting
them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following
them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions
when I've been pulled over by the police.
And on
late-evening constitutionals along streets less traveled by, I employ what
has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies
from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular
classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime
destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune.
Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn't be warbling
bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my
equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear
country.
1Soho: A
district of lower Manhattan known for
its art galleries. 2Norman Podhoretz: A well-known literary critic and editor of
Commentary
magazine.
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