The Lower East Side

The air on that mid-September night was filled with a heavy and sullen wetness. Light rain had been falling intermittently for hours. But nothing would deter the young and somewhat past-young writers of the Harlem Writers Guild from assembling at their weekly meeting, at whomever's house was being offered for the evening. This time it was my small Lower East Side apartment. It was a sacred although by no means always solemn occasion. It was a time for reading aloud our works-in-progress to one another. We would submit ourselves to the searing judgment of our peers, merciless in our demand for truth, but supportive of every sign of talent. And of that there was an exciting abundance. I shall never forget those somber and moving hours when a quiet voice would eloquently capture the agony of the Black experience in America, or the frequent moments of hilarity as someone caught our oppression's comic side. But we were serious even in our laughter, for we were all about the quest for truth, for justice, and for a world open to love. I had moved to the Lower East Side in the late 1950s attracted, like other Black artists and intellectuals, by the cheap rent of a community in transition from a Jewish ghetto to a largely Puerto Rican community which the landlords were in a hurry to turn into a slum. But isolated though we were, we had managed to create a kind of Harlem Renaissance downtown, reverberating to the rising struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements around the country. My five-floor walk-up building was located in one of the shabbier blocks in the neighborhood--a mixture of poor Jewish holdovers, unable to flee to the suburbs, and the impoverished, newly-arrived Puerto Ricans. It was the site of a titanic struggle for the souls of the immigrants waged between the storefront Pentecostal church, its loudspeakers blaring its message of salvation until late at night, and the quiet and efficient drug dealers offering soothing prescriptions for the hopeless. Though far from a palace, my building was nevertheless off limits to people of color. But some progressive white friends had through a subterfuge obtained a lease for me, and I was safely ensconced in my small apartment before the landlord realized his mistake, something to which the tenant directly below me could never resign herself, throwing open her window from time to time in the middle of the night and screaming her protests to the streets below, Nigger whore! Ultimately, she and more than half the other tenants in the building would unsuccessfully attempt to have my husband and I evicted on trumpedup charges that my writers' meetings were actually wild orgies. While I tried to ignore this half-mad woman of a half-mad society, her presence as I launched the writing of my novel This Child's Gonna Live contributed a special tension to the normal tensions of trying to write while exhausted after coming home from a full-time job, and dealing, at the same time, with a new marriage. I was not alone among the writers of our workshop in enduring the injuries of racism. And it was a frequent topic of our conversation--not just the crude bigotries, but particularly the paternalistic racism of liberal whites who prided themselves on what they thought to be their cosmopolitan and enlightened views. Before and after our readings the Guild members would eagerly exchange information about the Southern sit-ins, the freedom riders, exchange endless stories about the boundless degradation associated with maintaining the magnolia-scented plantation life and its lying memories. Practically all of us had come from the South, and we would return home every now and then to hear the firsthand reports of our kinfolk, hear their stories of howling mobs, of State troopers unleashing their dogs, conveying a greater immediacy to us than the nightly TV footage. The gaze of our Harlem Writers Guild was focused not only on the South

Ancient history · Art · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Race, History, and American Society