Harris - My soul looks back: a memoir

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Scribner

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Copyright 2017 by Jessica B. Harris

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Excerpt from To a Man on page 1 from Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water fore I Diiie: Poems by Maya Angelou, copyright 1971 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

First Scribner hardcover edition May 2017

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by Lauren Peters-Collaer

Front jacket photograph courtesy of the author

Back jacket photographs: top left Fred W. McDarrah/Contributor/Premium Archive/Getty Images; top right Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos; bottom Burt Glinn/Magnum Photo

ISBN 978-1-5011-2590-4

ISBN 978-1-5011-2700-7 (ebook)

For those who knew me then

And those who knew me when

And those who know me now

You cannot step twice in the same river.

HERACLITUS

My man is

Black Golden Amber

Changing.

Warm mouths of Brandy Fine...

So opens Maya Angelous poem To a Man. If Id read those lines back in the 1970s, this story would never have happened. Instead, ignorant, trusting, believing in love, and woefully too young, I raced in. Ive been rereading Angelous poetry recently because her passing has brought memories of my youth vividly back, like Lon Damass long-held-in hiccup. I relive them again and again.

Ive been known to say that I am the Zelig of the second half of the twentieth century because it has been my great good fortune to turn up in multiple special spots. I lived and studied in Paris when Les Halles was still going strong and the buildings were gray, Ive supped with Sembne in Senghors Senegal, and Ive danced in the Candombl ring in Jorge Amados Bahia. However, the real reason that I identify with the Woody Allen character is that it was my privilege to spend part of my youth with Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and their circles of friends as they were becoming icons of twentieth-century America. Their joy in one another, the fierceness of their intellectual pursuits, and their absolute dedication to civil rights and to the righting of civil wrongs of all sorts made their names hallmarks of honesty and totems for truth that influenced the world.

I am not central to the story, although I have lived it; rather, it is about an extraordinary circle of friends who came together, lived outrageously, loved abundantly, laughed uproariously, and savored life while they created work that would come to define the era. That they knew one another was interesting; that they partied together, savored one anothers company, encouraged one anothers endeavors, celebrated one anothers achievements, and mourned one anothers losses is extraordinary.

This tale is also the story of a city. New York City, its neighborhoods and its vibrant life, is also a character, for no other place in the world could have spawned and celebrated their lives with such intensity. Paris had the belle epoque, the 1920s, and the existentialist 1950s; London had the swinging sixties, and New York City in the early 1970s was the hub-of-the-universe city. It was a city in the throes of a major transition, when restaurants could offer a glimpse into the fading world of caf society or bubble with the excitement of the new era that was being created, and the clubs that existed for every possible social stripe throbbed nightly with the excesses of the sexual and moral revolution that had been ushered in in the 1960s. Life was lived in wide-screen Technicolor in ways that had never before existed. It was the city before AIDS and economic downturns made it a very different place. Memory has muted some of the vibrancy of the colors, and the dates fade into a continuum, but the vitality of the friendships, the commitment to activism, and the joie de vivre of those heady days remain as palpable as the intertwined connective tissue of the lives that were lived then.

James Baldwin was at the center of this circle of friends. His huge presence radiated warmth and intensity; his cultural and political stature at that point in time was enormous. Through my young eyes, being in Baldwins circle, however tangentially, felt at times as though all were in attendance at the court of a very reluctant sun king. Although the group was egalitarian, there was an unspoken hierarchy, and everyone sort of knew exactly where they fit in.

If Baldwin was the pivot of the literary court, his trusted second was a gentleman and a gentle man from Durham, North Carolina, named Samuel Clemens Floyd III : Angelous Amber Sam. Floyds names literary allusion to Mark Twain was prescient, for Sam had been one of the early Black writers on staff at Newsweek and was the director of faculty and curriculum and taught English in the higher-education opportunity program, SEEK , at Queens College, where I also worked. Like Candombls Orixa Ogun, breaker of bonds who clears paths and builds roads, it was Sam who opened the way into the circle of friends for me and led me down the rabbit hole into the wonderland that was that moment in time.

Chapter One

Its boarded and shuttered now, with windows taped as though for an impending hurricane or a wrecking ball: a relic of another time. Those who know the Meatpacking District from Sex and the City hurry by on their way to the High Line and the trendy restaurants or window-shop at the Louboutin shop across the street, but occasionally a passerby stops and stares into the blank windows as though recalling another time: a time before the area had a name, when this was the farthest outpost of Greenwich Village and there were some West Side blocks where only the brave dared walk because the rats were the size of small dogs. The Village then was a grittier place, but one that was equally vibrant with its own life. Beyond the building at the corner of Horatio and Greenwich Streets, farther up the street, West Street and the Hudson River loomed with meatpacking warehouses, single-room-occupancy hotels, hookers, johns, pickup bars, and nighttime cruising haunts for the gay population that had come out of the collective closet only a decade or so earlier.