Free Still Life in Harlem by Eddy L. Harris

shattered, the seats and the dashboard ripped out and tossed into the avenue, the car set on fire. Nothing remains but the burned-out shell.
    You look at this burned-out car, you think you are looking at a crime. What you are seeing is only the result of the crime.
    Three minutes’ walk away, down to the corner of 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, you can see the back side of a former apartment building that either reminds you of the car you just saw or makes you think of a war zone. The windows have all been blown out or boarded up. The entire face of the building is streaked with the scars of a fire. It is but the shell of a building, in front of which lies a fenced-in vacant lot covered with rocks and weeds, strewn with trash.
    This, they tell me, is the nicer part of Harlem.
    A few minutes from there, a walk down Manhattan Avenue leads you to row upon row of apartments where people live in units right beside units that have been gutted and boarded up. Young men stand on the front stoop steps and smoke dope. Down the street on another corner, money changes hands. Quite out in the open, drugs are sold in a flash of money unfolded, passed from one to another, a vial of cocaine slipped into a pocket. As you pass, your eyes meet the eyes of a man rocking on his heels in front of a building where people live—bad enough, but where children live too, and play. He mutters something. You think it’s a greeting. You nod hello. Then his mumbling registers.
    â€œGet you some, man, get you some right here.”
    Drugs for sale.
    In a second-floor window a little child sits and watches it all as if she is watching a television. A young woman approaches, looks up, and shouts.
    â€œGet out that window.”
    But she is only playing with the little girl, not concerned for the child’s safety—not enough for my liking.
    â€œGet out that window and go get your mama,” the woman shouts.
    The child still doesn’t move. The woman screams up again in a voice big enough to rise above the noise on the street.
    â€œHey. Somebody up there throw me down a drill. I need me a drill.”
    To the window where the child still sits someone finally comes and gets ready to throw hand tools down to the street. There seems little worry about the child sitting in an open window two floors above the ground, little concern from the apartment where the child lives, just as little from the street below. The child is just pushed aside.
    Street after street, more and more of the same. All you see are the weeds winning over the neighborhood. You never stop to wonder how the weeds came to be planted or how long ago the seeds were sown. You only shake your head in disgust. You see what you think is a shame, but what you see really is the result of the shame.
    I ask myself as I walk east across 111th Street: Is this what I came here for? I could be in the south of France, I said. I could be hiking the north Yorkshire moors. I could be living in Paris, for God’s sake.
    In fact, the season before I came to live in Harlem, I had spent in Paris, in London, and in Yorkshire. The season before that one I had spent in a seventeenth-century house almost as old as Harlem itself, and about as far removed from here as you can possibly get. It was in a little village called Montpeyroux in the southwest corner of France, the kind of place where you don’t have to lock the front door. In fact I never locked up when I was away from the house. The only time I locked the door was when I was home and didn’t want the neighbors, who when they dropped in for a visit would often enter without knocking.
    I think back to my time in Montpeyroux; lazy days and even lazier nights, the biggest danger coming from the possibility of getting run over by a teenager on a moped. Quite possibly that is how life is supposed to be, safe and quiet and calm. Just as possibly, for me it was too calm. Perhaps I need a certain tension.
    I had all the