Free New Boy by Julian Houston

before, used by angry colored men at home
on street corners or at sporting events or in parking lots, arguing with each other about a woman or the result of a ball game or the meaning of a passage of Scripture. It was the voice of anger at the cards that life had dealt.

    I got up from the kitchen table and walked over to a window. The sun was setting and the sky was bright red, but below the streets were dark, the paths of the maze deep in shadow. The globes of streetlights, the lighted windows of shabby tenements, the neon signs of shops and bars and the lights of cars and trucks were beginning to illuminate the darkened streets. And I felt once more the urge to wander through that maze, to understand why, in the largest Negro community in the world, there were so few white people. Harlem was in the North, not the South, but when I walked down 125th Street earlier in the day, it seemed like a bigger version of home.
    "Can you chop me some onions?" said Cousin Gwen. She removed my empty plate and replaced it with a wooden cutting board, a carving knife, and a bowl with three large yellow onions. I had not been assigned a task like this since leaving home.
    "Sure," I said. "I'll just wash my hands." I washed up quickly in the kitchen sink and returned to the table. "What's this for?" I said as I began to peel the onions.
    "Collards," said Cousin Gwen. "Collards are tough, so I cook them for a long time over a low flame with onions and smoked ham hocks and water. I'll cook them for a while tonight and finish 'em off tomorrow morning." Cousin Gwen's thin arms were covered with flour and buried in an enormous blue mixing bowl.

    "Are you making bread?" I said as she kneaded a pale ball of dough in the bowl.
    "Rolls. I'll let this rise overnight and they'll be ready for the oven in the morning."
    I started to chop the onions and, as I did, I remembered why I always hated the job. My eyes were filling with tears from the onion fumes. "This is killing me," I said.
    Cousin Gwen looked at me and smiled. "You look like you just got a whipping. Take that cutting board with the onions over to the sink and keep the water running while you finish chopping." I was ready to try anything, so I did what she said and it worked.
    When I finished chopping the onions, Cousin Gwen put them into a pot with the smoked hocks and the collards that were sitting on the stove, and turned on the burner underneath. "How about peeling and coring some apples for an apple pie?" she asked, handing me a big blue bowl of red apples. She had already begun to make the crust, so I got right to work. As we worked in silence at the kitchen table, I began to think about Harlem. I wondered how much it had changed since Cousin Gwen had arrived. She had lived there for more than forty years, so I asked her, "What was Harlem like when you moved here?"
    At first she didn't answer. I thought maybe she didn't hear me, but when I looked at her, I could see that she was concentrating on the pie crust, folding ice water and pieces of lard into the flour. Then she mixed it into a ball and started to roll it out with a rolling pin.

    "It was wild. The streets were ruled by bootleggers and racketeers who were paying everybody off. I wasn't twenty-five at the time. I had finished college and managed to find a job teaching school, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. You could walk down 125th Street and see James Weldon Johnson and Dr. Du Bois and Langston Hughes all on the same afternoon. And Garvey's people would be out, dressed up in those fancy military uniforms and marching up and down Seventh Avenue like they were about to take over the world. I tell you, it was wild." She shook her head slowly, smiling as she recalled the days. "Of course, during the Depression, there was a lot of suffering. I was lucky enough to have a job, so people would come to my door begging for food and I'd give them what I could. Everybody did. You'd see them dressed in rags out on the street holding