Civil Society: Moments of Vividness and Promise
Fox, Paula
I was born in New York City, and I have lived in or around it for a good part of my life. Some neighborhoods, although altered nearly beyond recognition, are still charged for me with...
...But there were moments of vividness and promise, even of glamour...
...Quite suddenly, Robeson walked out onto the stage in a blue suit...
...it's weakened by greed and waste and the shameless inequities that are their result...
...it had been sprayed on me as I walked through a department store by one of those clerks with an atomizer who spring at one like a tomcat...
...Now I wonder if I did not feel some immense consolatory quality in Robeson's presence that I may have seen reflected on the faces of the porters...
...That is the place where my memory ends, Robeson on a step...
...By then, I had come to know New York well, the way you know a city when you've had jobs in it— most of them pretty awful—that keep you more or less fed, and out of the weather...
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...In those days, centers of commerce, office districts, even railroad stations, were often deserted at such an hour...
...I had a friend who was a friend of Robeson's...
...Lucienne Boyer was singing in French as we sat down...
...As we walked down the wide stairs, our footsteps echoed throughout the vast reaches of the station where not even a late traveler could be seen hurrying to a last train home...
...The doorman of the club, and the maitre d'hiitel who hurried toward us through a shadowed foyer, both recognized Robeson, at whose request we were taken to small room with a balcony that overlooked the main space of the caf...
...The four of us could have been alone...
...Against the walls, I counted eleven people, some black, some white, two of them women, lying down or sitting slouched over on sections of dusty cardboard...
...We were going to a nightclub, Café Society Uptown, to hear a French chanteuse, Lucienne Boyer...
...Well—almost singing...
...one of them was The Man I Love...
...I recall the four of us in a taxi, but not where we had met before catching it...
...I recognized that scent...
...As they passed the fallen on their cardboard pallets, their faces were utterly vacant...
...Then, from every corner of the station, silently flying toward us like swallows, came the station porters in their red hats, converging on Robeson and his son as they reached the bottom step...
...to pick up her fur coat, which had fallen to the floor behind her bar stool...
...I once thought it was the high emotional tone of that evening that made it so memorable for me, its drama...
...For what seemed one hundred years, I paid rent to landlords for wildly differing lodgings in various sections of the city...
...I met him twice after that concert, once in California during the run of Othello, and a second time in New York City a few weeks after I had come home from Europe...
...I quavered out a few lines then fell silent, overwhelmed at the idea of singing with Paul Robeson...
...In a jazz club on 52nd Street that was called, I think, Kelly's Stable, Billie Holiday turned to me from the bar as I was passing her and asked me —"Darlin', would you mind...
...It isn't a "strong" city...
...Even so, it couldn't expunge the stench and reek of urine, of the unwashed and undernourished flesh of the people who sought shelter in the passage...
...She stood in a shower of light in a gold dress...
...I met Duke Ellington on a flight of marble stairs leading down from an exhibit by the painter Stuart Davis...
...The triumphant stupidities, the material preoccupations and fashions of many of its inhabitants appear to me to belong to a world devised in its entirety by Dostoevski's Smerdyakov...
...It must have been nearly midnight...
...I was getting away at last...
...I didn't look at it for long that time either...
...It is startling to recollect them...
...I heard Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter play on his guitar and sing The Midnight Special at a party in Greenwich Village for a cause I've forgotten...
...Planes flew overhead, searchlights played against the sky...
...laughing, his head thrown back, his son standing next to him, one of the porters suddenly gesturing toward a platform entrance as though Pauli's train was about to leave and they must run now to catch it...
...No matter what the circumstances, I always found the city hard to live in...
...He whispered to me suddenly to sing, too...
...I stole a glance at his hands...
...I believe its name is Poison...
...Many of them were heavily perfumed, and what struck me was that men and women alike were wearing the same very strong scent...
...Seventeen years later, a year after the end of the Second World War, I saw the city again—from the outside—as I stood on the deck of a partly reconverted Liberty ship on which I was going to Europe...
...I see the past differently as I grow older, and so, in a sense, the past changes...
...Afterwards, we all went to Grand Central where Pauli was to take a train back to his school...
...Later that same evening, the club doors were shut and I was among a few people who stayed inside, sitting around a table, listening to her sing far into the night...
...Robeson was spending time with his FALL • 1987 • 593 MEMORIES AND REPRESSIONS son, Pauli, who had come to the city from his prep school, somewhere to the north...
...Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary, "Real amazement comes from memory .. ." People, some of them now names on headstones, were walking around the city in the days of my youth, and you might run into them in all sorts of places...
...I had been thinking about what to write for this magazine, and as I read the word "city" I recalled all at once that evening...
...Some neighborhoods, although altered nearly beyond recognition, are still charged for me with the emotions of past events—at least, during those moments when I pass through them...
...I was always trying to find a way to get out of it during that time, a time when I imagined that if I could only find the right place, the difficulties of life would vanish...
...It was early morning...
...a number of people were on their way to work, briefcases and bags swinging at their sides...
...There was conversation, but I don't recollect saying a word though I must have done so for I remember Robeson looking at me and speaking, smiling...
...From Charles Street, where I had an apartment for a while, I could walk a couple of blocks to a bar on Seventh Avenue and hear Art Tatum play the piano all evening for the price of a glass of beer...
...I was taken to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem where I watched dancers bend and circle and hurl their partners through the air and, miraculously, catch them, to the music of two bands led by Cootie Williams and Lucky Millendar, and then was, myself, drawn into the dance, wondering when the floor would give way then not caring whether it did or not...
...One day recently, I got off the subway from Brooklyn where I now live, and walked through a long passage beneath Fifth Avenue...
...She sang a few songs in English...
...Memory always seems to begin in the middle of some story...
...for the pleasure of the passengers...
...Robeson hummed along with her, filling the balcony with the indescribable plangency of his voice though it was inaudible to the people sitting below...
...But recently I came upon something from the Book of Common Prayer: "Thanks be to the Lord: for he has showed me marvellous great kindness in a strong city...
...Someone had told me that when he played on the Rutgers football team, his own teammates had deliberately trodden on his hands during practice sessions...
...I don't really know...
...One evening I went to Lewisohn Stadium to hear Paul Robeson sing...
...The first time I recall glimpsing New York as a whole was from the deck of a Hudson River Dayliner when I was four or five years old...
...He stood among them for several moments, talking and listening, laughing at something, once, that one of the porters said to him...
...He was so splendid, so exalted to listen to, to look at, that the audience itself, I among them, seemed to feel an answering exaltation...
...But I must have found the view of Riverside Drive and its towers oppressive, for I remember I soon returned to a spot near a railing from which I could stare down at the heads of the musicians of a band sitting, two decks below, on camp chairs, playing "Hail, Columbia...
...There isn't much social kindness—certainly not civility—in New York anymore...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
