The Lower East Side: a rebirth of world vision.

Wright, Sarah E.

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! 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. We were also at one with the seething ghettos of the North, our ears attuned to Malcolm's message. And it was the year of Africa. We threw ourselves into solidarity work for the great freedom movements of the Congo, fought to head off the assassination of Lumumba, linked arms and hearts with the South African freedom struggle, supported the arms struggle of Angola and Mozambique against Portuguese rule, were in the forefront of bringing a consciousness of Africa to our people. We initiated petitions to the UN, peacefully picketed, and forcefully imposed ourselves on UN proceedings. My husband and I started the newspaper On Guard, devoted to the anti-colonial struggle, abroad and at home.

Our writers' workshop seethed with discussions about art and freedom, about the responsibility of the artist to make a better world. Out of that ferment more than a dozen first-class writers emerged with a considerable body of work of beauty and power.

But to return to that Monday night in mid-September 1960: The writers were gathering in my apartment. The major news of the day was that Fidel Castro, leader of the revolution of the dispossessed, was coming to the United Nations. For us it was a time of joy; for others a time of nervousness, expressed through a massive deployment of police and FBI agents. We had followed closely the calculated insults to Fidel, how the midtown hotels were closed to him and his delegation, how finally, under State Department pressure, the Shelburne at 37th Street and Lexington had agreed to take them in. We followed closely his arrival into Idlewild, now renamed Kennedy Airport. Fidel was part of a flood of new Third World leaders, people who had led liberation struggles, many from the African continent, who were now coming to serve notice that the days of the Black Man's Burden (a remarkably perceptive book later written by John Oliver Killens) were drawing to a close. There was a new day coming! The Establishment media ridiculed Fidel's marathon speeches. But what really aroused their ire was his giving voice to the aspirations of the voiceless!

Now we were gathering to hear John Oliver Killens read another chapter from his work-in-progress And Then We Heard the Thunder, a novel that would reveal the real role of Black troops in World War II and the vile treatment they had to endure. Along with John O. Killens, chair of our group, our mentor, his groundbreaking novel Youngblood our inspiration, there was John Henrik Clarke, blocked by racism from pursuing the accustomed road to academic distinction, who attained it anyhow against all odds through dint of a brilliant and encyclopedic intellect that would not be denied. And there was Bill Forde, then not yet published, masking a bitterness few would see behind his frequently flashing smile. And Grace Killens, wife of John O., not a writer but a discerning critic. And my husband Joseph Kaye, who so much enjoyed the stimulating atmosphere of the group.

John Killens had barely begun his reading when the phone rang. The call was for John Clarke, and after a moment he put down the receiver and announced, "Fidel Castro is moving to Harlem, to the Hotel Theresa--right now! They don't want him at the Shelburne."

Instantly the room was in a state of urgent motion. There was no discussion. People scurried about for their coats, and together we were running down the steps out into the street, hailing taxis. As we approached the hotel, we were caught up in a rapidly swelling crowd of people, spilling off the sidewalks, jubilant--a mass of Black humanity! The taxi was proceeding at a crawl, and we could hear cascading shouts of "Viva Cuba! Viva Fidel! Cuba Si, Yankee No!" The rooftops of buildings as far as one could see in all directions were covered with people waving flashlights and chanting. We got out of the taxis and began shouting, as well. While most of white New York was gnashing its teeth, Harlem was erupting! Here was a salute from a disenfranchised and disinherited people to the leader of a still poor but no longer disenfranchised people, a people who had shown that it was possible to win!

The crowds kept on growing, defying the chill, the rain, the heavily armed police roughly shoving the people away from the hotel, defying the centuries of fear and abuse--out in the streets to protect Fidel against unseen menaces.

Fidel and his entourage arrived shortly after midnight to a deafening roar that shot up and down 125th Street and up and down Seventh Avenue. And we of the Harlem Writers Guild, we too, stood guard. Soon, others from the Guild would find their way to the Theresa and join us, including Rosa Guy, then unpublished but afterwards becoming our most prolific published writer.

Later on we learned that Fidel had been warmly welcomed by Love B. Woods, a black man, and owner of the Hotel Theresa--a far cry from Fidel's reception downtown. Fidel spoke of the "uncivilized and violent" conduct accorded to him by a Shelburne Hotel security guard, of the "incredible inhospitality" extended to him there, of the demand, insulting and unprecedented, for immediate payment of a $10,000 guarantee against hotel damage. And he contrasted that with the respectful treatment he received in Harlem where, he said smiling, "I feel like I were in Cuba, now!"

He spoke of himself as African-American, of his own African ancestry. He spoke of the Cuban revolution and of its first accomplishments. Race discrimination was now a crime in revolutionary Cuba, rents had been slashed, education made free, medical attention guaranteed to all.

Fidel would not permit white reporters from the Establishment press to cover his news conference because he had learned that they would do nothing but distort his message.

Sitting alongside Fidel was Malcolm, who assured him that the people of Harlem were not brainwashed by the propaganda against him and the Cuban revolution. Through Malcolm's and Fidel's embrace, two peoples joined in love and brotherhood.

After a few hours of milling around the hotel, we finally went home. We rode that wave of exhilaration for days. Eventually, of course, that wave subsided. But what remained for me, what has always remained, as I see so many of our youth deprived of any chance of life, as I am confronted by the ugly swamp of poverty in our communities, the ever more insolent racism, the upsurge of murderous hate, the rampant and still growing unemployment and hopelessness, the death that increasingly comes too soon--what remains of Fidel's visit is a social vision immersed so deep in my heart it can never be dislodged.

Sarah E. Wright is most well known as the author of This Child's Gonna Live (1969). Regarded as an American classic, the novel is now entering its twenty-fifth year of constant sales with the current issuance of another edition by the publisher. She lives in New York with her husband.