New York

New York -- As described by Barack Obama in "Dreams from My Father"

I knew he was right [that New York was changing me], although I wasn’t sure myself what exactly had happened. In a way, I was confirming Sadik’s estimation of the city’s allure, I suppose; its consequent power to corrupt. With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was humming, new developments cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess, all of it dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire-a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high.

Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will.

My reaction was more than just an attempt to curb an excessive appetite, though, or a response to sensory overload.

Beneath the hum, the motion, I was seeing the steady fracturing of the world taking place. I had seen worse poverty in Indonesia and glimpsed the violent mood of inner-city kids in L.A.; I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes.

It was as if all middle ground had collapsed, utterly. And nowhere, it seemed, was that collapse more apparent than in the black community I had so lovingly imagined and within which I had hoped to find refuge. I might meet a black friend at his Midtown law firm, and before heading to lunch at the MoMA, I would look out across the city toward the East River from his high-rise office, imagining a satisfactory life for myself-a vocation, a family, a home. Until I noticed that the only other blacks in the office were messengers or clerks, the only other blacks in the museum the bluejacketed security guards who counted the hours before they could catch their train home to Brooklyn or Queens.

I might wander through Harlem-to play on courts. I’d once read about or heard Jesse Jackson make a speech on 125th; or, on a rare Sunday morning, to sit in the back pews of Abyssinian Baptist Church, lifted by the gospel choir’s sweet, sorrowful song-and catch a fleeting glimpse of that thing which I sought. But I had no guide that might show me how to join this troubled world, and when I looked for an apartment there, I found Sugar Hill’s elegant brownstones occupied and out of reach, the few decent rental buildings with ten-year-long waiting lists, so that all that remained were the rows and rows of uninhabitable tenements, in front of which young men counted out their rolls of large bills, and winos slouched and stumbled and wept softly to themselves.

I took all this as a personal affront, a mockery of my tender ambitions-although, when I brought up the subject with people who had lived in New York for a while, I was told there was nothing original about my observations. The city was out of control, they said, the polarization a natural phenomenon, like monsoons or continental drift. Political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful, came to take on the flavor of the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union or the African cultural fairs that took place in Harlem and Brooklyn during the summers-a few of the many diversions New York had to offer, like going to a foreign film or iceskating at Rockefeller Center. With a bit of money, I was free to live like most middle-class blacks in Manhattan, free to choose a motif around which to organize my life, free to patch together a collage of styles, friends, watering holes, political affiliations. I sensed, though, that at some stage-maybe when you had children and decided that you could stay in the city only at the cost of a private school, or when you began takings cabs at night to avoid the subways, or when you decided that you needed a doorman in your apartment building-your choice was irrevocable, the divide was now impassable, and you would find yourself on the side of the line that you’d never intended to be on.

Unwilling to make that choice, I spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.