A blue haze descended at night
and, with it, strings of fairy lights
on the broad avenues.…3
What a city! What a world! …
The first danger I recognized …
was that Harlem would be
too wonderful for words.
Unless I was careful,
I would be thrilled into silence.
—THE POET ARNA BONTEMPS UPON FIRST ARRIVING IN HARLEM, 1924
NEW YORK CITY, PENNSYLVANIA STATION, APRIL 15, 1945
GEORGE SWANSON STARLING
IN THE SPACE OF TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, George Starling had put behind him the slash pines and cypress swamps of his former world and was finally now stepping out of Pennsylvania Station. He walked beneath the Corinthian columns and the iron fretwork of its barrel-vaulted ceiling and into the muted light of a spring morning in Manhattan. He could see a blur of pedestrians brushing past him and yellow taxicabs swerving up Eighth Avenue. Concrete mountains were obscuring the sky, steam rising from sewer grates, the Empire State Building piercing the clouds above granite-faced office buildings, and, all around him, coffee shops and florists and shoe stores and street vendors and not a single colored- or white-only sign anywhere.
This was New York.
He had made it out of Florida and was now reaching into his pocket for the address and telephone number of his aunt Annie Swanson, the one they called Baby, who lived up in Harlem. But he couldn’t find the slip of paper with her number on it, and, in his fatigue and confusion and the upset of all he had been through, couldn’t remember precisely where she lived even though he had been there before, and so he made his way to the apartment of the only friend whose Harlem address he could remember and who just happened to be home.
“He took me in, and I sat there, and I tried to think,” George said. “The more I tried to think, the more confused I got.”
All the streets were numbered. What number street was she on? All the tenements looked the same. Which tenement was she in? She had moved so much. Where was she the last time he was here?
“Don’t worry about it,” the friend said. “It’ll come to you eventually. I’m a let you take you a good, hot bath, lay down, and relax a while.”
George got in the tub, and it came to him. “Oh shoot, I know where my aunt lives,” he said, and he hurried out of the tub. “Now I remember it. Now it has come to me. Maybe I needed to relax.”
He had crossed into another world and was feeling the weight of it all. “I think I was overtired,” he would say years later, “from getting ready to leave and getting out of there.”
The friend directed him to Aunt Baby’s three-room apartment on 112th Street between Fifth and Lenox, where he would sleep on the sofa in the front room until he could find work and a place of his own.
He set his things down just inside her front door, and, at that moment, he became a New Yorker, because, unlike on his other visits to the North, this time, he planned to stay. He would have to get accustomed to a concrete world with the horizon cut off by a stand of brownstones, to a land with no trees and where you couldn’t see the sun. Somehow, he would have to get used to the press of people who never seemed to sleep, the tight, dark cells they called tenements. He would quicken his steps, learn to walk faster, hold his head up and his back stiff and straight, not waving to everyone whose eyes he met but instead acting like he, too, had already seen and heard it all, because in a way, in a life-and-death sort of way, he had.
Curiously enough, one thing was for sure. He didn’t see himself as part of any great tidal wave. “No,” he said years later. “I just knew that I was getting away from Florida. I didn’t consider it like it was a general movement on and I was a part of it. No, I never considered that.”
He could only see what was in front of him, and that was, he hoped, a freer new life for himself. “I was hoping,” he said years later. “I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.”