Nation: No Place Like Home

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going full blast under the guidance of Holy Rollers and thunder-voiced spiritualists, some of whom drive new Cadillacs and live in the suburbs. It is a woman complaining: "Whenever you have a lot of preachers jumping on their head and rolling on the floor like hogs, I tell you, you can't get no place like that. You see people foaming, your women with their dresses up over their heads. My God, you can't get no place like that." But almost as numerous as the churches are the tawdry bars and the liquor stores, and you can't get no place like that either.

Harlem is the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, the black Times Square, where orators on soapboxes or folding chairs harangue passersby to "buy black" or "get whitey." In the shadow of the Theresa Hotel, where Fidel Castro plucked his chickens and Cassius Clay celebrated the feathering of his nest, Lewis Michaux composes Black Nationalist doggerel:

If you're black get back If you're red be afraid If you're white you're perfectly right.

This is Harlem's heart, and 125th Street is its aorta. Here is Frank's Restaurant, crowded with white merchants at lunchtime, but thronged at dinnertime with middle-class Negroes, who are served with unctuous concern by white waiters. Here is Blumstein's, the only real department store in Harlem, but hardly a match for a midtown five and clime. And here is the Baby Grand, where Nipsey Russell's successor, Comedian Ray Scott, folds his hands, raises his eyes and beseeches:

"Let Goldwater have a seven-car accident with a gasoline truck that's been hit by a match wagon over the Grand Canyon. If he should survive, let the ambulance that's taking him to the hospital have four flat tires and run into a brick wall that's holding nuclear warheads and TNT. And if he should survive that, let him be thrown into a patch of wild dogs that's suffering from flea-itis and may he scratch himself insane. When he gets to the hospital, let the doctor be a junkie with a gorilla on his back and an orangoutang in his room. Let the hospital catch on fire, and every fire hydrant from Nova Scotia to wherever he was born be froze up. Let muddy water run in his grave. Let lightning strike in his heart and make him so ugly that he'll resemble a gorilla sucking hot Chinese mustard lying across a railroad track with freight trains running across his kneecaps. And if that's not bad enough, let him wake up tomorrow morning—black like me."

Happy Valley. Above all, Harlem is, as the man said, home. "You couldn't pay me to live anywhere else," says a Negro high school dropout. "A white man, he's got a mark on him if he comes up here. I got a mark on me if I go down there." Still some Negroes would live almost anywhere else just to get out of the ghetto. "I felt caged, like an animal," said Writer James Baldwin, who fled to Greenwich Village and then to Europe. "I felt if I didn't get out I would slowly strangle." Poet Claude McKay put it another way 40-odd years ago when he described the Negro as feeling

Hunted and penned in an inglorious

spot

While round us bark the mad and

hungry dogs.

Making their mock at our accursed

lot.

Once this inglorious spot was one of the glories of New