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No walls surround the ghetto except the invisible ones that can be the hardest of all to surmount. Harlem's Negroes have withdrawn behind the invisible walls, almost out of necessity, into a world of their own, complete with its own pride, its own lingo, and even its own time. In Harlem, C.P.T. means "Colored People's Time," and it runs one full hour behind white people's time.
The nether border of the Negro's world is Central Park. From just one block north, the fresh breezes and greenery seem a planet distant. Here is 111th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, infested with prostitutes and dope addicts. Up a ways, at 118th and Lenox Avenue, is "junkie's corner," and at the New York Central overpass at 125th Street, over which suburban commuters ride every day between air-conditioned offices and well-kept homes, Negro prostitutes wait for white johns who know the spot and drive by in their cars.
"You Can't Get No Place." Harlem is three classes: middle, working and deprived. It is where the middle class, or what is left of it, joins the Jack and Jill Club to insulate its children, later sends them to prep schools and takes them on vacation to the Caribbean or Europe or Sag Harbor—but almost never to Miami. It is where the middle class disdains interracial marriage and bristles when a Harry Belafonte marries a white woman. "We've got all the colors in the rainbow," said a doctor's wife. "What do we need to marry them for?"
Harlem is where Negroes refer to one another as "nigger" and "brother," "spook" and "hardhead," but woe to the white man who uses the same expression. It is where the white man is no longer the "ofay" (pig Latin for foe), but "Mr. Charlie" or "the man," and mostly "whitey," derived from the Black Nationalist talk of "the blue-eyed white devil." It is where a common laborer mutters to himself at a corner bar: "You don't come up to Harlem and whip my head, white man. You can whip me somewhere else. But not here, white man." It is where the Negro's next-door neighbor, the Puerto Rican, is eyed with suspicion when he ventures over from his East Harlem slum.
Harlem is also composed of sharp merchants and peddlers hawking "icies," cups of ice drenched with sickly sweet syrup. Its shops sell second-rate strawberries for half again as much as first-rate ones cost in Greenwich Village, and men can buy clothing for 9¢ to $1.99 in "dump shops." Everywhere is the smell of cooking grease and the sizzle from all-night fry shops that sell porgie fish or pig's knuckles or chitlins (hog intestines).
Black Times Square. Harlem is the noise of Congo drums from a dark window and a throbbing twist beat on a transistor radio. It is street-corner churches and spired temples, 400 in all, always