The Fugitivities, стр. 82

if I’m writing to you from the past or maybe even a past life. I want to leave a record of my thoughts, so that if by chance you do read this, you will have some idea, at least some understanding of the man I am now. What can I tell you about that man? I’m writing to you today from New York City. From my desk in the heights of the Bronx, the city runs down the Hudson River away from me into steel and glass and fumes of Manhattan. It’s not at all like Paris, which I can recall as clearly as this view. I can still see you standing outside the tabac, your hands moving as you talk at a café table, the shape your body made under the sheets, your books, the smell of cigarettes and plaster on the rue des Cinq-Diamants. That was Paris. It was our city, but it was your home. This is mine.

If you came you would find it’s too hot in the summer, and too damn cold in the winter. It’s too crowded and too poor and too rich…and every year it seems like things are getting worse, although, in truth, things always seem to be about the same. This is where I was raised, not just in the Bronx, but the whole city. I love the sound of a New York voice. I love the sound of helicopters in the sky, tugboats on the river, yellow cabs as they jump in and out of lanes, small talk at 125th Street and Lenox, night games at Yankee Stadium, girls in troupes cursing and singing and clapping, the beautiful sound of Spanish on Upper Broadway where they sell platanos and sandía out the side of a Chevy, players pushing Fleetwood Cadillacs through the projects, bass booming. The smell of garbage and the hiss of frying meats, kids clowning around coming out of the corner bodega, brothers talking that talk on the corner, the subway rolling down the Jerome Avenue line. I love the sound of basketball courts at dusk. It’s a sound that takes me way back…I’m talking back to the days of guys that used to play there that we gave names like Big Helicopter, Earl “The Goat,” “Pee Wee” Kirkland, all these legends that I came up playing with in Rucker Park, a place where if your game was tight you went home feeling tall as Kareem. I remember kids used to sit in the trees just to watch Julius Erving rise up through the air from the free-throw line, his arm carrying the ball like a torch of liberty. These things are the stuff my city is made of.

Laura, there are things I wish you could see. I have children now. Ones I’m teaching what I can in the hopes of doing something to make things change and come out right for once, to try and change the destiny of the kids who grow up on the blocks where I grew up, blocks where half the kids I grew up with are gone, dead, or doing bids upstate. I want so bad for these kids to have a chance to see what I’ve seen, to move through the world different, to see more and know more, and taste the kind of living that they struggle to imagine. And I can see it happen before my eyes one at a time. With all the love the folks in the community show me, I get new students to my basketball clinic every day. They come from all over the Bronx to learn how to play ball, how to improve their game. I always tell them: If you want to improve your game, improve yourself. You are the game. They don’t know how literally I mean it. Sometimes there are fights, and sometimes the play is too rough. I remember how it was when I was coming up. I was small. I used to get knocked around a lot. Had to learn to scrape, had to be better. The game is intuition. You always know before you let go whether it’s going in. You always know when to make the pass before you can think to make it. You know where to be, you feel the ball reach your hands at the top of the key, you fake, you whirl like Earl the Pearl, you open a notch and pop up, the ball is gone, it’s over, sinking in, and you turn away because the game has already moved on. Everyone moves on, and the world doesn’t slow for none of us.

The other night I went for a walk along the West Side promenade. I stood at the edge of the Hudson and looked up. The lights of the George Washington Bridge parted the night. The sight of the bridge struck me like John Henry’s hammer. I looked up and thought: What is this? What is this giant thing that I am made of? America, wading knee-high in the blood of its own children. Of the African slaves. Of Cherokee and Sioux. Union regiments and Confederate cavalry. Of sharecroppers and lynching blood on the leaves, railroad workers, field hands and migrant farmers, the children of Birmingham and the garbage collectors of Memphis, the people of Vietnam under our napalm and our flamethrowers, the blood of our own sons and daughters. The blood of my ancestors that flows in my veins. All that blood that I know we got to answer for. This imperial force more powerful than Rome. The George Washington Bridge is so awesome, so vast. It’s got to mean something, to portend something that’s still happening, something so big we’ll never be able to imagine the end toward which it is pointing. And then I also feel there’s something austere, even lonely about it. A Miles Davis kind of thing. For Baldwin it’s where a man goes to jump when he can’t take this life no more. I’ve seen people