1964

547 Riverside Drive faced the park on a stretch that was quiet more often than not. Until they moved, the Carneys had no inkling of how shallow the elevated train had kept their sleep. As with many things in the city—traffic noise below, quarrelsome neighbors above, a dark walk from the corner to your front door—its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone. The train was like a bad thought or bad memory in that way, a persistent poke and constant whisper. In the spring, the baby pigeons hatched on the roof of 547 and a prodigious cooing woke the household most mornings, but who wouldn’t prefer that to the elevated, prefer new life over the screech of metal.

It was a third-floor apartment opposite the north end of the small hill where they’d stuck Grant’s Tomb. Instead of the Hudson River, their windows overlooked a splash of oak leaves for most of the year, and a scrabbly brown slope the rest.

“You call that a seasonal view,” Alma said. She’d been pouting ever since John had refused “a hug for Grandma.” In general John was compliant when it came to grown-ups’ unearned demands for affection, so Carney took it as a sign of good character.

“In the winter all those green leaves will be gone,” Leland said.

“Yes,” Carney said. “That’s what happens with trees.” He made a quick prayer for Elizabeth’s return from the kitchen with the cookies. He asked his in-laws how they were enjoying Park West Village, the complex off Columbus that they’d moved into.

“We love it,” Alma said. “There’s a Gristedes opening up.”

It was their third apartment since they’d sold the Strivers’ Row house. They left the first because the block transformed into a drug bazaar once the weather changed. They’d toured it on a snowy afternoon and it had seemed sleepy enough.

The second apartment was in a nice clean building on Amsterdam. Next door to a judge and down the hall from a pastor. Six months into the lease, the Joneses were alarmed by an odd smell. They assumed a mouse had expired in the walls. A reddish-brown liquid dripped from the ceiling and sent them running to the super, who after a quick investigation identified the substance as the upstairs neighbor’s putrefying remains. Such unchecked seepage through the substandard flooring pointed to larger structural issues in the building, on that point everyone agreed. The Joneses stayed at the Hotel Theresa until they landed at Park West Village. As for the upstairs neighbor, he had chased away his friends and family over the decades and the city buried him on Hart Island one unexceptional Sunday afternoon.

There had been plenty of relocations and pullings-up of stakes recently. Leland moved his firm from Broadway and 114th to a more affordable space on 125th. Carney and Elizabeth finally made proper use of the apartment fund and split for the river and the boulevard of Carney’s aspirational dreams. The building was integrated, with a lot of black families with children moving in. Elizabeth had made two friends already. Historically, turnover had been low, with little wear and tear to speak of in the individual units. The common areas were well-lit and well-maintained. There was a laundry room in the basement with a bank of brand-new Westinghouse machines, an active tenants’ group, and of course the park was right there.

The furniture store remained where it was, an anchor on 125th and Morningside, and continued to flourish in areas aboveboard, and below.

The new living room had plenty of space for the kids to sprawl. On the thick Moroccan Luxury rug, May flipped through her Richie Rich comics and disjointedly hummed Motown tunes while John harassed a Matchbox fleet with the toy brontosaurus. This year Carney went Argent with regard to his home furniture, opting for the three-piece sectional with the kiln-dried hardwood frame and Herculean blue-and-green upholstery. As he sat on the couch with his legs extended and his ankles crossed, taking in the room and the greenery outside, Carney grudgingly allowed himself a contented moment. He rubbed his fingertips across the tweed cushions to calm himself as his in-laws prattled.

At last Elizabeth arrived with the cookies. The kitchen in the new place was more hospitable than the last one, granting a survey of an uptown battalion of rooftops as opposed to the dead-end air shaft. Marie had been sharing recipes, and this had to be one of hers, so thoroughly did the aroma bend them to its will. Elizabeth gave Carney a smile to reward his forbearance.

The children jumped up for dibs on the best cookies.

“He get that at the World’s Fair?” Leland asked. The little dinosaur.

Carney said yes. They’d taken the subway to Flushing to check out the exhibition last May. “This is what they call ‘Queens,’ guys.” The publicity machine had plugged it so much that it was bound to disappoint, and the editorial pages had wrung their hands over how the city’d pay for it, but the whole production was top-notch. Years from now May and John would look back on it and understand they’d been a part of something special. Sinclair Oil had handed out plastic versions of their brontosaurus mascot at the Dinoland pavilion. John slept with it under his pillow.

“We’d still like to take them,” Leland said. “Max and Judy said that Futurama was something else.” May and John squealed. The fairground was too vast, too stuffed to take in on one visit. The grandchildren provided an alibi for Alma and Leland to mix with the commoners.

“That’s fine,” Carney said.

“If they haven’t looted the place,” Alma said.

“I don’t think burning down the World’s Fair was high on their list, Mommy,” Elizabeth said.

John said, “They burned down the World’s Fair? Why?”

“Who knows what they’re liable to do, those student activists,” Alma said.

“You’re against the protest movement now?” Elizabeth said. “After all those benefits for the Freedom Riders?”

“It’s not the students I mind,” Leland said, “so much as the shiftless element that attached themselves. Did you see what they did to that supermarket on Eighth, next to the AME church?” His ascot was never less than ridiculous and the July heat turned it pathetic. He panted by the window and sipped his lemonade. “They looted everything one day, picked it clean like vultures, and torched it the next. Why would you do that to your own neighborhood store?”

“Why’d that policeman kill a fifteen-year-old boy in cold blood?” Elizabeth said.

“They said he had a knife,” Alma said.

“They say they find a knife the next day and you believe him.”

“Cops,” Carney said.

“I’d like to go to ‘It’s a Small World’ again,” May said, and Elizabeth changed the conversation.

The riots had petered out. It had been hot—ninety-two degrees—when they started, and the kindling went up quick. Wednesday’s rain extinguished the marches and upset in Harlem, and the violence in Bedford-Stuyvesant died down the next night. Everyone was afraid that another incident or confrontation—by police, by a protester—might spark another round. That next eruption is why they talked about the riots as if they were gloomy weather. Far off now, but turn your head and it’s upon you.

Carney said he had to go to the office to take care of a few things and excused himself from his in-laws’ visit.

The walk to work was longer from the new place, but it allowed Carney to savor a few calm blocks before reinsertion into the Harlem mania. Once you walked under the elevated—look up to see the slats cut the sky like prison bars—and crossed Broadway, you were back in the hustle.

At the corner of 125th, next to the subway entrance, Lucky Luke’s Shoe Repair was a blackened ruin. Had it been the best shine? No.

A hulking man in stained yellow dungarees yelled at Carney as he approached, and he steeled himself. Then Carney recognized him—the gentleman had purchased a used dinette set last year, layaway. Jeffrey Martins. Carney waved and grinned. Modern life had put them out of touch with the primitive friend-or-foe sorting but it came back quick. In these aftermath days, folks appraised strangers to see where they fell on the spectrum of outrage. Did their expression say Such strange days, don’t you think? or their balled fists communicate Can you believe they’re going to get away with it again? Had the person before you triple-locked the apartment door and waited in the dark for it to be over, or slashed a cop’s face with a bottle? These were your neighbors.

Some blocks were untouched and it was the Harlem you recognized. Then you rounded the corner and two cars were overturned like fat beetles, a cigar-store Indian stood decapitated before a line of shattered front windows. The entrance of a firebombed grocery store gaped like a tunnel to the underworld. Sable Construction vans idled outside the addresses of their priority customers and dayworkers tossed drywall and fire-hose-soaked insulation into dumpsters. The sanitation department had done a bang-up job of cleaning up the sidewalk trash and debris, which made the stroll more unsettling, as if the ruined addresses had been shipped in from another, worse city.

As Carney walked down 125th, he got to thinking about the grand pavilions in Flushing, Queens. A few miles away, the World’s Fair celebrated the wonders on the horizon. Sure, Carney dug all the gee-whiz stuff in Futurama—the sleek moon bases and slowly twirling space stations, the undersea headquarters—but more amazing were the demonstrations of what humanity had already accomplished. In one room Bell Labs had Picturephones that showed you the face of the person on the other end of the line, in another mammoth computers talked to each other through telephone wires. The Space Park showcased full-size replicas of the Saturn V rocket, the Gemini spacecraft, a lunar landing module. Here were impossible objects that had been to outer space—and come back safely, traveled all that distance.

You didn’t need to journey far, certainly didn’t need three-stage rockets and manned capsules and arcane telemetry, to see what else we were capable of. If Carney walked five minutes in any direction, one generation’s immaculate townhouses were the next’s shooting galleries, slum blocks testified in a chorus of neglect, and businesses sat ravaged and demolished after nights of violent protest. What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.

Harlem was calm again, or as calm as Harlem ever got. Carney was relieved the protests had ended, for many reasons. For everyone’s safety, of course. Only one person had died, a miracle, but hundreds had been shot, stabbed, billy-clubbed, or otherwise smacked in the head with two-by-fours. He’d called Aunt Millie to check on her—Pedro and Freddie weren’t around—and she described the scene at Harlem Hospital as a battlefield. “It’s worse than Saturday-night craziness—times ten!”

Apart from the long shifts she was doing fine, thanks for calling.

And he was glad the riots were done for the sake of his fellow merchants. The obvious targets were raided, decimated: supermarkets, liquor stores, clothing stores, electronics shops. They stole everything and then grabbed a broom to steal the dust, too. Carney knew firsthand how hard it was for a Negro shopkeeper to persuade an insurance company to write a policy. The vandalism and looting had wiped out a lot of people. Whole livelihoods gone, like that.

Most of the destruction lay east of Manhattan Ave; Carney’s Furniture was outside the border. Furniture stores were low on the list of loot-able establishments, given the portability issue—but of course any savvy neighborhood resident knew that Carney sold TVs and handsome table lamps, and what about that irate dude who’d been refused credit and hungered for revenge? Can’t carry a sofa on your back, but you can throw a bottle of gasoline through a front window. Which was why he and Rusty spent four nights in the front of the showroom, cradling baseball bats they’d bought at Gary’s Sports down the block. Security gate rolled down, lights out, on sentry duty in the exquisite embrace of their Collins-Hathaway armchairs, whose virtues the salesmen had not exaggerated over the years, no not at all.

Half the Negroes in Harlem had that story about their grandfather down South, the one who spent all night on the front porch with a shotgun, waiting for the Night Riders to fuck with his family over some incident in town. Black men of legend. Carney and Rusty sipped Coca-Cola and upheld the tradition of the midnight vigil. In most of those stories, the family packs up and flees North the next morning, their Southern term brought to an end. On to the next chapter in the ancestral chronicle. But Carney wasn’t going anywhere. The next morning he pulled up the gate, flipped the sign from closed to open, and waited for customers.

Business was slow. It was a good time to be in plate glass.

Most important, Carney welcomed the peace because he had a big meeting lined up, one he’d been trying to engineer for years: a face-to-face with the Bella Fontaine company. Lord knows what Mr. Gibbs, the regional sales rep, had seen on Walter Cronkite or The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Pillaged storefronts, cops tackling miscreants, young girls with batty smiles chucking bricks at news photographers. Making Mr. Gibbs fight his way through pandemonium was a big ask. Especially given that Bella Fontaine had never taken on a Negro dealer before.

Wednesday morning, Carney had talked Mr. Gibbs out of canceling his trip uptown. Do I sound like I am on fire? We are open for business. Carney was small potatoes; if not for Mr. Gibbs’s meeting with All-American on Lexington, in white midtown, and with some Suffolk County accounts, he never would have boarded the plane from Omaha. Uptown was burning but business in white Manhattan proceeded as usual.

The negro owned & operated sign was still in his window, next to the sun-yellowed time payments negotiable. Carney smiled—from one angle, maybe the two signs went together. Marie had stenciled the “Negro Owned” one and brought it from Brooklyn the Monday after the boy was killed. “So they leave us alone,” she said. When the protests jumped to Bed-Stuy, Carney told her to stay home to look after her mother and sister. He and Rusty could manage. Marie agreed, after a round of sobs and apologies. Thursday appeared to be the end of it and Marie showed up for work the next day on time, as if nothing had happened.

No harm in leaving the sign, in case.

“No sales,” Rusty said. “People are taking a nice long look at the Argent sofa, though. They’re flipping over the herringbone.”

“I noticed.”