Night Walker free essay sample

In psychology from the University of Chicago and often writes about the African-American experience in his essays, which have appeared in such publications as the New York Times and has published the autobiographical Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (19947) for which he won the Anisfield Wolff Book Award. Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponder’s His Power to Alter Public Space 1MY FIRST VICTIM WAS A WOMAN-white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neigh-borhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. 2She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man—a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket—seemed menacingly close. We will write a custom essay sample on Night Walker or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within sec-onds she disappeared into a cross street. That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified womans footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inher-itance Id come into—the ability to alter pub-lic space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insom-nia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken—let alone hold it to a persons throat—I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indis-tinguishable from the muggers who occasion-ally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians—particularly women—and me. And I soon gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet—and they often do in urban America—there is always the possibility of death. 4In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly famil-iar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections in Chicago, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver—black, white, male, or female—hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people who crossed to the other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with police, doormen, bouncers, cab drivers, and others whose busi-ness it is to screen out troublesome individuals before there is any nastiness. 5I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an avid night walker. In central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere—visiting friends in SoHo,1 where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky—things can get very taut indeed. 6Black men have a firm place in New York mugging literature. Norman Podhoretz2 in his famed (or infamous) 1963 essay, My Negro Problem—And Ours, recalls growing up in terror of black males; they were tougher than we were, more ruthless, he writes—and as an adult on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he continues, he cannot constrain his nervousness when he meets black men on certain streets. Similarly, a decade later, the essayist and novel-ist Edward Hoagland extols a New York where once Negro bitterness bore down mainly on other Negroes. Where some see mere pan-handlers, Hoagland sees a mugger who is clearly screwing up his nerve to do more than just ask for money. But Hoagland has the New Yorkers quick-hunch posture for bro-ken-field maneuvering, and the bad guy swerves away. 7I often witness that hunch posture, from women after dark on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live. They seem to set their faces on neutral and, with their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, against being set apart, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact. 8It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable against a back-drop of gang warfare, street knifings, and mur-ders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist fights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources. 9Many things go into the making of a young thug. One of those things is the consummation of the male romance with the power to intimi-date. An infant discovers that random flailings send the baby bottle flying out of the crib and crashing to the floor. Delighted, the joyful babe repeats those motions again and again, seeking to duplicate the feat. Just so, I recall the points at which some of my boyhood friends were finally seduced by the perception of themselves as tough guys. When a mark cowered and surrendered his money without resistance, myth and reality merged—and paid off. It is, after all, only manly to embrace the power to frighten and intimidate. We, as men, are not supposed to give an inch of our lane on the highway; we are to seize the fighters edge in work and in play and even in love; we are to be valiant in the face of hostile forces. 10Unfortunately, poor and powerless young men seem to take all this nonsense literally. As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too. They were babies, really—a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties—all gone down in episodes of bravado played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, per-haps even unconsciously, to remain a shadow— timid, but a survivor. 11The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor. The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pur-sued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editors door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew me. 12Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an inter-view. I entered a jewelry store on the citys affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night. Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of sum-mers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his press credentials would probably have tried to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time. 13In My Negro Problem—And Ours, Podhoretz writes that the hatred he feels for blacks makes itself known to him through a variety of avenues—one being his discomfort with that special brand of paranoid touchi-ness to which he says blacks are prone. No doubt he is speaking here of black men. In time, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to be so would surely have led to madness—via that spe-cial paranoid touchiness that so annoyed Podhoretz at the time he wrote the essay. I began to take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, partic-ularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when Ive been pulled over by the police. And on late-evening constitutionals along streets less traveled by, I employ what was proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mug-ger wouldnt be warbling bright, sunny selec-tions from Vivaldis Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.