Down the Up Staircase, by Bruce D. Haynes and Syma Solovitch (preface)

B RUC E D. HAY NES and SYMA SOLOVITCH

DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE Three Generations of a Harlem Family

PREFACE

I

November 1995, my parents hired a chauffeur and limousine to take them from Sugar Hill, Harlem, to the quaint seashore town of Milford, Connecticut, where my future had finally begun. I had defended my doctoral dissertation that May, married in July, and moved to Connecticut in September to begin teaching at Yale. The limo ride was a once-in-a-lifetime event for my dad, a man who counted kilowatts in pennies and stashed slivers of soap—to be used later for bubble bath. But he was old and frail now, and in a final nod to my mother as well as to his own mortality, he spared no expense for this Thanksgiving Day. We had long since stopped celebrating holidays at our family home, which had no running water on the main floor. By 1995, my parents were living like squatters in their own house. The pipes were frozen and busted, the roof was beyond repair, and despite the size of the house—nearly five thousand square feet— space was at a premium. Nothing had been dusted, cleared, discarded, or repaired in more than two decades. What was once a formal parlor that hosted W. E. B. Du Bois and other Talented Tenth elites now held the remnants of my brother George’s failed business ventures. Half-empty cans of spray paint, battered furniture, and broken appliances heaped on top of one another. . . .

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One might have taken the scene for the final stages of a family move—all stacked up and ready to go—except that there was a frozenness about it, a sense of havoc in suspension.

My parents had money and could easily have fi xed the place, if they’d so chosen. Pop was collecting a modest monthly pension from the New York State Division of Parole and was sitting on some sweet blue chip stocks he’d bought on margin back in the 1970s. Mom was still employed, as director of quality assurance at the Washington Heights/West Inwood Community Mental Health Center. But, caught in a whorl of reprisal and censure, my parents had let the house fall to ruin until they were living in near-squalor.

That Thanksgiving morning, my mother would have spongebathed with Poland Spring water before unwrapping her silk blouse and Dior suit from their plastic encasements, taking care to keep them from brushing against the dust-thick armoire. She would have fi xed her makeup in a dirty cracked mirror in a lightless room before carving a path through the stacks of old newspapers and empty water bottles that littered the floor. My father and her mink coat would be waiting for her on the fi rst floor landing. After locking the double doors—a barricade of latches, padlocks, and deadbolts—my parents would have climbed into the back of the sleek limousine and instructed the driver to circle around to pick up my brother George, who was now living in a halfway house just a few blocks away. Then, up Riverside Drive and the Henry Hudson Parkway and on to the world that my mother had always imagined for me.

They arrived in full fanfare. My mother’s arms were laden with the customary bags from Zabar’s, Citarella’s, and Greenberg’s Bakery; George followed dutifully with what seemed like a year’s supply of toilet paper and paper towels. Pop, haggard and unsteady, carried a long rectangular frame. In it was an oil painting of my grandfather, George Edmund Haynes. On its

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upper right corner was the signature of Laura Wheeler Waring, a prominent Negro portraitist of the Harlem Renaissance. As I came to learn later, the painting was one of twenty-three Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin that had appeared at the Smithsonian Institution in 1944 and that toured the country between 1944 and 1946. In the 1960s, most of the portraits were donated to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian museum, where they remain to this day. The portrait of George Haynes, long buried in our attic, was one of the few that had gone missing.

The painting brought up so many questions. How did Pop come to own it? Why had he never spoken of it? Why was it consigned to the attic? There would never be enough time to get the answers to these questions. Pop died within a month of the visit.

The discovery of the portrait renewed my feelings of ancestral pride but also dredged up memories of pain and dysfunction in my family’s history: my dad’s confl icted feelings toward his own father, his betrayal of my mother, the ruthless neglect of our home, the murder of one son, the addiction and mental illness of another, the countless wounds and indignities and heartbreaks that my parents had endured. And it underscored the tenuous nature of existence for black, middle-class families like my own.

How much protection did the gains of my forefathers, the safety net of a stable two-parent household, and the advantages of expensive private schools ultimately give my brothers and me against becoming three more black male statistics?

In 1967, the sociologists Peter Blau and Otis Duncan conducted their now classic study examining the relationship between parental background and children’s occupational outcomes.

They found that, among white families, a parent’s education and class status were strong predictors of their children’s occupational attainment. In black families, however, the children were more likely to end up in the lower strata of the economy regardless of

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their parents’ backgrounds. In many ways, my family defied the odds. All four great-grandparents on my father’s side owned land in the South as early as 1880. My grandfather was the first black social economist in the country; his wife, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, was an important children’s author of the Harlem Renaissance and an esteemed social scientist of the day. And while my mother’s side did not come from money, three successive generations of women in her family were college-educated.

My parents had master’s degrees and were gainfully employed. My brothers and I had all attended elite private schools, and I had just completed my PhD and was teaching at Yale University. We owned a three-story brownstone in Harlem, the kind built for a rising moneyed class. Now it stood as a testament to our family’s rise and demise over the century. Its walls echoed the voices of three generations of a black middle-class family: the hard-won glories of my grandfather, the whispered regrets and concessions of my parents, the fall from grace of their firstborn, and the wrenching blow that came with the death of their second.

Yet, as our home and family tumbled, my mother held her head high and showed the world a triumphant Negro who wore her wealth and success on her sleeve. She wore designer suits and dazzling diamonds and kept a standing Saturday appointment at Saks Fifth Avenue to get her fingernails and toenails polished—classic red. No one, not even her closest friends, would know that she hauled jugs of water up the stairs each night to sponge-bathe, cook, and flush the toilet. Unable to receive guests in her own house, she entertained in trendy restaurants, often throwing lavish dinner parties for up to thirty people at Empire Szechuan on the Upper West Side. To see her, this dark-skinned beauty with her flawless skin, well into her seventies, snapping her fi ngers at waiters, ordering General Tso’s (which she pronounced “Jen-#-TŌ”) chicken like she owned the place, no one

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would guess what she came home to. Nor would they have been allowed in if they’d asked. It was rare that anyone—neither my mother’s friends nor my own, not my wife’s family, not even the New York City Fire Department (much to their frustration)— would make their way past the double glass doors of 411 Convent Avenue.