He had seen worse poverty in Indonesia and glimpse the violent mood of inner-city kids in L.A; He had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicion between the races. But whether because of New York’s density or because of its scale, it was only now that he began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problem joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well, where, no matter how many times the administration tried to paint them over, the walls remained scratched with blunt correspondence between niggers and kikes. It was as if all middle ground had collapsed, utterly. And nowhere, it seemed, was that collapse more apparent than in the black community he had so lovingly imagined and within which he had hoped to find refuge. He might meet a black friend at his Midtown law firm, and before heading to lunch at the MoMA, he would look out across the city toward the East River from his high-rise office, imagining a satisfactory life for himself-a vocation, a family, a home. Until he noticed that the only other blacks in the office were messengers on clerks, the only other blacks in the museum the blue-jacketed security guards who counted the hours before they could catch their train home to Brooklyn or Queens. He spent a year walking from one end of Manhattan to the other. Like a tourist, he watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out his future in the lives of the people he saw, looking for some opening through which he could reenter. -P125. August 28, 2021
