Visit to Manhattan

She pointed out a marble statue of two men holding hands in a tiny parkette.

I saw only the ragged woman beneath it asleep, her head in her lover’s lap

– silent, screaming alarms, the most-poor,

circled by shiny black rails and manicured shrubs.

I walk the streets and am stopped again and again by city dwellers,

who ask me for directions.

I wrote this in the notebook that I always carry in case of sudden-need-to- write-a-poem, for which I would need paper and a pen.

I was in Manhattan for a music conference and staying downtown with my childhood friend from school in Trinidad and her American husband. It was my first visit to the city and they walked me around pointing out landmarks, as I kept an eye out for vegetarian restaurants. They took me to the famous Blue Note Jazz Club, where I experienced the one set wonder of music clubs in New York. Spinning lightly between closely packed tables, a whirlwind of serious wait staff took orders and raced to land food and drinks on the table before us. I realized that we were not there to lounge over a bite and a couple of drinks for the evening as was customary in Toronto. Our job was to sit down, order fast, eat quickly, drink up and leave at the end of the set, as the next round of listeners was already lined up outdoors, ready to take our places. I don’t even remember who played.

I’d been slotted to perform in a small club in Alphabet City. Canadian bass player Steve Lucas had made the trip with me and arranged for two New York musicians to join us and complete the quartet. We did one rehearsal in the guitarist’s Brooklyn home. The gig was fun. The conference was uneventful. My hosts both had day jobs and needed to be up early, so on other nights, I’d wander around by myself, weirdly at ease on the late night streets. There were line ups at many of the conference venues, so I took myself to a nearby comedy club, a blues bar, a vegetarian restaurant.

This was in the early 1990’s. I recall that in that city, a certain tension drained from my body. I felt a weight of a kind of hypervisibility that I carried in Toronto, Canada — a Black woman with dreads and a guitar slug over my back — disappear. I had not felt this way since childhood in the Caribbean, a place where my looks and presence were ordinary.

After four days, I took the train back home. I’d bought two things on my trip. Tucked into my knapsack was an orange hat from a boutique close to Washington Square. I’d also bought a black t-shirt. On the back of it are rows and rows of tiny raised white letters. About one third of the way down in letters about 5 millimeters high, my own name was nestled amongst those of the 200 other conference musicians. I remember that I also carried a lightness within me, a momentary feeling of ease and invisibility, garnered over four days, on the anonymous streets of Manhattan, New York.