Harlem

Stop, fool!

There was a time in the short story “The City of Refuge” by Rudolph Fisher when the main character was so self destructive that I wanted to tell him to just stop! King Solomon Gillis moved to Harlem from North Carolina to begin a new life in a place where blacks (according to his depiction) were considered white. He had $100 to get to New York and once there, was preyed upon by an advantage seeking dealer. I enjoyed Fisher’s descriptions of how Gillis saw Harlem for the first time. He commented on the girl in green stockings and the whites driving around, intimidated. More importantly, Gillis commented on the black policemen. “…Even got cullud policemans,” he said.

Gillis only wanted two things once in Harlem – to be a policeman and to have a girl like the one in green socks. For such a simple man, he certainly got into a heap of trouble. Uggam convinced Gillis to distribute dope out of the store where he was employed. At this point in the story I wanted Gillis to use his brain! I find it hard to believe that someone of his age, capable of traveling alone and seeing the world could be taken advantage of so easily. Gillis honestly had no idea that what he was doing was illegal. When the two white policemen approached Gillis, he was so dumbfounded by Uggam’s complete denial that his only instinct was to fight back. He fought the white policemen until he was confronted by a black policeman. This ending made me enjoy and appreciate the story. Gillis was raised and accustomed to only whites having the power to rule and govern. The last line “… the grin that came over his features had something exultant about it” shows how simple and unassuming Gillis’s character really was.