Woe to those who live in this patch of Harlem and are prone to dreams about the dead. On these streets, no one mistakes gunfire for a backfiring car, and the fatalities are among the young. Children collect black T-shirts with the photographs of the dead, which they wear to funerals, as if they were baseball cards.
Lynda Gray, director of the Harlem Branch of the YWCA, missed Donald Bonaparte's funeral Saturday, but he haunts her thoughts. He was 21. Someone shot him in the head and dumped his body out of a moving car. His hands were folded and he looked peaceful in his white coffin, but his father wept bitterly inside the musty, low-ceilinged funeral home.As Gray watched the revelers at Harlem Week, an event already marred by a confrontation with the police, she wondered about the juxtaposition of revelry and death.
She shudders to recall that she had nothing to offer Bonaparte as he sat in her office and confessed that he was afraid of being killed. He lived near the office, which is on 127th Street between Malcolm X and Seventh Avenues.
Bonaparte was no saint, but as far as Gray knew, he had done nothing to warrant his end. The friends who mourned him had recently buried three other friends. All of this has brought Gray to the sour conclusion that young men and women in troubled neighborhoods need the kind of shelters that sustain battered women.
"You always hear that people need to get out," Gray said. "People send their kids out of the city - to the South, out West, to the Dominican Republic - when they know they're in trouble.
"I know a woman who moved to New Jersey with her son when the gangs were bothering him, and he said later that it probably saved his life. Where do people go when they don't have those resources?"
On the streets that radiate out from the once-majestic avenue named for Malcolm X, these are considerations more serious than outrageous.
Gray, at the helm of the YWCA since it reopened two years ago after being closed for 17 years, hears about the boys and young men who kill over girls, an offhand insult, an errant glance.
People are sometimes hunted for weeks or months unless they first kill their hunters.
Bonaparte had been in trouble with the law over drugs and guns. As part of his probation he was working off 524 hours of community service at the YWCA, but his attendance was spotty.
When Bonaparte missed a whole week at the end of July, Gray started delivering her stock speech about responsibility. But something in his eyes stopped her.
"He said, `My friend got killed,' " Gray recalled. "He said he got shot in the head just three minutes after he had left him, and Donald said he wanted to get out. Out of the neighborhood, maybe out of the city."