The Fire This Time

Garnette Cadogan’s essay begins with two epigraphs: one from Fats Waller’s song “(What Did I do to Be So) Black and Blue?” and the other from Walt Whitman’s “Manhattan’s Streets I Saunter’d, Pondering.” Cadogan walked around his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, at night during childhood. Warring political factions made the streets dangerous for everyone. During these walks, Cadogan made friends with and took advice from other walkers. He writes, “I imagined myself as a Jamaican Tom Sawyer” (130), and his fantasies turned the night from a treacherous place into an exciting one. He found solace in the streets, removed from threats of his stepfather’s abuse.

He developed skills as Kingston’s “nighttime cartographer” (131), learning its unwritten rules, patterns, and neighborhoods divided by class. He saw homes of all kinds, from mansions to shacks, as he walked down the hills of the city and found more activity in poorer neighborhoods. As a preteen, he developed his after-dark walking habit and sometimes stayed out until sunrise, to his mother’s dismay. 

Cadogan lived in New Orleans for college, and he expected to walk just as extensively, immersing himself in the city’s distinctive cultural blend. Staffers at his college warned him against walking in crime-ridden areas, but Kingston was considered much more dangerous, statistically, so  Cadogan dismissed their warnings.

White pedestrians treated Cadogan with suspicion and fear throughout New Orleans. Unfamiliar with such treatment, Cadogan was shocked not only by this but repetitive harassment from the police. These encounters taught him to neutralize the police by emphasizing his status as an international college student and wearing a “cop-proof wardrobe” (133). 

With intense focus on his body language while walking, Cadogan found his New Orleans walks fearful and threatening. He waved at a police car eight years after living in America, and the officer handcuffed him as a result. Cadogan’s friends scoffed at Cadogan for this friendly wave. 

While Cadogan visited his dying grandmother in Jamaica, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and increased his grief as he walked his old routes through Kingston. The smells, the sight of a local store, and the music resembled what he knew as a child. The environment felt much more secure than America did. He created new paths as he walked through Kingston and found new opportunities in the process of walking, which is “interrupted falling” (136). He took faith that he would not fall but that he would, like the philosopher Kierkegaard, “walk myself into my best thoughts” (136). 

After the hurricane, Cadogan could not fly to New Orleans and considered flying to Texas instead. His aunt Maxine warned against this, and Cadogan stayed with her in New York City so he could walk the city and live where some of his favorite writers had lived. He walked diverse neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn, observing the architecture and cultural mix in each place. Friends and a girlfriend joined him for extensive exploring. The excitement of exploration faded over time, however, and certain dangers arose in his walks. 

A white man, suspecting Cadogan of criminal behavior, struck him as he ran down the sidewalk and blamed the writer for arousing his suspicions. Police stared at Cadogan and other black men, especially in subway stations. He created a new code for traveling through the city. 

While running near Columbus Circle (and breaking his code), Cadogan was assaulted by a large group of police officers. They yelled many questions at once. While one officer searched his pockets and others yelled at him, Cadogan repeated that he was departing from one friend group to meet another downtown at a concert. He had learned that “For a black man, to assert your dignity before the police was to risk assault” (140). Police respect the complaints of white witnesses more than those of black witnesses, whom they also might detain. 

Amidst continued berating from the police, the captain noted Cadogan’s lack of sweat and ordered the others to take the handcuffs off him. The police were looking for the suspect in a recent stabbing nearby, and Cadogan re-asserted his alibi. The captain released Cadogan and offered to drive him to the subway, while the other officers did not apologize. The police captain told him they released Cadogan because he spoke to them politely rather than aggressively.

Cadogan compares walking as a black man in any city with learning to walk as a toddler. Both processes require watchfulness and a fear of danger, but re-enacting this process as an adult frustrates him. When walking, he sometimes copes by making jokes with police or traveling with white friends, although walking with white women in New Orleans provokes some passersby. 

Although he longs to wander like other writers and observe the environment, Cadogan has learned to walk with constant attention to himself and his surroundings. A quote from James Baldwin testifies to the long history of police discrimination against black New Yorkers. 

As a primal activity, walking might prove the perfect picture of home for many, but not for black Americans. The process of walking enacts desire for many things, “But more than anything else, we long to be free” (143). Cadogan yearns for the freedom he experienced in Kingston as he continues to walk in New York. The city reveals and conceals itself as he walks, just as he is alternately revealed and concealed in that environment.