The Ghost of Broad Street

Twenty-five years after leaving town, our writer, who grew up in Logan, came back to walk all 13 miles of our grandest boulevard. The landmarks he remembered are largely gone, but it’s still a street overflowing with stories, dreams and danger

Now, approaching Allegheny Avenue, I enjoy the sun and keep my stride wide and mouth shut. Until I walk past a chubby black dude wearing a black baseball cap and sunglasses. “Socks,” he says. “Six pair for five dollars.”

I’m set with socks, I think, and walk on by. Halfway down the block, I stop. Maybe it’s not socks he’s selling, maybe that’s just a code for some other contraband, something more exotic. I go back. I ask where the socks come from.

“Heaven,” says the vendor.

“Heaven? How did they get to you?”

“I am blessed, brother.”

“How much money do these blessings bring you each day?”

“Oh, you want to talk money.”

“Do you make a living selling socks on Broad Street?”

“People don’t need socks, brother. People need a spiritual encounter. A psychological encounter. Something to lift them up. You have to see beyond what is seeable. You read Deepak Chopra, right?”

“Some.”

In Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, he deals with quantum physics and how the physical is false. I’m not stuck in the material world like George W. Bush is.”

“I thought Bush was a spiritual man.”

“Bush is a dirt man. Born and raised looking at dirt, trying to find what’s under that dirt. Bush and Cheney. Dirt men. In Texas, people have oil and people have guns. They see a few John Wayne movies, and the whole world’s in trouble.” The vendor laughs. But he doesn’t want me to tell people what he knows.

“Because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, my brother. Teach someone a little bit of truth and he can become another Father Divine, who set up shop right here on Broad Street, at the Divine Lorraine, and he had people worship him like he was God himself.”

I buy the socks. Six pair for five dollars. White Excell Cushion Athletic Tube Socks. All cotton. I feel light. I continue my walk.

The Uptown is dark. Smokey Robinson, the Jackson Five and the Supremes are but frozen portraits painted by kids, not even professionals, next to the unlit box office. The Uptown is silent. A vast mausoleum near Susquehanna. The first show I ever saw here featured Major Lance, Mary Wells and the Vibrations, and “introduced” the Supremes. Our seats were good enough that we could tell, my AEPi frat brothers and me, that Mary Wilson was sexier than skinny-minny Diana. We were the Jitterbugs, the White Negro Wannabes, sensing something truer and hipper, both stylistically and spiritually, in black America.