New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [422]
Gorham wanted to know more about what Juan had been doing recently, so Juan told them how he’d been working with nearby Mount Sinai Hospital to provide health care in El Barrio, and how he was trying to improve the terrible housing there. He’d been working with some of the radical Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio as well, getting them to back these projects too.
Gorham was impressed. “That’s good work, Juan,” he said. “The link with Mount Sinai is brilliant.” Maggie also listened intently, but the young lawyer seemed puzzled.
“How do you work with the radicals?” she asked. “From what I hear, some of these people are pretty dangerous.”
Juan sighed. He knew what was troubling her. Back at the end of the sixties some of the younger Puerto Ricans had formed a group, called themselves the Young Lords, and demanded better conditions in El Barrio. For a while they’d made common cause with the Black Panthers of Chicago, for which they’d been reviled in the press. It was hardly surprising that a nice, white, middle-class lawyer like Maggie would find such people frightening.
“You have to understand, Maggie,” he said, “that I was lucky. I got an education, and I was out of the gangs. Otherwise I might easily have been in prison by now, like my cousin Juan. Illegal activities are natural in some communities.” Maggie frowned—the lawyer in her didn’t like that—but he pressed on. “Look, the problems of Harlem and the South Bronx are the same as those of other American cities. New York, Chicago, wherever: it’s the same thing. You have poor populations who’ve suffered years of massive neglect, who have few if any chances of getting out of the mean streets where they live, and who believe, often rightly, that no one cares about them. When Puerto Ricans in El Barrio called themselves the Young Lords and organized free breakfasts and health clinics, that wasn’t such a bad idea. They were demanding help for their people. So, in their way, were the Black Panthers in Chicago. When Puerto Ricans talked about self-determination, that wasn’t so unreasonable either. Nobody else seemed to care about them.
“Some of them, in their rage, advocated violent demonstrations. I’m against that. And it’s perfectly true there was an accompanying political philosophy. They claimed to be socialists or even communists—whatever that actually meant. Hoover and his FBI made a big deal of the communist thing. I’m certainly not a socialist, but I find their feelings understandable. When a society turns its back on one community, then people in that community may quite reasonably believe that life might be better under another system—it’s human nature. So I try to alleviate the causes of that mistaken belief. Some people have worked hard to discredit the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, and they have largely succeeded, but the underlying problems that caused these groups to protest remain unsolved. If Harlem is still seething, it’s for a reason, I promise you.”
Juan realized he’d become a little heated, but he couldn’t help it. He watched the redhead to see her reaction. He’d thought she might make a nice date for Gorham, but if she reacted badly to what he’d said, maybe he’d made the wrong choice.
“Interesting,” she said.
Gorham laughed. “Typical lawyer,” he said.
The conversation turned to people’s childhoods after that. Janet had been brought up in Queens. “Black Catholic. My mom was very strict.” Gorham described visits to his grandmother. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by great crashes of thunder and lightning as the storm moved from south to north up Manhattan. Gorham learned that Maggie’s grandfather had been brought up in a big house on lower Fifth Avenue. “Old Sean O’Donnell had money. He made it in the last century.” She smiled.