Not Easily Broken

When I came up out of the escalators at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, it was still sunny out, and moreover quite warm. The last two months had been brutally cold in New England, and it was quite pleasurable to hang out in Columbus Circle and people-watch. It felt like spring had started to arrive.

I didn't have another movie scheduled until the evening, and I wound up walking all the way up through Central Park into Harlem, taking my time navigating the muddy paths along Croton Reservoir.

Harlem is one of those places that used to scare me, but not anymore. When I first arrived on Saturday evening, I had gone out into the darkness and meandered up along Adam Clayton Powell Blvd, then walked the length of 125th Street to 2nd Avenue and back. Walking through Harlem on a Saturday night was not something I thought I would ever do, but it felt quite pleasant. This is not the old Harlem: almost every storefront had a poster for our current black president, and the barber shops advertised their wireless Internet access.

So on Sunday evening I was back in Harlem a second time, and it felt familiar. With over an hour to kill before my movie, I ducked into the Hue-Man Bookstore on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, where I bought a copy of When Africa Awakes, a classic set of essays from 1920 written by Hubert Henry Harrison. The bookstore was tidy and well-lit, like something next to a college campus. At the register, an African-American man saw what I was buying and struck up a friendly conversation with me, because he had never heard of the book. That kind of friendly, spur-of-the-moment conversation is something that seems so "New York" to me.

I took my book to a nearby Dunkin Donuts where I read for about an hour until the movie time. Then I went back to 125th Street and climbed the escalators three stories to the AMC Magic Johnson Theater, a spectacular modern complex with windows that look out over the street below, including the nearby Apollo Theater (map). Above the concession counter is an enormous mural of a city street scene with Magic Johnson, as well as kids of various races in NBA uniforms (Knicks and Lakers).

The movie I'd come to see, Not Easily Broken, had been playing in Boston for two weeks, but it never made it out to the suburbs. Before I came to New York, I noticed it was still playing in various theaters in predominantly African-American districts, so I made it a priority to go see it.

The story falls into the genre of Christian-inspired "marriage redemption" movies, in which a troubled husband and wife undergo trials and tribulations, then finally learn to come together again through the help of God. In this way, it seemed somewhat like an African-American version of last fall's Fireproof, a movie starring Kirk Cameron I had mocked before it came out, but which turned out to be quite watchable and well-written, for the kind of movie it was.

Not Easily Broken had God in it, but it seemed lighter on the Christian aspect than Fireproof, partly because it had African-American characters, giving less of the White-America judgmental flavor of religious story-telling.

In Fireproof, the source of the narrative tension was a defect in the husband, who was neglectful of his wife and "not a hero" to her. In Not Easily Broken, the tension springs from an unloving wife who puts her career above her marriage, and who denigrates her husband as an inferior provider. Furthermore she has given her mother "an equal vote in the marriage." The story revolves around the resolution of these issues, and the wife learning how to love and respect her husband, and to overcome the toxic influence of her mother.

The story was quite watchable and pleasant, for the kind of movie that it was. It would certainly be too preachy for most audiences, but as a niche movie (Christian, not African-American), it was well-written and well-made.

After the movie, as I walked back to my cousin's apartment, I decided that Harlem was one of my favorite parts of New York City. There was something about it that was so refreshing. Partly it was that in Midtown, every time I looked up at the new glittering buildings built over the last several decades, all I could see was the phony, criminal wealth that had built them, and the delusions we all lived under. But in Harlem people have always known that it was a con game. They were never fooled by those things, but saw them for what they were. I felt like I was among my people.