A Sidewalk Debate In Harlem

As I was coming out of a supermarket on Lenox Avenue in Harlem one night recently, I overheard two panhandlers (one of them in a wheelchair) debating whether or not God made ugliness. "If God made pretty," insisted the one who was standing, "then He made ugly, too." The conversation brought to mind something Chester Himes wrote (facetiously) in one of his Coffin Ed Johnson/Grave Digger Jones Harlem detective novels: Harlem is the only place where you can get into an argument about whether Paris was in France or France was in Paris.