My grandfather and I were shopping in the street markets near his apartment, on Thayer Street, far north Manhattan, in the Washington Heights neighborhood. I was just a few years old. This was and still is a big Spanish market. My grandfather didn’t speak much English, so we conversed in a blend of Spanish and English. We were out looking for a toy gun – back then, they were still sold in black – as my parents wouldn’t let me have one.
As ever in the market on a Sunday morning, people of all colors were bustling in every direction, bumping into each other, trespassing onto the street, shouting to each other over the long and short distances. Papers covered the walls of the shops and the light posts, and blew all through the streets.
We were on a particularly busy thoroughfare, filled with sun, almost noon. It was quite hot – the dirty, city kind of hot that you can feel. The sidewalk burned.
That was when I saw them.
They were a couple. The man wore a beard and that rounded hat I now know to be Muslim topping his black face. The woman wore a black full burqa – I could see only her darting eyes and the glistening black skin around them. They walked up the sidewalk together silently, at a slight distance.
What I remember was that every step they took broke up the crowd. Everyone was looking at them. Every shopkeeper peered up from his wares to mark the passing of these two, and all the buyers and talkers and hustlers in the street stopped what they were doing to watch this couple. Sentences ended midway. No one ran before them.
At my young age, I was equally puzzled as I was impressed. Who were these two wearing so much black in that heat and strolling so seriously that everyone so loud and vibrant just moments before could be struck dumb? At that age, I already had ideas of what faith was, having done my best to juggle Judaism and my grandmother’s devout Catholicism already all my life. But what was the power of this faith (for I quickly knew faith was at the core of this scene) that it should part the human sea of the market at morning?
They moved closer, till they were passing just before me. I still don’t know what look I saw in that woman’s eyes. Was it a flash of fear as she walked straight on? The man she was with wove among the crowd somewhat more. His expression may have had a bit of delight in it, as he searched around, perhaps for what they had come to market for.
When I got home, I asked my mother about these people. She was liberal and knowledgeable, but didn’t elaborate, perhaps because it would be too complex to explain to someone my age.
I think this was the moment I first knew that Islam would ever be a factor in my life, in all our lives, in the streets of the world and in our national interests. I have never stopped trying to figure out what look I saw in that woman’s eyes.