II. Engaging an Underground Subculture of Reading — Winthrop R. Holder

Reading Time 2 mins

Underground Subculture of Reading

January 16, 2020

In mid-September 2019, I had to retrieve a long-lost book from a friend who works for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) at the Avenue X Station in Coney Island, Brooklyn. As someone slowly (re)embracing public transportation, I pondered reentering my world of the 1970s and 1980s; I resolved to take the subway. And, since I had not completed that week’s NY Sunday Times, I decided to carry reading material for what could be a three-hour round trip.

I recalled my early days navigating the underground. But, of course, distance and time often provide perspective. And it was neither the squalor and graffiti nor the violence and jungle-like nature of the NYC subway that came to mind, but the underground reading subculture flooded my memory.

Today, rather than remembering the subway as “hell on wheels” or “the most dangerous place on earth,” I often remember ethnic newspapers like the Irish Echo and El Diario. While underground, I first observed other newspapers like the Village Voice, the Amsterdam News, the Chief, SoHo News, the City Sun, and Workers World. Numerous magazines/journals covers–such as Dissent, India Today, Africa, Everybody’s Caribbean-American Magazine, the Atlantic, Ebony, the Nation, NACLA Report on the Americas, the Black Scholar, Monthly Review Press,  National Geographic, even Playboy–I first glimpsed underground and later purchased one or two at Hotalings News Agency on 42^nd Street in Manhattan, where I first encountered newspapers from all over the world, including those from the Caribbean nations–Barbados Nation, Jamaica Gleaner, and the Trinidad Express.

Another advantage arose from book covers, such as Moral Man and Immoral Society,  Brown Girl: Brownstones, Their Eyes were Watching God,  La Casa De Los Espiritus, Silent Spring, Autobiography of Malcolm X, A Tad Overweight, but Violet Eyes to Die For that I first observed in the hands of fellow sojourners. In a sense, then, in those pre-Internet days, the underground-–reading-subculture served as a window to books/magazines and may well have facilitated personal transformation and an intellectual awakening among straphangers.

Quite often, too, I was fortunate to get newspapers that commuters consciously left on subway seats, sometimes by familiar strangers, in what may best be described as a communal act of recycling and sharing reading material.

It appears contradictory that the notorious train delays of the 1970s and 1980s gave rise to resilience and coping mechanisms in some riders. For example, I began ’embracing’ interruptions in subway service as providing pathways to deep introspection and opportunities to complete compelling reading. Thus, while some respond to “no trains in motion” by reading, calypsonian the Mighty Swallow parodies the situation by offering music, “subway jam,” as anesthesia. 

While Swallow captured the view from underground, Sparrow cast an eye on the happenings above ground during the NYC Caribbean Carnival. Embracing the roles of raconteur, ethnographer, and sociologist, Sparrow helped us visualize the refashioning of the festival in words that still echo:

“You could be from St. Clair or John John
In New York, all that done.
It ain’t have no who’s who
New York equalize you.”

Central to Sparrow’s vision is the equalizing tendency of public spaces where people enter en masse and willingly. Similarly, by sandwiching the different cultures, genders, and class backgrounds into an underground hole, there’s also an equalizing and democratic tenor to the NY Subway.

Click here for Part III: Begging for Trouble.