It’s too easy to resort to stereotypes and preconceptions. To be poor, African-American and disabled in Harlem must be tough, right? But don’t jump to any conclusions. Wheelers in America’s most famous black neighborhood are as resilient and as individual as they are anywhere.

Take Marcus Johnson and Craig Rawls. On the surface, they have much in common. Both are bright young black men, both are blessed with enormous charm, both use wheelchairs. They spend time about a block from each other yet they’ve never met and probably never will. Despite their similarities, they’re as different as Harlem’s yuppie Starbucks coffee shop and the nearby soulfood restaurant. Marcus is what Harlemites call a striver; Craig is what any place would call an outlaw.

Just eight years ago Marcus was a dancer, talented enough to consider scholarship offers from the Martha Graham School of Dance and the Dance Theater of Harlem before accepting one from the Julliard School of Music. All three are world famous. A ride with a friend one summer evening after his second year at Julliard ended those dreams.

“Why are you driving so fast?” he recalls asking. Suddenly, a dog ran into the street and they swerved to avoid it. When Marcus came to, he couldn’t move. His friend was unhurt. The van had flipped three times. “My friend was intoxicated but I had no idea,” he says without a trace of bitterness.

Today, as a C4 incomplete quad, he has patched his life back together to a remarkable extent. He’s now a senior at New York University majoring in performing arts administration and dance education. With some friends he’s begun a nonprofit organization, Disabled in Demand Inc. He’ll head its inclusive dance company. “We plan to change the attitudinal barriers that are out there,” he says.

A block away, Craig, a 29-year-old native New Yorker, is hanging out on the corner of 125th and Lexington, the site of one of the city’s few accessible subway stops. He, too, has plans. “I’m trying to get a lot of medical things taken care of, then get back into my drug program and then get into some kind of training program,” he says. He radiates the same optimism as Marcus, although his circumstances are completely different, starting with the way he was injured.

“It was in the process of an armed robbery,” he says cheerfully, using cop talk to recall a fall day six years ago. “Unfortunately, I was the bad guy and it went bad and I ended up getting shot in the process.” The bullet remains lodged in his spine. He’s a T3-4 para.

“It’s sad, but I laugh about it sometimes,” he says with a chuckle. “I was holding up a cab driver in Baltimore. I had a gun with no bullets because I wasn’t out to hurt anybody.” The cabby’s gun, ironically, was loaded. “When you’re on drugs you do kind of crazy things to feed your habit.”

After a hospital stay, he went through rehab and then spent 13 months in three different slammers. All were relatively accessible and no one picked on him. “You become kind of vulnerable in a wheelchair,” he says, “but it depends on how you carry yourself in a situation like that.” Even now, he wears his self-confidence like a shield.

He’s been back in New York for a year. “You could classify me as being homeless,” he says. “I’m just staying with a few friends.” Public housing is out of the question. “After you catch a felony in the projects they don’t want you back,” he explains.

One block away in his comfortable apartment, Marcus’ attendant is typing a school paper for him. She uses one of two computers he’s talked New York State’s Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities (VESID) into giving him. VESID also pays his tuition and for the van that takes him to his classes.

He’s soft-spoken but he knows how to work the system. “You really have to go in with your head on straight,” he says. “Tell them what you want and know what you’re entitled to so they won’t give you the runaround. That’s the only way to get the services you’re qualified to receive.”

People want to help Marcus. His hospital social worker, learning that private sponsors were opening a building for crips in Harlem, pushed to get him in. The Julliard faculty bombarded City Hall with supporting letters. It worked. He was one of the first tenants.

A Decent Place to Live

Thirty-year-old Carissa Hanson, Marcus’ upstairs neighbor, is also an original tenant. She’d been living in an inaccessible apartment in Brooklyn with a cousin when a local disability group got her in. Carissa meets me at the elevator on foot, surprising me. I’d expected a black woman using a wheelchair. She’s white and can walk but depends on a power chair to cover distances.

Carissa is a fragile-looking woman with cerebral palsy. She admits she felt strange moving to Harlem, but she also felt she didn’t have a choice. “At that time if you turned down housing they would be reluctant to give it to you a second time,” she says. “If you don’t like it, it’s basically tough crap. I don’t feel that’s fair because ablebodied people have a choice about where they want to live. But seeing that disabled housing is so rare, I’m pretty lucky to be here.”

Her apartment, which she shares with two cats, is more sparsely furnished than Marcus’, but identical in layout to his and every other unit in Treemill House, a six-story, 36-unit building. Each apartment has a separate bedroom, an accessible kitchen, and a bathroom with a raised toilet, sink and grab bars but, inexplicably, no roll-in shower. Although Carissa says there’s some drug dealing in the building and, unlike Marcus, she’s been burglarized twice, she agrees that it’s a decent place to live compared to much of the neighborhood.

“When I first moved in, every time I went outside I got a lot of racial remarks,” she recalls, “but they got used to me.” She broke up with her last boyfriend four years ago and hasn’t dated since. She’s slim and attractive, so it’s not surprising that men sometimes hit on her. “For the most part I don’t let it bother me,” she says. “I put the chair on high speed and I fly. I figure no one is going to chase me. When I’m out late at night, I’ll drive it in the street.”

Although Carissa has enough credits to be a college junior, she dropped out because she says the VESID-supplied vans were unreliable and the school schedule too exhausting. She and Marcus give talks to outside groups through the Harlem Independent Living Center.

“I speak about my wheelchair because a lot of people in the medical field think a chair is a bad thing,” she says angrily. “They’ll tell parents, don’t show your children how to use wheelchairs, don’t let them use crutches. This is what I grew up with. You know, ‘Make her walk!’ Making me walk has caused me to bust my teeth two times, bust my chin three times, bust my face a couple of times. I say a chair is a good thing if it can get you from point A to point B.” She’s had hers for seven years.

In the Neighborhood

It’s just four blocks west along 125th Street to the Harlem Independent Living Center. Every corner has curbcuts, something you can’t count on in more touristy parts of the city like Soho and Greenwich Village. The ILC’s window is filled with training and job fliers. Doorway signs warn: “We do not notarize” and “This is not H&R Block.” Security is a big concern. To get in, you first push a bell, a voice asks your business, then tells you to step back. The door opens electrically.

Inside, one of the center’s six staffers talks with a deaf Latino woman using sign language. Her two nondisabled preschool children break into smiles when James Billy, the center’s director, appears. He’s a tall, slender black man with a hook prosthesis instead of a left hand.

The center serves some 1,400 “consumers,” he tells me, but this is misleading because once someone comes in for help they stay on the rolls forever. Housing is the biggest client problem. “We don’t ever tell consumers that we are going to get them housing,” Billy explains. “We help them fill out the application, help them learn the process of how to get the housing.”

It’s not hard to find disabled people in Harlem who need this kind of help. Three blocks away, Olive and William Rivera, both 40, are desperate for accessible housing. They met and fell in love doing piecework in a factory. Two years ago, William, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, had a stroke and landed in a neighborhood nursing home.

Married a year now, they’ve been unable to live together. Olive, who is from Trinidad, has a basement apartment, inaccessible to William’s power chair. The open tracheotomy in his neck makes him almost mute, so she does the talking. They’ve never heard of the ILC. A stranger tells them about it and leads them to its door.

There always seem to be wheelers hanging out on 125th Street. Fifty-year-old Lawrence Coleman, a man who has survived two strokes, comes here most days from another part of the city to wait for his wife while she attends an outpatient drug treatment program at a local hospital. He says he doesn’t mind waiting.

Not far away, Donald Bradshaw, 52, sits in his wheelchair behind a battered table filled with oils, incense, beads, soap and odds and ends. While he waits for customers, he talks about December 12, 1995, the day he woke up mysteriously paralyzed from the neck down. “At that time, man, I was like homeless,” he remembers. He now lives with a sister.

Doctors warned that if they didn’t immediately operate to remove two cracked disks and fuse his neck he could be paralyzed for life. Even with that, they gave him only a 50-50 chance of recovery. “About eight months after the operation the feeling slowly came back and my hands started to move” he says. “I now can walk a little with a walker or canes. It went away! That’s God’s work!” adds Donald, a Muslim.

Back near the accessible subway station, Charles Frazier, 47, a thin black man using a wheelchair, talks about rebuilding his body as he waits for a bus to take him to the city shelter he calls home. “Before I got sick,” he says, “I worked construction and was a weightlifter. In those days, I weighed 195.” Acute diabetes forced doctors to amputate the toes on his right foot and drove his weight down to 132. That seems to bother him more than any of his other troubles. He’s back up to 145 now. “I’ve been weightlifting again,” he says proudly.

Craig Rawls, the failed holdup man, is still hanging out nearby. “I’m just waiting on a friend now,” he says. “We got to take care of something that’s kind of profitable. I told him I’d go along for the ride. An honest buck won’t hurt nobody.” Is he sure it’s an honest buck? “Oh, yes it is!” he laughs, delighted to be asked the question.