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Baldwin’s classic Harlem essays “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Notes of a Native Son,” and “Fifth Avenue Uptown” all have examples of this tactic. The earliest of these, “The Harlem Ghetto,” finds Baldwin pacing the streets of the neighborhood where he was born in 1924.
Harlem, physically at least
, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime or mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block
.

Baldwin goes on to enumerate other hardships of Harlem life: rents that are higher than elsewhere in the city, food that is of lesser quality yet more expensive than elsewhere in the city, job discrimination, and low wages. Baldwin’s first deployment of “the Jimmy” happens almost immediately.
All of Harlem,
he observes,
is pervaded
by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut
.

It could be another example for my high school lesson on similes, but it reveals much besides the linguistic force Baldwin perfected as a teenage holiness preacher. Baldwin’s description of life in Harlem suddenly quits the specific and, through that powerful image of the stifling, sealed-off room, makes a dash for the general. It is one of those grand, poetic generalizations that are
Baldwin’s great gift to literature, as well as his great rhetorical weakness. But Baldwin’s trick is not just a matter of figurative language. We are so accustomed to these kinds of sweeping statements about Harlem and—as they’re often called—the “Harlems of America,” that it’s difficult to measure the work done by that simple phrase:
All of Harlem
. With those words, Baldwin positions himself as an expert/interpreter of the place which in “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” he describes as
the turf
(
bounded by Lenox Avenue
on the west, the Harlem River on the east, 135th Street on the north and 130th on the south. We never lived beyond these boundaries; this is where we grew up
…). Having transcended those boundaries to reach the pages of
Commentary
magazine, Baldwin’s phrase
All of Harlem
indicates not only the place he is speaking about, but to whom he speaks. That great leap, from speaking about particular situations of particular people in a particular place to voicing the generalized conditions of Negroes, is performed for the benefit of the mostly white audience. It’s possible to think of the move Baldwin makes as a kind of transcendence, insofar as he leaves behind the boundaries of Harlem itself, and the specifics of its daily, lived reality, in the process of describing it. Sometimes it seems that Baldwin’s wide angle looks past what he is describing toward the people he is describing it for. The price of this particular transcendence is to become a spokesperson, a representative. But in February 1948, when the essay appeared, that conundrum was still in Baldwin’s future. By the end of the year, Baldwin was living in Paris. It was the first of a series of departures, a deliberate attempt to escape that very small room of Harlem, and America, where he could no longer breathe.

In 1955, when Baldwin was already established in Paris,
Harper’s
published the essay “Me and My House.” It was later renamed and became the title essay for the collection
Notes of a Native Son.
The essay concerns the death and burial of Baldwin’s father, which
coincided with the writer’s nineteenth birthday and the 1943 Harlem riot. It is more narrowly a memoir, so Baldwin is mostly limited to the landscape of his own psyche, the events of his own life, and the relationship between himself and his father, rather than to the relationship between a whole race and the rest of the world. But “Notes of a Native Son” still contains some moments of Baldwin’s particular form of transcendence. In the days leading up to the riot, Baldwin remembers a peculiar silence.
All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected
by waiting
. Later, after the riot, Baldwin surveys its aftermath in the form of smashed plate glass all over the streets and interprets the debris pattern as if reading tea leaves.

Here, Baldwin switches into prophet mode, and the events in Harlem become a parable for the racialized soul-sickness plaguing America. Baldwin the prophet is also Baldwin the healer, so “Notes of a Native Son” ends with a prescription:
Blackness and whiteness
did not matter, to believe that they did was to acquiesce to one’s own destruction.
It is a message found in much of Baldwin’s work, where he is so often addressing a
we
that is startlingly mobile. At times the
we
is Baldwin’s family, or the people he grew up with in and around the turf. At other moments, the
we
seems
to be the mostly white audience of the middlebrow magazines where Baldwin was a frequent contributor. At its most profound, Baldwin addresses a
we
that, perhaps, had not previously been taken for granted in American literature, challenging white America to align itself with the
we
of black Harlem. In “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Baldwin challenged the readers of
Esquire
to
walk through the streets of Harlem
and see what we this nation have become.

As early as my high school lessons on Langston Hughes, I had absorbed the platitude that the task of the writer was to glean universal lessons from specific and personal experiences. But in Baldwin, I learned the particular peril of that path for a black writer. As Baldwin admits in his “Autobiographical Notes,”
I have not written about being a Negro
at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it is the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

After working for the Federal Writer’s Project, when he was still in the midst of writing
Invisible Man,
Ralph Ellison accepted an assignment to report on a free mental health clinic in Harlem. It begins with a perspective that is the reverse of Baldwin’s trademark move. Ellison makes a panoramic survey of Harlem before zooming in on his chosen topic.

By 1948, when Ellison wrote those words, Harlem was the scene and symbol of a great deal. Alain Locke had begun with the dissection of Harlem as a representative specimen for all of black America, and photographers like Aaron Siskind used the neighborhood as a laboratory for their experiments in atomizing reality.

His masterful description takes us, as near as a realist photographer’s lens, into a typically gritty Harlem scene, but Ellison keeps the shifting and fugitive quality of dreams nearby. The very circumstances make it difficult to tell one from the other, for real life is
indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams
. Ellison reverses the arrangement of dreams and realities that appears in
Invisible Man,
when his protagonist arrives in Harlem from the South and declares,
This was not a city of realities
but of dreams
.

The South hovers above Ellison’s landscape. That lost place and lost way of life cannot be reconciled with the present, due to

Ellison attempts to ignore sociology and economics in favor of psychology, keeping to his stated subject. But recently, a sociologist using Ellison’s essay to establish the framework for her study of gentrification in Harlem in the 1990s found much that was relevant to her field—especially what she called Ellison’s depiction of Harlem as a
metaphoric space
.

That description of Ellison’s Harlem reminds me of something from W. E. B. DuBois. At the beginning of
The Souls of Black Folk,
DuBois describes his amused irritation with the pressing and searching inquiries from well-meaning whites about life as a Negro.
How does it feel to be a problem?
was his summary of their curiosity. Reading that sociologist, and Ellison, I wondered, How does it feel to live inside a metaphor?

Ellison is interested in a different question. How have black people who were
the grandchildren of those
who possessed no written literature
come to
examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre
? This juxtaposition, for Ellison, results in a
world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence
. And that world, as lived out on the streets of Harlem, produces
the most surreal fantasies:

Thus Ellison describes the psychic breaks and identity crises that lead to the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in the basement of St. Philip’s Church on 134th Street, a place founded and operated by black and white psychiatrists because blacks could not receive mental health care at other hospitals.

But, inevitably, mental health cannot be divorced from sociology and economics.

Ellison’s essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” written in 1948, finds that the general condition of life in Harlem is the source of the specific mental conditions of the clinic’s patients, whose specific
names and histories he does not explore. The
general
condition of second-class citizenship among black Americans leads to a
general
condition that is, or approaches, collective insanity. He does not remark upon whether he includes himself among the afflicted.

Within the essay, his position, to the degree he is located anywhere, is slightly outside the boundaries of the landscape under scrutiny. His function is related to the interpretive roles of Hurston or Baldwin, but he doesn’t match Hurston’s entertainments or Baldwin’s exhortations. His beautiful, clinical descriptions emit a kind of hostility. A similar hostility is heard in “No Apologies,” Ellison’s 1967 contribution to a heated exchange with Norman Podhoretz, the editor of
Commentary
. Asserting that Podhoretz was
throwing his typewriter
at the whole unsuspecting Negro people,
Ellison’s lengthy response to Podhoretz is nothing short of an evisceration. But Ellison’s gripe isn’t merely a reflexive defense against injury done to himself or all black people. He takes specific issue with
how often white liberals
, possessing little firsthand knowledge of any area of the society other than their own, eagerly presume to interpret Negro life while ignoring their primary obligation as intellectuals—which is to know what they are talking about.