B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (25 page)

There were signs posted in front of Bobby’s Happy House, where the ninety-year-old proprietor of the oldest black-owned business in Harlem had been evicted, along with several other commercial tenants, as a result of
the largest single-parcel real estate deal
in Harlem, valued at about $30 million. The high dollar value was not the only remarkable thing about that transaction. At meetings activists exhorted the public to investigate rumors that the real estate broker behind the deal and the property owner benefiting from the sale and the evictions were one and the same person. That person was also president of the 125th Street Business Improvement District, an organization of business owners with strong ties to Harlem politicians.

Another sign carried an unusually plaintive call to action, notable because it was unattached to any specific building under threat. Besides the “NYC Council” and “Your House of Worship Leader,” it did not identify any particular actors to blame. It did not bear the name of any organization to join, or the date of a rally to attend—the crisis was general and the siege ongoing.

It was because of such signs that I began to attend meetings. They were held in church sanctuaries and anterooms, school auditoriums and community centers.

The Oberia Dempsey Multiservice Center was nearly filled to capacity. It was the first presentation of the city’s plan to rezone 125th Street, an initiative known as the River-to-River plan because the changes would sweep the corridor from Broadway to Second Avenue between 124th and 126th Streets. The meeting was hosted by the Community Board representing Central Harlem (no. 10) and attended by representatives of the Department of City Planning. The thousand-page rezoning document was distilled into a slide presentation. The main objective of the rezoning was to transform the commercial district into a residential area and to revise prevailing codes restricting density and height, allowing
the construction of high-rise luxury condominiums. By the city’s own estimate, the rezoning would increase the residential capacity of 125th Street by 750 percent. The majority of this housing would be market-rate, but developers had the option to include affordable housing, with the incentive that any developer offering a certain number of affordable housing units would be rewarded with permission to build even more luxury or market-rate units.

Another incentive offered to developers was an “arts and culture” bonus, in which developers were similarly rewarded with more market-rate units if their buildings included space that could be rented as galleries, performance spaces, studios, or offices for artistic organizations. The representative from the city planning department put it thusly:
We’ve been told that arts and culture are important up here, so there are going to be restaurants and cultural venues
. A community member in the audience grumbled in response:
Arts and culture don’t pay the bills
. Another suggested that the arts and culture bonus would lead to a situation where black culture was celebrated in Harlem but no black people actually lived there anymore. A long line of residents stood at a microphone to denounce the plan, the testimonies growing more and more heated. One man suggested that
there have been riots before in Harlem’s past, and there can be riots again.
Another man wore a T-shirt that read
HARLEM IS NOT FOR SALE BECAUSE HARLEM’S ALREADY BEEN SOLD
. He named the local politicians and businessmen he claimed were responsible, then left the mic to hover close to the urban planners seated at a dais in the front of the room. He looked each in the eye and then said:
Whatever you build, we’ll burn it down.

The auditorium erupted in shouts. The community board member at the helm of the meeting admonished the crowd like a bunch of unruly children, threatening to shut the meeting down. No one settled down. The meeting was abruptly ended. A young woman from city planning was in tears.

A small sign on West 138th Street just off Lenox Avenue marks the spot where Marcus Mosiah Garvey convened his first gathering on American soil. The location was a meeting hall of St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church. The sign itself is unassuming, hardly doing justice to the aims Garvey unveiled there in May 1916.
I told them in Harlem
that it was my duty to reunite the Negroes of the Western world with the Negroes of Africa, to make a great nation of black men.
Garvey had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League (UNIA) two years earlier in Kingston, Jamaica, soon after returning from a stint in London, where he’d polished his political chops as an orator at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Within a few years of arriving in America, Garvey claimed
UNIA membership had reached the millions
, galvanized by the soaring rhetoric on display in such writing as “An Inspiring Vision”:

Other political actors in Harlem made less lofty appeals. The Friends of Negro Freedom was founded in 1920 by union organizers A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. They openly reviled Garvey. Their magazine,
The Messenger,
carried the following notice:

The imperial ambitions of Garvey and the socialist project of the Friends of Negro Freedom took opposite approaches to a common plight. There was, as Garvey’s vision suggested,
much to live for,
and, as
The Messenger
warned, much to lose.

Walking down Lenox, going from the library to a meeting, I saw the Chief again. He was resting on the walker he uses to move around, planted on its seat, with his back against the plate-glass window of a variety store. It calls itself a department store, but it is really an overpriced ninety-nine-cent shop, and probably not a location where one could Buy Black. He was not passing out flyers.

I did not ask why he had paused there; he didn’t ask whether I’d acquired a platform. Instead, the Chief stared across the street and began to speak aloud the words that must have been filling his head before I interrupted him.
I see fleeting images,
he told me.
Fleeting images,
he said again. The images before his eyes did not stand up to those in his mind. He told me that when he arrived here from Chicago, he was a young man who’d been hanging out around the University of Chicago. I told him that my grandfather had been a student there around the same time. He said he might have known him, but that he was not attending the school but mixing with its black intellectuals, trying to become one, too. He’d come to New York to study theater, and a trace of this training was still evident in his diction and his bearing. I tried to imagine him in his pre-African Nationalist Pioneer days. With tones that mixed contempt for his past ambitions with slight wistfulness, he mentioned that he’d wanted to go to Paris.

Chicago, he said, had fostered in him what he called
the Booker T. mentality.
It was a quality the Chief felt was lacking among New York blacks. He said the source of the distinction was that in Chicago the ruling white ethnic groups (Germans and Irish) had left the blacks more or less to their own devices; thus, he said, they had a kind of independence. According to the Chief, in New York a black man could not move without having to ask
the white man and the Jew
for permission.

Upon arriving in New York, his Booker T. mentality was stimulated by what he called the
dynamic, revolutionary, charismatic
leadership of Carlos A. Cooks. Thus did he assume his African name and dedicate his life to the cause of Pan-Africanism. From his early days with the ANPM, the Chief recalled to me a fellow member who was from Texas. That place of origin had not only made him prone to the platform of the ANPM, but this Pan-Africanist Texan was also a vicious political operator, known for
murdering his foes. I was curious to know more about that. But the Chief changed the subject. He wanted to talk about my hair.

My hair was relevant because, as the Chief went on to explain, I would not be wearing my hair in its natural, unprocessed African state if it had not been for the dynamic, revolutionary, charismatic leadership of Carlos A. Cooks, who, in addition to the Buy Black platform had also arranged the Natural Standard of Beauty contests, through which the beauty of African hair in its natural state was promoted, during the 1950s, long before the Afro was in vogue. He pointed out this legacy with pride and also with some bitterness, for the genius and originality of Cooks’s ideas about black being beautiful had been usurped by a subsequent decade. Other women passed by as we spoke: their braids, dreadlocks, and other natural styles supported his standards, as those wearing weaves and wigs of various shades, from blonde to fuchsia, defied them.

Next, he complained about my name. Why did I have an Arabic name? Why didn’t I drop that name and find one from an African queen? I did not take time to explain that my parents had chosen the name Sharifa from that classic of 1960s and 1970s cultural nationalism
Know and Claim Your African Name
. It was still on the bookshelves of our home in Texas. As children, my sister and I used to take it down occasionally to study its pages, which featured line drawings of men and women with Afro hairstyles, with great reverence. When we needed to find names for new dolls or our puppy, we consulted the worn pamphlet that had been the source of our own names.

I did not explain how, in that publication, the origin of my name had been given as Swahili for “honorable” or “distinguished,” which is how I always explained my name growing up. At that point, neither I nor my parents were considering, as the Chief was now, the problem of the Arab trade in salt, gold, and slaves. Swahili, the
lingua franca
of southern and eastern Africa, is
a language born of commerce and invasion and other inconvenient aspects of cultural collision. It contains many words and names that are Arabic in origin, including my own. Only as an adult did I learn that, according to a more strict definition, my name was a title referring to direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and was thus objectionable to the anti-Islamic sensibilities of the Chief. I didn’t protest. He probably wouldn’t have been satisfied unless I had announced just then on Lenox Avenue that I was taking the name Hatshepsut. And I didn’t point out to the Chief that his own second name was taken from an Egyptian pharaoh who had probably enslaved Nubians to work his mines, and was likely the pharaoh during the time of the Exodus.