B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (33 page)

Chanticleer’s pioneer homestead in Harlem was in the midst of a drug-infested block of West 115th Street. He purchased two town houses next to each other, living in one and turning the other into his museum. But he was spurred on by memories of his Harlem childhood, in a cultured home on Sugar Hill.
His father was born in Haiti
and was a school principal; his mother was from Barbados and had been a concert pianist.

It felt like Harlem was the center of the world
,
he recounted to one reporter.

Once Raven Chanticleer had been around the world and achieved some of those great things, he felt compelled to return to his roots.
Harlem is coming back
… and I’m doing my part. I could
have gone anywhere and lived in luxury, but I’ve come back home where I belong.

I discovered all this about Raven Chanticleer in a file at the Schomburg Center. After exhausting the limited sources available about him and his museum on the Internet and in newspaper databases, I’d asked a librarian if she knew where I could find any other details. She directed me to the typewritten index cataloging a collection of materials called the “vertical files.” These files contain clippings of newspaper articles, an antiquated system from the pre-Internet days when the library had an entire department devoted to that task. I was delighted when I found that there was, indeed, a clippings file devoted to Raven Chanticleer’s African American Wax and History Museum. It was overflowing with all the newspaper articles and ephemera from which I have constructed the story above. In one of those articles, attention was called to the existence of the file itself:
His work is cataloged
in the Schomburg collection,
mentioned one article, in a reverent tone.

Later, when I went back to continue my research, one of the librarians handed me the file with an amused look on her face.
Oh yeah, I remember him.
She remembered Raven Chanticleer because he was a regular visitor to the library, where he spent many hours creating and maintaining the very file I was consulting. She described his fantastical outfits, his outré manner. And she mentioned having seen him outside the library on one occasion, when he dominated the proceedings of a meeting held about property ownership in Harlem, advocating for an elderly woman who was in danger of losing her home.

Another librarian also remembered Chanticleer’s visits. She mentioned a woman who began to appear at the library after Chanticleer’s death and spent many hours maintaining the clippings file. She said she didn’t know the relationship between the woman and Chanticleer, but she remembered that this library
patron often wept uncontrollably as she went about her task. This woman returned repeatedly, as if tending the flowers at a grave, but the librarian said she had not been seen there in a while.

At first I thought it would be wonderful to find and interview this unidentified weeping lady. I even managed, through some details found in the files, to identify her name. But after several visits with Chanticleer’s file, I decided that I had enough information. I also decided not to contact his friend and unofficial executor, fearing my questions would somehow distress her and disturb her bereavement.

On the Thursday afternoon of Ms. Minnie’s funeral, I emerged from our building feeling solemn and official in a black dress. I had never gone to a funeral outside of Texas—my attendance had always been within the context of family, or friends with family connections. I glanced around to see if anyone from the block was heading over. I didn’t see anyone, so walked alone to Bailey’s Funeral Home just a few doors down the avenue. I had passed there so many times, winding through its crowds and avoiding the path of its hearse, which used the city sidewalk as a private driveway. It was strange to now be greeted at those doors as a mourner. I was surprised by the pristine interior. The wood veneer of the wall paneling and benches shone under the room’s bright lights. The employees of the funeral home gave great attention to formality, ushering guests in a manner at once sincerely tender and highly scripted.

It was time for the viewing. I slipped into a bench next to the nearest familiar faces, just behind Ms. Barbara and next to Ms. Freddie Mae Baxter. Ms. Freddie Mae was a childhood friend of Ms. Minnie’s. I remember clearly the first time we met. I was talking with Ms. Minnie in front of our building, and this smartly
dressed woman came sidling up to us with a mischievous look on her face. Something about their interaction let me know, immediately, that they had been girls together. Ms. Minnie often mentioned to me that her friend Freddie Mae had written a book about childhood in their hometown and her adult life in Harlem. At the funeral home, Ms. Freddie Mae sat with another friend, and they were talking. I said hello, but I didn’t make an effort to join their conversation, because by then I’d looked to the front of the room and seen Ms. Minnie in the coffin, wearing a pink suit. When I saw her body I began to cry, and seeing that no one else at the wake was crying, I began to feel self-conscious.

Then, my response was only to try to suppress my tears. Now, when I think of it, I realize it was the kind of moment when belief, or lack thereof, exposes itself. I looked around at the other mourners, who calmly waited for the service to begin. There were no hysterics in the crowd. Maybe they’d gone to more funerals than I had, or maybe they’d had a chance to say good-bye to Ms. Minnie. Maybe it had to do with a faith I could not summon on command—a lack of certainty about the regions that the dead pass through.

More people arrived for the viewing, and I sat there a bit longer. Then I got up to attend a town hall meeting.

A shooting spree had taken place a few days before the funeral, the weekend after Ms. Minnie died. It was Memorial Day weekend. Eight people had been wounded on Lenox and Seventh Avenues in a maelstrom that progressed up the blocks between 125th and 131st Streets. No one was killed. Later, I heard rumors that the violence was part of a gang initiation or had begun with a fight after a concert in Marcus Garvey Park. The night of the shooting, I was at home, working at my desk. I made a note,
night—almost midnight.
Below that, enclosed within brackets,
[a helicopter is circling the area.]

The reason for the helicopter’s flight
was revealed the next morning in the newspaper. Upon learning the news of the shooting spree, I made another note:

It was this feeling of having avoided my duty that led me to rush over—in the interim between the end of Ms. Minnie’s wake and the beginning of her funeral—to that town hall meeting about the shooting. Not much said in the meeting added to my understanding of the event, or helped to avoid its repetition. It was, like many meetings I’d been to, something of a ritual, a place for the community to come together to share shock, outrage, and sadness. I didn’t take any notes. A preacher gave a long invocation; earnest and sincere teenagers of the sort who were involved in after-school programs, not in shootings, stood up to speak about the state of their peers; parents shouted anguished calls to action. After listening awhile, I slipped out of my seat to return to the funeral.

The program had already begun by the time I made it back. I
paused with another latecomer at the front door before we were ushered inside to seats at the rear of the chapel. I saw some of my neighbors in the pews, as well as people in the front row I assumed to be Ms. Minnie’s relatives. There was testimony from a niece, and a message of condolence read aloud that had been sent from the family’s home church in South Carolina. Ms. Barbara got up and spoke directly
to
Ms. Minnie and not
about
her, thanking her for being such a good friend. After the preacher gave his eulogy, the obituary was read. It was spare and gave basic details: the year she had been born, the year she came to New York, her work in the garment district, her having one son.

Ms. Minnie’s son was seated in the front row with her sister and a niece, the ones she had always spoken of. The ushers began to direct us for the procession past the body, inviting one row at a time to the front of the room. Throughout all of this, I was aware of a struggle going on inside me. I was trying to stop myself from taking note of what was happening. I was trying not to be an observer but a participant: to participate in the prayers, the songs, the proper etiquette. Some part of this attempt to stop the recording instinct was successful, because now much of what happened is a blur that resists being shaped into words. What is certain: I did not know the words to the ancient lamentation. I was uninitiated in how to die and how to mourn the dead.

When the service ended, we all went outside and stood in front of the funeral home. We remarked upon how beautiful the service had been, the skill of the preacher, and the selection of the songs. Soon we were laughing, because Willie, who always flirts with me but is old enough to be my father, began to flirt again. I began to scold him as I normally do, and as Ms. Minnie sometimes did on my behalf. I told him that if Ms. Minnie had been there, she would’ve told him off. Someone pulled out a camera, and Willie,
Ms. Barbara, and I posed, smiling, against the backdrop of Lenox Avenue.

Afterward, and for the next several days, a line in a song from the service persisted in my mind. It picked up on a theme from the preacher’s eulogy. The organist, who was also the singer, led the assembled mourners in several rounds of this repeating chorus. The song had the sound of a march, with descending and ascending chords. Its lyrics assume the voice of the dead upon reaching the gates of heaven, faced with that record of deeds written on the angel’s scroll:
Let my life speak for me
…

Several copies of the
New York Times
obituary announcing the death of Raven Chanticleer are included in his carefully curated file. This was one element of the archive he could not control. At least one copy had been added by a librarian, bearing the date and source in neat handwriting. Other copies seemed to have been added later, perhaps by the friend of Raven Chanticleer. One of the librarians had told me that this mourning friend of Chanticleer had asked the library to start a file archiving her own life. She said that Raven had instructed her to do so. Strangely, some artifacts about this woman, lacking any information about Raven Chanticleer, were mixed up in the file about the wax museum.

The newspaper obituary included some details of his life that the other articles had missed. It serves as a corrective footnote to the official record on Raven Chanticleer as collected and preserved by himself.

Raven Chanticleer, who was
born and raised in Harlem
and resides there to this day
was
actually born James Watson
on September 13, 1928, in Woodruff, South Carolina. His parents—mentioned in several earlier profiles as Henri and Abbie
Chanticleer, a Haitian-born school principal and a Barbados-born concert pianist and couturier respectively, who lived on Sugar Hill—were, according to the
Times
obituary, sharecroppers. He had not graduated from the Sorbonne or the University of Ghana. Most likely there were no
old mentors from the University of Timbuktu
.
A niece is quoted in the obituary
stating that she intended to keep the museum going, once the family had sorted out some of the
legalities
.