B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (37 page)

Once, I needed scrap paper to make notes while at the library. I pulled a few sheets from the container provided for that purpose. Later, one of those scraps fluttered out from among my papers. It was sheet I had not used, so seeing its blank front, I turned to the other side to check for any notes before throwing it away. On the other side was a picture of a parade. It was a picture I’d seen before, a parade of Garveyites from the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The caption reads
A UNIA parade, Harlem, 1924… North-east corner of Lenox.
In the picture, one convertible moves down Lenox Avenue in a blur, exiting the frame. The only passenger visible sits in the backseat wearing a straw boater hat that matches those worn by almost everyone else in the crowd of onlookers. Another car, also a convertible, is just making the turn from 135th Street onto Lenox. It is in the middle of the intersection, at the crossroads, and the sign held by its passengers reads
THE NEW NEGRO HAS NO FEAR.
The straw boater hat of every spectator is pointed toward that oncoming car, as if all are reading the sign, absorbing its message, before the car and the parade continues heading south, down the avenue, followed by the cloud of exhaust already visible at its rear.

In 1917, two years before the 369th Regiment made its jubilant northward march returning to Harlem, a parade traced the same route on Fifth Avenue, only that time, it headed south. This display was not intended just for the pride of Harlem, it was also directed at the rest of New York, and the rest of the world. It was the “Silent March” organized to protest bloody race riots in East St. Louis and the lynch mob terror then rampant throughout the South. Its participants wore all white; they did not shout any slogans, they had no musical accompaniment except for a beating drum. They carried placards declaring their cause:

Universal Negro Improvement Association Parade, corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, 1924. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

Moving away from the hostile police officer, I headed west, rejoining the throng as it continued toward the river. I don’t know what ultimately happened, how far they were pushed, or whether any more shots rang out that night. What comes next is not a metaphor. I had not reached the end of the first block when I turned around, heading back toward Lenox. I went against the crowd, against the command of the officer, determined to make my way home.

These pages owe so much to so many. My debts extend beyond scholarly matters, as these five years have found me sustained by a more generalized grace, while stumbling toward some notion of how to write and how to live.

Michael Vazquez, the executive editor of
Transition
magazine from 1995 to 2006, was very much involved with the genesis of this project. In 2002, soon after arriving in Harlem, I constantly regaled him with stories of the people I met in the street. Mike asked me to write an essay from those stories; our conversations were such an important part of my process that I could only begin to work after writing the words “Dear Mike.” That essay, “Lenox Terminal” (2004), was the seed of this book. Writing for and thinking with Mike was a rigorous and singular apprenticeship, to say nothing of his place in my life as a treasured friend.

A number of other editors, including Kate Tuttle and Zakia Spalter of Africana.com; Jon Garelick of the
Boston Phoenix;
Jennifer Schuessler, then of the
Boston Globe;
Amy Hoffman of
The Women’s Review of Books;
and Betsy Reed of
The Nation,
were also important teachers, pushing my limits while offering me a way to earn some fragment of a living as a writer. The editor Paul Elie encouraged this book before it was written. He understood what I was aiming at when I barely understood it myself.

At age seventeen, having traveled to Cornell University for a summer seminar called “Geography and Literature,” without any idea what that meant, I met professors Barry Maxwell and Shelley Wong. They put Ann Petry’s Harlem novel,
The Street,
in my hands; they taught me Walter Benjamin and the word
flâneur.
They demanded I be more precise with language and disabused me of a vague teenaged disdain for things political. It is only a slight exaggeration to say this book began that summer, under their influence.

I was fortunate to be mentored by several artists who were my teachers at Harvard: Adrienne Kennedy, Ross McElwee, and Isaac Julien each left a deep impression. Though I’ve ended up neither playwright nor filmmaker they remain guides for this work. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth advised me on an extracurricular research
project with devotion and intensity. In a class on Haiti, Laurent Dubois gave us Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which changed everything. I am grateful to my professors in the Department of Afro-American Studies for providing such a fertile ground during those heady years; pursuing a life of the mind seemed like the only possible option.

In more than seven years in New York, I refused to be called a New Yorker, partly to do with my allegiance to a great number of people in Texas—where I was born and raised and where I intend to return. Margaret Crawford and Nancy Eisenberg encouraged my writing at Episcopal High School and were great guides in the love of literature. The vibrant group of community-based and socially engaged artists who are my mother’s contemporaries—including Vivian Ayers-Allen, Kimberly Lakes, Bert Long, Rick Lowe, and Floyd Newsum—provided a model of creativity and commitment. Jesse Lott is chief among them and a giant among men; his influence on my life is without measure. Texas is the land of my maternal family, so I honor the Williamses and Robertses of Cedar Creek, the Rhodeses of Fort Worth, and the Bradshaws of Austin. Gratitude is due to my extended / adopted families, the Zermeños, the Merciers, the Browns, the Newsums, the Allibones, and many more—all of you helped grow me up.

During work and lamentations for lack of work I received the generosity of so many organizations that I doubted my worthiness. The Lannan Foundation gave me ten weeks in Marfa, Texas, setting my Harlem thoughts to roam under the high desert sky, unveiling a hidden corner of my native state, and allowing me to plant a garden in which to putter when my pen would bear no fruit. The Rona Jaffe Foundation saw ahead to my next project with the honor of its award specifically for emerging women writers. I interrupted the earliest phase of writing to take up a scholarship from the U.S. – U.K. Fulbright Commission, landing me at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland as the only student in a historiography course. This quixotic pursuit and many walks across woods and fields in Britain were an unlikely proving ground for my notions about the streets of Harlem, thus I attempted the first words of this book while living in a hilltop cottage in Fife. Much later in the writing process the New York Foundation for the Arts; the Common Fire Foundation in Tivoli, New York; the Centre International d’Accueil et d’Échanges des Récollets, Paris; and A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans, provided monetary support and safe harbor.

Michael Henry Adams, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Thomas Wirth are scholars whose contributions to the study of Harlem are widely and deservedly celebrated; I am grateful to all three for conferring small nuggets from their vast treasuries of knowledge and resources. Michael and Brent also contributed gifts for the soul: Michael often demanded I abandon my desk to join him for dinners and parties, while Brent filled gaps in my musical library with generous donations from his own. CUNY Graduate Center PhD candidate in English Lavelle Porter did some
stealth undercover work to put me on the trail of a hard-to-locate photograph. Less concretely, this book is buoyed by near-invisible strands of lively conversations conducted over coffee, tea, lunch, dinner, loud music, long walks (and the very rare alcoholic beverage) with some formidable artists and thinkers who are also cherished friends: Naomi Beckwith, LeRonn Brooks, Sarah M. Broom, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Ntone Edjabe, Leslie Hewitt, Arthur Jafa, Darryl Pinckney, Emily Raboteau, Greg Tate, and Shatema Threadcraft, among many others. Their wisdom and warmth have nourished me. On the very day I missed my first deadline and was deep in a pit of self-loathing, Emily arrived for tea bearing pastries and perspective, observing that I was not the first writer ever to do so.

My everyday life in Harlem was quite mixed up with writing about it, but plenty of times, when the writing offered no comfort at all, I was enveloped and protected by the friendship, care, and welcome of Barbara James, Bessie Smallwood, Julius Nelson, Ms. Shirley, Mr. Monroe, Willie, Rob, Sonny, Bing, Bobby, Ramadan, Marvin Lofton, Valerie Price, and many others, including those with whom, in the intimate informality of Lenox Avenue, I exchanged greetings on a daily basis but never exchanged names. Neighbors in my building, especially Donna Kiel and Ahmed Kiel-Kamil, Laaraji Nadananda, Nadi Burton, and Ernest Davis (son of Minnie Davis), at times made our five-floor tenement feel like a family house.

My landlord, Henry M. Greenup, rented me the last decently priced two-bedroom apartment in Harlem, in which an underemployed freelancer could afford to have a home office. For this I am eternally grateful. Mr. Greenup must also be publicly thanked for waiting patiently during the times when the underemployed freelancer couldn’t afford the affordable apartment; under such circumstances he acted as an unofficial patron of the arts! A native New Orleanian, World War II veteran, and longtime Harlem businessman, Henry Greenup has been an education and a blessing to know.

When I returned to Harlem from Scotland, I found the neighborhood under siege by the onslaught of Columbia, the 125th Street Rezoning, and luxury condominiums. I attended meetings first to take notes and ended up taking minutes, becoming part of the organized resistance to a wrongheaded policy. By joining this struggle I benefited from the wisdom of many I am proud to call comrades and friends. Abdul-Kareem Muhammad; Katherine Adora Samuels, MD; Brenda Stokely; and M. Ndigo Washington must be singled out as particular inspirations during the months of the rezoning campaign. I am glad an early chapter of the effort brought me the friendship of Alana Atterbury and Barbara Smith Graves. I honor the steadfast commitment of Bertha Aiken, Peter Anderson, Nellie Hester Bailey, Carlton “Chuck” Berkely, Sharon Bowie, Francine Brown, Fatima Faloye, Imee Jackson, Patti Jacobs, Agnes Johnson, Akinlabi Mackall, Carole Nelson, Sandra Rivers, Shaka Shakur, Shikulu Shange, Ameena Shareef, the late Gloria
Swanson, Julius Tajiddin, and Alex Williams, among many others. All of these people were working for Harlem long before I arrived and continue to pursue a vision of beloved community where those who made the neighborhood famous, sustained it during difficult years, and have raised generations of families are not displaced, disinherited, and disenfranchised by supposedly benign market forces.

Rosten Woo, co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and Mitch McEwen, founder of architecture and art enterprise SUPERFRONT, are both old friends. In the midst of the rezoning fiasco, their professional expertise gave me much-needed insight about the city’s urban planning apparatus.

In the course of researching and writing this book, I spent countless days at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; it is as much a community center as a library, and a little bit of home. I wish to thank the librarians and staff of the Schomburg, including Sharon Howard, Sharon Jarvis, Betty Obadashian, Genette McLaurin, Michael Perry, Troy Belle, and Steven Fullwood. Many library assistants performed their repetitive tasks with smiles and diligence, and the security staff always ushered me in and out with kindness.

Other libraries and archives also aided my work. I wish to thank the following individuals and institutions: Louise Bernard, Moira Fitzgerald, and Nancy Kuhl at Yale’s Beinecke Library; Anne Coleman Torrey of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and Barbara Puorro Galasso of George Eastman House; Eleanor Gillers and Jill Slaight of the New-York Historical Society; Tom Lisanti at the New York Public Library; Susan Hamson at the Rare Books and Manuscripts department of Columbia’s Butler Library; Bruce Kellner of the Carl Van Vechten Trust; and anonymous workers of the Library of Congress and Bettmann / Corbis.

I thank the estate of Langston Hughes for permission to reprint his poetry; Craig Tenney of Harold Ober Associates and Jennifer Rowley of Random House helped facilitate this process.

I want to thank certain other friends for the love that has sheltered me over many years: Alice Albinia, Gini Alhadeff, Amiri Barksdale, Leslie Bennett, Jon Caramanica, Nucomme Davis-Walker, Cheryl Follon, Aaron Goldberg, Jamil Higley, Carmelo Larose, Jesse Lichtenstein, Rebecca Lubens, Brina Milikowsky, Beatrice Monti della Corte, Laura Moser, Miranda Pyne, Shirley Rumierk, Angela Shaiman, Claire Tancons, and Caecilia Tripp. Jomo K. Alakoye-Simmons has his own Harlem book to write. The instruction and guidance of Jill Satterfield, Ethan Nichtern, Sherene Schostak, and Margot Borden helped keep body, soul, and mind in one piece.