B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (4 page)

Emma Lou Morgan is running from her black skin. Wallace Thurman tells us as much in the epigraph to his novel
The Blacker the Berry
… :
My color shrouds me in,
goes the selection from poet
Countee Cullen. Where better to send his heroine than Harlem, and how better for her to arrive there than not to arrive at all—the emphasis is placed on what she left behind. Leaving is the main thing.
She would have gone any place to escape
, and so she is soon in Harlem. She can hardly believe it herself:
It did seem strange, this being in Harlem when only a few weeks before she had been over three thousand miles away.
Emma Lou is philosophical: she is thinking about time, and she is thinking about distance and about the immutability of the two. Soon enough, she glimpses her own folly.
What was that line in Cullen’s verse, “I run, but Time’s abreast with me”? She had only traversed space and defied distance.

Helga Crane had just as far to come. Like Emma Lou, her journey was not direct. Last it was Chicago, and before that, Naxos, the little southern town, with its stultifying black-college propriety. She leaves, and she leaves, and she leaves. But when she arrives in Harlem,
again she had that strange transforming experience
—the watchword here is “again”
—this time not so fleetingly, the magic sense of having come home
. What does Helga Crane know of home? Both black and Danish, like Nella Larsen who made her, Helga has been yanked through the pages of
Quicksand
from one home to another and then yet another. But homeless Helga sings that
Harlem, teeming black Harlem
, had welcomed her and lulled her into something that was, she was certain, peace and contentment
.

Oh, to be in Harlem again
after two years away
. This is Jake laying first sights on Harlem, arriving home from Europe after the Great War. His ecstasy can hardly be contained; it can hardly be believed. The
deep-dyed color
and the
thickness
and the
closeness
and the
noises
and the
sugared laughter
and the
honey-talk
and
ragtime
and
blues
. Never mind that Jake sounds more like a tourist than a joyous returnee. He does not return to the bosom of a woe-begotten mother, but to
Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem!
Sweet Harlem!
This is the Harlem to which downtown revelers (and downtown readers of Claude McKay’s
Home to Harlem
) flocked:
Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem
. Burning everywhere in the dark-eyed Harlem…. Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood
.

He stood up and his feet burned
. Then he remembered. He remembered walking until his feet were blistered where the soles had worn bare on his shoes. He remembered walking, but he didn’t know why he kept on walking.
Wretched Jule wakes up after his first night in Harlem, a rainy night spent on a bench in St. Nicholas Park. He is numb and hungry, his meager belongings in a small bundle—the luggage of swift departure. He is dazed by the streetlights reflected in the wet pavement. The tall buildings of City College—up the hill from the park—remind him (or his creator, George Wylie Henderson, in
Jule
) of the walls of Babylon. Where is good old Harlem, chocolate Harlem, sweet Harlem? Nowhere.
A sign on a lamppost said W. 135th St.
, but it didn’t mean anything to him.

King Solomon Gillis arrives in the same spot as Jule, under the same circumstances. (They have both murdered men.) But when he emerges from the train at 135th Street and Lenox he meets
clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight
. Then slowly, spreadingly, he grinned at what he saw.
Maybe he saw Emma Lou and Helga and Jule, new arrivals like himself, still staggered by the pace of life in Harlem. But perhaps he also saw, and was impressed by, the already acclimated, debonair, and citified habitués of the black metropolis. What is certain: He saw

For King Solomon Gillis, escaping the South in the pages of Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The City of Refuge,” Harlem offered freedoms that were not merely existential.
In Harlem, black was white
. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty…. The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also a city of refuge
.

“Who you say sentcher heah, dearie?”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Pinkie is full of doubts.
“Uh-a-a man down at the boat landing where I got off—North River. I just come in on the boat.”
But the rooming house where she has landed is full of unsavory characters.
She wished herself back home
again even with the ill treatment and squalor.
Faced with the city’s unyielding harshness, she has nothing to fall back on. She has three dollars, and they are stuffed in her shoe to guard against thieves. She thinks of
flight—but where?
Nowhere. For there was no home to which she could return, nor any place she knew.

Lutie Johnson scorns 116th Street, the street where she has landed, working as a maid to make a living for her son. She hates the street, it is the source of all her misfortunes, and they are many, but yet—when she comes home from cleaning houses there is a small dose of relief.

In Harlem Lutie is human, and she is not alone. Ascending the subway into Harlem after a day’s work in her domestic job downtown, at the very moment she enters the throng she achieves individuality.

Many of these books were among those on a reading list I made for myself around age fourteen. On the first page of a composition book I wrote the heading “Books written during the Harlem Renaissance” and plotted an itinerary through my library’s shelves, searching for this El Dorado of black literature. Besides these, there was Jean Toomer’s
Cane
and novels by Jessie Fauset. I read Federico García Lorca’s Harlem poems from
El Poeta en Nueva York,
in which he sets an unforgettable scene.
Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem!
I didn’t need the facing page of my bilingual edition to translate what he saw:
Negros! Negros! Negros! Negros!
Thus goes the attempt of
el poeta
to come to terms with Harlem.
Palabras
fail. Those are the barest facts of the situation: he escapes the realm of the poetic, and tumbles toward the sociological. To understand the problems presented by this bustling horde, one need only juxtapose García Lorca’s frenetic naming of
things (
blacks blacks blacks blacks
) with Lutie’s idea, on the pages of Ann Petry’s novel
The Street:
finally she was in a place where she was not merely black.

I like to think of Emma Lou and Helga and Lutie and Jule and King Solomon brushing shoulders with García Lorca, who is unable to grasp the various paths they followed as refugees and fugitives in that black city where he was a tourist. There are many paths, but how many destinations for this journey? Some, like Helga Crane, are immediately taken in, content to live within the boundary. Some, like, Emma Lou, long to see 135th Street and then find it does not merit their expectation. Surely there must have been many like Jule, for whom the destination itself did not conjure any particular magic. Or others like Pinkie, who would like to be anywhere, not there—thinking of flight but with no place to go. There is no going home, and the place where you have arrived offers no substantial shelter.

Emma Lou and Helga Crane both leave Harlem. Lutie is driven to commit a gruesome murder, and then flees, too. Reading their stories as a teenager in Texas, I only cared about the first part of their irresistible trajectory—an outward, upward momentum.

Of my own arrival, I can say that it is difficult to tell the beginning without any inkling of the end, to show you the light of enchantment without any shadow of disenchantment. I no longer find anything remarkable about my own arrival here. It was not the arrival of a fugitive or a refugee. That feeling—of running from something or running to something—only came later, in the very streets where I was living, and often simultaneously.

I cannot fit my entry into Harlem into a neat narrative arc, like those of Emma Lou and Helga, or Lutie and Pinkie. I had come to New York for a visit, with the faintest unresolved notion of
making a move. I bought the
Amsterdam News
on a Thursday, when the apartment listings would be new, and called up the cheapest spots. I saved the paper, so I can tell you that the listing described as
Harlem 1 bedroom / Renovated, locked doors / No fee. By Owner,
for $775 with a minimum income of $40,000 that I did not have, was already taken when I called. The
one bedroom for $775 with hardwood floors and new appliances in an elevator bldg and quiet neighborhood
must also have gone quickly. That would have left the studio apartment on Edgecombe Avenue for $675, which was not actually an option. A previous bad experience of cramped studio living had taught me the true nature of my Texan sense of space.

At the top of the page I found the ad for
3 Rms. Floor-thru apt. No Kit. Clean, Non-smoker. Ref’s req’d, $750/mo.
When I called the number the owner said the apartment wasn’t taken. In the margin of the now-creased and aged newsprint are the directions I quickly scrawled. I went uptown at once.

The apartment was located in the very last house on the block of 120th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. I met the landlady on the garden level and followed her up three flights of decrepit stairs. We entered the available apartment on the top floor. Its green-painted hallways and matching green carpet were hideous, but there was light streaming in from the front and back windows and a skylight presiding over the entryway and landing. To cross from the front to back required a short stroll. It was, even without a kitchen, the very definition of happiness. I wrote a check for the first and last months’ rent, then went downtown to collect my things.

At the time, the miraculous location of a floor-through brownstone apartment—even a floor-through brownstone apartment without a kitchen and with a lamentable green hallway complemented by ugly green wall-to-wall carpeting—held a certain
sense of destiny. It was somehow meant to be. The notion that an apartment without a kitchen was ever anyone’s destiny has to do with the general desperation of real estate in New York City, but it is a good indicator of how I saw the world then. I needed providence as an escort on my own ascent from the subway station into Harlem. I, too, was going to meet a place I had already filled with so many expectations. I, too, would have to match the pictures in my mind—the ones I’d invented and the ones I’d seen in books—with the world that was now my own.

But I did not immediately rush out to follow the trails of my favorite Harlem characters; I did not rush to stand before the hallowed sites where history had been made. I did not rush at all. I moved slowly, keeping a deliberately languid pace, because some part of me needed to pretend that my body was still in Texas. And my eyes were still in Texas, too, because I could not give up the habit (and did not lose it until much later) of meeting the eyes of everyone I passed. I didn’t know (or did know and didn’t mind) that it was through the eyes I would be dragged into stories.

I met eyes with the older ladies who gathered in front of buildings and with the elderly men who sat on park benches in the median, as the traffic rushed north and south around them. When crossing paths with young men who seemed about to make an unwanted advance, I smiled brightly and shouted
Hi!
like an overexcited flight attendant, and then kept walking while they were too stunned to reply. But often I did not refuse when a man offered to walk with me some part of the way down Lenox Avenue, always ending such promenades at the corner of my block. Once, I saw an old lady struggling with her groceries and offered my hands. We walked together for a while, but when she, too, stopped at the corner where her street met Lenox Avenue I was puzzled—alarmed that my assistance could be confused for predation.