B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (5 page)

I did not make a pilgrimage to the home of Langston Hughes. Instead I met—probably in the street—a young man who lived in Hughes’s old house and who made certain everyone knew this fact within minutes of making his acquaintance. I did not immediately go up to the Schomburg Center. Instead I spent hours at a branch library, reading the newspaper and waiting to use the public computers in order to look for a job. Eventually I started going out to dances and art openings, but many more nights I stayed inside, listening to the radio and to the sounds of traffic on Seventh Avenue.

I furnished my apartment with discoveries from junk shops and neighborhood antique dealers whose premises were filled to the rafters with half-upholstered sofas and repaired lamps that would likely never again give light. I purchased a barely functional but finely crafted chair that was sold to me on assurance that I was “handy.” I pined after an Art Deco bedroom set that had supposedly belonged to Billie Holiday. It would have cost more than a month’s rent, which I could not spare, and my mother warned me by phone from Texas not to trust the pedigree. I picked up tables from the sidewalk, bought cut-glass goblets from the Salvation Army on 125th Street, and purchased knickknacks from elderly ladies having tag sales to raise money for their church. I spent the money for two weeks’ worth of groceries on an exotic folding table with a copper-tray tabletop. The seller said it was Persian; his final, successful sales ploy was that although it was his sincere desire to give me a bargain price, he could easily get more money from buyers of
the other persuasion
—by which he meant white shoppers at flea markets in suburban Connecticut. And though I could not remove the sickly green carpet, my landlady relented to my capricious wish to paint the walls of my study an overheated red. (It was the presence of that extra room, just for my work, that had caused me to accept the kitchenless dwelling.)

I had the sense, when putting together these implements for life in my first apartment, that I was bringing in castaways, remnants of other lives that had been lived here. During those early days in Harlem, I also saw great piles of furniture and clothes on sidewalks, of greater quantity and less organization than one would see in an average trash disposal. These piles confused me, until I realized they were the aftermath of evictions.

Even though it was just a few short years ago, nearly all of the stores where I bought the items for my first apartment are gone—there is no room for the junk of old Harlem. But then, the junk prevailed, in shops and on piles in the street. Though I didn’t know who lived in my rooms before me, I was already aware of the furor in Harlem about gentrification. I arrived the very week
a long, hand-wringing article
on the subject had appeared in
The New Yorker
.
More recently a plaintive piece
in the
New York Times
sought to find common ground between Harlem old and new, but instead skillfully illustrated the distance between them. In an interview, one new resident described parties featuring a parlor game in which she and other recent arrivals joked about what amenities the neighborhood needed most. The answer agreed upon at the latest gathering was that Harlem was in dire need of a Thai restaurant. At the time, Harlem was also experiencing
a housing deficit, lacking over 38,000 units
of housing needed by its poorest residents.

When I was new to Harlem and experiencing my own pangs of complicity on the issue, I asked a politically minded friend if I was a gentrifier. He firmly answered no—because I was black and poor. I was not convinced. Another friend laughed at the archetypal narrative of my move north and dubbed me Miss Great Migration 2002.

If I was part of the new Harlem, that meant the new café at the end of my block, opened only a few months before I moved to
town, should have been my natural habitat. It was lauded as a marvel of civilization and progress—one
New York Times
reporter theorized that
the availability of a quality latte in Harlem
was a symbol of the neighborhood’s imminent conversion. Yet I couldn’t help but wince when noticing my elderly neighbor Mr. Edward standing outside the door of that new café, but never going in. He hovered next to the entrance, drinking a seventy-five-cent cup of bodega coffee.

Once, while sitting inside the café, I happened to overhear a conversation between two white men seated nearby. One seemed to be a stay-at-home dad who worked in marketing; he talked business while nursing a toddler in a stroller. I gathered from eavesdropping that the other man was visiting his friend’s new neighborhood for the first time.
This is fabulous
, he exclaimed. Then, noting the first man’s skills in marketing, he added:
Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more
people
up here!

I later read an article in the
New York Sun
that joyously reported that developers had purchased several high-rise rental buildings in Harlem and would be turning them into expensive condominiums. The buildings, long a stronghold of Harlem’s middle class, were originally built as a consolation prize because blacks were barred from living in similar developments in lower Manhattan.
The article ended by celebrating
the return of
people
to Harlem, which used to be a place
people
only visited, during Prohibition, for booze and big bands.

The visitor I overheard and the journalist I read were afflicted by that exuberant myopia common to colonists of varied epochs and ambitions: thus did the explorers conquering Africa for God, king, country, and commerce, declare with the endorsement of the Vatican that
any land where the native people were not Christians
was officially a
terra nullius
, a no-man’s-land. (
There need to
be more people up here!
) Thus did the
nineteenth-century British architects of the plan
to restore Europe’s Jews to Israel as a refuge against pogroms (a plan conceived mostly from British theological and political self-interest) examine the map of the ancient homeland and declare that it was an empty territory,
a land without a people for a people without a land
. (
There need to be more people up here!
)

I should not have been shocked by those careless quips, but it was the sort of thing that made me especially tight-lipped when I happened to run into a white acquaintance downtown who, upon hearing I had moved to Harlem, and perhaps having read that recent
New Yorker
article, was pressingly curious to know about
interesting things going on up there
….

During those first months in New York, I was busy with an assignment at my new job with a Harlem-based publisher: to pore through the archives of photographer James VanDerZee in order to make a new book of his images. VanDerZee’s photo studio operated during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, capturing Harlemites in elegant portraits, wearing their finest threads. His were the kind of pictures that would have pride of place on a mantel or be tucked into an envelope along with a letter sent back home, a tableau of the good life available up north. When VanDerZee’s work was rediscovered in the late 1960s by curators of
the controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his photographs of cosmopolitan Harlem provided an antidote to the destitute, shell-shocked image then attached to the neighborhood and formed a new iconography of its best days.

VanDerZee’s Harlem is a province of extravagance, culture, and high society. We meet the delicate young students of a dancing
school, adorable in a hundred different ways, and the dandified members of all-male social clubs. In individual portraits of cultured ladies and fine gentlemen, unidentified Harlemites whose personal histories are not preserved display the glamour and bearing of celebrities and aristocrats. A couple poses in front of an exquisite convertible sedan clad in matching full-length raccoon fur coats. A group portrait shows a vast wedding party, the bridesmaids wearing matching taffeta headgear and the men dressed in white tie, all attended by a retinue of flower girls and ring-bearers. Improbably, VanDerZee’s signature—etched into the negative of these photos—shows that both pictures were taken in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression.

Outside the archive, I compared the buildings and the faces I saw in the street to the buildings and faces in the photographs. It was easy to establish which intersection was the setting of a certain parade and easy to note how soot and grime had attached to the facade of a certain church. But it was not possible, just by looking, to establish a direct connection between the people I saw motionless in the photographs and coursing through the streets. One could assume a trajectory, the continuity of families across eight or nine decades.
Here we have arrived
, the photographs whispered.
And here we remain,
came the answer from the streets. But I noticed in the contemporary faces some alteration, the consequence of a force not visible within the frame.

Then, I was always looking for approval, seeking it out in a returned smile—I was looking for mutuality. I was not known by anyone; they could not verify my background. I was unable, therefore, to truly lay claim to this place where I’d landed. My relationship to it was, for some time, like the effect of a picturesque landscape that hangs as a backdrop in a portrait studio, with the sitter arranged statically in the foreground.

It was a setting. It was not, exactly, History.

VanDerZee’s portraits escort the viewer halfway into the interior life of Harlem, but anonymity brusquely slams the door. It is not possible to learn about the journey each person made to this place, or how that congregation managed to acquire its fine premises, or just what those all-male social clubs were getting up to in their smartly matched gear. The piles of VanDerZee photos in the archive and that frantic line from García Lorca (
Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blacks!
) speak a common tongue. It is the noise of the crowd.

The faces in the archive and the ones in the street were equally out of reach. We shared color and we shared location. At the moment when those two elements had just begun to collide in black Harlem, the combination produced a shared aspiration and a shared riddle. On the one hand, to cross the physical boundary was to overthrow the color line. But the forces of color and culture could be harnessed and endowed with a liberating power. Alain Locke, serving in his role as chief interpreter and philosopher of the New Negro movement, explained it as a question of velocity:

Locke speaks of the
Negro peasant
and his educated counterpart; both are transformed by their new surroundings. Both are subject to the original conundrum of the place: it is the result of bigotry and exclusion. It is also a proving ground for aspirations. It is a place that contracts one’s possibilities, and a place where all things are possible.

In
Invisible Man,
Ralph Ellison joins Locke’s two Harlem archetypes in one body. His narrator’s entry into Harlem was much like the others I’d read about, but with an added dose of poetry:
When I came out of the subway
, Lenox Avenue seemed to careen away from me at a drunken angle, and I focused upon the teetering scene with wild, infant’s eyes, my head throbbing.
Ellison’s Invisible Man is intoxicated by what he sees: