B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (27 page)

It all comes down to a point that is as simple as it is terrible. It is a fact that closes in on itself, like the mythical serpent that devours its own tail: This is our land that we don’t own. At times the terrible simplicity of that fact was expressed at those various meetings, as the case for the moral claim to Harlem asserted by black people was detailed, with eloquence and power, in staggering litanies of abuses, triumphs, and betrayals, both historical and contemporary. But having enumerated such sorrows to the chairwoman of the New York City Planning Commission, most would have been met with a semirobotic smile before she said, as she did to me at the two hearings where I and many hundreds of others
gave testimony opposing the city’s plan,
Thank-you-will-you-please-submit-your-written-testimony-for-our-consideration
.

At meetings, people often say,
We have sweat equity in Harlem
. The reason for this is,
We have paid for it with our blood
.

But a blood payment and sweat equity were not what the Reverend W. W. Brown of Metropolitan Baptist Church had in mind during the earliest days of the Harlem Renaissance, when—according to James Weldon Johnson—
Reverend Brown’s Sunday sermons
began to instruct his parishioners not only on the dimensions of the kingdom of heaven or the mystical capacities of sin-cleansing blood, but on one simple necessity of their lives as black people living under white supremacy and American capitalism:
Buy Property!
It was a sacrament that mixed spiritual salvation with the earthly deliverance of the race.

A few decades later, another minister, Malcolm X, said it differently in his “Message to the Grassroots”:
Revolution is based on land
. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality
.

Revolution was not launched from the land mentioned in a recent article in the
Amsterdam News,
where the ongoing political-cum-theological debate over property and equity and blood and deliverance arrived at a quite different resolution. Suddenly, the commandment was not to acquire land but to relinquish it, to the highest bidder. The pastor of the Church of the Master, on Morningside Drive in the 120s, announced the demolition of its 115-year-old premises. The land beneath the church was sold to the developer of a condominium block whose residences would likely be out of reach for the minister or his flock. The announcement included date and time of the demolition, promoted as a spectacle.

During that winter of meetings, a woman known as Arapha Speaks, who sometimes refers to herself as the Cussin’ Preacher, established residence in a series of cardboard boxes fixed together
near the base of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. statue in front of the State Office Building. She identified each house by its number, according to the order in which it was built and the order of its destruction. She was continually being turned out of her houses, their contents seized and the structures demolished. At a community meeting convened to mourn and respond to the police murder of a young unarmed man shot in the back on the grounds of housing projects named for Harlem’s congressman at the time (who remained silent on the Columbia expansion and the rezoning of 125th Street), Arapha Speaks exhorted the assembly to take a stand.
Are you willing to come up out of your houses?
she asked. We were, she said, in as much danger of being turned out of our brick-and-mortar houses as she was from her cardboard ones. We had to be willing to be out-of-doors, without refuge, in order to preserve Harlem. She envisioned a movement in the form of a spiritual Exodus; she would lead midnight prayer meetings in the State Office Plaza, by the Powell statue. It was, she said, the only way to turn back the malevolent forces behind the destruction of her homes and the threat of Harlem’s obliteration.

At one of those hearings, I met a man who grew impatient when I expressed incredulity at his casual anecdote about a church that, in the 1980s or early 1990s, had been entrusted with the development of its own plot of land in addition to a number of brownstone houses. The houses had been acquired during the mythic era—immortalized by real estate journalists and speakers at community meetings—when brownstones in Harlem were being sold by the city for a dollar. The construction of that particular church had never come to pass—supposedly, the money was embezzled. The shell of the church’s half-built future home was still standing on Lenox Avenue at 131st when I arrived in Harlem—it resembled the ruin of a cathedral I’d seen in Berlin. Bombed during the Allies’ air war, its rubble was left
standing as if the strike had just occurred yesterday, both a memorial and a reminder to the German people of their sin. But on Lenox Avenue, there was no trace, no atonement: the property was developed into a condominium. For a few months, the tenant in the building’s ground-floor retail space was a black-owned car dealership specializing in Bentleys and other exotic luxury cars.

When I pressed for details about the spectacular failure of that ruined church, he shrugged his shoulders and gave the vaguest details about who absconded with the money.
It’s all well known
, he said,
this is all common knowledge
. But the era of profligacy had come to an end. He invoked an image from the Bible that was equal in force but directly opposite to that earlier mention of Exodus. He said it was as if we had been forty years in the desert and our time in the wilderness was just about to end.

All of this leaves quite a few unanswered questions.

Which is more valuable, “sweat equity” or actual equity, such as the kind mobilized by that preacher when he sold his church’s land to developers?

Does the legend of the one-dollar brownstone bring shame upon all in Harlem who did not purchase when the getting was good, or does the story unravel when you consider the minor detail that many would not have been able to afford to renovate or insure such a building because of red-lining practices by mortgage and insurance companies?

Do the people of Harlem stand with forty years of wilderness stretched out in front of us, or is deliverance close at hand, the Exodus already at our backs?

Depending on who tells the story,
the Black Star Line
was either Marcus Garvey’s most visionary Pan-African program or his greatest hoax. In 1919, Garvey launched his dream: the first black-owned shipping line to ply the seas, with black captains at the helm. It would refigure the old triangular trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and America. This new version would bypass Europe, and its cargo would be liberatory economic self-determination instead of slaves, cotton, rum, and sugar. Beyond goods,
the Black Star Line
would carry Garveyites back to Africa. Members of the UNIA flocked to support the endeavor, pledging at least $500,000 in stock certificates purchased at $5 apiece. The first ship was the SS
Frederick Douglass
. It was a reconditioned World War I navy ship, and it was a poor beginning for the shipping company. Worth only $25,000, the ship was sold to Garvey’s agents for $165,000 and then required a further $200,000 in repairs. In his own defense, Garvey later asserted that his appointed captain had profited from the payment on the ship. Another vessel, the SS
Antonio Maceo,
named for the Afro-Cuban general, was inaugurated with a celebration at one of Harlem’s piers. During its maiden voyage, it suffered a mechanical failure at sea that killed a crew member; it had to be towed into port. As
for the Black Star Line’s contribution to commerce, one voyage allegedly carried a cargo of tropical fruit that rotted because Garvey insisted that it make ceremonial stops at ports of call around the Caribbean. Another ship made a dramatic embarkment from the Hudson River, only to deposit its passengers a few miles north on what was deemed
the cruise to nowhere.

A letter published in the October 1921
issue of
The Crusader,
a magazine published by the Afrocentric, Marxist-influenced Hamitic League of the World, bore the headline
Salvation of the Negro
. The correspondent was writing from the South during the most virulent era of lynching, mob violence, land seizure, voter disenfranchisement, and debt peonage. But he did not believe—as Alain Locke did when he called Harlem
the Mecca of the New Negro
just a few years later—that salvation was located north of the Mason-Dixon Line:

I next saw the Chief at the library. He arranged himself across from me at a table in the reading room, and I knew my work for that day had come to an end. He eyed the books that were spread before me without offering an opinion on the selection. Then he produced his own reading material. This included photocopies of his Buy Black flyers and other ANPM literature I’d seen before. He laid them out as if entering exhibits into evidence. Last, he brought out a sheet bearing a brief passage. It had no headline, and gave no reference to its original source.

I asked if I could read that page, and when I finished, I asked permission to copy it down. He hesitated, and then—as if he were passing me a classified document, rather than a quotation that with a bit of effort I could locate in the pages of the ANPM newsletter, whose archives were available for public review right there in the library—he warily agreed, after insisting that
this is not meant for Europeans.

It was a quotation from Carlos Cooks. In the passage, Cooks is outlining the end result of a successful march to African Nationalism in America. And, despite the injunctions of the Chief,
Cooks’s words and his aims would have been familiar to certain Europeans of the twentieth century: