B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (32 page)

I crafted my own version of its history. I assumed it was named for the barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, which is the stronghold of Gullah culture and the ancestral home of many Harlemites whose roots are in that state. It was also the location
of
the Port Royal experiment
, an episode during the Civil War when the Union Army, having driven the slaveowners off the land, organized the freedmen to manage and operate the plantations they had already been running to create income that would help fund the Union’s effort.

I became convinced, based only on my fantasies, that each funeral home in Harlem had a very specific following, determined not by quality of service or membership in a certain church or lodge, but by the place from which one’s family came. According to my explanation, the services of each particular chapel included preparing the body, arranging the services, and then carrying the body back home. Attached to this last fantasy was a fugitive factoid from my earliest researches at the Schomburg Center as a student visiting New York. It crossed my mind whenever I passed the Carolina Chapel; though it was not exactly appropriate, the memory could not be suppressed. Back when I’d been frantically researching the Scottsboro Boys, and black madonnas, and eighteenth-century executions of slave children, I was also looking up the dramatic structure of old minstrel shows. I jotted down the following words, which were often spoken as the curtain was about to close:
And now, kind friends
, as all good things must come to an end, so too must this part of our entertainment come to an end, and thanking you one and all, we’ll say farewell, for we are going back to Carolina.

Putting an end to all this speculation, one day I happened to pass the Mickey funeral home on Lenox and finally saw a man standing outside. His elegant dress and the way he commanded the expanse of sidewalk directly in front of the building’s entryway made me certain he was the undertaker. I decided that instead of those unfruitful hellos with the owner of the St. Helena parlor, I would take my chance. I greeted him and asked if he was the proprietor. When he assured me he was, I explained my curiosity
about the name of his establishment. Why was it called the Carolina Chapel? He confirmed my suspicion that the owners had come from the Carolinas. When I asked him what year they’d arrived in Harlem, he said he wasn’t sure, maybe in the 1930s, but they had come to New York earlier and had gone to Brooklyn first.

After he answered my question, and I thanked him brightly for solving my riddle (
Oh, I had always wondered about that
), our conversation did not continue. There was no invitation beyond the gate. I proceeded up the avenue, proud of myself for having defeated my fancies, yet knowing I’d only produced a bit of trivia.

By then, having hesitated at the door of those two funeral parlors so many times without entering, without reason, I created a logic for my apprehension, or at least an excuse. One should not venture into a funeral home without cause, I told myself. It was a convenient superstition, invented especially for the occasion.

The Harlem rituals of death
have parallels with those of the ancient necropolis of Egypt. They are in the continuum of those on the Nile of four thousand years ago.
Thus begins Camille Billops’s introduction to
The Harlem Book of the Dead,
which collects the funeral portraits made by James VanDerZee. In addition to the parade pictures and studio portraits for which he became famous, VanDerZee also made pictures of dead people in their coffins. It was a common practice at the time, and a good source of income.

In these pictures, death is recorded as yet another milestone of life—along with baptism, graduation, or marriage. At the time, a portrait was a common way to commemorate another rite of passage. A newly arrived southerner might pose in his finest clothes for a picture that could be sent to the family left behind. The photographs
of the dead are also for the left behind. In VanDerZee’s funeral portraits, the dead are sometimes pictured alone; sometimes their essential aloneness is pierced by the presence of mourners posed impassively nearby. The coffins are lined with gleaming satin and taffeta and piled with arrangements of mums, roses, carnations, and lilies. The corpses wear cakey makeup and fine clothes.

Usually, the portraits are enhanced with one of VanDerZee’s special death portrait innovations. When producing the prints, he superimposed embellishments onto the picture. Sometimes these were stock images of angelic orders hovering above, unfurling scrolls that contained a few lines of poetry or a prayer. Sometimes he merged the past with the present, double-exposing the funeral image with an old portrait of the same person while alive. The death of a soldier is commemorated in a picture decorated with an American flag. At times VanDerZee’s interventions are not technological, but merely a matter of arrangement. One picture shows a dead man with his arms folded around a newspaper that announces the 1927 death of Florence Mills. The funerals took place on the same day.
To make this dead gentleman
look more natural, his family wanted the paper put in his hand, to make it appear he had been reading and had just dozed off.

But sometimes, despite arrangement and embellishment, the pictures still told their own story. A father cradles a dead infant in his arms, as if the child is still alive. I wonder if this was according to VanDerZee’s instruction. The father smiles ever so slightly, as if proudly admiring his child on the day it was born. The mother, perched on the arm of the photography studio’s prop chair, leans over her husband’s shoulder, also looking at the baby. But VanDerZee’s carefully composed domestic scene failed to conceal the odd look on her face, which reads as derangement mixed with accusation.

In an interview featured along with the portraits, VanDerZee mentions Mickey’s funeral home as one of the places where he worked regularly. It is only a passing detail among many passing details. At the prompting of the interviewer, VanDerZee recounts small snippets from the stories of the dead, whether the circumstances of their death, the repercussions of their death (an inheritance), or how he had come to produce a certain effect within the frame. Indeed, throughout the interview, he sometimes seems a bit annoyed by the probing questions of the archivist, Camille Billops. Perhaps for VanDerZee the book consists of photographs of people who have no relation to each other or significance beyond proximity of circumstance and time: They had lived in Harlem, they had died, and they had died in Harlem while James VanDerZee was making some portion of his living by fulfilling the demand for funeral portraiture, then in fashion.

VanDerZee offers the half-remembered details surrounding the death of one young beauty, her fair skin somewhat mottled by an exuberant application of mortuary makeup. Her fate is obscured by the satin ripples and mounds of flowers. She’d fallen ill at a party, complaining of stomach pain. When her friends took her to lie down, loosening her clothes for comfort, they discovered that she was bleeding from the abdomen. She’d been shot in the midst of the revelry by a silenced gun. Asked to identify her assailant as she was dying, all she said was,
I’ll tell you tomorrow
, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

The woman’s murder and her last words, giving her disgruntled lover enough time to escape, provided
the point of departure for Toni Morrison’s novel
Jazz
. The novel, an imaginary version of the circumstances surrounding the young woman’s fate, does more than fictionalize fact. In weaving a complete story from the woman’s fragmented deferral, Morrison unravels the trick this woman played on the living at the moment of her death. It is a
commonplace that the dead tell no tales. But no cliché has been invented to capture just how troubled we are by those who take their truth beyond the grave.

On Lenox Avenue, a brownstone owner took special care, when restoring his property’s facade, to uncover and preserve a sign. Thick black letters spelling “G&G Photo Studio” stand out against a white background that is streaked with residual brown paint. When the sign was first uncovered, it was a marvel:
That is VanDerZee’s studio! That is where he worked!
The physical excavation of that sign made the fact more urgent than if I’d just found the address in a history book and then gone to stand at the door. I imagined the process of uncovering it, precise as the deft brushwork used at excavations to unearth a fossilized skull preserved by volcanic ash.

Until recently, the old VanDerZee studio housed a new real estate office specializing in condos and brownstone conversions. But the agent must have had poor business, because later I saw a sign posted in the window announcing that the marshal had taken possession of the premises. The customized awning that advertised the office is still there, but the name has been painted out. Elsewhere in Harlem, other long-gone storefronts also retain their signs. These are not acts of preservation or additions to the tourist trail, they are simply the last traces of failed enterprises. As with the sign above VanDerZee’s studio, the letters are only meaningful to one who knows. And even then, they only mean so much.
That is where he was, he is not there any longer.

In
The Harlem Book of the Dead,
when VanDerZee is asked why people had stopped taking pictures with their dead loved ones, he answers bluntly.
I didn’t know they had stopped
. They’re still doing it today. Sometimes the family wanted to be there to show the other relatives just how the deceased had been put away
.

If funeral portraiture captured images of the dead that were of more use to the living, the traditional books of the dead for which
the collection of VanDerZee’s funeral pictures is named are oriented more insistently toward the hereafter. They examine not only how to manage the passage in a psychological and metaphysical sense, but actually how one might, by ritual, transcend earthly existence, defeat death, and penetrate eternity.

The Egyptian death rites cited in the introduction to
The Harlem Book of the Dead
are based on
the epic lamentation of Isis
, who scoured the four corners of the earth in search of the dismembered parts of her murdered husband, Osiris. In putting him back together again and achieving his resurrection, she helps him gain immortality, establishing him as Lord of the Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. The incantation of Isis’s lament formed the foundation of all burial ceremonies in ancient Egypt. Mourners, in preparing the body, also accomplished the resurrection of their dead. The belief was that each man buried according to those original rites would also live forever and, in death, become the risen god.

The
Tibetan Book of the Dead
is also a carefully conceived ritual for immortality, meant to be read aloud to a person who is dying; it includes a description of various regions of the afterlife, particularly the
bardo,
that territory between the end of one life cycle and the rebirth which begins the next. This description of the landscapes that one would pass through after leaving earth was preparation for the journey. This may be a kind of comfort, but it is also an initiation. Another important part of the Tibetan philosophy of death is that the soul must depart the body in a certain manner, so that the condition of the spirit in the next life could be elevated. A person had to know how to die in order to achieve this transcendence, leading to eventual liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Perhaps participating in the ritual deathbed reading, engaging the earthly part of the passage, was one occasion to learn.

In 1981, after living downtown and abroad, Raven Chanticleer returned to his native Harlem.
I had to come back
,
he told one journalist.
I imagined myself as some kind of pioneer
,
he told another.
And I figured that if those people in their covered wagons withstood all those Indians and the cold winters, then so could I.
He’d been working at Bergdorf Goodman when
crossing West 110th Street
one day I felt the pulsation—the beat of the drums—call me forth to give my people the wax form.