B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (34 page)

As early as 1993, one reporter was suspicious of Chanticleer’s tale. Chanticleer gave an interview to the
New York Post
very soon after the birth of the museum. Pointing at the various items he’d created, he announced that one of his furniture designs had won a prize at the 1940 World’s Fair. The reporter remarked that, according to the 1936 birth date Chanticleer had provided, the achievement would have been prodigious—he would have been four years old.

I could read and write
when I was four,
Raven countered sharply before changing the subject. The article proceeds with the reporter’s tongue placed complicitly in cheek.
Pointing to an idealized rustic scene à la Woolworth’s
—complete with utopian cabin—
[he] continues,
“
That’s the house in Alabama where I lived when I joined Martin Luther King’s Freedom Ride.
”
Sensing the reporter’s wariness, he asks, “You believe me, don’t you?”

I looked up the census on a computer program available at the library, used mostly by people searching out their own ancestry. I hoped it would yield other information about this James Watson.
He appears in 1930
as the one-and-a-half-year-old youngest child of Henry and Abbie Watson. Henry was thirty-five years old in 1930, Abbie was thirty-three. Their family included Sam, age nine; Leroy, age seven; Irene, age six; and Fred, age three. Also listed in their household were two boarders, both twenty-three years old, by the names of Geneva Moore and David Watson.
Henry and Abbie Watsons were renters. Henry’s occupation is listed as a laborer in public works, and Abbie took in laundry at home.

Looking at the facts of the Watson household as revealed by those few lines scrawled by a census taker, I began to understand why their youngest son might have embroidered his history. We are used to the idea that to forget, obscure, or embellish is to forsake. Such was the forgetfulness which Chanticleer tried to abolish with his museum, and that Arthur Schomburg tried to abolish with his library. But Raven Chanticleer’s forgetfulness was also his transcendence. Forgetting, obscuring, and embellishing were vital to Chanticleer’s self-creation. He transcended his earthly birth to become the first figure immortalized in wax at his museum.

Raven Chanticleer included his parents in his mythology—he mentioned them in those newspaper accounts, gave them new countries of origin, new accomplishments, and his new name. This could be seen as a disavowal, a rejection of his origins. Or it could be seen as an act of love. His invented Haitian patrimony provided Chanticleer with a strain of racial heroism, and the fiction of his mother’s musical career gave him an artistically inclined pedigree. But he’d also provided his parents with an alternative existence, a different future.

But what about all of his siblings? Were they also given illustrious new biographies? And what of all the other sons and daughters of sharecroppers from the South among whom Raven Chanticleer lived in Harlem, and who were to be uplifted by his museum—had he transcended them, too?

I didn’t find a specific moment when James Watson disappears from public record and Raven Chanticleer takes his place. It is not possible, from the facts available at the library, to know when this man—who was not, in fact, a native son of Harlem—actually arrived up north and uptown. It is not possible to know what he
saw when exiting the subway station. The shock of it, the distance between the world he was entering and the one he’d been born into, might have been enough to make him want to rewrite his entire history. Walking those streets, where he did not—as a child at least—see Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Louis Armstrong, may have given him the feeling of being born again. Life as he had lived it up to that point was obliterated. This new life was one in which he was the parent and the child, the artist and the creation.

The census document on the computer didn’t unlock any door to the past. I left the Watson family in 1930 and
considered the name
Raven Chanticleer had chosen for himself. The last name is a word taken from Old French, meaning “clear song.” Chanticleer is the merry and colorful rooster made famous in an episode of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. This wily cock outwits the fox who hunts him, tricking death with a last-minute escape. Raven Chanticleer’s first name honors another trickster bird. In many Native American stories, the raven’s powers include shape-shifting and creation.

Or perhaps the new name stood for nothing but his transcendence. Maybe Raven Chanticleer just liked the sound of those words as they flew from his tongue. It would be reason enough. Keen to shake that suspicious
Post
reporter from his tail, Raven Chanticleer insisted on being known by his true name:
I’m an
artiste
…
stress that. I’m not an artist, I’m an
artiste.
And flamboyant. Yes? Naw! The word is totally inadequate.

Sometime before the day when she invited me into her apartment, I’d mentioned to Ms. Minnie that I might need to interview her to help with research for this book. The request was a truce, settling the war I was having with myself. I was not sure I wanted to
interview anyone, but if I asked, I’d have to do it. An eminent essayist I respected said (in an interview) that she didn’t trust interviews and did not conduct them. This supplied me an excuse, for I had the distinct suspicion that the very act of posing a question irrevocably alters the answer you receive. There was a difference—perhaps especially in Harlem—between what people told you from memory, unbidden and of their own volition, and the nostalgic tones that crept in when you asked them a question, no matter how specific, about The Past. Perhaps this discrepancy was a function of my interview skills, but I did not think it
should
be a matter of interview skills. I did not want to be haranguing my neighbors with a tape recorder and reporter’s pad. When I asked Ms. Minnie, it was because I thought I should give interviews a try—in the name of a method more respectable than memory. I told her I’d slip a note under her door with a formal request.

My misgivings won out. I never slipped that note under her door. Instead, I continued to see Ms. Minnie in the ways to which we were accustomed: in the hallway checking our mailboxes, or crossing paths when she was coming in for the day after her morning excursion while I was just going out. We complimented each other, me remarking on how well she looked, her telling me about the secret product she used for smooth skin, or about making soap in her childhood yard with lye and lard, or about piling into a car with girlfriends, going from South Carolina to dances in Georgia. She pulled my coat closed as the winter approached, and was pleased when we met and I was properly bundled. We told each other how glad we were to be neighbors, we said hello, we said goodbye and that we loved each other. She would tell me about various characters on the street, and she told me to stop and stare.

None of these things are “material” of the sort I would have gained had I interviewed her. The archive of oral histories at the Schomburg is surely bursting with such material. Now that
Ms. Minnie is gone, the part of me that wants to be a more obedient student of history regrets not having conducted a formal interview. But there was something else gained in the conversations we did have. It was not just a transaction of information; there was also the care she gave me, and the care I hope I gave her. And, sometimes, in those moments we had together, something passed between us that could not have been caught on tape yet bears witness to something too vast to be contained on paper.

One day when we stood in front of our building, Ms. Minnie was telling me about her hometown, Denmark, South Carolina. She told me it was
a black town
and her sister-in-law was mayor. Then she shared a detail I had not known in our years as neighbors and acquaintances. It is a detail that I would not have necessarily asked about and that she would not necessarily have told me had I ever slipped the note under her door formally asking for her stories and her time. She told me that Davis was her married name. Her family name was Sojourner. I said it was a beautiful name, and she told me that not many people knew about her true name—only those who knew her from home. She looked me squarely in the eye before continuing.
That’s not a slave name.

I went to West 115th Street to see Raven Chanticleer’s house. Finding it did not require the exact address. I recognized the building from a photocopy in the files, because the house had once graced the cover of Italian
Vogue.
For the occasion, Raven Chanticleer had posed outside, wearing a fur coat. The house is still painted with the exuberant mural. A dream landscape on the stoop shows a tropical scene—a beach, a little fish, an ominous shark. Another mural shows an Egyptian fantasia, with the Sphinx, the pyramids, and the same palm trees as shown on the beach.
I love beautiful things
,
Raven Chanticleer once said.
I just
have to make things around me beautiful.
An example of his inclination was a pair of trash cans near his stoop, decorated with the faces of a king and queen. Showing those same cans to a reporter, Chanticleer had declared:
In the midst of ugliness
, I find beauty.

When I visited, the low, winding staircase leading to the front door was blocked at the sidewalk by a high gate. The gate was closed and secured by a chain. A fine cobweb drawn over the padlock added the appearance of abandonment—perhaps the gate had not been unlocked in some time. But the uppermost windows facing the street were open, as if to ventilate the house during the summer’s heat. A fan was visible through one open window. I could not see any lights inside. The only way I could have made my presence known was to begin rattling the gate and shouting up to that open window. I was not inclined to do so.

At that moment a man appeared from the garden level of the house directly adjacent—a house built of sandstone, a staid aristocrat beside its neighbor, the garish painted lady. The man asked me if I needed any assistance, and I told him I was just looking at the museum of Raven Chanticleer. He told me that I was looking at the wrong house. His own building had been the actual museum—Chanticleer had lived behind the elaborate facade next door.

When I asked the man if he knew what had happened to the contents of the museum, he shrugged. He thought they’d been placed in storage after Chanticleer’s death. When I told him I’d noticed that the number for the museum was still listed in the phone book, he smiled with mild embarrassment. He had always intended to call the phone company to have the listing removed, he said. He was responsible for the illusion that the museum was still open.

He told me that relatives of Raven Chanticleer, a niece and nephew, now lived in the house with the murals. Thinking of the
cobweb I’d just seen, I was surprised to hear this; it must have been the busy work of a spider earlier that morning. The man said Chanticleer’s relatives were very friendly and would probably be happy to help in my research. He gave me their names, and I thanked him for taking the time to speak, apologizing for lingering outside his door.

I knew, even as he suggested it, that I would not leave a note at that gate or call the niece and nephew to get additional details beyond what Raven Chanticleer had so carefully curated at the library. I might have discovered more of the official story, but it seemed like a trespass. I had not been invited beyond the gate.

Perhaps it is an act of respect due the dead—akin to certain ointments applied to a corpse, or the proper prayers murmured beside an open coffin—to not want to know more than they cared to tell.
I’ll tell you tomorrow… I’ll tell you tomorrow
… Perhaps it is an act of love. Raven Chanticleer told the most crucial details of his story. The fact that he invented his origins is important, but it would be too easy to dwell on his flamboyant character and the sensational lies from which he sculpted his existence. Apart from all that, there was also the very simple, and very honorable, mission of his life’s work.

I started the museum
to bring our history to life, and to help people’s self-esteem
, he said.
I created these wax figures
to keep alive their words and their deeds at a time when too many African Americans think we have no heroes….
The wax museum has been my dream
since childhood
.