B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (40 page)
Authors: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has written a beautiful account of Harlem that tells us as much about the author, her life, her tastes, her politics, and her unique sensibility as it does about this extraordinary part of Manhattan. As a result,
Harlem Is Nowhere
is much more than a work of urban history; it is a work of literature.”
—Ian Buruma, author of
Murder in Amsterdam
“Potent social commentary…. Rhodes-Pitts’s assured writing supports her theory that Harlem, like black folks, is complex. It isn’t just one community but many communities. As mystical as New Orleans and as enchanting as Paris.”
—Patrik Henry Bass,
Essence
“Rhodes-Pitts weaves a glittering living tapestry of snatches of overheard conversation, sidewalk chalk scribbles, want ads, unspoken social codes, literary analysis, studies of black slang—all of it held together with assurance and erudition. Like Zora Neale Hurston (whose contradictions she nails), she is ‘tour-guide and interpreter’ of a Mecca cherished and feared, a place enduring and threatened that becomes home.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“In this beautiful and inventive book, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts finds—in a stray photograph, the corridors of a library, a wax museum, or a sidewalk chalk tract—pathways that lead us through and around another Harlem, interior to the ones we have known, and unforgettable. Written in the visionary documentary tradition of James Agee, Walter Benjamin, and Ralph Ellison,
Harlem Is Nowhere
is a work of great imagination and quiet splendor.”
—Rachel Cohen, author of
A Chance Meeting
“Rhodes-Pitts compares and contrasts her own experience of moving from Texas to Harlem with accounts from literature of the Harlem Renaissance and other cultural glories, and news reports of gentrification…. Settling into her own place in Harlem, she offers vivid portraits of the residents, who straddle the past and present of the storied neighborhood, many wondering themselves about their futures and the future of Harlem.”
—Vanessa Bush,
Booklist
“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has crafted a Harlem book that fluently and lyrically assays the geography, mythography, ethnography, and dream books of the fabled black Mecca. It is also a record of her own insightful wanderings about Uptown’s still mean, mirthful, romantic, but now highly marketable streets. What Rhodes-Pitts contributes to the Harlem chronicles that others have only vaguely glimpsed is how eloquently, extravagantly, and defiantly the people rooted there take ownership of Harlem storytelling every damn day.”
—Greg Tate, editor of
Everything but the Burden
“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s new book resists easy classification: It’s part literary walking tour, part urban history, part memoir, and all beautiful prose…. As Ralph Ellison, from whose 1948 essay Rhodes-Pitts borrows her book’s title, wrote in
Invisible Man:
‘This really was Harlem, and now all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive in my mind…. This was not a city of realities, but of dreams.’ Reading
Harlem Is Nowhere,
we’re also watching Rhodes-Pitts chase this dream, and it’s impossible to look away.”
—Laura Moser, “DoubleX Book of the Week,”
Slate
Poems by Langston Hughes—“The Weary Blues,” “Lament over Love,” “Harlem Night Song,” “Juke Box Love Song,” “Harlem (2) [‘What happens to a dream deferred…’],” and “Theme for English B”—are from
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
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Epigraph
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads”
: Flannery O’Connor, “The Regional Writer,” in
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 59.
“Harlem: A residential and business district”
:
The Columbia-Lippincott Gazetteer of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1952).
This volume reveals that a city called Hankow
:
The Handbook of Geographical Nicknames
(Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1980).
Harlem is blocked in
:
The WPA Guide to New York City
(New York: Pantheon, 1982), 253.
“Negro Harlem, into which are crowded”
: Ibid., 253 – 54.
a haven for the clerks and small merchants
:
Charles Henry White, “In Up-town New York,”
Harper’s Monthly Magazine,
112 (December 1905), 220.
“The whites paid little attention”
: James Weldon Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in
The New Negro: An Interpretation,
edited by Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), 303 – 4.
When the Hudson Realty Company
: Ibid., 304.
A December 17, 1905, article
:
New York Times,
“Real Estate Race War Is Started in Harlem,” December 17, 1905.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archivefree/pdfres=9B00E4DB153AE733A25754C1A9649D946497D6CF
(accessed May 5, 2010).
“An untoward circumstance”
:
New York Herald,
“Negroes Move into Harlem,” December 24, 1905. Excerpted in Allon Schoener,
Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900 – 1968
(New York: Random House, 1968), 23.
“Their presence is undesirable among us”
:
New York Indicator
article quoted by unattributed author in “Opinion: Land,”
The Crisis,
Vol. 8, No. 4 (August 1914): 176.
We believe… that real friends of Negroes
: Harlem Home News
, “Loans to
White Renegades Who Back Negroes Cut Off,” April 7, 1911. Excerpted in Schoener,
Harlem on My Mind
, 25.
“In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon”
: Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in Locke, ed.,
The New Negro: An Interpretation,
7.
Harlem represents the Negro’s latest thrust
:
Locke, “Harlem,” in
Survey Graphic
(March 1925: Special Issue, “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”): 629.
And there was New York City
:
Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” in Locke, ed.,
The New Negro: An Interpretation,
279.
In 1928, Wallace Thurman’s
: Wallace Thurman,
Negro Life in New York’s Harlem: A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section
(New York: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927), 5.
“Harlem, like a Picasso painting in his cubistic period”
: Langston Hughes, “My Early Days in Harlem,” in
Harlem, U.S.A.,
edited by John Henrik Clarke (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 85 – 89.
Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical
:
Locke, “Harlem,” 630.
“The question naturally arises”
: Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” 308.
more determination than ever… what was that line
:
Wallace Thurman,
The Blacker the Berry
… (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 66.
again she had that strange transforming experience
: Nella Larsen,
Quicksand and Passing
(New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 43.
Harlem, teeming black Harlem
:
Ibid.
Oh, to be in Harlem again
:
Claude McKay,
Home to Harlem
(Belmont, CA: Northeastern, 1987), 15.
Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem
:
Ibid.
He stood up and his feet burned
:
George Wylie Henderson,
Jule
(New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 96 – 97.
A sign on a lamppost said W. 135th St.
:
Ibid.
clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight
:
Rudolph Fisher, “City of Refuge,” in
The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 35.
“Negroes at every turn”
: Ibid.
In Harlem, black was white
:
Ibid., 36.
“Who you say sentcher heah, dearie?”
:
Zora Neale Hurston, “Muttsy,” in
The Complete Stories
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 41 – 42.
She wished herself back home
:
Ibid., 45.
24
flight—but where?
:
Ibid.
“She got off the train”
: Ann Petry,
The Street
(Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1946), 57.
“Up here they are no longer creatures”
: Ibid.
Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem!
:
Federico García Lorca, “El Rey de Harlem / The King of Harlem,” in
Poet in New York: A Bilingual Edition
(New York: Grove Press, 2007), 25 – 33.
a long, hand-wringing article
: Adam Gopnik, “Saving Paradise,”
The New Yorker
(April 22, 2002), 76 – 84.
More recently a plaintive piece
: Trymaine Lee, “Harlem Pas de Deux,”
New York Times,
February 17, 2008.
a housing deficit, lacking over 38,000 units
: Danilo Pelletiere, Keith Wendrip, Sheila Crowley,
Out of Reach 2006
(New York: National Low Income Housing Coalition), 15.
the availability of a quality latte in Harlem
: John Leland, “A New Harlem Gentry in Search of Its Latte,”
New York Times,
August 7, 2003.
The article ended by celebrating
: Michael Stoler, “The Sweetest and Best of Manhattan,”
New York Sun
, September 1, 2005.
any land where the native people were not Christians
: V. Y. Mudimbe,
The Idea of Africa
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 30.
nineteenth-century British architects of the plan
: Diana Muir, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,”
The Middle East Quarterly
15 (Spring 2008): 55 – 62.
The controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition
: The show was a groundbreaking endeavor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sparking debate and dissent on many fronts. It was a major exhibition at the nation’s premier art museum, but it did not feature any art, instead offering multimedia displays, archival photos, music. This was seen as an affront to black artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, and as anathema to cultural conservatives, who saw the museum as straying from its role; both sides deemed the show a sociological exhibit. Meanwhile, community representatives from Harlem who’d been brought in to bolster the show’s credibility withdrew their support. Finally, the exhibition catalog contained an essay by a teenage Harlemite who was accused of anti-Semitism for her statements about the relationship between black Harlemites and Jewish shopkeepers. For more information about the historic exhibition, see Matthew Israel, “As Landmark: An Introduction to ‘Harlem on My Mind,’ ” Art Spaces Archive Project, http://as-ap.org/Israel/resources.cfm (accessed August 29, 2010).
“A railroad ticket and a suitcase”
: Locke, “Harlem,” 630.
When I came out of the subway
:
Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man
(New York: Vintage, 1995), 159.
“This really was Harlem”
: Ibid.
“I spent as much time as I could in Harlem”
: Langston Hughes, “My Early Days in Harlem,” in
Harlem, U.S.A.
, edited by John Henrik Clarke (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 57 – 59.
youthful illusion that Harlem was a world unto itself
:
Ibid.
“The arrival uptown, Harlem”
: Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones, “The Black Arts (Harlem, Politics, Search for a New Life),” in
Autobiography of LeRoi Jones
(Chicago: Freundlich Books, 1984), 202.
the Negro’s latest thrust
:
Alain Locke, “Harlem,” in
Survey Graphic
(March 1925: Special Issue, “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro”): 629.
“It’s you young folks”
: Ellison,
Invisible Man,
255.
She eschewed the “Y” as too bare
: Larsen,
Quicksand,
44.
“Beds with long, tapering posts”
: Ibid.
“Little by little the signs of spring appeared”
: Ibid.
the dark, dirty, three rooms
:
Petry,
The Street,
12.
“The farther up they went”
: Ibid.
I usedta live in the world
:
Ntozake Shange, from
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf
(New York: Macmillan, 1977), 28.
Black boy / O black boy
:
Melvin B. Tolson, from “Alpha,” in
The Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965), 20.
sometimes a few little Italians and Jewish children
: New York Evening Post
, April 6, 1910.
“Although Mrs. Matthews was at the dock”
: Mary L. Lewis, “The White Rose Industrial Association: The Friend of the Strange Girl in New York,”
The Messenger
VII (April 1925), 158.
friend of the strange girl
:
Ibid.
Let us call it White Rose
:
Hallie Q. Brown, “Victoria Earle Matthews, 1861 – 1898,” in
Homespun Heroines
(Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1926), 214.