B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (7 page)

When I lived in the house on 120th Street, sometimes I did not leave Harlem for weeks at a stretch. I didn’t need to: my new job was only three blocks from my home. I would walk back to my apartment for lunch, and I didn’t have much money to spend exploring the rest of the city. When I was in need of entertainment I found plenty to do above 110th Street. Sometimes this felt like a comfort—I was cosseted by those streets. By restricting my own movements I avoided the complication that a life lived in the whole of the city would later bring. But for me this was a choice. One of my new acquaintances around the corner was a teenage girl who went to school in deepest Brooklyn and made an epic underground journey there and back each school day, but had never in her brief life been to Greenwich Village.

I was always in the streets in those days, and they were usually filled with lively and amusing scenes. But once, walking down Lenox, I passed a large family group sitting outside their building to escape the summer’s heat. There were people of all ages, from toddlers to grandparents. I noticed in particular a tiny girl entertaining herself in an inspired moment of make-believe; she was chattering with great animation into a pay phone. No sooner had I noticed her at play, than a man in the group, perhaps her father, had noticed her, too, and he rushed up behind the child to punish her, shocking her out of that mime with severe blows about the back of her legs. It all happened so quickly, her face contorted with terrible shrieks, the receiver dangled as she was reprimanded. I do not record this so that it should stand in for all little girls in Harlem or all fathers in Harlem, but because, as that scene played out before my eyes, those substitutions
were
made, all at once.
Only one thing crossed my mind, and it arrived without the intervention of any rational thought:
Burn it down.
At that moment, I wanted any place in any corner of the universe that could contain what I’d just seen to no longer exist.

Sometimes I remembered a line from Ntozake Shange’s play
for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf
. The words had puzzled me when I read them as a teenager in Texas. A character remarks:
I usedta live in the world
, but then I moved to Harlem, and my universe is now six blocks.

And elsewhere, the poet Melvin Tolson mused:
Black boy / O black boy
, / Was the port worth the cruise?

During the years when New York was swelling with newcomers from Europe’s shores, Victoria Earle Matthews established a refuge specializing in the welfare of those not included among Lady Liberty’s huddled masses. Mrs. Matthews—prominent in New York’s black society and the daughter of a Georgia slave—founded the White Rose Home in 1897, providing classes in cooking and sewing to black women along with meals and education to children of the black poor. The White Rose was similar to the mission societies and settlement houses then opening in New York for the uplift and assimilation of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. It filled a need those other charities did not address, for at the White Rose,
sometimes a few little Italians and Jewish children
come in with the others and they are never turned away. But the settlement is there for the dark-skinned little Americans who are not very welcome elsewhere.

Mrs. Matthews expanded this program of good works when she was called upon by a friend to give hospitality to a young girl from Jacksonville, Florida, arriving in New York to seek employment. Victoria Matthews arranged to meet the girl at the dock;
the young traveler would wear a red ribbon drawn through a buttonhole in her coat. According to the memoir of a White Rose Home associate writing in 1925:

Thus, the White Rose Industrial Association took up its new mission, to be a
friend of the strange girl
in New York
, a sanctuary for the migrant.
Let us call it White Rose
, Mrs. Matthews declared.
I shall always feel that the girls will think of the meaning—purity, goodness and virtue and strive to live up to our beautiful name.
Acting as an unauthorized society for the aid of travelers,
Mrs. Matthews and her collaborators took turns at the pier
in order to meet every steamer of the Old Dominion line arriving from the principal southern port of Norfolk, Virginia. They delivered the witless and lonely travelers out of the hands of job sharks and into a setting where they would find
pleasant lodgings for girls
with privilege of music and reading rooms, dining room, kitchen and laundry
offered at reasonable rates. In some cases, the neediest wayfarers were housed for free. By 1925, more than 30,000 girls and young
women had passed through the doors of the White Rose Home.
Some were well educated
, earnest, of sterling worth, capable and willing to take care of themselves, needing only the advice and encouragement of a good woman. Others were in need of help in many ways. They had no money, no knowledge of the ways of a great city, no friends.
They were
sheltered, guided, fed, clothed when necessary, many taught to work acceptably in the homes of the Metropolis and many others saved from lives of shame.

The original White Rose Home was located on the Upper East Side.
By 1918, when the black population of New York
was in the midst of its move to Harlem, the White Rose Home followed, leasing and then purchasing a brownstone on West 136th Street. When young women like Emma Lou, Lutie, Helga Crane, and Pinkie arrived in Harlem, they could find a warm bed and companionship in its elegant rooms. But the White Rose was more than an employment agency or a rooming house; it also provided moral guidance. How the custodians of the home kept their charges away from the nearby speakeasies, taverns, and ballrooms is unrecorded.

The young women received assistance in job placement and classes in “Race History.” Whereas the domestic training was necessary for the new arrivals to make a living in the very limited field of work available to black women, the classes in literature and “Race History” were a particular passion of Mrs. Matthews. She was a writer and an intellectual; her own development had been encouraged by an employer who interrupted her in reverie while she was supposed to be dusting books in his library. In 1905, the original White Rose Home was said to possess
one of the most unique special libraries
in New York.
It included works by Booker T. Washington, Charles Chestnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; rare volumes like a 1773 second edition of Phillis Wheatley’s
poetry; a bound edition of the 1859
Anglo-African Magazine
, which gave an account of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and his subsequent trial and execution; and several narratives of escaped slaves.

If Matthews provided the tools of domesticity, including
a good stock of aprons
, dust caps, dusters etc always on hand,
her library and classes held their own utility.
Our history and individuality
as a people not only provide material for masterly treatment, but would seem to make a Race Literature a necessity as an outlet for unnaturally suppressed inner lives which our people have been compelled to lead.

The library of the White Rose Home provided a shelter for souls, based on the conviction that racial uplift could be accomplished by young women whose only value in the white world was as maids.

The seventieth anniversary of the White Rose Home was celebrated in 1967 on the society pages of the
Amsterdam News,
in an article that bordered notices about a Mardi Gras ball, the installation of new officers at the Imperial Elks Home, marriage announcements, and the Founder’s Day festivities for a sorority. In addition to its purpose to avert the perdition of innocents, the White Rose had also become something of a society enterprise. The archives of the White Rose held at the Schomburg Center preserve the records of regular garden parties, annual linen
showers, “gypsy teas” featuring performances of operettas, and a “tea bag festival” that raised money for roof repair by imploring invited guests to “drop herein three pennies for every year old.”

Upon its 1967 anniversary, the house on 136th Street still received lodgers in its dormitory rooms, which could be
decorated to the taste
of the occupant.
The whole house had been recently renovated, reported the
Amsterdam News.

The article is illustrated by a picture of three members of the White Rose Home and Industrial Association and a clergyman attending the anniversary occasion. They flank the empty chair of Victoria Earle Matthews—one woman lays a hand upon its seat, as if in supplication to a holy relic.

One day I went to find the White Rose Home. It had been operational—in name, at least—into the early 1980s. I found it on a street of brownstones that were plain and modest in comparison with the distinctive manses of nearby Striver’s Row. Arrangement of silk flowers adorned the exterior window boxes. The building was well kept, and the address was fixed to the front in oversized gilt numbers. I thought of knocking on the door to gain entry. Instead I stood across the street to have a better view. Soon, a man came to the house, walked up the stairs, and went in. I tried to look as though I was not paying unusual attention to his home, while half wishing it had been open to receive me upon arriving in Harlem with a suitcase full of tales.

I FOUND A PICTURE
in the digital archive of the library. The circumstances were not extraordinary; I was not looking for anything in particular. I had merely typed the word “Harlem” into the image archive to see what it would yield.

The picture shows an intersection, but nothing about the juncture is immediately recognizable. A large apartment building sits in the background, and in the foreground stand a man and a boy. The back of the man is turned against the camera, the boy is in partial profile; they are watching the scene coming toward them and toward me.

The scene is only people walking; it is not remarkable. The men all wear dark suits with waistcoats, and fedoras or newsboy caps. There is a woman in the group wearing a skirt of black organdy that shines against the dominating flatness in view. Another group stands under the awning of a storefront, their backs also turned against the camera. The store’s sign—
W. A. HOLLEY PHARMACIST
—is crowded alongside advertisements for Coca-Cola and other billboards. One promotes a new comedy
called
39 East
. At ground level is a sign for
STRAW HATS
, a partially obscured sign for a cigar shop, and another sign,
DRUGS
. At the left edge of the frame is the slightest suggestion of street furniture: a lamppost or subway entrance. There is an unidentifiable piece of debris on the pavement. Most people in the picture walk determinedly, in the typical city-dweller’s trance, but one walker—forever caught in the middle distance—is worth noting. His hands are in his pockets, his upper body torques as if he is turning, midstep, to greet a friend. There is something familiar in his stance. It is the strut of a Harlem dandy, and his descendants can still be seen on the streets. Although the quality of the photo is poor and the camera is too far away to capture any defining
features, there is the faintest flash of white where his mouth would be. He is in the middle of a shout or a smile.