B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK Read online

  There used to be an empty lot near my house, on Seventh Avenue just south of 133rd Street. One day in summer, I saw through its chain-link fence a pile of watermelon rinds at the rear of the lot. There was an open pit in the ground nearby, where someone was burying the waste. Later, the pile disappeared and the open pit was covered by recently turned earth. Soon, construction began on that site. It was only a matter of weeks before the frame of a new building rose up on the lot. A security guard was now stationed there each night to guard the property. He didn’t wear a uniform, and like many of the men (and sometimes women) who work security jobs at construction sites in Harlem, he was an immigrant from West Africa.

  Later, when construction was nearly completed but the premises were not yet occupied, I passed again one night and saw through the building’s glass doors the outline of a man sitting in the condominium entry. He kept watch in near darkness, visible only by the light of a nearby street lamp. Whenever I passed the spot, I looked to see if anyone was inside. Sometimes the guard was there, slumped in his seat, sleeping through his shift out of exhaustion or boredom. Other times, there was only an empty chair. A few times, the watchman waved hello. Once, the figure beckoned me inside.

  I didn’t accept the invitation. The building still looked unoccupied, but a large sign now hung from its facade. The building is called the Ellison. To advertise the property, the sign shows a photograph of a handsome, clean-cut young black man in a suit. He is shown in regal profile, his eyes are closed, his chin is lifted toward the sky. Change your state of mind, begins the sales pitch for the new condominiums. The man on the sign looks lost in contemplation, on the brink of transcendence, about to receive some celestial enlightenment. Or maybe he has just thrown back his head and is about to unleash a howling laugh.

  That picture from 1880 shows the beginning of what was, essentially, a failed settlement. More buildings were constructed so the isolated housing blocks eventually formed complete streets. As people moved in, Harlem became, according to one observer in 1905, a haven for the clerks and small merchants, the family man and the newly married couple and the young professional man, who all flocked thither. But the real estate speculation behind the Harlem housing boom had not anticipated the city’s delay in extending transportation to the area. Many town houses and apartment buildings were empty or partially empty. Around 1900 the situation attracted the interest of African American businessman Philip A. Payton Jr., an associate of Booker T. Washington. Payton proposed to several landlords that he act as a broker, renting their vacant properties to black tenants. He began quietly, with a few houses on 134th Street east of Lenox Avenue (the same area shown in that photo of prehistoric Harlem). According to James Weldon Johnson,

  The whites paid little attention to the movement until it began to spread west of Lenox Avenue; they then took steps to check it. They proposed through a financial organization, the Hudson Realty Company, to buy in all properties occupied by colored people and evict the tenants.

  Another group, Shaw & Company, pursued the same tactics, as did the Harlem Property Owners’ Improvement Association. But Payton was equal to the challenge. When the Hudson Realty Company started buying property and evicting blacks, Payton combined with other black businessmen to launch the Afro-American Realty Company, which bought property and evicted whites. A December 17, 1905, article from the New York Times reported the furor with the tone of an urgent telegram: Real Estate Race War Is Started in Harlem; Dispossessed White Men Ask Negroes to be Allowed to Stay; Colored Folks Retaliated; They Were Dispossessed First—Then Formed a Real Estate Company to Buy Tenements. Payton and the Afro-American Realty Company are accurately credited with the invention of black Harlem. The strategy was not merely to secure rental housing or buy individual property, but to harness the collective economic power of well-to-do blacks, toward the general empowerment of the race.

  The New York Herald described the unfolding controversy on December 24, 1905, under the headline Negroes Move into Harlem.

  An untoward circumstance has been injected into the private-dwelling market in the vicinity of 133rd and 134th Streets. During the last three years the flats in 134th between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, that were occupied entirely by white folks, have been captured for occupation by a Negro population. Its presence there has tended also to lend much color to conditions in 133rd and 135th Streets between Lenox and Seventh Avenues.

  One Hundred and Thirty-third Street still shows some signs of resistance to the blending of colors in that street, but between Lenox and Seventh Avenues has practically succumbed to the ingress of colored tenants. Nearly all the old dwellings in 134th Street to midway in the block west from Seventh Avenue are occupied by colored tenants and real estate brokers predict that it is only a matter of time when the entire block, to Eighth Avenue, will be a stronghold of the Negro population.

  As a result of the extension of this African colony, dwellings in 133rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and in 132nd Street from Lenox to Eighth Avenue have depreciated from fifteen to twenty per cent in value, especially in the sides of those streets nearest to 134th Street. The cause of the colored influx is inexplicable.

  After a few years of this untoward circumstance, the good citizens of Harlem resolved to erect a twenty-four-foot fence on 136th Street, a battlement to defend their besieged city. The New York Indicator, a real estate publication, summarized popular opinion:

  Their presence is undesirable among us… they should not only be disenfranchised, but also segregated in some colony in the outskirts of the city, where their transportation and other problems will not inflict injustice and disgust on worthy citizens.

  As white Harlem gathered its forces, a spokesperson for a group of outraged citizens offered a self-serving prophecy, masked as philanthropy: We believe… that real friends of Negroes will eventually convince them that they should buy large tracts of unimproved land near the city and there build up colonies of their own.

  Only two decades had passed when the prophecy was borne out under slightly altered circumstances. A Negro colony spread from the concentrated area around Philip Payton’s original buildings on 134th Street, until it became an onslaught no wall could contain. White New Yorkers quit Harlem. Some sold their property at a loss, others abandoned houses and apartment buildings, preferring to board them up rather than rent or sell to black people. Eventually, the move of blacks into Harlem reached the physical limits of the ridges, the rivers, and 110th Street. Alain Locke, writing in the introduction to his 1925 anthology The New Negro, found that the concentration of black New Yorkers crowding into that physical space mirrored a metaphysical force then gaining strength.

  In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. That is why our comparison is taken with those nascent centers of folk-expression and self-determination which are playing a creative part in the world today. Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.

  Locke was among the first to define Harlem as a race capital, a physical center that focuses a people. It was the stage of the pageant of contemporary Negro life on which would unfold the resurgence of a race. Locke invokes two young European republics whose people had rejected imperialism through nationalism. But he did not aspire to self-determination by means of actual political sovereignty or a separate nation for blacks. Locke believed that Harlem would be a place of cultural and social uplift. This, in time, would lead to equality for blacks within the wider American scene. In 1925, Locke asserted that Harlem represents the Negro’s latest thrust towards Democracy.

  Others tried to add their own pronouncements to Locke’s prophecy. The New Negro anthology includes Charles S. Johnson reaching for Locke’s gravitas, while waxing nostalgic about events still in progress: And there was New York City with its polite personal service and its Harlem—the Mecca of the Negroes the
country over. Delightful Harlem of the effete East! Old families, brownstone mansions, a step from wonderful Broadway, the end of the rainbow.

  In 1928, Wallace Thurman’s Negro Life in New York’s Harlem noted that the neighborhood—known as The Mecca of the New Negro, the center of black America’s cultural renaissance, Nigger Heaven, Pickaninny Paradise, Capital of Black America, among other monikers—had been surveyed and interpreted, explored and exploited. But Thurman launches his own survey and interpretation, producing a lively picture of a popular and interesting section that reads like a travel guide, with chapters on social life, night life, amusement, house rent parties, the numbers, the church, and newspapers. The resulting vision of Harlem is a great deal less than the sum of its parts.

  Langston Hughes riffs on Harlem in his contribution to a 1963 special Harlem issue of Freedomways magazine. Hughes mixes sentimentality with a dose of his typically biting wit, in the following incantation:

  Harlem, like a Picasso painting in his cubistic period. Harlem—Southern Harlem—the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida—looking for the Promised Land—dressed in rhythmic words, painted in bright pictures, dancing to jazz—and ending up in the subway at morning rush time—headed downtown. West Indian Harlem—warm rambunctious sassy remembering Marcus Garvey, Haitian Harlem, Cuban Harlem, little pockets of tropical dreams in alien tongues. Magnet Harlem, pulling an Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, pulling an Arna Bontemps all the way from California, a Nora Holt from way out West, an E. Simms Campbell from St. Louis, likewise a Josephine Baker, a Charles S. Johnson from Virginia, an A. Phillip Randolph from Florida, a Roy Wilkins from Minnesota, an Alta Douglas from Kansas. Melting pot Harlem—Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown, where the jazz is drained to Broadway whence Josephine [Baker] goes to Paris, Robeson to London, Jean Toomer to a Quaker Meeting House, Garvey to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and Wallace Thurman to his grave; but Duke Ellington to fame and fortune, Lena Horne to Broadway, and Buck Clayton to China.

  The business of defining Harlem has already been perfected. You have heard them all before: Harlem is a ruin, it is the home of the Negro’s Zionism; it is a third world country; an East Berlin whose Wall is 110th Street. This is hyperbolic Harlem, the cultural capital of black America or its epicenter (likening the place to a natural disaster). There is Harlem as Mecca—a city of sanctuary, a place that merges devotion and duty.

  In The New Negro Alain Locke declared: Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic. No sane observer, however sympathetic to the new trend, would contend that the great masses are articulate as yet, but they stir, they move, they are more than physically restless.

  But in another essay included in the 1925 anthology, James Weldon Johnson offered a different kind of prophecy. In the tradition of the best oracles, it comes in the form of a riddle:

  The question naturally arises, “Are the Negroes going to be able to hold Harlem?” If they have been steadily driven northward for the past hundred years and out of less desirable sections, can they hold this choice bit of Manhattan Island? It is hardly probable that Negroes will hold Harlem indefinitely, but when they are forced out it will not be for the same reasons that forced them out of former quarters in New York City. The situation is entirely different and without precedent. When colored people do leave Harlem, their homes, their churches, their investments and their businesses, it will be because the land has become so valuable they can no longer afford to live on it. But the date of another move northward is very far in the future.

  Johnson suspected that Locke’s restless masses would be forced—as before in New York, but compelled by a different propulsion—to move yet again. But he did not dwell much on the possibility, or divulge a spell to stop events from coming to pass.

  2

  Into the City of Refuge

  EMMA LOU MORGAN arrives in Harlem with the turn of a page. She has come far. How was the journey, Emma Lou? She keeps the details close to her chest, hidden away in the space between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. We are not told what she saw crossing the country from Los Angeles, or how long it took; whether sleep on the journey was fitful, or if there were moments on the way when she felt like getting off that train and making her way back home to Boise, Idaho, which she had fled looking for education and enlightenment in the California sun.

  That didn’t last long. Soon she was filled with more determination than ever to escape should the chance present itself. Emma Lou took her chance when it came, with little thought given to the vehicle of her flight. Once more, Emma Lou fled into an unknown town to escape the haunting chimera of intra-racial color prejudice.

  Emma Lou Morgan is running from her black skin. Wallace Thurman tells us as much in the epigraph to his novel The Blacker the Berry… : My color shrouds me in, goes the selection from poet Countee Cullen. Where better to send his heroine than Harlem, and how better for her to arrive there than not to arrive at all—the emphasis is placed on what she left behind. Leaving is the main thing. She would have gone any place to escape, and so she is soon in Harlem. She can hardly believe it herself: It did seem strange, this being in Harlem when only a few weeks before she had been over three thousand miles away. Emma Lou is philosophical: she is thinking about time, and she is thinking about distance and about the immutability of the two. Soon enough, she glimpses her own folly. What was that line in Cullen’s verse, “I run, but Time’s abreast with me”? She had only traversed space and defied distance.

  Helga Crane had just as far to come. Like Emma Lou, her journey was not direct. Last it was Chicago, and before that, Naxos, the little southern town, with its stultifying black-college propriety. She leaves, and she leaves, and she leaves. But when she arrives in Harlem, again she had that strange transforming experience—the watchword here is “again”—this time not so fleetingly, the magic sense of having come home. What does Helga Crane know of home? Both black and Danish, like Nella Larsen who made her, Helga has been yanked through the pages of Quicksand from one home to another and then yet another. But homeless Helga sings that Harlem, teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and lulled her into something that was, she was certain, peace and contentment.

  Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. This is Jake laying first sights on Harlem, arriving home from Europe after the Great War. His ecstasy can hardly be contained; it can hardly be believed. The deep-dyed color and the thickness and the closeness and the noises and the sugared laughter and the honey-talk and ragtime and blues. Never mind that Jake sounds more like a tourist than a joyous returnee. He does not return to the bosom of a woe-begotten mother, but to Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem! Sweet Harlem! This is the Harlem to which downtown revelers (and downtown readers of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem) flocked: Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in the dark-eyed Harlem…. Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood.

  He stood up and his feet burned. Then he remembered. He remembered walking until his feet were blistered where the soles had worn bare on his shoes. He remembered walking, but he didn’t know why he kept on walking. Wretched Jule wakes up after his first night in Harlem, a rainy night spent on a bench in St. Nicholas Park. He is numb and hungry, his meager belongings in a small bundle—the luggage of swift departure. He is dazed by the streetlights reflected in the wet pavement. The tall buildings of City College—up the hill from the park—remind him (or his creator, George Wylie Henderson, in Jule) of the walls of Babylon. Where is good old Harlem, chocolate Harlem, sweet Harlem? Nowhere. A sign on a lamppost said W. 135th St., but it didn’t mean anything to him.

  King Solomon Gillis arrives in the same spot as Jule, under the same circumstances. (They have both murdered men.) But when he emerges from the train at 135th Street and Lenox he meets clean air, blue sky, bright sunlight. Then slowly, spreadingly, he g
rinned at what he saw. Maybe he saw Emma Lou and Helga and Jule, new arrivals like himself, still staggered by the pace of life in Harlem. But perhaps he also saw, and was impressed by, the already acclimated, debonair, and citified habitués of the black metropolis. What is certain: He saw

  Negroes at every turn; up and down Lenox Avenue, up and down One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; big, lanky Negroes, short, squat Negroes; black ones, brown ones, yellow ones; men standing idle on the curb, women, bundle-laden, trudging reluctantly homeward, children rattle trapping about the sidewalks; here and there a white face drifting along, but Negroes predominantly, overwhelmingly everywhere. There was assuredly no doubt of his whereabouts. This was Negro Harlem.

  For King Solomon Gillis, escaping the South in the pages of Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The City of Refuge,” Harlem offered freedoms that were not merely existential. In Harlem, black was white. You had rights that could not be denied you; you had privileges, protected by law. And you had money. Everybody in Harlem had money. It was a land of plenty…. The land of plenty was more than that now; it was also a city of refuge.

  “Who you say sentcher heah, dearie?” Zora Neale Hurston’s Pinkie is full of doubts. “Uh-a-a man down at the boat landing where I got off—North River. I just come in on the boat.” But the rooming house where she has landed is full of unsavory characters. She wished herself back home again even with the ill treatment and squalor. Faced with the city’s unyielding harshness, she has nothing to fall back on. She has three dollars, and they are stuffed in her shoe to guard against thieves. She thinks of flight—but where? Nowhere. For there was no home to which she could return, nor any place she knew.