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  Lutie Johnson scorns 116th Street, the street where she has landed, working as a maid to make a living for her son. She hates the street, it is the source of all her misfortunes, and they are many, but yet—when she comes home from cleaning houses there is a small dose of relief.

  She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs.

  In Harlem Lutie is human, and she is not alone. Ascending the subway into Harlem after a day’s work in her domestic job downtown, at the very moment she enters the throng she achieves individuality.

  Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply colored and therefore all alike… in Harlem you are bigger than yourself… you take up space different. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.

  Many of these books were among those on a reading list I made for myself around age fourteen. On the first page of a composition book I wrote the heading “Books written during the Harlem Renaissance” and plotted an itinerary through my library’s shelves, searching for this El Dorado of black literature. Besides these, there was Jean Toomer’s Cane and novels by Jessie Fauset. I read Federico García Lorca’s Harlem poems from El Poeta en Nueva York, in which he sets an unforgettable scene. Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem! Ay, Harlem! I didn’t need the facing page of my bilingual edition to translate what he saw: Negros! Negros! Negros! Negros! Thus goes the attempt of el poeta to come to terms with Harlem. Palabras fail. Those are the barest facts of the situation: he escapes the realm of the poetic, and tumbles toward the sociological. To understand the problems presented by this bustling horde, one need only juxtapose García Lorca’s frenetic naming of things (blacks blacks blacks blacks) with Lutie’s idea, on the pages of Ann Petry’s novel The Street: finally she was in a place where she was not merely black.

  I like to think of Emma Lou and Helga and Lutie and Jule and King Solomon brushing shoulders with García Lorca, who is unable to grasp the various paths they followed as refugees and fugitives in that black city where he was a tourist. There are many paths, but how many destinations for this journey? Some, like Helga Crane, are immediately taken in, content to live within the boundary. Some, like, Emma Lou, long to see 135th Street and then find it does not merit their expectation. Surely there must have been many like Jule, for whom the destination itself did not conjure any particular magic. Or others like Pinkie, who would like to be anywhere, not there—thinking of flight but with no place to go. There is no going home, and the place where you have arrived offers no substantial shelter.

  Emma Lou and Helga Crane both leave Harlem. Lutie is driven to commit a gruesome murder, and then flees, too. Reading their stories as a teenager in Texas, I only cared about the first part of their irresistible trajectory—an outward, upward momentum.

  Of my own arrival, I can say that it is difficult to tell the beginning without any inkling of the end, to show you the light of enchantment without any shadow of disenchantment. I no longer find anything remarkable about my own arrival here. It was not the arrival of a fugitive or a refugee. That feeling—of running from something or running to something—only came later, in the very streets where I was living, and often simultaneously.

  I cannot fit my entry into Harlem into a neat narrative arc, like those of Emma Lou and Helga, or Lutie and Pinkie. I had come to New York for a visit, with the faintest unresolved notion of making a move. I bought the Amsterdam News on a Thursday, when the apartment listings would be new, and called up the cheapest spots. I saved the paper, so I can tell you that the listing described as Harlem 1 bedroom / Renovated, locked doors / No fee. By Owner, for $775 with a minimum income of $40,000 that I did not have, was already taken when I called. The one bedroom for $775 with hardwood floors and new appliances in an elevator bldg and quiet neighborhood must also have gone quickly. That would have left the studio apartment on Edgecombe Avenue for $675, which was not actually an option. A previous bad experience of cramped studio living had taught me the true nature of my Texan sense of space.

  At the top of the page I found the ad for 3 Rms. Floor-thru apt. No Kit. Clean, Non-smoker. Ref’s req’d, $750/mo. When I called the number the owner said the apartment wasn’t taken. In the margin of the now-creased and aged newsprint are the directions I quickly scrawled. I went uptown at once.

  The apartment was located in the very last house on the block of 120th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues. I met the landlady on the garden level and followed her up three flights of decrepit stairs. We entered the available apartment on the top floor. Its green-painted hallways and matching green carpet were hideous, but there was light streaming in from the front and back windows and a skylight presiding over the entryway and landing. To cross from the front to back required a short stroll. It was, even without a kitchen, the very definition of happiness. I wrote a check for the first and last months’ rent, then went downtown to collect my things.

  At the time, the miraculous location of a floor-through brownstone apartment—even a floor-through brownstone apartment without a kitchen and with a lamentable green hallway complemented by ugly green wall-to-wall carpeting—held a certain sense of destiny. It was somehow meant to be. The notion that an apartment without a kitchen was ever anyone’s destiny has to do with the general desperation of real estate in New York City, but it is a good indicator of how I saw the world then. I needed providence as an escort on my own ascent from the subway station into Harlem. I, too, was going to meet a place I had already filled with so many expectations. I, too, would have to match the pictures in my mind—the ones I’d invented and the ones I’d seen in books—with the world that was now my own.

  But I did not immediately rush out to follow the trails of my favorite Harlem characters; I did not rush to stand before the hallowed sites where history had been made. I did not rush at all. I moved slowly, keeping a deliberately languid pace, because some part of me needed to pretend that my body was still in Texas. And my eyes were still in Texas, too, because I could not give up the habit (and did not lose it until much later) of meeting the eyes of everyone I passed. I didn’t know (or did know and didn’t mind) that it was through the eyes I would be dragged into stories.

  I met eyes with the older ladies who gathered in front of buildings and with the elderly men who sat on park benches in the median, as the traffic rushed north and south around them. When crossing paths with young men who seemed about to make an unwanted advance, I smiled brightly and shouted Hi! like an overexcited flight attendant, and then kept walking while they were too stunned to reply. But often I did not refuse when a man offered to walk with me some part of the way down Lenox Avenue, always ending such promenades at the corner of my block. Once, I saw an old lady struggling with her groceries and offered my hands. We walked together for a while, but when she, too, stopped at the corner where her street met Lenox Avenue I was puzzled—alarmed that my assistance could be confused for predation.

  I did not make a pilgrimage to the home of Langston Hughes. Instead I met—probably in the street—a young man who lived in Hughes’s old house and who made certain everyone knew this fact within minutes of making his acquaintance. I did not immediately go up to the Schomburg Center. Instead I spent hours at a branch library, reading the newspaper and waiting to use the public computers in order to look for a job. Eventually I started going out to dances and art openings, but many more nights I stayed inside, listening to the radio and to the sounds of traffic on Seventh Avenue.

  I furnished my apartment with discoveries from junk shops and neighborhood antique de
alers whose premises were filled to the rafters with half-upholstered sofas and repaired lamps that would likely never again give light. I purchased a barely functional but finely crafted chair that was sold to me on assurance that I was “handy.” I pined after an Art Deco bedroom set that had supposedly belonged to Billie Holiday. It would have cost more than a month’s rent, which I could not spare, and my mother warned me by phone from Texas not to trust the pedigree. I picked up tables from the sidewalk, bought cut-glass goblets from the Salvation Army on 125th Street, and purchased knickknacks from elderly ladies having tag sales to raise money for their church. I spent the money for two weeks’ worth of groceries on an exotic folding table with a copper-tray tabletop. The seller said it was Persian; his final, successful sales ploy was that although it was his sincere desire to give me a bargain price, he could easily get more money from buyers of the other persuasion—by which he meant white shoppers at flea markets in suburban Connecticut. And though I could not remove the sickly green carpet, my landlady relented to my capricious wish to paint the walls of my study an overheated red. (It was the presence of that extra room, just for my work, that had caused me to accept the kitchenless dwelling.)

  I had the sense, when putting together these implements for life in my first apartment, that I was bringing in castaways, remnants of other lives that had been lived here. During those early days in Harlem, I also saw great piles of furniture and clothes on sidewalks, of greater quantity and less organization than one would see in an average trash disposal. These piles confused me, until I realized they were the aftermath of evictions.

  Even though it was just a few short years ago, nearly all of the stores where I bought the items for my first apartment are gone—there is no room for the junk of old Harlem. But then, the junk prevailed, in shops and on piles in the street. Though I didn’t know who lived in my rooms before me, I was already aware of the furor in Harlem about gentrification. I arrived the very week a long, hand-wringing article on the subject had appeared in The New Yorker. More recently a plaintive piece in the New York Times sought to find common ground between Harlem old and new, but instead skillfully illustrated the distance between them. In an interview, one new resident described parties featuring a parlor game in which she and other recent arrivals joked about what amenities the neighborhood needed most. The answer agreed upon at the latest gathering was that Harlem was in dire need of a Thai restaurant. At the time, Harlem was also experiencing a housing deficit, lacking over 38,000 units of housing needed by its poorest residents.

  When I was new to Harlem and experiencing my own pangs of complicity on the issue, I asked a politically minded friend if I was a gentrifier. He firmly answered no—because I was black and poor. I was not convinced. Another friend laughed at the archetypal narrative of my move north and dubbed me Miss Great Migration 2002.

  If I was part of the new Harlem, that meant the new café at the end of my block, opened only a few months before I moved to town, should have been my natural habitat. It was lauded as a marvel of civilization and progress—one New York Times reporter theorized that the availability of a quality latte in Harlem was a symbol of the neighborhood’s imminent conversion. Yet I couldn’t help but wince when noticing my elderly neighbor Mr. Edward standing outside the door of that new café, but never going in. He hovered next to the entrance, drinking a seventy-five-cent cup of bodega coffee.

  Once, while sitting inside the café, I happened to overhear a conversation between two white men seated nearby. One seemed to be a stay-at-home dad who worked in marketing; he talked business while nursing a toddler in a stroller. I gathered from eavesdropping that the other man was visiting his friend’s new neighborhood for the first time. This is fabulous, he exclaimed. Then, noting the first man’s skills in marketing, he added: Really, you have to do something to get the word out. There need to be more people up here!

  I later read an article in the New York Sun that joyously reported that developers had purchased several high-rise rental buildings in Harlem and would be turning them into expensive condominiums. The buildings, long a stronghold of Harlem’s middle class, were originally built as a consolation prize because blacks were barred from living in similar developments in lower Manhattan. The article ended by celebrating the return of people to Harlem, which used to be a place people only visited, during Prohibition, for booze and big bands.

  The visitor I overheard and the journalist I read were afflicted by that exuberant myopia common to colonists of varied epochs and ambitions: thus did the explorers conquering Africa for God, king, country, and commerce, declare with the endorsement of the Vatican that any land where the native people were not Christians was officially a terra nullius, a no-man’s-land. (There need to be more people up here!) Thus did the nineteenth-century British architects of the plan to restore Europe’s Jews to Israel as a refuge against pogroms (a plan conceived mostly from British theological and political self-interest) examine the map of the ancient homeland and declare that it was an empty territory, a land without a people for a people without a land. (There need to be more people up here!)

  I should not have been shocked by those careless quips, but it was the sort of thing that made me especially tight-lipped when I happened to run into a white acquaintance downtown who, upon hearing I had moved to Harlem, and perhaps having read that recent New Yorker article, was pressingly curious to know about interesting things going on up there….

  During those first months in New York, I was busy with an assignment at my new job with a Harlem-based publisher: to pore through the archives of photographer James VanDerZee in order to make a new book of his images. VanDerZee’s photo studio operated during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, capturing Harlemites in elegant portraits, wearing their finest threads. His were the kind of pictures that would have pride of place on a mantel or be tucked into an envelope along with a letter sent back home, a tableau of the good life available up north. When VanDerZee’s work was rediscovered in the late 1960s by curators of the controversial “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his photographs of cosmopolitan Harlem provided an antidote to the destitute, shell-shocked image then attached to the neighborhood and formed a new iconography of its best days.

  VanDerZee’s Harlem is a province of extravagance, culture, and high society. We meet the delicate young students of a dancing school, adorable in a hundred different ways, and the dandified members of all-male social clubs. In individual portraits of cultured ladies and fine gentlemen, unidentified Harlemites whose personal histories are not preserved display the glamour and bearing of celebrities and aristocrats. A couple poses in front of an exquisite convertible sedan clad in matching full-length raccoon fur coats. A group portrait shows a vast wedding party, the bridesmaids wearing matching taffeta headgear and the men dressed in white tie, all attended by a retinue of flower girls and ring-bearers. Improbably, VanDerZee’s signature—etched into the negative of these photos—shows that both pictures were taken in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression.

  Outside the archive, I compared the buildings and the faces I saw in the street to the buildings and faces in the photographs. It was easy to establish which intersection was the setting of a certain parade and easy to note how soot and grime had attached to the facade of a certain church. But it was not possible, just by looking, to establish a direct connection between the people I saw motionless in the photographs and coursing through the streets. One could assume a trajectory, the continuity of families across eight or nine decades. Here we have arrived, the photographs whispered. And here we remain, came the answer from the streets. But I noticed in the contemporary faces some alteration, the consequence of a force not visible within the frame.

  Then, I was always looking for approval, seeking it out in a returned smile—I was looking for mutuality. I was not known by anyone; they could not verify my background. I was unable, therefore, to truly lay claim to this place where I’d landed. My relationsh
ip to it was, for some time, like the effect of a picturesque landscape that hangs as a backdrop in a portrait studio, with the sitter arranged statically in the foreground.

  It was a setting. It was not, exactly, History.

  VanDerZee’s portraits escort the viewer halfway into the interior life of Harlem, but anonymity brusquely slams the door. It is not possible to learn about the journey each person made to this place, or how that congregation managed to acquire its fine premises, or just what those all-male social clubs were getting up to in their smartly matched gear. The piles of VanDerZee photos in the archive and that frantic line from García Lorca (Blacks! Blacks! Blacks! Blacks!) speak a common tongue. It is the noise of the crowd.

  The faces in the archive and the ones in the street were equally out of reach. We shared color and we shared location. At the moment when those two elements had just begun to collide in black Harlem, the combination produced a shared aspiration and a shared riddle. On the one hand, to cross the physical boundary was to overthrow the color line. But the forces of color and culture could be harnessed and endowed with a liberating power. Alain Locke, serving in his role as chief interpreter and philosopher of the New Negro movement, explained it as a question of velocity:

  A railroad ticket and a suitcase, like a Bagdad carpet, transport the Negro peasant from the cotton-field and farm to the heart of the most complex urban civilization. Here in the mass, he must and does survive a jump of two generations in social economy and of a century and more in civilisation. Meanwhile the Negro poet, student, artist, thinker, by the very move that normally would take him off at a tangent from the masses, finds himself in their midst, in a situation concentrating the racial side of his experience and heightening his race-consciousness.