"Harlem Is Nowhere": Travels in a city of dreams
A young writer finds the "Mecca of black America" is in danger of slipping away
By Laura Miller
Library of Congress
A street scene in 1943 Harlem.
Any neighborhood worthy of the name is a kind of shared dream, and no neighborhood in America better illustrates this principle than Harlem. The place is, as the young writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts puts it in her new memoir, "Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America," "the result of bigotry and exclusion" as well as "a proving ground for aspirations. It is a place that contracts one's possibilities, and a place where all things are possible."
Situated in the midst of the urgent, unfolding history of black America, Harlem has had plenty of historians and journalists to account for its facts: the famous writers, artists and leaders who lived there; the major events that transpired within its borders; the wonders achieved and the crises endured by its residents. Now it also has Rhodes-Pitts to account for its dream life, for what almost happened there but didn't and for what did happen but is only half-remembered, for what its people longed for and never got and for what they loved but could not hold onto.
Although its subject is quite different -- not to mention located a whole continent way -- the recent work that Rhodes-Pitts' memoir brings to mind is Judith Freeman's "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved." Long, dreamy passages of that book are given up to describing how Freeman drove around Los Angeles, looking at buildings Chandler once inhabited or frequented, or sometimes just staring at the former sites of such buildings, trying to reach a past that seems at once close and utterly unreclaimable. These, strangely enough, are the most enthralling parts of "The Long Embrace," the ones that best evoke Freeman's lonely, enigmatic subject and the city whose moods he captured so well.
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