What Harlem Is and Was
By KAIAMA L. GLOVER
Published: March 11, 2011
About midway through Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s slim, enchanting volume we are introduced to rather an odd figure, L. S. Alexander Gumby, proprietor of the Gumby Book Studio and motive force behind a 1920s Harlem-based literary salon. The studio and salon both evolved, Rhodes-Pitts explains, out of Gumby’s singular passion for scrapbooking — his “impulse to compile, collect and curate the detritus of his reality.” Gumby’s efforts ultimately produced an apartment’s worth of materials about the so-called black experience, culminating, we are told, in a “brilliant and strange production.” These words well describe Rhodes-Pitts own achievement in “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Her happily disparate text blends the historical and the personal, the exceptional and the ordinary, adroitly communicating the multiplicity of Harlem itself.
Chester Higgins Jr.
HARLEM: A Century in Images
256 pp. Skira Rizzoli/Studio Museum Harlem. $55.
Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Helen Levitt, Gordon Parks and Weegee are among more than 50 photographers represented in this chronicle of Harlem as a crossroads of art, culture and politics. Pictured, “The New Moon Bar” (1977), by Chester Higgins Jr. More Photos »
HARLEM IS NOWHERE
A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
296 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.
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Excerpt: ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’(January 26, 2011)
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Books of The Times: ‘Harlem Is Nowhere’ by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (January 26, 2011)
Like Gumby, Rhodes-Pitts is a transplant to Harlem (in her case, from Texas, via Harvard), and like him she found herself compelled to document her own and others’ experiences there. Like Gumby, Rhodes-Pitts is clearly very much enthralled by “something too vast to be contained on paper” and so has chosen the at once arbitrary and exhaustive medium of collage. Her scrapbook of a chronicle communicates the impossibility of the very task it seems to have set for itself: to figure out Harlem, in some measure, to truly understand the parameters of its symbolic value to (black) America. Sensing, however, the wrongheadedness implicit in any attempt at defining Harlem, Rhodes-Pitts works instead at revising received ideas. “I did not understand how this place existed as both haven and ghetto,” she writes. “It seemed . . . a great paradox. It also revealed something damning about the history I had learned — a flattened version of events where a place is allowed to be only one thing or the other.”
“Harlem Is Nowhere,” Rhodes-Pitts’s first book, is in large part the product of the countless hours she spent poring over photographs and news clippings in the bowels of the New York Public Library’s Harlem-based research center, or “Mr. Schomburg’s labyrinth,” as she so aptly calls it. Rhodes-Pitts — and in this, unlike Alexander Gumby — does not favor “the most exceptional and the most beautiful.” She makes us privy to obscure interviews, photographs, advertisements and even obituaries. While Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and many other widely celebrated personages make an appearance, Rhodes-Pitts is at least as engaged by Harlem’s lesser-known players, like the proto-feminist Victoria Earle Matthews, the African nationalist Carlos A. Cooks and the fashionista-cum-wax-museum-owner Raven Chanticleer — those whose names have not been “immortalized by way of a street sign.”
Rhodes-Pitts also took the time to go outside and meet her neighbors. From her verbal jousts with “the Chief,” a frustratingly single-minded holdover from black power days, to her exchanges with a homeless person and fellow writer, Sister Doris Littlejohn, to her encounters with “the Messenger,”an elusive Harlem celebrity known for the inspirational chalk messages he leaves on the sidewalks flanking Lenox Avenue, Rhodes-Pitts’s dealings with the people she befriends are gentle yet without condescension. She introduces us to one eccentric and fascinating individual after the next, allowing us a taste of the “unexpected intimacy” that comes from entering someone’s parlor or standing on his street corner. At the same time, she is very careful to reject “the position of tour guide or interpreter.” She respects her interlocutors’ right to opacity while affirming the importance of their stories.
For Rhodes-Pitts, these stories provide vital points of access to the Harlem she is hoping to find. Rhodes-Pitts brings the library into the street, not only looking to history to explain the present, but also and equally relying on contemporary reality to tell Harlem’s past. “Outside the archive,” she admits, “I compared the buildings and the faces I saw in the street to the buildings and faces in the photographs.” The photographs of boarded up buildings and unremarkable intersections she retrieves from the archive, the vacant lots and undeveloped foundations of buildings she takes the time to photograph in her own wanderings — these become charged with the politics of place. The costs of both isolation and gentrification become evident. “Later I understood that these empty fields were indeed the setting of a history, the loathsome history of neglect and destruction stretching back to the beginning of black settlement in Harlem,” she tells us. “This is the evidence of an unnatural history — it was not always this way, it came to be that way for a reason.”
Readers looking for a more straightforward, comprehensive account of the neighborhood might pick up Jonathan Gill’s new book, HARLEM: The Four Hundred Year History From Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (Grove, $29.95).Rhodes-Pitts instead provides tangentially related points of entry and departure from which to put together a narrative. She makes much of what she does not remember and leads she has chosen not to pursue. After piecing together scattered bits of information about the life of one of the more outlandish characters she has researched, she is offered the means to contact — to meet even — two of his relatives. But “I decided that I had enough information,” she rationalizes. “I might have discovered more of the official story, but it seemed like a trespass. I had not been invited beyond the gate.”
Rhodes-Pitts’s ostensible discretion can feel like a cop-out — a failure of courage, or lack of moxie, even. She is perhaps more comfortable in the library or at 10 or so paces from a deserted building than she is in the private lives of the Harlemites among whom she lives and works. In this reticence, “Harlem Is Nowhere” reveals more than a little bit about Rhodes-Pitts herself. The respectfulness that keeps Rhodes-Pitts standing outside gates or at the edge of conversations has much to do with her uncertainty about belonging to this place and her ambivalence about what it means to be at home. At the very beginning of the book, she acknowledges “the impermanent status of my residence here,” and she returns sporadically but consistently to this question of community. In the second chapter she confesses: “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 relationship to it was, for some time, like the effect of a picturesque landscape that hangs as a backdrop in a portrait studio.” By Chapter 5 her position has shifted markedly: “A stranger stops to ask if I require directions. I have lingered too long before stepping into an intersection, or I look uncertain as to where I am headed. . . . I shake my head no, insisting I am not lost, or even very far from home.”
The final scene of “Harlem Is Nowhere” describes Rhodes-Pitts’s experience of a minor police injustice. Caught in the crowd at the tail end of the African-American Day parade, she is strong-armed by a bullying cop and forced to move with the crowd, away from the direction of her own apartment. Once out of his sight and reach she turns back, “determined to make my way home.” This “is not a metaphor,” Rhodes-Pitts makes sure to put on record. But that is, of course, nonsense. This final, literal moment of fighting to get back to her home in Harlem is most certainly a metaphor for the homecoming journeys of all those for whom Harlem was and is the only place to be. Rhodes-Pitts’s Harlem is a place worth fighting for. It is a place more endangered than dangerous — a “blank, disavowed” place bursting with the best stories never told. It is anything and everything but nowhere.
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