Harlem is Nowhere
A Journey to the Mecca of Black America
by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Little, Brown & Company
“Do you think you’ll ever go home?” Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts was asked as she inserted her key into the front-door lock of her new residence on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. The question came from one of the men who spent their days standing as “vigilant sentinels” outside her building. Later, another man, after having asked where she was from, said, “Oh, I thought you were a foreigner.”
It’s a nice touch for her to begin her memoir of Harlem with queries from neighbors who, in a sense, are challenging her credentials as a Harlemite. Something about her tells them that she’s from some place else and will eventually leave. And their suspicions were not misplaced — she grew up in Texas and, after a few years in New York, now lives in New Orleans.
She subtly links (and justifies?) her transient lifestyle to Harlem’s heritage by beginning her second chapter with the stories of Emma Lou Morgan, Wallace Thurman’s heroine, who fled to New York from Boise, Idaho, and Helga Crane, Nella Larsen’s heroine, a Chicagoan who was welcomed and lulled by “teeming black Harlem.” Or Zora Neale Hurston’s Pinkie, who had “no home to which she could return.” Home and all its implications of care and conviviality is a theme of Rhodes-Pitts’ book. “Where are your people from?” is something she was often asked as she walked the neighborhood.
The beauty of Harlem — or perhaps just the Harlem mythology — is that the black stranger can appear in the neighborhood and be warmly received. Indeed, nearly all the greats of the Harlem Renaissance — Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, dozens more — were born elsewhere and headed to Harlem to achieve their ranking in the pantheon.
But Rhodes-Pitts seems not so confident of her own place. Is she a “politically minded friend,” a gentrifier? No, she’s assured, because she’s both black and poor.
This gave me pause. Since she holds a BA from Harvard, she’s not really poor — no matter what her cash flow situation — in the same way that her neighbors who spend their days on street corners are poor. This might not matter so much except she seems to think Harlem’s most serious problem is not the poor, but progress. She writes disdainfully of the new café at the end of her block — she must mean Settepani, though she doesn’t name it — saying sarcastically that it’s been “lauded as a marvel of civilization and progress.”
But it is a marvel of progress, as are the dozens of other new uptown restaurants and stores. Harlem has been underserved by retail for most of its history, in part because of blatant discrimination. That’s now changing, and that’s good.
In fairness to her enterprise, which is to reconcile the renowned, metaphorical Harlem (the “Mecca of Black America,” as her subtitle notes) with the reality of today, she gives a marvelous tour through decades of iconic writings on Harlem. She is one with Hughes, who wrote, “I was in love with Harlem long before I ever got there.” She spent her high school days reading and categorizing the great Harlem writers and envisioning what Harlem would be like before she ever saw it. She commands a deep knowledge of the literature and applies it to individual buildings and streets — a unique and useful contribution. She quotes and intends to live by Alain Locke’s “The New Negro,” which warned, “History must restore what slavery took away.” This is an admirable sentiment.
Yet she’s not a romantic. She can’t quite grasp how Harlem could exist as “both haven and ghetto.” Set against what she sees as the enchantment of Harlem is the disenchantment of the rest of her book’s title. She borrows “Harlem is Nowhere” from Ralph Ellison’s essay of 1948, which was not published until Harper’s ran it in 1964, the year of Harlem’s destructive riots. “If Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro’s death agony,” wrote Ellison, “it is also the setting of his transcendence. Here it is possible for talented youths to leap through the development of decades in a brief 20 years, while beside them white-haired adults crawl in the feudal darkness of their childhood.”
Rhodes-Pitts tries to hold onto the transcendence while exploring the bitterness of her neighbors and the squalor of some of their lives.
But from her observations and conversations, she comes to the odd conclusion that gentrification is destroying Harlem. Angered by what she sees as decades of failed government policy culminating in the Bloomberg administration’s river-to-river rezoning of 125th Street, she says the plan will “turn 125th Street into a valley of high-rise luxury apartment buildings.” She became an organizer of the April 2008 demonstration, “Hands Across Harlem,” whose press release charged, “The people of Harlem are being evicted from the neighborhood they have made internationally famous, only to be replaced by a plan that rewards the wealthy real estate industry.”
The protestors did not succeed in creating their planned human chain the length of 125th Street because, said Rhodes-Pitts’ fellow demonstrator, Harlemites “were so broke down, so scared, so indifferent.”
But here’s the problem that Rhodes-Pitts never answers: How does any community hold onto its unique character with atrophy? Even during the fabled days of the Harlem Renaissance, famous black residents, including Louis Armstrong and Lena Horne, complained about Harlem’s noise and crime and disembarked for Queens. If it is to retain its unique character, Harlem must continue its transformation into an attractive, high-density neighborhood in which residents and businesses flourish. Part of the point of the Bloomberg rezoning was to bring in new residents to patronize the 125th Street corridor’s restaurants and stores, many of which desperately need new customers.
The riddle, as Rhodes-Pitts notes, was identified decades earlier by Locke. “It all comes down to a point that is as simple as it is terrible,” she writes. “It is a fact that closes in on itself, like the mythical serpent that devours its own tail: This is our land that we don’t own.”
Julia Vitullo-Martin is director of the Regional Plan Association’s Center for Urban Innovation.