No Crystal Stair

by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson

  Lewis Michaux took his knowledge with him. But it wasn’t a complete destruction. He transferred some of it to people who came into his bookstore. He left tentacles that reached a lot of people like me. So his spirit is still here. That didn’t go away with him. It’s what we all need to do, leave something that spreads to other people.

  LEWIS JR.

  Yesterday, Dad, when you said, “You’re the man of the house now,” I had to swallow my tears. It wasn’t the first time you’d called me a man. It was the first time I felt it was true.

  You were sixty when I was born, so time was against us from the start. But you seemed to know how to make memories for me whenever we were together. And the books. The books. They’re still here but, without you, when I open them, the pages seem blank.

  You used to talk about the smell of books. I remember I didn’t get it at first. But you taught me . . . helped me to smell the trees in the paper, the words in the ink, the history in the words . . . helped me to smell the knowing. Now, the smell of the knowing overwhelms me. And there’s something else beneath it. Another smell. Your aftershave. Old Spice.

  I’m shaving now. The man of the house. You treated me like a young man long before I started to shave, long before I deserved it. You didn’t talk down to me like I was a child who couldn’t understand.

  The man of the house. Guess I have to be. Mom needs me. And I’m not so grown that I don’t need her.

  I may be a man, but I still need you, Dad. No one will ever fill your empty place.

  Every day

  I seem to find

  some of you

  you left behind

  A note, a book,

  a rhyme or such

  just a trace

  of your personal touch

  James E. Turner, Cornell University

  2000

  As a youth, my identity was clouded by such negative images as appeared in the Tarzan movies—the pop-eyed, half-naked, savage natives. But at the National Memorial African Bookstore, I found a different reality—therapeutic and challenging as well as informative—the notion that African people are global.

  The bookstore was a dramatic presence for many young Blacks, like myself, whose consciousness of the issues facing our community was just being awakened. It offered something that we were craving—a Black-centered view.

  A. Peter Bailey

  2001

  I have my own personal collection of about twelve hundred black books. Mr. Michaux and the National Memorial African Bookstore launched me into this.

  I was in my twenties in the 1960s when I was visiting the bookstore. At the time, I was too much in awe to approach Brother Michaux. He was approachable, but I was kind of wary, so I can’t say I got to know him on a personal level.

  I wish now that I had.

  Ilyasah Shabazz,

  Daughter of Malcolm X

  and Betty Shabazz

  2011

  I grew up knowing of Lewis Michaux and his famous bookstore. It was the only one of its kind and attracted many scholars, historians, and students from around the country. I have a photo of my sister, Qubilah, and me on my father’s lap. My father was drinking from a Chock full o’Nuts coffee mug, surrounded by mounds of books. He spent any free time he had in that store.

  Lewis Michaux should be a household name for positioning this phenomenal store in Harlem. He understood the importance of history, literature, and philosophy. He made certain that great books were available to the community. It certainly helped my father and his work. I’ve been told Dad buried himself in there, and that he deeply respected and admired Mr. Michaux.

  Books were important to my family. We had a wonderful library at home. Every Wednesday evening, we had storytelling in our living room. Books became more than stories. My parents raised us girls to know the value of reading, the importance of literature, history, accountability for self, and responsibility for others, all the while maintaining integrity—values both Dad and Mom would have encountered in Michaux’s books.

  Think, for example, of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—the largest forced migration of human beings ever recorded in history. Millions of technically advanced and culturally diverse Africans held in bondage that laid the foundations upon which the north, south, and central Americas as well as the Caribbean now stand. Consider the psychological trauma Africans endured for hundreds of years—stripped from their homes, land, culture, family, and friends; forbidden to read, forbidden to understand who they were as individuals and who they were as a people, forbidden to form a healthy identity, forbidden to understand the significance of history. Imagine their connectedness to the human family erased. It is inevitable that people of African ancestry would confront the challenges they face today—and that our nation and the world would be in such dire straits.

  Lewis Michaux understood this, and he took action. He placed his bookstore in the center of Harlem, and the people flocked to it. They read the books he provided, and they left empowered by what they learned. They were fortified with the understanding that accurate knowledge of history prepares us for leadership in our homes. It prepares us for leadership in our communities and around the world. It enforces self-respect and then respect for others. Accurate historical knowledge led to a clear understanding that we cannot suppress another without subjugating ourselves, that we cannot come to the aid of another without helping ourselves. When we look at history, we find that even our oldest ancestors who built pyramids, erected monuments, farmed land, cattle, corn, cotton, and even danced for the rains and the sun overhead; that each gave back to society in his/her own way. When we understand such values, we understand the role each individual must play—that we are in fact our brother/sister’s keeper. That each of us is responsible for one another.

  The beauty and blessing of Mr. Michaux is that he assumed such a responsibility and left us with a monumental treasure.

  The Reverend Dr. Charles E. Becknell Sr.

  2010

  As I visit places and I’m in a black community, I try to find a bookstore, but I’ve never seen another place like the National Memorial African Bookstore. I’ve never seen another place that had that focus, that energy.

  When I was going to the bookstore in 1969, there was a blossoming of black literature and black awareness. I remember talking to Mr. Michaux about some of the black writers in the Harlem Renaissance. I was interested in that period because works by those artists, those writers, were beginning to resurface. They had been on bookshelves for years, but when this whole black awareness thing came about, they started coming to the forefront.

  What would I read next—Native Son? The Fire Next Time? I remember one book Mr. Michaux recommended was The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Those were exciting times. The whole explosion of African American literature was incredible. People were hungry for it. People aren’t hungry anymore.

  Our history and culture is fading away. If you know the history, the foundation that our people laid, if you read, you see the sacrifice that people paid. It’s about dignity. Our culture today is not being dignified. People like Mr. Michaux, and people my age, we stood for something. We had standards. What are the standards today?

  Rodnell Collins,

  Nephew of Malcolm X

  2010

  When I think of Lewis Michaux, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man comes to mind. He, like Uncle Malcolm, was touchable.

  Unlike many of the personalities today’s young people idolize, Brother Michaux was substance. He was solid ground.

  When there was going to be a rally in front of the bookstore, people would gather like it was some big rock concert. But they didn’t come for entertainment. They came looking for knowledge. The educational impact of the bookstore was profound.

  Poet Nikki Giovanni

  2010

  That bookstore was a national monument. There was no such thing as a black writer who didn’t know Lewis Michaux. He was a wonderful, wonderful man.

  I lived
in New York for eleven years and was in the store a lot. I got to know his secretary Helen Brown fairly well too. Not personally, just the back and forth, you know.

  Lewis was always very nice to me. And I had many signings at his store. It was a place that you stopped in because he knew everybody and everybody knew him. If you were looking for someone, he was the man to go to. If you wanted to know when a particular black writer was coming to town, you could ask Lewis. It was the stop-in place. If somebody was looking for me, Lewis could say, “Well, she stops in maybe a couple of times a week, but we can call her.”

  They took that whole block for the state office building. They wanted to get rid of the bookstore. You can’t overlook that. There were plenty of places in Harlem they could have put that building besides 125th Street. When you look at Harlem today, you can see there were places they could have built without taking down the bookstore. They wanted to disrupt it. It’s a typical story.

  I think there’s been a war on independent bookstores. It’s a crime because books are more than just books in the African American community. Literacy and education were once the hopes for getting away from slavery, out of the ghetto, into power. Bookstores have been cultural crossroads, information centers. The bookstore is where we meet, where we talk. In the sixties, in Harlem, at 125th Street and Seventh, it was Lewis Michaux’s bookstore.

  Ashley Bryan,

  Author and Illustrator

  2010

  When I went into the store, Mr. Michaux recognized me in that informal way that he had with anyone who came in. Often he was engaged with others in lively debate over contemporary or historical events affecting black life. He talked to everyone the same—the famous, the ordinary person, the intellectual.

  Mr. Michaux was so close to the work. He lived there really. When you walked in, it wasn’t so much the feeling of going into a store as it was a spirit of being in someone’s home with things that he loved.

  In the 1960s I was teaching a course on black poets at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. So I would go round the little shops in Harlem picking up on the work that was coming out of the black American poets—Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and a whole group of others at the time. They were coming in very small publications from Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit. Some were pamphlets, some were larger. Other small presses were also publishing the black poets. I found many of these little publications at the Michaux bookstore.

  That was a time when people were out on the street expounding things about Africa, the assertion of black identity and black pride. It’s the story of a people who have been put down as having no history. It was an explosion of affirming who we were and what we had given in terms of our contribution to world culture. The Michaux bookstore celebrated those contributions.

  Mr. Michaux put so much of his life into his collection and the people who went to the store. The Harlem bookstore was his world, and those who have shared it count the experience as unforgettable.

  A child can be reading a book and you call his name ten times, but he doesn’t hear you. He’s entered another world. Being in Michaux’s bookstore was like that.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  ABOUT THE RESEARCH

  My interest in Lewis Michaux and the National Memorial African Bookstore is both professional and personal. Lewis Michaux was my great-uncle. I visited the store only once, when I was fourteen and, regretfully, didn’t realize the store’s significance until years after it had closed and my uncle had passed away.

  Transcripts and audio recordings of interviews with Lewis were prime resources in my research, as were family archives, articles, books, and interviews with family members and others who knew him and/or visited the store.

  Researching this family history was exciting and challenging, though nonexistent and conflicting information complicated the project. I did my best to tell Lewis’s story using facts where I could, filling gaps with informed speculation, making this a work a fiction. My goal was to leave readers with the essence of the man, an understanding of what shaped him, and a picture of how he and his National Memorial African Bookstore influenced a community. Most of my characters are, or were, real. In creating their voices, I used a combination of their actual words and imagined text. The few fictional characters (Snooze, Calvin, Gus Travers, and those without names) were created from the oral-history stories of real people who were touched by the bookstore. Most of the newspapers, articles, and reporters in the book are fictional but based on research. The FBI files, obtained through the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, appear here with minimal editing.

  I’ve concluded that Lewis may have changed his name at some point in his life. His birth name was recorded in a family Bible as William Lonell Michaux. I knew him as Uncle Lonnie. Lewis’s wife, Willie Ann, always referred to him as Lonell. It seems name changing (and not always through legal transaction) was not uncommon. Some of my father’s generation added an e to Michaux, I suspect in an attempt to connect with the noted filmmaker and author Oscar Micheaux. This explains why my maiden name contains an e. (An amusing aside: Oscar’s original name may have been Michaux without the e.) To avoid confusion, in my novel I spelled Norris III’s last name “Michaux.” In reality, his legal name was spelled Micheaux, like my own.

  The bookstore’s name also changed. The National Memorial Bookstore was the original name. Lewis added “African” sometime around 1960.

  Lewis’s true age is a bit of a mystery. According to many sources, Lewis was in his early nineties when he died, placing his year of birth at 1884 or 1885, but census reports, FBI files, and a family Bible list his birth some ten years later as August 4, October 10, or October 20, 1895. A birth certificate (in any spelling variation of Lewis Henri or William Lonell) could not be located by Virginia’s Division of Vital Records. Lewis himself provides differing ages in several interviews, even in the course of a single interview. That said, it should be noted that census records and FBI files are not always accurate. For my purposes, I have used August 4, 1895, as his date of birth.

  The bookstore’s opening is also unclear. Various sources, including Lewis himself, give shifting start-up dates. That Lewis sold books for forty-four years is a common assertion, placing the inception at about 1931. Unable to track down a city business license, I have made an educated guess that the store began sometime in the late 1930s. My reasons include: 1) Lewis named the bookstore after his brother Lightfoot’s farm project, the National Memorial to the Progress of the Colored Race in America. This undertaking wasn’t conceived until 1936, when Lightfoot Michaux purchased land in Virginia. 2) The Philadelphia Church of God, where Lewis was business manager, didn’t exist until 1935. It is my understanding that he married Willie Ann Tabron-Allen in 1929, and they lived in Newport News before moving to Philadelphia to help establish a branch of the Church there. If he was operating a bookstore in Harlem at this time, he would have had to commute between Philadelphia and New York or between Newport News and New York, something he alludes to in a 1970 interview. 3) FBI files give 1939 as the year the bookstore opened. 4) Lewis stated in a 1974 interview that he was at the Seventh Avenue location for twenty-eight years before having to move the store to 101 West 125th Street in 1968. This, I believe is true and would place the opening of the original store around 1939. It is important to note, however, Lewis said in the same 1974 interview, “I started this place forty years ago,” suggesting the store opened in 1934. My great-uncle was quite a raconteur and not always the most reliable source.

  Lewis may have first tried his hand at selling books in the early 1930s while in Philadephia. Edith Ann Foreman, the first secretary for the Church of God in Philadelphia (1935–1940), wrote in a tribute read at Lewis’s funeral: “One day he walked in the office holding about five books in his hand. ‘I am going to open a bookstore,’ he announced. . . . ‘If I can get the Negro to read, it will change his mind about life, thus changing his lifestyle. We’ve been told from slavery
that the Negro is nothing, and he’ll always be nothing. . . . I’m going to change that. I want the Negro to know and understand that he has something to contribute to society.’”

  Foreman said Lewis rented a storefront, put a few books on display, and waited. He didn’t sell much, but “he had caught the vision.”

  Lewis may have begun peddling books in Harlem without a storefront or in association with another bookseller (there are mentions of Richard B. Moore and Willis Huggins) prior to officially opening the National Memorial African Bookstore.

  I was unable to document any of this. For the flow and sequence of events in my story, I have dated the bookstore’s start-up at 1939.

  Exactly when the business began is of little importance relative to the historic significance of Lewis Michaux and his National Memorial African Bookstore. Regardless of when the store opened, this story is worth telling and knowing.

  ADDITIONAL NOTES

  Lewis died before Lightfoot Michaux’s estate was settled. Although the 1968 will was ultimately set aside, the estate remained unresolved for more than twenty years with legal fees exhausting most of the assets.

  Lightfoot Michaux’s Gospel Spreading Church of God still exists with ten churches scattered throughout Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Happy News, first published in 1933, continues its monthly circulation. In 1992, a memorial marker dedicated to Lightfoot’s work was placed in Williamsburg, Virginia, near the tract of land purchased for the National Memorial to the Progress of the Colored Race in America. Currently, the land is being used for a Christian summer youth camp. Originally called the Happy Am I Summer Camp, it was renamed Camp Lightfoot following the death of the Church’s founder. A dairy farm and cemetery are also on the property.