B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  Thus, the White Rose Industrial Association took up its new mission, to be a friend of the strange girl in New York, a sanctuary for the migrant. Let us call it White Rose, Mrs. Matthews declared. I shall always feel that the girls will think of the meaning—purity, goodness and virtue and strive to live up to our beautiful name. Acting as an unauthorized society for the aid of travelers, Mrs. Matthews and her collaborators took turns at the pier in order to meet every steamer of the Old Dominion line arriving from the principal southern port of Norfolk, Virginia. They delivered the witless and lonely travelers out of the hands of job sharks and into a setting where they would find pleasant lodgings for girls with privilege of music and reading rooms, dining room, kitchen and laundry offered at reasonable rates. In some cases, the neediest wayfarers were housed for free. By 1925, more than 30,000 girls and young women had passed through the doors of the White Rose Home. Some were well educated, earnest, of sterling worth, capable and willing to take care of themselves, needing only the advice and encouragement of a good woman. Others were in need of help in many ways. They had no money, no knowledge of the ways of a great city, no friends. They were sheltered, guided, fed, clothed when necessary, many taught to work acceptably in the homes of the Metropolis and many others saved from lives of shame.

  The original White Rose Home was located on the Upper East Side. By 1918, when the black population of New York was in the midst of its move to Harlem, the White Rose Home followed, leasing and then purchasing a brownstone on West 136th Street. When young women like Emma Lou, Lutie, Helga Crane, and Pinkie arrived in Harlem, they could find a warm bed and companionship in its elegant rooms. But the White Rose was more than an employment agency or a rooming house; it also provided moral guidance. How the custodians of the home kept their charges away from the nearby speakeasies, taverns, and ballrooms is unrecorded.

  The young women received assistance in job placement and classes in “Race History.” Whereas the domestic training was necessary for the new arrivals to make a living in the very limited field of work available to black women, the classes in literature and “Race History” were a particular passion of Mrs. Matthews. She was a writer and an intellectual; her own development had been encouraged by an employer who interrupted her in reverie while she was supposed to be dusting books in his library. In 1905, the original White Rose Home was said to possess one of the most unique special libraries in New York. It included works by Booker T. Washington, Charles Chestnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar; rare volumes like a 1773 second edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry; a bound edition of the 1859 Anglo-African Magazine, which gave an account of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and his subsequent trial and execution; and several narratives of escaped slaves.

  If Matthews provided the tools of domesticity, including a good stock of aprons, dust caps, dusters etc always on hand, her library and classes held their own utility. Our history and individuality as a people not only provide material for masterly treatment, but would seem to make a Race Literature a necessity as an outlet for unnaturally suppressed inner lives which our people have been compelled to lead.

  The library of the White Rose Home provided a shelter for souls, based on the conviction that racial uplift could be accomplished by young women whose only value in the white world was as maids.

  Thus she hoped to inspire in them confidence in their group and in themselves—confidence and a hope that she believed would incite them to noble thoughts and great ideas and deeds. Who dares to estimate to what extent her dream was realized?

  The seventieth anniversary of the White Rose Home was celebrated in 1967 on the society pages of the Amsterdam News, in an article that bordered notices about a Mardi Gras ball, the installation of new officers at the Imperial Elks Home, marriage announcements, and the Founder’s Day festivities for a sorority. In addition to its purpose to avert the perdition of innocents, the White Rose had also become something of a society enterprise. The archives of the White Rose held at the Schomburg Center preserve the records of regular garden parties, annual linen showers, “gypsy teas” featuring performances of operettas, and a “tea bag festival” that raised money for roof repair by imploring invited guests to “drop herein three pennies for every year old.”

  Upon its 1967 anniversary, the house on 136th Street still received lodgers in its dormitory rooms, which could be decorated to the taste of the occupant. The whole house had been recently renovated, reported the Amsterdam News.

  The rooms retain their soft, nostalgic glow with its homelike atmosphere. Pale yellow walls in the first floor meeting room provide a cheerful background for the mahogany paneling and treasured antiques, one a chair from the home of the founder is one of the most revered pieces…

  The article is illustrated by a picture of three members of the White Rose Home and Industrial Association and a clergyman attending the anniversary occasion. They flank the empty chair of Victoria Earle Matthews—one woman lays a hand upon its seat, as if in supplication to a holy relic.

  One day I went to find the White Rose Home. It had been operational—in name, at least—into the early 1980s. I found it on a street of brownstones that were plain and modest in comparison with the distinctive manses of nearby Striver’s Row. Arrangement of silk flowers adorned the exterior window boxes. The building was well kept, and the address was fixed to the front in oversized gilt numbers. I thought of knocking on the door to gain entry. Instead I stood across the street to have a better view. Soon, a man came to the house, walked up the stairs, and went in. I tried to look as though I was not paying unusual attention to his home, while half wishing it had been open to receive me upon arriving in Harlem with a suitcase full of tales.

  3

  Searching for the Underground City

  I FOUND A PICTURE in the digital archive of the library. The circumstances were not extraordinary; I was not looking for anything in particular. I had merely typed the word “Harlem” into the image archive to see what it would yield.

  The picture shows an intersection, but nothing about the juncture is immediately recognizable. A large apartment building sits in the background, and in the foreground stand a man and a boy. The back of the man is turned against the camera, the boy is in partial profile; they are watching the scene coming toward them and toward me.

  The scene is only people walking; it is not remarkable. The men all wear dark suits with waistcoats, and fedoras or newsboy caps. There is a woman in the group wearing a skirt of black organdy that shines against the dominating flatness in view. Another group stands under the awning of a storefront, their backs also turned against the camera. The store’s sign—W. A. HOLLEY PHARMACIST—is crowded alongside advertisements for Coca-Cola and other billboards. One promotes a new comedy called 39 East. At ground level is a sign for STRAW HATS, a partially obscured sign for a cigar shop, and another sign, DRUGS. At the left edge of the frame is the slightest suggestion of street furniture: a lamppost or subway entrance. There is an unidentifiable piece of debris on the pavement. Most people in the picture walk determinedly, in the typical city-dweller’s trance, but one walker—forever caught in the middle distance—is worth noting. His hands are in his pockets, his upper body torques as if he is turning, midstep, to greet a friend. There is something familiar in his stance. It is the strut of a Harlem dandy, and his descendants can still be seen on the streets. Although the quality of the photo is poor and the camera is too far away to capture any defining features, there is the faintest flash of white where his mouth would be. He is in the middle of a shout or a smile.

  A street scene close to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, 1920. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

  An apartment building occupies the background on the far side of the intersection. Just visible in a few of the upper-story windows are figures looking out from their apartments—people surveying the ha
ppenings on the street, keeping watch from within. No one looks at the camera. I can tell from the clothing of the walkers that the picture dates to the 1910s. The shadows should tell me the time of day, but I can’t decipher the angle at which they fall.

  It is a Harlem street scene. It is another Harlem street scene. It is not an especially crowded scene, so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary crowdedness. The people are elegantly dressed, so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary destitution. The comedy advertised on the billboard is the movie adaptation of a 1919 stage play of no great distinction—the story of a minister’s daughter who comes to New York, lives in a boarding house, winds up a chorus girl, and then falls in love—so it does not tell the story of Harlem’s legendary artistic outpouring of racial consciousness.

  In fact, the story that captured my attention was not told by the photograph itself but by its caption. The picture is titled Within Thirty Seconds Walk of the 135th Street Branch. Nothing indicates whether these words were fixed to this image by its maker or by its cataloguer. It gives information not contained within the frame: there is no street sign in view alerting us that this corner is the intersection of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. For the caption’s author, the crucial thing was not the exact location—we do not learn whether you could reach this scene by walking north, south, east, or west. Essentially, the caption does not describe what the photo shows. Instead, it offers a lesson about perspective that has nothing to do with the position of the photographer’s camera. According to the caption, the people we are looking at, and their various activities, are not of primary importance. The scene is important only in relation to what is nearby. For the author of the caption, defining this image for the official record, the crucial thing was time: thirty seconds was all it took to go out and meet this scene. Its significance is in its distance from the library; all things in the street refer back to the library, just as the hour of the day around the world is determined by one’s distance from Greenwich. I scan the image looking for some other sign and wonder how many times I have hurried over that very spot.

  It has the character of a clue from a treasure hunt: Within thirty seconds’ walk of the 135th Street Branch you will find…. But there is a tear in the parchment. It is not possible to hunt treasure with such incomplete instructions. Within thirty seconds’ walk of the library you find a Halal grill cart manned by Egyptians, and West African women standing at the subway entrance selling the Daily News and New York Post. Walk in another direction and you find the Yemeni bodega where I go for tea and junk food while working at the library. At the intersection of 135th and Lenox, within thirty seconds’ walk of the library, I once found a man toting a portable xylophone who offered to play me a song. He walked with me in the direction of my building, chiming his keys, but he would not tell me, when I asked, the name of the tune he played. He acted as though it were an insult to ask and a blasphemy to answer.

  Within thirty seconds’ walk of the library, just near the corner of 136th Street, a handsome and serious-looking African man sells incense, perfume oils, and shea butter. Watching him during my breaks from the library, I notice that usually he is not minding his wares, but sits planted beneath a sidewalk tree reading the Koran, making notes, and manipulating a length of prayer beads. I imagine him to be a diligent scholar of Islamic law and wonder how he came to be a street merchant outside the library. One day, taking my break under a nearby tree, I saw that he’d been joined at his station and in his activity by two attentive students. I could not hear his voice, but the tender incantations of his young charges, timidly repeating their lessons for review, carried over the sound of traffic from that makeshift classroom beneath a shade tree. First they answered in concert, then each child spoke alone. The smaller of the two boys struggled to stay focused. He scribbled hurriedly in his composition book when his eyes were not darting up and into the crowd, as if searching for clues in the faces of the people streaming by.

  Before moving to Harlem, I often visited the library as a college student, during trips to New York. At the time I didn’t think of this as “going to Harlem,” because I was “going to the library.” Technically, when setting out on such journeys I was already in Harlem, because I always stayed with a boyfriend who lived just north of Columbia University. If I’d been more enterprising, I could have walked to the library or taken a series of buses, but instead I’d take the local 1 or 9 line from its elevated tracks at 125th Street and Broadway downtown to 96th Street. From there, I would then take the express train back uptown to 135th Street and Lenox, via the 2 or 3 line, which deposited me directly at the library door.

  When I came up from the station, it was necessary to get my bearings. This was not difficult—on one side of the intersection at 135th and Lenox was the hospital, on the other side was the library. I could invent for you the street scene of a decade past, some loud summer noise or curious encounter, but they would be just that, inventions, because I don’t remember a thing. I don’t remember a thrill that was specific to being in Harlem. The thrill was in the library. Harlem was the place I rushed past to meet it. The library was my true destination.

  Once inside, I settled into my work. My research at the time was scattered but intense. I went to the library armed with a list of topics, usually for some writing project that was never accomplished. The library was where I read the history of the Scottsboro trial. I read about the cult of the Black Madonna shrines scattered throughout Europe, deciphering the controversy about whether the faces of the Madonna statues had been black intentionally, perhaps hearkening back to dark-goddess worship beginning with Isis, or whether the images had become blackened through the operation of time and the residue of smoke from candles burned by her devotees. I studied minstrel shows. I read about the Great Migration and about the public execution of a twelve-year-old slave girl in 1786. All of these subjects consumed me at the time, the answers to a series of questions whose urgency I have since forgotten. Even though the hours spent at the library in those years did not produce any tangible achievement, my pilgrimages were carried out with a great sense of purpose: I was in the place I needed to be in order to know all things. But my visits to the city were brief. I would leave the library and dash out past Harlem, back to New York.

  Looking through my own old photographs I found a strange souvenir of those days, a picture I do not remember making of a vista I don’t recall having admired. It is a street scene, a Harlem street scene. It shows the intersection of 135th and Lenox Avenue—looking south down Lenox and taken from a slightly elevated view. When I first discovered the picture, it took some moments to understand how I could have achieved such an angle. Looking closer, a slight glare revealed that it was taken through a window. I soon realized only one place could have offered this particular vantage point: the library. Perhaps I’d abandoned my research that day and had been staring out the window. But I was looking out at nothing in particular, it seems. I did not train my lens on an event taking place in the distance or on any specific person. The clothes of the people in the street reveal that it was winter. There are no shadows by which to tell the time of day.

  Another picture in the library shows the point of departure for that thirty-second journey. It is the reading room of the 135th Street Branch, in 1935. A group of fashionable aesthetes are gathered for a portrait. They sit in a formal semicircle, with some in chairs and others standing behind in a second row.

  The static composure of these figures suggests none of the clamor that could be found in the intersection just a few yards away. The Staff and friends of the Negro Division of the 135th Street Library occupy a distant realm. The gentlemen sit with legs placidly crossed and arms folded in their laps, the women tuck their ankles in quiet propriety. One man wears white spats over his shoes; some of the women hold pocketbooks. The ladies are coiffed with hairstyles plastered into finely marcelled curls. One woman’s dress fastens with a multitude of buttons, another woman wears a corsage. In the center o
f the room is an Italian marble sculpture of the great nineteenth-century actor Ira Aldridge as Othello at the moment when he mournfully clutches Desdemona’s handkerchief. Around the room, framed pictures hang salon-style, and bronze busts decorate the tops of bookshelves. In the background, African masks jut out from the wall. Standing in the back row, unassuming, is Arthur Schomburg, the man whose collection was housed in that library, the man whose search for origins made the place a destination.

  What became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture began as the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Indeed, the now world-renowned special collection was, at first, just a few files of newspaper clippings on black history, curated by a white librarian, Ernestine Rose, and her black assistant, Catherine Latimer. Upon arriving at that post in 1920, at the moment when the slowly accumulating mass of blacks was beginning to assert its permanence and purpose in Harlem, Ernestine Rose devoted herself to creating a facility that might answer the question posed by the crowd in the streets outside. As she saw it, Instead of considering the Negro problem shall we not treat the Negroes as individuals, with the opportunities and restrictions only which surround all individuals?