If the street was the place where black Harlem constituted “the Negro problem,” where people were only of sociological interest, then the library would be a temple of the individual, worshipping the personal aspirations and collective triumphs of black people and their culture. The purpose of the 135th Street Branch, articulated early on by Rose, was to preserve the historical records of the race; to arouse the race consciousness and race pride; to inspire art students [and] to give information to everyone about the Negro.
Rose and Latimer set up a program of poetry readings and book discussions, and, most important, they began to build a small collection of books, periodicals, and clippings related to the history of black people in Africa and America. The novelist Nella Larsen worked there as a librarian. The young poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were regular patrons. Of course, a great many other seekers whose purposes and accomplishments will never be known also came to the library. The black history collection soon became so popular that the librarians, after consulting with a committee of local intellectuals, removed the items from general circulation in the lending library, keeping them on the upper floor of the branch, where they could only be retrieved for reference on the premises. The few books available on black history were so frequently used and so much in demand that many hard-to-find and irreplaceable books were read until they fell apart.
Readers at work in the Schomburg Room of the 135th Street branch library, ca. 1926. (Courtesy of New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)
By the time this mania for the black past was unfolding at the 135th Street Branch library, Arthur Schomburg was already a noted bibliophile, well known for the breadth and value of his collection and the ardor with which he pursued it. Schomburg belonged to a circle of “race men” who were also book fiends, sharing and trading recent acquisitions. Before there was such a thing as the New Negro movement, he had cofounded the Negro Society for Historical Research, was a member of the Negro Book Collectors Exchange, and had served as president of the American Negro Academy. These organizations were all ambitious in their aims, and they were all short-lived, but their existence tells us much about the spirit of their age. The desire of these men to uncover the forgotten history of black people was matched by a desire to protect and steward that knowledge.
The books and documents Schomburg and his colleagues hunted were precious, and they had to compete with better-funded white collectors. According to one account, Schomburg once refused to sell his collection to a wealthy white man because the prospective buyer wouldn’t reveal his plans for the materials. Upon learning that many white institutions had impressive collections of historic black books, Schomburg wrote to a friend, You would be surprised to know that libraries in the South who bar the Negro’s admittance have a large amount of his literature.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg was a native of Puerto Rico, born to a German father and a black mother. His interest in black history was sparked when a teacher told him that black people had no history. By the time he was living in Brooklyn and making a respectable, middle-class living as a mail clerk at a bank, he was still passionately attempting to refute that charge. Schomburg was said to have a magic sense that guided his quest for new material, spending his lunch hours and weekends digging through New York’s antiquarian bookstores. In his search for treasures, Schomburg corresponded with other collectors around the country and abroad, including Haiti and Liberia. He drafted friends into his research, sending requests to travelers like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke when they were just about to depart for sojourns in Europe. He also traveled around the country, partly because of his duties as a Freemason.
In addition to collecting, Schomburg produced monographs and papers on neglected black figures from world history. His pamphlet Is Hayti Decadent? investigated the political situation of that country leading up to and in the midst of the American occupation. He researched and wrote of notable men of African descent who made important but sometimes forgotten contributions to world history, including the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the Guadeloupe-born composer and courtier; Antonio Maceo, a black officer in the struggle for Cuban independence from Spain; Alessandro, the Florentine duke who was known as “the Negro Medici”; and Leo Africanus, the Moorish geographer from Granada, a place Schomburg visited during his only journey to Europe.
In 1925, the 135th Street Branch library hosted an exhibition featuring a small assortment of Schomburg’s collection. There is a Negro exhibit at the New York Public Library, one report began. Within a dozen cases there lies the story of a race. A dozen cases, narrow, shallow, compressed and yet through their clear glass tops there shines that which arrests, challenges, commands attention.
Writing of that same exhibition, without mentioning that the collection on display was his own, Schomburg issued what may have been a challenge to that old schoolteacher who had robbed him of his claim to history:
Not long ago, the Public Library of Harlem housed a special exhibition of books, pamphlets, prints and old engravings, that simply said, to skeptic and believer alike, to scholar and schoolchild, to proud black and astonished white, “Here is the evidence.”
The exhibit was so well received that in 1926 the New York Public Library, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, purchased the entire collection for $10,000. The Schomburg accession included more than 5,000 books, 3,000 rare manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits, clippings albums, and several thousand pamphlets. Among the treasures were original manuscripts of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar; an original, signed edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems; and an original proclamation of Haitian independence, signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Schomburg’s collection was added to the existing holdings at the 135th Street Branch, forming the New York Public Library’s Division of Negro History, Literature, and Prints. Though he relinquished ownership of his collection, Schomburg did not give up its stewardship or his quest. He continued to acquire items and in 1932 was appointed curator of the Negro Division, overseeing the fulfillment of his vision until his death in 1938.
The original 135th Street Branch building still stands. It is one of several libraries in Harlem dating back to the philanthropic atonements of the Gilded Age, all funded by Andrew Carnegie and all featuring facades in the Palladian style. The Schomburg Center was enlarged in 1977. The new addition was made to connect to the old building via an atrium, though its style does not at all communicate with the old one—one is a civilizing fantasy of the European Renaissance, the other a purifying fantasy of Afrocentric brutalism. After the library closes in the evening, the upper rooms of the old library remain lit. Walking across 135th Street at night, I am often startled by shadows that can be seen through the ivy-covered windows. They are only busts and statues in a windowsill—their silhouettes throw outlines against the drawn blinds. But at first they look like moving figures, busy in the library after dark.
Long before Arthur Schomburg dreamed of his library, a retail space of the St. Phillips Apartments, just a few doors away at 135 West 135th Street, housed the first black bookstore in Harlem. George Young’s Book Exchange came to be known as the “Mecca of Literature Pertaining to Colored People.” A pilgrim there would find nothing less than the holy books of the New Negro—not only histories written by blacks, but also any book the proprietor could find with enlightening references to Africa, which were often written by abolitionists and explorers. Revealing volumes expressed the consciousness of Africa and marshaled evidence of early African culture and its significant contribution to Europe and the world in crushing refutation of the racist theories of inequality. Typical of the bookstore’s offerings were universal histories of black people documented by Joel Augustus Rogers in From Superman to Man and by W. E. B. DuBois in The Negro. Both titles can still be purchased from Young’s heirs, the West African book vendors who operate from folding tables all along 125th Street. Young was also a publisher, an
d among the works bearing his imprint was an edition of the inaugural address given by Edwin Wilmot Blyden on January 5, 1881, at his swearing-in as president of Liberia College; William Lloyd Garrison’s treatise on The loyalty and devotion of colored Americans in the revolution and war of 1812; and The mote and the beam: an epic on sex-relationship ’twixt white and Black in British South Africa.
A few decades later, Lewis Michaux opened his National Memorial African Bookstore at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Signs above its storefront, captured in many photographs, blared its significance as the “House of Common Sense,” the “Home of Proper Propaganda,” and the “World History Book Outlet on 2,000,000,000 (Two Billion) Africans and Non-White Peoples.” An American flag was placed out front, and so was a sign urging passersby to “Register Here,” for it was also the “Repatriation Headquarters for the Back to Africa Movement.” The area in front of Michaux’s bookstore was called Harlem Square; it was the starting point or endpoint of many street marches and a place where rallies convened and impromptu street speakers held court.
Michaux’s iconic bookstore is gone, but when I arrived in Harlem another famous destination for black thought was still in existence. Liberation Bookstore, at the corner of 131st and Lenox, dates back to the late 1960s. Its proprietor, Una Mulzac, recalled to a journalist the trouble brought on by her store’s name. When I first thought of opening a bookstore and calling it “Liberation” I met with a lot of comments and discouragement from certain people about the name. They said I shouldn’t call it liberation. I would be inviting trouble, I should name it after myself or my father or just call it “Bookstore.”
My father remembers making special trips to New York to visit the shop during his college days. I passed it many times before I ever went in—often the door was locked, and it seemed to operate on an irregular schedule. When I finally did visit, I found the elderly Ms. Mulzac minding the store alone. She was happy to have a visitor and make conversation, and she was still fiercely dedicated to propagating the knowledge whose importance blared on several posters decorating the store windows and facade. By the time I returned there, the irregular business hours of the bookstore had apparently ceased altogether. I heard that Ms. Mulzac was ill and noticed piles of mail accumulating in a heap inside the door. I copied down the words from signs in the windows and the titles of books that could be seen through the glass. Later I passed and saw a small hole in the window, surrounded by the spiderweb pattern of shattered glass. I heard a rumor that all the books inside were going to be sold off. Soon the old, faded sign was whitewashed, and someone made a half-hearted attempt to cover the windows with newspaper. But the books remained inside, untouched, for a long while to come.
Now, when I go to the library, I do not make such a tortuous journey. I live just minutes away, and it is not even necessary to turn a corner. One of the security guards, Mr. Kingston, always greets me with kind words and a smile. When I leave, he bids me good-bye with a wish for safe travels. Once I told him it would only be two blocks before I reached my door, and he said he wished me safety all the same.
Some time passed before I knew Julius Bobby Nelson by name. This is because when I first arrived on Lenox Avenue, I did not know anyone and was not known by anyone. When I passed into and out of my front door, the people standing at my stoop would part to let me enter and part to let me leave. For a long time, little was exchanged between us except excuse me and thank you. I didn’t know who they were or where they lived, these older people who stood facing Lenox Avenue during the day, or the younger ones who came at night to guard the same spots. But they seemed to belong there more than I did, provoking in me the impulse to apologize for my presence at my own front door. I was not used to living in the middle of it all, right there on the avenue with only the thinnest of veils to pass through before meeting the world.
Eventually I did begin to know my neighbors and be known by them, but this process happened by degrees. I came to know Ms. Bessie and some of the others, even those who eyed me with suspicion at first and did not speak unless I insisted on it. Sometimes I would pause when going out or pause before going in; this became my habit, so I was often late to wherever I was going on account of having paused at my door to chat.
I don’t remember if I was going out or coming in the day I met Julius Bobby Nelson. I don’t even remember for certain if what I am about to tell you happened on the day we formally met, or if it is simply a day I remember with some clarity because what he said compelled me to write it down. I would have already known his face by then, and he would have known mine. It was spring. I had probably stopped under the tree to speak with Ms. Bessie or Ms. Minnie when Julius Bobby Nelson got my attention and beckoned me to him with a pull of his eyes and his hand and a flick of his chin. I knew he wanted me to come closer and listen.
To listen well one must come close indeed, for his speech is somewhat impeded. I am not sure of the reason, but the longer I listened, the clearer he became and the more I understood. Sometimes I heard him with a tantalizing clarity, but then a crucial word would disappear into the back of his mouth, never reaching my ear. Before I knew him by name, I knew him by this manner of speaking; in my head I thought of him as the Mumbler. He did not seem bothered by or necessarily aware of my difficulty in understanding him. I never noticed anyone else having this difficulty. When I still knew him as the Mumbler, we had at least one exchange: he told me that he was a champ, that he’d been almost pro. I never did ask what he was a champion of. I assumed it was boxing, and I assumed that was why he spoke the way he did.
On the day I learned his name, Julius Bobby Nelson beckoned to me and said, I live here… I grew up here, and I knew immediately he did not mean the city or even our neighborhood, but the block in which we stood. He is a tall man, and as he stood there, it was like he stood on the whole block all at once. He waved his large hand in a gesture only slightly more dramatic than the one that drew me into his audience. He took the whole block into view, indicating the breadth of his knowledge and the passage of time. He told me that his mother and father had lived in No. 469—the building adjacent to mine—his sister had lived in No. 471, and his school had been P.S. 89, the Douglass School. He pointed out the Douglass School, which was no longer there. We both faced the direction of where it was not, on the southwest corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, directly across from the library, where a tall apartment building now stood.
He mentioned names and characters and happenings without any explicit suggestion of their significance. It was in this way I learned about the gypsies, about the guinea Italian in the cigar shop who wouldn’t sell him a hot dog, about Dick’s liquor, and about Chicken Joe and the butcher. It was in this way I learned that they didn’t kill the white lady at the school. At the time, these facts hung together in a manner that fails in the retelling, and you will understand that I did not stop him to ask who were they or who was the white lady or under what circumstances did they not kill her at the school.
To point in a different direction was to land upon another set of disjointed facts. He pointed across the street where Lenox Terrace is now, and he said I built it and he said bricks and he said twenty-year lease and he said horse and carriage. As before, I did not stop him to beg for clarification. He told me that his nine brothers had lived across the street, he said something about the all-boys school on 119th (he said ’19th) while looking down the avenue in that direction. When his eyes came back to rest on me he said, I live here. I grew up here. I know all of it.
Julius Bobby Nelson told me more of what he knew, and I continued not to understand all of what he told me. He said he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and later, when I went inside and wrote this part down, I noted that he repeated it with a certain glint in his eye. He told me about a river, but I did not understand the name of it, and his repetitions did not help. Ms. Barbara was sitting there under the tree with us, and she understood what I did not. He was talking about the Cooper Riv
er, she said, and she asked What about that river? Whether he answered or what was the meaning, I did not record. Some importance was attached it, I noted, or merely my own curiosity. He returned to more immediate geography. First he pointed northeast to the Franklin Theatre on 135th Street just off Lenox, which is now a church, then to another theater, the Lincoln, on 132nd Street behind McDonald’s, which is now an empty shell.
He pointed behind me, and for a moment I did not turn in that direction. I knew he was pointing at the funeral home on the next block. He said he was friends with the man—I don’t know if he meant the proprietor or the man being buried that day. It was then he began to present riddles even stranger than before. Watch the walking, not the dead, he told me, and I had to have him repeat it. The ones who are walking, not the ones lying down, he said. I asked him to run it by me one more time, and then he said something about having laid a body out.
I am what I am, he told me. I am the law.
That was it. Was there anything more to say? Thus did God rebuke the impudence of Moses, when he dared to ask the unspeakable name. I went inside. Later that afternoon I left the house again and I saw Julius again, and he began again: I am what I am who I am.
Now Ms. Bessie was sitting under the tree. He pointed to her and said he knew her son, her daughter, her daughter-in-law, and a long list of other relatives. Ms. Bessie nodded to affirm his knowledge of her whole family. I did not doubt he could tell me the name of every person who had ever lived on the block. I know everybody, he said, and pointed again in the direction of the funeral home, as if to continue the point he had begun earlier. Clearer than anything else he said that day, he asked, See that hearse over there?
My notes drop off here. I didn’t write down what he told me about the hearse or who was in it. I did write down that Julius Bobby Nelson mumbled something more about the South and about Mississippi, but those were the only words I made out. I did not speculate as to what he meant to tell me, but I was sure it was something pertinent. Once, he pointed toward the library but he made sure to indicate that he meant the old library.
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