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I remember appreciating the simplicity of the poem’s title: “Harlem.” The name did not appear anywhere else in the poem, but by virtue of that title alone, the images described in Hughes’s lines took on a documentary quality. Faithfully trusting the poet as a source of reportage, I thought: of course Harlem is a place where dreams are consumed by various degrees of frustration. We (my white classmates and me) did not have to know much about the place to be somehow certain of that.
Armed with a new appreciation of figurative speech, I looked for more Hughes in the school library and discovered the romance of his love poems. There was “Harlem Night Song”:
Come, Let us roam the night together
Singing.
I love you.
Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.
Down the street
A band is playing
I love you.
Come,
Let us roam the night together
Singing.
I memorized the poem and imagined a bard at least as handsome as Langston Hughes singing those words to me. And there was “Juke Box Love Song”:
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem’s heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day—
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.
Hughes had harsher songs, the tone of which would have pierced the mood and cleared the dance floor of all love-struck couples. So, until many years later I skipped over poems like “The Weary Blues.” Lenox Avenue was still the bandstand, but the poet was not striking up Tin Pan Alley love songs. This was a funereal dirge, sung without accompaniment. Reading its opening lines in the midst of my Harlem rhapsodies, I moved on to another poem. Here’s what I missed:
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Also at the school library, I found pictures that I associated with Hughes’s Harlem poems. They were from Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document, a collection of photographs made during the Great Depression. They showed families crammed into tenements and dancers at the Savoy ballroom, marchers on Seventh Avenue, and schoolchildren playing stickball. I found shots of a street vendor selling watermelons from the back of a truck, and children playing in the shell of an abandoned building whose doorway is marked KEEP OUT. Siskind ventured into private apartments to record family scenes: Here is a woman in a crowded, disheveled kitchen. She stands before an icebox with the door open, looking in. Her face is just barely in profile; the camera seems unconcerned with her defining features. On the nearest side of that turned-away face, you can nearly glimpse a smile, or at least a hint of amusement. She wears a stylish ensemble—a fluted tea-length black skirt that falls above elegant yet sensible shoes, a blouse with draped keyhole openings at the shoulders.
Untitled [Street Facade 1], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)
Untitled [Street Facade 2], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)
The photograph could be read as “Depression-era woman looking for food,” but the woman stands with the poise of a spokesmodel for a kitchen-appliance store showing off the latest modern conveniences. The picture captures her fine clothes, her grace, and that hint of a smile. But perhaps we are meant to register only her black skin, her cramped surroundings, and wonder if the icebox is empty.
Siskind was concerned with showing the destitution of Harlem during the Depression. But among the photos I studied in Harlem Document, the one that occupied me most carried the fewest social signifiers—no skin, no appliances, no face denying the camera’s view. It showed only the front of an apartment building, its facade staring blankly at the camera, its many windows boarded up with horizontal slats. The repetition of the windows and the boards created a jarring visual beat, abstracting the poverty that was figured elsewhere so explicitly.
Untitled [Street Facade 3], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)
Untitled [Street Facade 4], from “Harlem Document Series,” ca. 1937 – 1940. (Photo by Aaron Siskind / Courtesy of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film)
This was a rhythm to which you could not dance. Beneath their bleak and bitter sheen, the other pictures had a bit of sepia charm from having passed into history, but this facade did not provide the comfort of the long gone. I knew—even then, growing up in Texas—that Harlem was a place where you could still find buildings boarded up like that, forsaken for more than half a century.
Hughes’s love poems still floated through my mind, along with the amorous territorialism of a jazz ballad I listened to as a teenager, playing the cassette in an infinite loop: You can have Broadway / give me Lenox Avenue. Those lyrics and everything I had heard about the Harlem Renaissance collided with the repulsion thrown off by the boarded-up buildings. I did not understand how this place existed as both haven and ghetto. It seemed, to my teenage mind, 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.
The unpublished outtakes of Siskind’s Harlem project offer a submerged narrative. I was surprised to find many more disconcerting images of facades. It’s as if, while trawling uptown streets to record the scenes that became Harlem Document, Siskind had often retreated from the easy schematics of reportage, drifting toward photography as architectural survey. Frame after frame shows abandoned buildings and brownstones, elegant and majestic if not for the bricks and boards. Here, Siskind releases Harlem from the scrutinizing grip of the social realist’s eye, but the abstractions of his facade studies also tell a story.
I realized much later, that, though Siskind’s photos of abandoned buildings could not be classed as street life reportage or used as evidence for social programs of the New Deal, the images still documented events in motion. Just as the natural inclination of a dream is not explosion but expression and fulfillment, the natural destiny of a building is not to be sealed off from the world around it, no longer offering shelter. The buildings had been abandoned and boarded up for a reason. There was human activity captured within the frame of those eerie photographs. The activity was contempt.
What you call a ghetto, I call my home. The voice of a young man who opens the introduction to Bruce Davidson’s book East 100th Street is a challenge to that project before it has even begun—a taunt to the photographer and viewer. The voice matches the stark, frank portraits in high-contrast black-and-white. The subjects often stare directly into the camera, unlike Siskind’s Harlemites—turned away or looking into the distance. I am still in the library as a teenager, but my taste for the real as defined by twentieth
-century photographers has veered from nostalgic to gritty. Davidson delivered this quality in his 1960s portraits of street toughs and the tender shots of families whose lives seemed to sag along with their furniture. These images came closer to the realities I was by then reading about in Harlem coming-of-age memoirs by Claude Brown and Piri Thomas. How close? Davidson takes us into the bedroom of Harlem odalisques—one is draped naked across a bed that is itself stripped nearly to the ticking-covered mattress. Another photo shows a woman in a negligee, the heart-shaped cardboard top of an old Valentine’s candy box fixed to the wall as decoration. In another, the rotting carcass of a dead horse crowns the abundant debris piled in an empty lot.
My study of Davidson’s work was not limited to observation. In the pages of a commonplace book where I collected quotations from my favorite writers (at the time, Hurston and Baldwin, Ellison and Fanon, Whitman and Dickinson and Walcott), I also made sketches from the photographs of East 100th Street. If the poetry of Hughes was one kind of apprenticeship (Go home and write / a page tonight…), Davidson’s pictures provoked another. But one element of the photographs could not be revealed by way of careful sketches—the white lie of the realist photographer, a sin of omission. We rarely learn under what circumstances such photographs are made. How did Davidson and Siskind gain entry? Were the reclining women in Davidson’s dingy rooms aspiring models, the photographer’s lovers, or whores? Who granted access? And after access, who granted permission?
These questions are necessary, because such photographs are destined to play a role, cast out of art’s refuge to the harsher realm of sociology and political propaganda. These pictures make an argument about the way life is lived. The people in a photograph end up as symbols. They are both specific and generic—the photographs capture moments in time and space, but the subjects are transformed into representative specimens.
Too often in documentary photographs, the transaction is obscured and the presence of the eye is not accounted for. As a film student experimenting with photography, I could never take pictures of people on the street. In those days—visiting Harlem to use the library—I made photo expeditions halfway across 125th Street before giving up and turning back toward Broadway. My efforts resulted in a mediocre collection of photos featuring no people at all, only words on signs. My eyes were drawn to two slogans in particular, united in their ubiquity: JESUS SAVES and LIQUOR.
In Harlem Document, Siskind’s images are paired with texts from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project. The project deployed a number of young writers, scholars, and journalists to collect oral histories from black New Yorkers, especially in Harlem. While a number of unknown writers participated as interviewers, Harlem Document includes the work of a few who went on to prominence, including Ralph Ellison and Dorothy West. Though not included in the Siskind volume, the wider project also gave a boost to the young Zora Neale Hurston, as well as to Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and Richard Wright. They were paid twenty dollars per week for their services.
The question of access that sounds so urgently from the Harlem photographs of Siskind and Davidson also arises from the stories collected by these oral historians. FWP writer Frank Byrd answers it this way: I was a neighborhood boy. So Byrd could easily join games of hardball, basketball, and stickball, and then strike up conversations. That way you got to know the people. And that was the beginning, you see…. Then you had to pass the time of day with them until you felt a warm relationship so that you could talk, so that they could talk.
Ralph Ellison remembered a similar method. I hung around playgrounds. I hung around the streets, the bars. I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. I would tell some stories to get people going and then I’d sit back and try to get it as accurately as I could.
Both men describe a kind of stakeout, where their proximity led to friendship, which eventually led to talk. But there was also a proximity of circumstances, for they were black and themselves “on relief.”
In some cases, the writers later converted the FWP material into their own artistic product. One encounter, transcribed by Dorothy West and included in Harlem Document, shows the young writer clearly trying out her powers of narrative, pathos, and poetry within the confines of her sociological mission. Ralph Ellison uses the words of one woman—whom he must have approached in one of those hundreds of apartment buildings he canvassed for the FWP—in his essay “The Way It Is.” He records the suspicion with which his questions were met:
“So you want to know about how we’re doing? Don’t you live in Harlem?”
“Oh, yes, but I want to know what you think about it.”
“So’s you can write it up?”
“Some of it, sure. But I won’t use your name.”
“Oh I don’t care ’bout that. I want them to know how I feel.”
She became silent. Then, “You didn’t tell me where you live, you know,” she said cagily. I had to laugh and she laughed too.
“I live up near Amsterdam Avenue,” I said.
“You telling me the truth?”
“Honest.”
“And is your place a nice one?”
“Just average. You know how they go,” I said.
“I bet you live up there on Sugar Hill.”
“Not me,” I said.
“And you’re sure you’re not one of those investigators?”
“Of course not.”
“I bet you are too.” She smiled.
I shook my head and she laughed.
Another example is the barstool testimony of a railroad porter interviewed by Ellison:
I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me. You understand? I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me. What do I mean? Listen. I’m from Jacksonville Florida. Been in New York twenty-five years. I’m a New Yorker! But I’m in New York and New York ain’t in me. Yuh understand? Naw, naw, you don’t get me. What do they do. Take Lenox Avenue. Take Seventh Avenue. Take Sugar Hill! Pimps. Numbers. Cheating these poor people out what they got. Shooting, cutting, backbiting, all them things. Yuh see? Yuh see what I mean? I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me! Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. I’m laughing but I don’t mean it; it ain’t funny. Yuh see, I’m on Sugar Hill, but Sugar Hill ain’t on me.
Yuh understand? Naw, naw, you don’t get me. The railroad porter’s existential musings later appear verbatim, from the mouth of a character in Ellison’s Invisible Man.
“And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don’t let this Harlem git you. I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me, understand what I mean? Don’t git corrupted.”
Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin (left to right), ca. 1955. (Courtesy of the Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Zora Neale Hurston, 1934. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten / Courtesy of the Van Vechten Trust and the Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Langston Hughes was not a member of the FWP, but since the earliest days of his career, he, too, was concerned with fidelity to “the way it is.” As early as 1926, he argued that nothe low-down folks, the so-called common element would be the only launching ground for a truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. The other classes, producing greater numbers of artists of lesser quality, were too self-conscious and too concerned with European standards, he thought, to make a great achievement.
Hughes himself was from a modest background, but he was well educated and well traveled. He had his own moment of confusion about European standards when, famously, his white patroness Charlotte Osgood Mason rejected some of his writings as lacking the authentic and primitive qualities of the work that had first gained her attention and accolades from the white publishing world. This episode sent Hughes into a crisis—he broke with Mason and went on an extended trip to Haiti to recover
. His crime had been attempting poetry that was, in the opinion of his patroness, inauthentic. And let that page come out of you—/ Then, it will be true.
Throughout the rest of his career, Hughes hewed closely to a style of poetry that could better be labeled “authentic” and pertaining to the so-called common element. He enjoyed wide popularity, earning the unofficial title of Harlem’s poet laureate. But some of his work, including the collection Montage of a Dream Deferred, caused at least one reviewer to grumble about the limitations of folk art.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Harlem’s beloved poet wrote a popular weekly column for the Chicago Defender that borrowed the voice of the low-down folks. Like Ellison and the other WPA writers, Hughes was a denizen of Harlem barstools. From that perch he copied down as accurately as possible the humor, cadences, and quandaries of his neighbor’s lives, animating them though his barfly avatar Jesse B. Semple, also known as Simple. Though Simple was a fictional creature, Hughes explained the nature of his material: I cannot truthfully state, confesses Hughes, as some novelists do at the beginnings of their books, that these stories are about “nobody living or dead.”
The facts are that these tales are about a great many people—although they are stories about no specific persons as such. But it is impossible to live in Harlem and not know at least a hundred Simples, [and, referring to other characters in the Simple tales] fifty Joyces, twenty-five Zaritas, or reasonable facsimiles thereof.
On one occasion, Hughes came face to face with a facsimile of his hero. When entering the local pub, a bartender who was an avid reader of the Simple columns introduced the writer to a patron. Without me saying a word, a conversation began so much like the opening chapter in my book that even I was a bit amazed to see how nearly life can be like fiction or vice versa.