B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  Hughes opened himself as a medium for the voices of the public. I wonder what effect that had on what he could or could not say about his private life. Hughes, like many of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance, was a homosexual, although his biographer is content to class him as asexual. While Hughes’s love for his people received full-throated, unequivocal expression in his writing, his love for men could not.

  There was one love poem by Langston Hughes that I did not encounter back as a never-been-kissed teenage girl. It is written in the voice of the folk:

  I hope my child’ll

  Never love a man.

  I say I hope my child’ll

  Never love a man.

  Love can hurt you

  Mo’n anything else can.

  …………………

  I’m goin’ up in a tower

  Tall as a tree is tall,

  Up in a tower

  Tall as a tree is tall.

  Gonna think about my man—

  And let my fool self fall.

  Zora Neale Hurston is a writer about whom the questions of fiction, fact, and authenticity are always urgent. She is one of the most iconic writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, yet it is rarely noted how little of her written production concerns the place itself, and how little time Hurston actually spent there. This particular trick played on literary history seems fitting for a writer who thought of New York as both a basement to Hell and the place where she was most free: At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance… the cosmic Zora emerges.

  The cosmic Zora was the one brought up in the protective landscape of an all-black town in Florida, with little interaction from the white world to disrupt the certainty that she and her people were the center of existence. The cosmic Zora had lied about her age in order to further her education. Cosmic Zora was the scene-stealer who made jaw-dropping entrances at parties. She spoke carefully accented Barnardese but abandoned that refinement when it hindered her collection of anthropological materials during trips down South.

  Langston Hughes tells a hilarious but possibly apocryphal story that shows the unflappable Zora Hurston at work in the streets of her Harlem City. He describes the research she pursued for her studies at Columbia University:

  Almost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it.

  Hurston gives a wonderful mission statement for her work: Research is a formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell within.

  Hurston was as resourceful in her research as she was in procuring the means to pursue it. She was a protégée of the same demanding patroness who rejected Langston Hughes. But Charlotte Mason did not cause Hurston any angst, at least none that Hurston later wrote about. Hughes only barely conceals the scorn left over from his colossal falling out with Hurston when he describes how [to] many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect “darkie,” in the nice meaning they gave the term—that is a naïve, childlike, sweet, humorous, and highly colored Negro. But Hurston also manipulated those patronage relationships to her advantage, gaining support for the research trips that took her throughout the American South, to Jamaica, and to Haiti. In some ways, her association with both the niggerati (as she deemed her black creative contemporaries in Harlem’s artistic and literary bohemian set) and the negrotarians (as she called the enthusiastic white supporters) happened from a distance. Harlem was a point of access and a point of departure. Harlem was the place that launched her into the wider world. She was not blocked in.

  I have always been intrigued by a particular product of Hurston’s research. Her “Glossary of Harlem Slang” accompanied a short piece of fiction that was called “Story in Harlem Slang.” Indeed, the story’s plot is so thin that it seems her main intention was to showcase her fluency in the fast-flicking mother tongue of the street. What happens is not as important as how it’s said, and the uninitiated will need Zora Neale Hurston nearby to explain.

  A brief selection from the glossary shows her vivid mastery of the language. There are many variations on the provinces of Hell among other place names:

  Bam, and down in Bam – down South

  Beluthahatchie – next station beyond Hell

  Diddy-wah-diddy – a far place, a measure of distance. (2) another suburb of Hell, built since way before Hell wasn’t no bigger than Baltimore. The folks in Hell go there for a big time.

  Ginny Gall – a suburb of Hell, a long way off

  And then there are the many synonyms for black:

  Aunt Hagar – Negro race

  Conk buster – cheap liquor; also an intellectual Negro

  Dark black – a casually black person, also low black, lam black, damn black

  Eight-rock – very black person

  Handkerchief-head – sycophant type of Negro; also an Uncle Tom

  Inky dink – very black person

  Jar head – Negro man

  Jig – Negro, a corrupted shortening of zigaboo

  My people! My people! – Sad and satiric expression in the Negro language: sad when a Negro comments on the backwardness of some members of his race; at other times, used for satiric or comic effect

  But for all its value as research, and its possibly diverting pleasures for those white patrons who, according to Hughes, considered Hurston a perfect darkie, Hurston’s Harlem dictionary defines a troubling conundrum. If Hughes was the unmediated, celebratory voice singing of the folk to the folk, Hurston acted as a filter, collecting, preserving, and exalting the genius and artistry of black folk life even as she acted, sometimes literally, as a tour guide and interpreter.

  This complexity extends to other aspects of Hurston’s thought. On the one hand, she celebrated the all-black town that grew her up, eventually arguing in favor of segregation on the grounds that black people had nothing to gain from mixing with white folk. But, just as often, she casts off the shared burden of racial experience: Since I wash myself of race pride and repudiate race solidarity, by the same token I turn my back upon the past. I see no reason to keep my eyes fixed on the dark years of slavery and the Reconstruction.

  What does it mean to turn one’s back on the past, as Hurston pronounced? It means more than her experiments with personal mythology. It is, perhaps, a stony kind of realism. From where she stood, the past did not hold any mystical key to the present. (My old folks are dead. Let them wrestle all over Hell about it if they want to.) From where she stood, the future did not necessarily hold salvation. (Standing on the watch-wall and looking, I no longer expect the millennium. It would be wishful thinking to be searching for justice in the absolute.)

  In almost every essay James Baldwin wrote about Harlem, there is a moment when he commits a literary sleight-of-hand so particular that, if he’d been an athlete, sportscasters would have codified the maneuver and named it “the Jimmy.” I think of it in cinematic terms, because its effect reminds me of the technique wherein camera operators pan out by starting with a tight shot and then zoom out to a wide view while the lens remains focused on a point in the distance.

  Baldwin’s classic Harlem essays “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Notes of a Native Son,” and “Fifth Avenue Uptown” all have examples of this tactic. The earliest of these, “The Harlem Ghetto,” finds Baldwin pacing the streets of the neighborhood where he was born in 1924. Harlem, physically at least, has changed very little in my parents’ lifetime or mine. Now as then the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty, there are too many human beings per square block.

  Baldwin goes on to enumerate other hardships of H
arlem life: rents that are higher than elsewhere in the city, food that is of lesser quality yet more expensive than elsewhere in the city, job discrimination, and low wages. Baldwin’s first deployment of “the Jimmy” happens almost immediately. All of Harlem, he observes, is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.

  It could be another example for my high school lesson on similes, but it reveals much besides the linguistic force Baldwin perfected as a teenage holiness preacher. Baldwin’s description of life in Harlem suddenly quits the specific and, through that powerful image of the stifling, sealed-off room, makes a dash for the general. It is one of those grand, poetic generalizations that are Baldwin’s great gift to literature, as well as his great rhetorical weakness. But Baldwin’s trick is not just a matter of figurative language. We are so accustomed to these kinds of sweeping statements about Harlem and—as they’re often called—the “Harlems of America,” that it’s difficult to measure the work done by that simple phrase: All of Harlem. With those words, Baldwin positions himself as an expert/interpreter of the place which in “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” he describes as the turf (bounded by Lenox Avenue on the west, the Harlem River on the east, 135th Street on the north and 130th on the south. We never lived beyond these boundaries; this is where we grew up…). Having transcended those boundaries to reach the pages of Commentary magazine, Baldwin’s phrase All of Harlem indicates not only the place he is speaking about, but to whom he speaks. That great leap, from speaking about particular situations of particular people in a particular place to voicing the generalized conditions of Negroes, is performed for the benefit of the mostly white audience. It’s possible to think of the move Baldwin makes as a kind of transcendence, insofar as he leaves behind the boundaries of Harlem itself, and the specifics of its daily, lived reality, in the process of describing it. Sometimes it seems that Baldwin’s wide angle looks past what he is describing toward the people he is describing it for. The price of this particular transcendence is to become a spokesperson, a representative. But in February 1948, when the essay appeared, that conundrum was still in Baldwin’s future. By the end of the year, Baldwin was living in Paris. It was the first of a series of departures, a deliberate attempt to escape that very small room of Harlem, and America, where he could no longer breathe.

  In 1955, when Baldwin was already established in Paris, Harper’s published the essay “Me and My House.” It was later renamed and became the title essay for the collection Notes of a Native Son. The essay concerns the death and burial of Baldwin’s father, which coincided with the writer’s nineteenth birthday and the 1943 Harlem riot. It is more narrowly a memoir, so Baldwin is mostly limited to the landscape of his own psyche, the events of his own life, and the relationship between himself and his father, rather than to the relationship between a whole race and the rest of the world. But “Notes of a Native Son” still contains some moments of Baldwin’s particular form of transcendence. In the days leading up to the riot, Baldwin remembers a peculiar silence. All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. Later, after the riot, Baldwin surveys its aftermath in the form of smashed plate glass all over the streets and interprets the debris pattern as if reading tea leaves.

  Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something was the ghetto’s chronic need—most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Harlem’s churches, pool-halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct fashion, Harlem and its citizens are likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood.

  Here, Baldwin switches into prophet mode, and the events in Harlem become a parable for the racialized soul-sickness plaguing America. Baldwin the prophet is also Baldwin the healer, so “Notes of a Native Son” ends with a prescription: Blackness and whiteness did not matter, to believe that they did was to acquiesce to one’s own destruction. It is a message found in much of Baldwin’s work, where he is so often addressing a we that is startlingly mobile. At times the we is Baldwin’s family, or the people he grew up with in and around the turf. At other moments, the we seems to be the mostly white audience of the middlebrow magazines where Baldwin was a frequent contributor. At its most profound, Baldwin addresses a we that, perhaps, had not previously been taken for granted in American literature, challenging white America to align itself with the we of black Harlem. In “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Baldwin challenged the readers of Esquire to walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we this nation have become.

  As early as my high school lessons on Langston Hughes, I had absorbed the platitude that the task of the writer was to glean universal lessons from specific and personal experiences. But in Baldwin, I learned the particular peril of that path for a black writer. As Baldwin admits in his “Autobiographical Notes,” I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it is the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else.

  After working for the Federal Writer’s Project, when he was still in the midst of writing Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison accepted an assignment to report on a free mental health clinic in Harlem. It begins with a perspective that is the reverse of Baldwin’s trademark move. Ellison makes a panoramic survey of Harlem before zooming in on his chosen topic.

  To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin; many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, casual violence, crumbling buildings with littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance. Yet this is no dream, but the reality of well over four hundred thousand Americans, a reality which for many defines and colors the world. Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.

  By 1948, when Ellison wrote those words, Harlem was the scene and symbol of a great deal. Alain Locke had begun with the dissection of Harlem as a representative specimen for all of black America, and photographers like Aaron Siskind used the neighborhood as a laboratory for their experiments in atomizing reality.

  His masterful description takes us, as near as a realist photographer’s lens, into a typically gritty Harlem scene, but Ellison keeps the shifting and fugitive quality of dreams nearby. The very circumstances make it difficult to tell one from the other, for real life is indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams. Ellison reverses the arrangement of dreams and realities that appears in Invisible Man, when his protagonist arrives in Harlem from the South and declares, This was not a city of realities but of dreams.

  The South hovers above Ellison’s landscape. That lost place and lost way of life cannot be reconciled with the present, due to

  a vast process of change that has swept [the American Negro] from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a space of time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is literally possible for them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason-Dixon Line.

  Ellison attempts to ignore sociology and economics in favor of psychology, keeping to his stated subject. But recently, a sociologist using Ellison’s essay to establish the framework for her study of gentrification in Harlem in the 1990s found much that was relevant to her field—especially what she called Ellison’s depiction of Harlem as a metaphoric space.

  That description of Ellison’s Harlem reminds me of something from W. E. B. DuBois. At the beginning of The
Souls of Black Folk, DuBois describes his amused irritation with the pressing and searching inquiries from well-meaning whites about life as a Negro. How does it feel to be a problem? was his summary of their curiosity. Reading that sociologist, and Ellison, I wondered, How does it feel to live inside a metaphor?

  Ellison is interested in a different question. How have black people who were the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature come to examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre? This juxtaposition, for Ellison, results in a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence. And that world, as lived out on the streets of Harlem, produces the most surreal fantasies:

  A man ducks in and out of traffic shouting and throwing imaginary grenades that actually exploded during World War I; a boy participates in the rape-robbery of his mother; a man beating his wife in a park uses boxing “science” and observes Marquis of Queensberry rules (no rabbit punching, no blows beneath the belt); two men hold a third while a lesbian slashes him to death with a razor blade; boy gangsters wielding homemade pistols (which in the South of their origin are but toy symbols of adolescent yearning for manhood) shoot down their young rivals. Life becomes a masquerade; exotic costumes are worn by day. Those who cannot afford to hire a horse wear riding habits; others who could not afford a hunting trip or who seldom attend sporting events carry shooting sticks.

  Thus Ellison describes the psychic breaks and identity crises that lead to the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic in the basement of St. Philip’s Church on 134th Street, a place founded and operated by black and white psychiatrists because blacks could not receive mental health care at other hospitals.