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  But, inevitably, mental health cannot be divorced from sociology and economics.

  Not quite citizens and yet Americans, full of the tensions of modern man but regarded as primitives, Negro Americans are in desperate search for an identity. Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, they feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, and Where? Significantly in Harlem the reply to the greeting, “How are you?” is often, “Oh, man, I’m nowhere”—a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word.

  Ellison’s essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” written in 1948, finds that the general condition of life in Harlem is the source of the specific mental conditions of the clinic’s patients, whose specific names and histories he does not explore. The general condition of second-class citizenship among black Americans leads to a general condition that is, or approaches, collective insanity. He does not remark upon whether he includes himself among the afflicted.

  Within the essay, his position, to the degree he is located anywhere, is slightly outside the boundaries of the landscape under scrutiny. His function is related to the interpretive roles of Hurston or Baldwin, but he doesn’t match Hurston’s entertainments or Baldwin’s exhortations. His beautiful, clinical descriptions emit a kind of hostility. A similar hostility is heard in “No Apologies,” Ellison’s 1967 contribution to a heated exchange with Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. Asserting that Podhoretz was throwing his typewriter at the whole unsuspecting Negro people, Ellison’s lengthy response to Podhoretz is nothing short of an evisceration. But Ellison’s gripe isn’t merely a reflexive defense against injury done to himself or all black people. He takes specific issue with how often white liberals, possessing little firsthand knowledge of any area of the society other than their own, eagerly presume to interpret Negro life while ignoring their primary obligation as intellectuals—which is to know what they are talking about.

  Likening Podhoretz and other would-be white interpreters of black life to absentee owners of tenement buildings [who] exploit the abstract sociological “Negro” as a facile means of getting ahead in the world, Ellison issues a decree banishing trespassers and pretenders from the realm of his culture and his thought, demanding that members of other cultural groups

  respect the sacredness and inwardness of my own, and that they recognize my right to define it, glorify it, affirm it, criticize it—even though to them it seems wrapped in the blackest of mysteries. I must insist because such regard for others is seldom reciprocated when the Negro American’s sense of his own reality is in question.

  Ellison directly addresses some of the dilemmas of interpretation and orientation found in Hurston and Baldwin. In claiming the sacredness and inwardness of his position as a black writer concerned with black lives, Ellison rejects the position of tour guide or interpreter. His activity—defining, glorifying, affirming, criticizing—takes place behind a curtain of mystery. Crucially, in this 1967 essay Ellison raises, once again, the question of reality, that conundrum that he tracks through the Harlem streets in 1948 and runs from in the pages of his 1952 novel. For Ellison in 1967, reality is still in question. Perhaps even more so because this is the moment when Ellison was at his height as author of the most distinguished American novel written since World War II, and also was being denounced by young writers who, like Amiri Baraka, were getting up to some nowhere shit in the name of a programmatic, didactic notion of the role of the black artist. Additionally, as far as his sense of reality was concerned, this was also the period when Ellison was stumbling into the deferrals, excuses, and diversions that prevented his ever completing another novel.

  Which brings us back to “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Among his dizzying haunted-house descriptions of life in the neighborhood, one of the most intriguing pronouncements is that this is a world in which the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination. This causes the crises leading to that free psychiatric clinic. But, Ellison also acknowledges, that energy also led to various other forms of creative response, including the slang of his title. In the 1967 polemic where Ellison so defiantly stakes out the claim of his intellectual territory, his insistence on sacredness and inwardness reads like his own attempt to overcome such frustrations, groping toward that inward and sacred space where literature is possible.

  “Harlem Is Nowhere” was not published by the magazine that commissioned it in 1948. It did not appear in print until 1964, when it was published in Harper’s. As the editorial note preceding the piece observes, how little has changed in the everyday life of the ghetto in the past sixteen years. Ellison’s essay helps explain, and in hindsight justifies, the impatience of the American Negro in 1964. The essay was published in August. Perhaps by coincidence, that issue must have hit the newsstands around the time the third major riot in Harlem occurred. It is unclear if the impatience of the American Negro in 1964 is an oblique reference to this event or an uncanny presentiment. The explanation and justification mentioned in the editorial note are worth a mention. Interestingly, the version of the essay that appeared in Harper’s omits the section about the Lafargue Clinic, which had been the very impetus for the piece in 1948. Possibly it was no longer in operation and the editors didn’t want to include anything that wasn’t, according to that maddening adjective of the magazine trade, timely.

  But in the original essay (published in full in Shadow and Act), the clinic is the scene where the madness of white supremacy could be overcome. The clinic was a place where its clients could explain and justify to themselves the conditions inside their minds and in the world. Unmoored from the setting of the psychiatric clinic, Ellison’s essay becomes another occasion to explain and justify the whole unsuspecting Negro people to the same readers of Harper’s who were already used to being—variously—horrified, soothed, chastised, and exhorted by James Baldwin.

  We find Ellison carefully watching the perimeter, defending his right to live and create from beyond a veil, but also oriented outward, toward maintaining his position upon the elevated dais of various panel discussions, a dignitary in the republic of letters, a spokesman even—the most exceptional Negro novelist of his generation. To the degree his call for inwardness coincided with his talent turning in on itself, Ellison occupied a negated position, a nowhere. One “is” literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a “displaced person” of American democracy.

  In the best of circumstances, that dazed wanderer is also the dreamer, creating a world that hasn’t yet come to be. Utopia, after all, means nowhere. Ellison’s biographical note in Harper’s stated, He is best known for “Invisible Man,” a novel about “one Negro’s effort to find his place in the world.”

  In 1948, Ralph Ellison heard the street slang Oh, man, I’m nowhere and heard the identity crises, negation, and psychic despair provoked by daily life under white supremacy.

  In 1961, James Baldwin, writing “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” perhaps writing from Paris, remembered a different greeting:

  “How’re you making it?” one may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. “Oh, I’m TV-ing it”… with the saddest, sweetest, most shame-faced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world.

  Baldwin’s greeting also referred to a state of negation, but now it was expressed in reference to the lives of certain young men in Harlem, who, unemployed and without prospects, were spending their lives at their mother’s house, watching daytime TV.

  In 1981, when Aaron Siskind’s photos were published as Harlem Document, the writer, photographer, and director Gordon Parks contributed a brief introduction to the volume. His piece fulfils the typical obligation of writing about Harlem—offering pronouncements that Harlem is this or Harlem is that. His reminiscence of Harlem also inc
ludes something he heard on the street.

  “Heh, baby, how you doing?” That was a familiar greeting when I was a young man up in Harlem. Today it’s “What’s happening, brother? What’s shaking up and down the line?”

  … Jobless young people with anger in their eyes stand on the corners and stare into space. “Nothing’s happening,” they say. “Nothing’s shaking up or down the line.”

  Perhaps it is just a coincidence that these three writers emerge from their descent into Harlem with the trophy of a greeting from which to derive a metaphor about all of black existence. I think it has more to do with the instrument of the writer’s art, a blade that is sometimes destructive and reductive, though it also flashes light. Perhaps those greetings and their interpretations say more about the interpreters than about those who are purported to use them.

  Don’t get corrupted.

  The town house at 2144 Fifth Avenue is located within the boundaries of James Baldwin’s turf—near the corner of 131st Street, where Baldwin grew up. The house has a varicolored brick facade on its two lowest levels, with typical brownstone above. Someone has carefully painted the bricks in alternating shades of pastel blue, green, and pink. For years I passed that building, noting its strange decoration, noting the plate-glass window that looked out onto Fifth Avenue from the second floor, noting how the windows above never gave any indication of lives lived within. A minimum of business was transacted in the appliance, furniture, and lamp repair shop operating at street level.

  Later, I found out this had once been the location of L. S. Alexander Gumby’s Book Studio. Then I passed the building with more curiosity, wondering how to gain entry and what would be the proper way to approach, thinking that I should take a companion because I might disappear into one of those dark upper stories. My relationship with the building went on like this for a long while: it was the setting of my worst single-girl-doing-research fantasies. In the meantime, I collected information about the life of the man whose ambitions had reached their height inside the confines of that room with the plate-glass window looking out over upper Fifth.

  Alexander Gumby came to New York from Baltimore around 1906. According to an unpublished autobiographical essay, immediately he became a New Yorker in spirit and principle, having discovered more freedom of action than [he] had ever known before. A passionate theatergoer, he collected Broadway playbills, pictures, and newspaper clippings as souvenirs. He made scrapbooks of the material, a carryover from a childhood hobby, and when he worked at Columbia waiting tables, he made scrapbooks about Columbia, too. He worked as a butler and caretaker for a banker in Riverdale. The banker was also a collector, so Gumby’s responsibilities included the stewardship of pottery, bronzes, ivories, etc. Upon leaving that situation, he was armed with a letter of introduction recommending him highly on account of services rendered: I have been going to Europe for a number of years, wrote his employer, and have left him in full charge of my house and all its contents and I have never had occasion to regret it.

  Gumby’s impulse to compile, collect, and curate the detritus of his reality matured when he found himself overwhelmed by what he called his overflowing collection of clippings. He attacked the problem with intense seriousness, describing it in a detailed statement of purpose:

  I decided to gather them into scrapbooks. Without experience in the arranging of such a vast amount of miscellaneous material, I naturally made a botch of it in my first efforts. When I finally admitted to myself that it would all have to be done over, I decided to classify the material into groups. I soon found, however as my collections continued to grow, that even this arrangement was unsatisfactory, for it was impossible to interfile new material. It was not until I adopted the looseleaf method that I found a satisfactory answer to my problem. That, of course, meant remounting my material once more. After sorting it into master subjects, I found out that I had enough Negro items for a scrapbook on that subject alone. This Negro scrapbook I in turn divided into master subjects; and because the leaves could be shifted, I was able to break the master subjects into chapters. I arranged the clippings chronologically that were not too badly damaged by their repeated remountings in the unsuccessful scrapbooks. I soon had a bulging volume of Negro items, whereupon I broke the chapters up into separate books. Thus began my Negro Scrapbook collection.

  The birth of Gumby’s Negro Scrapbook, or “Negroana” as it was later called, came just before two other significant developments in his life. First, he became acquainted with a young man who was a few years my junior. A bawdy song by Gumby, written in 1907, using the voice of his alter ego Count DeGumphry, perhaps tells us something about their meeting:

  I am a Count,—

  The Count DeGumphry.

  I am looking for an heir,

  Of some yankie millionear

  That has a income of a hundred thousand pounds a year.

  In his typewritten memoirs, Gumby describes this relationship as a staunch friendship that lasted nearly three decades. The man, a scion of a New York business family, was Gumby’s lover and patron. It was with the help of this friend, Charles W. Newman, that Gumby began to amass a collection of rare editions, manuscripts, and ephemera to complement his scrapbook productions. Hardly anything is known about their relationship—whether it was a true love that had to be suppressed because of its challenge to the racial and sexual order, or whether it was a less tender transaction. Alexander Gumby’s story, when it is told at all, is usually mentioned as a minor footnote to other more celebrated queer lives of the Harlem Renaissance era. There is Richard Bruce Nugent, with his bohemian disregard for neckties and socks, throwing off his bourgeois pedigree with defiant dishevelment. There is Countee Cullen, marrying the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois in a lavish ceremony and then leaving her behind to embark on their European honeymoon in the company of his alleged lover, the Harlem man-about-town Harold Jackman. There are the rumors about A’Lelia Walker and Langston Hughes, and rumors about many others. Those rumors serve a purpose for the history of love that mirrors a similar tendency in black history to insist upon its “firsts,” and to speculate about the African blood coursing through the veins of historical figures like Beethoven. But while the life of Gumby is known—and, thanks to Gumby himself, ferociously documented—it is not much celebrated. It is not necessary for rumors to swirl about Gumby’s sexuality. In a letter to his friend Bruce Nugent, Gumby was frank about the many charms of Columbia University to be found outside the library. Perhaps part of the silence around Gumby is that the terms of his relationship with a white man mirrored the patronage relationship going on throughout Harlem, where art was paid for by white enthusiasts and fetish-collectors, and where black gangsters paid tribute to the white mob. Perhaps the open combination of white patronage and sex in Gumby’s life accounts for the way his story has disappeared. Or maybe the silence also has to do with the fact that Gumby’s story is, in part, a narrative of failure.

  But now I am getting ahead of the story, because at this point, when he has just begun the passionate project of his Negroana scrapbooks, Gumby himself had no intention of disappearing. Indeed, his entire activity seemed to guard against oblivion. Gumby arrived in Harlem in the earliest days of the New Negro push into the neighborhood. He established himself (or Newman established him) at 2144 Fifth Avenue almost immediately, for that is the return address supplied in correspondence related to the second chief occupation of his early years, the Southern Utopia Fraternity.

  The S.U.F. was dedicated to the support and edification of young college men from the South for the purpose of helping themselves as well as all young men from Southern schools who come to New York seeking a larger experience. The actual activities of the fraternity are not described in the materials Gumby pasted into a few of his scrapbook pages. It seems as though its mere existence, and the notice it garnered, were most important. Its founding was noted in local newspapers: Young College Men from South Organize. A subsequent mention announces the election of officers, i
ncluding the election of Gumby himself to the position of treasurer. The scrapbook preserves a bank draft drawn in Gumby’s name in the amount of five dollars for S.U.F. premiere dance. There are elegantly printed ephemera: the cover of a program to be held Thursday evening, April the Sixth, Eight-thirty announces that Mr. Justice of the Fraternity will entertain Members and Friends of the Frat. A small calling card expresses the Fraternity’s mission statement: Its purpose is to bring into closer relation for mutual cooperative help ambitious young men from the various schools who spend their time wholly or in part in New York and vicinity.

  The major document we have of the fraternal order is a letter, written by Gumby in 1917, which resembles the marching orders for a coup. In six pages of feverish prose Gumby solicits the aid of members for his faction: It is now that your help is needed, in order that our Fraternity may be launched on the waves of life. The source of the controversy is not clear; he proposes amendments to the constitution and doing away with lengthy debating during meetings. He mentions that the fraternity needs its own clubhouse, because members are being snatched away by other groups that boast facilities.

  With a level of detail that tells us much more about the character of Gumby and the other young men who comprised the Southern Utopia Fraternity than it does about their aims, Gumby fills several pages with purple prose about the status of the organization and the problems at hand:

  S.U.F. was organized in the year of 1915 by a body of very able men, and it can be truthfully said, what they did, was well done in parts. But they failed to rivet the parts together. Tis the rivteing we must now do. This Fraternity must be united in one body, its parts working in unison, if it is to fulfil the purpose it was so religiously organized to do. Today it stands in parts.