B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  Not long after I saw Sister Doris in the second and final instance, and before I stopped going out, I saw a pair of women planted at the intersection of 133rd and Lenox, right near my building. They were preaching and singing, holding a two-woman revival without a tent and without an audience. Their congregants were the people passing by. Their production was broadcast into the night by a microphone and portable amplifier. They are often there on summer nights, so I walked briskly by them, scarcely looking up as I passed. Their song followed me from behind, accompanied by the tinny syncopation of a single tambourine: I have a feeling, I have a feeling, I have feeling everything is gonna be all right. I turned the corner quickly because I did not share the sentiment.

  It was springtime when I finally met the creator of the chalk messages. I would like to tell you his name, to tell you about the way he dresses, to tell you about his eyes and the way he cocks his head to one side when he pauses to listen and also when he speaks. But the most important thing about our first meeting is that he didn’t want me to write about him at all. Because I had already been recording the chalk messages whenever I saw them, I had thought it would be a good topic for a local-color story I could pitch to the Times or a radio station as an “only in New York” – type segment. Now that I had met the creator, the story had a protagonist. I told him I wanted to write about him, but he immediately brushed me off. He said he did not want to be written about, he did not want publicity. He said he had just met another girl who was a journalism student and wanted to write about him for a school project. He patted the pocket of his trousers and said it was full of cards from people who tell him to call because they, too, would like to write a story about him. I felt a bit rebuked. I wondered whether it was, in fact, a question of “publicity.”

  You will ask why I am writing this anyway, only without mentioning his name. I have asked this, too. The man who writes the chalk messages (I will call him the Messenger) perhaps offers the clearest answer to us both. A while after our first meeting, when we had become friends, when I told him that my hands were hurting and I could not write, he scolded me because I had not been to see a doctor. He said that he hated to take a stern tone with me, but he had to because I had to get serious about my business. And once, when I complimented him on what he was doing, and how the messages were so important and so urgent, he shrugged and said that he was only trying to make his contribution, and that this was something we all had to figure out how to do. He often says that he is in touch with the reality of existence, and that this is what compels him to his task.

  I’d seen the Messenger once before that first meeting. He was crouched down on the sidewalk working on a new creation, oblivious to anything going on around him, and much of what was going on around him reciprocated the oblivion. This time, he was not in the middle of work; he was perched on a standpipe in front of the hospital surveying something he had just completed. At first, I had passed him by because I was on the way somewhere else and was late, but I stopped and doubled back. Once I’d reached him and we had finished our salutations—we didn’t shake hands, but bumped elbows because his hands were covered in chalk—he said he’d watched me pass and watched me pause and watched me turn around to come back, and that he was glad I had done so.

  When we spoke that first afternoon, the Messenger told me some of the things he has again told me since: that he writes his messages because the children have an emptiness inside, an emptiness because they are not nourished at home. He says his mission is to share his wisdom and understanding. He tells me about the children he meets who are thrilled by the mathematical problems he writes on the sidewalk, and he also tells me how some of the adults who used to scorn him and make fun of him now offer nods of approval.

  The Messenger said he wanted to expand his territory; he thinks of moving over to Seventh Avenue, for instance. But I have only seen his messages on both sides of Lenox Avenue in the blocks between 125th and 136th Streets. The Messenger spoke of a gang member who’d asked him to write a few chalk messages on his block, to inspire the children there. He decried the attitude of the young man, especially the way he insisted on the territory being his block, as if it were his sole dominion. The Messenger said this was evidence of a damaged mentality, but he took up this strange commission anyway, going beyond his normal area on the avenue and into a side street. He planned to write a message on the sidewalk before a small storefront that was boarded up, choosing that spot because it wouldn’t obstruct the traffic of a business. But in the midst of setting his words down, the cops stopped him. He mentioned that it was a black female cop in particular who talked to him like he was a dog. He said he wasn’t doing anything wrong and that if the cops had actually stopped to read what he was writing, they would have agreed with him and congratulated him and encouraged what he was doing. It was another instance of the damaged mentality he’d spoken of.

  Along with his inspirational statements, the Messenger includes certain symbols that appear repeatedly in his creations. He makes hearts held aloft by wings, shooting stars, and birds that soar over the words. Lately I’ve noticed another symbol among his messages, an embellished cross that resembles an image found by archaeologists in abandoned slave cabins in Texas, among other places. Some researchers have related the sign to the Kongo cosmogram, a “map” of the world that can be traced back hundreds of years to the kingdom of Kongo in West Central Africa. Its lines and quadrants could be mistaken for a simple compass showing the four directions, but in fact they mark the boundaries between night and day, life and death, past and present, male and female, matter and spirit. When the sign was made on the ground, the spot was consecrated; it sealed an oath, made in the presence and under the authority of God and the ancestors. To stand in the center of the circle that surrounds the crossing lines is to stand at the center of the world, safe within the boundaries of the community. These symbols have been found etched into shell or brick, but many more have vanished, having been etched into dust.

  The Messenger asked me the title of the book I was writing. I began by telling him the title was borrowed from Ralph Ellison, but he hadn’t heard of Ellison. He mentioned that when he was in school there were so many things they didn’t teach, and he said he’d never had much opportunity to visit the library. When I said the title would be Harlem Is Nowhere, his face formed a pained expression, as if the very pronouncement of the words had erased us from the spot where we stood. Quickly I added that Ellison was talking about mentality, and immediately he seemed soothed. I tried to explain that Ellison’s essay spoke of the same things he wrote about on the sidewalk.

  I imagine him inside whatever walls he calls home, listening to the sound of the storms that come almost daily in late summer. But that is a worry of mine, not his. Probably he doesn’t think of it at all; the one time he mentioned a message that disappeared in the rain, he waved it off like it was without consequence. He has told me only once about having written something twice. The first time, it had been washed away. He said that normally he doesn’t repeat himself, but this particular phrase had stuck with him

  Once, he stopped me to present a riddle he had not yet committed to the street. He said that he had tried the same thing earlier in the day with another female friend and that she had been stumped, so he wanted to test my wits. The riddle was: What is the first thing that happens when a child comes into the world?

  I hesitated before venturing an answer, and of course my attempt was wrong. The Messenger said the question was very simple, and so was the correct reply. The first thing a child does when it comes into the world is take a deep breath. He said people seemed to not grasp the importance of this, but that was a simple fact gleaned from being in touch with the reality of existence.

  When I meet him on Lenox Avenue, I never leave without thinking that I should like to make my task adhere to the Messenger’s simple mission: to share his wisdom and understanding. To make things simple so that people can see. To fill what is empty inside us. When I see t
he Messenger, we do not talk about the rezoning of 125th Street. We do not talk about land. We do not talk about politics. When I see him we stop and chat; if he sees me first, he always calls out my name as I am walking down the avenue. Recently he was perched on a standpipe beneath a tree at the corner by Liberation Books. One of his friends had recently brought him a whole bag of chalk that she’d gotten on sale at Target. When it’s blue it’s blue all the way through, he said, when it’s pink it’s pink all the way through. He pointed with insistence toward the sidewalk, really through the sidewalk, and with such force that I did not doubt the possibility of those pigments penetrating the earth’s crust. Noting the vibrancy of his new, better-quality colors, he wondered aloud whether maybe what he writes will last a bit longer. As I left, he told me he loved me, and I told him the same. He told me to check out the latest thing he’d written and tell him what I thought when we next met.

  I walked a block down Lenox and saw his latest message. I didn’t write it down because I was in a hurry, or I didn’t have a pen, or I thought I would pass that way again later in the afternoon or even on the next day. But I did not leave the house at all the next day, and the day after that it rained.

  6

  Land Is the Basis of All Independence

  WE COLLECTED OUR flyers from the Record Shack and spread from there across Harlem. I began my shift at the corner of 125th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, as I had by then begun to refer to Eighth Avenue. This was a result of going to meetings: it was now necessary to call things by their correct names. So, Seventh was always Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, and Lenox Avenue was Malcolm X Boulevard. At one meeting, a woman interrupted every time someone used the term 125th Street, instead of calling it by its official designation, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The name mattered, she said. How could we be serious if we didn’t invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. by insisting that Harlem’s most famous thoroughfare be called by its right and proper name? The meeting was stuck on this point for a few moments. Eventually it was agreed that since no one ever called 125th Street by its longer name, and because we were fighting for its future, we shouldn’t confuse people by speaking about and passing out flyers referring to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

  I walked east, attempting to interest passersby in the fact that the city was pushing a new plan to turn 125th Street into a valley of high-rise luxury apartment buildings. Would they care to have a flyer? Did they know about the rezoning? Had they heard about the upcoming protest? But I lacked technique, unable to mimic the rapid, florid gestures used by the other hawkers on the street—I could match neither the showmanship of Nation of Islam members selling The Final Call nor the rush-hour urgency of the people who distribute free newspapers at subway entrances. Instead, I surveyed the crowd streaming by and set upon anyone who looked vaguely sympathetic. My canvassing focused at first on mothers with children. I quickly abandoned an imprecise assessment of political commitment based on hairstyle or accessories (anyone wearing dreadlocks or African garb was an instant target). More often than not, people passed me by without even pausing. They did not show a fleeting interest in the fact that in a few days’ time, the Coalition to Save Harlem would attempt to form a human chain across 125th Street to protest the city’s plan to rezone the main street of Harlem. My partner for the shift observed that people were so broke down, so scared, so indifferent, they couldn’t even take a flyer. But a few already knew about the demonstration, and a few others said they intended to join. One older man refused to take a flyer, not because he was indifferent or because he was broken down, but, he said, because we were jiving the people—that no demonstration across any length of 125th Street would ever change the outcome of the city’s plan. He said we were too late; but actually, he was saying we were worse than late, we were dishonest and self-serving.

  I stopped for a break at the base of the monument celebrating Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. The statue of Powell, who was pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church from 1937 until 1970, and Harlem’s envoy to the U.S. House of Representatives between 1945 and 1971, guards the southwest corner of 125th and Seventh Avenue, which was renamed in his honor. When the monument was first erected a few years ago, I thought it seemed flamboyant. Powell is depicted as a kind of superhero. He trudges up a treacherous incline of shiny metal, the path as steep as it is slick. The figure is ill-clad for the ascent, wearing dress shoes and a formal suit with coattails sculpted to flap permanently in an allegorical wind. His only tool for this trek up the mountaintop is a Bible tucked under one arm. Engraved around the plinth is a list of all the legislation the congressman passed while serving Harlem. On one side is a quote from Powell: Press forward at all times, climbing forward toward that higher ground of the harmonious society that shapes the laws of man to the laws of God. Around the other side in large letters is Powell’s trademark phrase, Keep the Faith. The designer of the statue had sanitized the particular cool-cat phraseology of Harlem’s suave representative. Both a race man and a ladies’ man, he was actually known to encourage his constituents with the saying Keep the faith, baby.

  My thoughts about the statue changed when I started attending political meetings in Harlem, where Powell’s name and memory are invoked with the frequency and veneration usually accorded a saint. I heard a woman talk excitedly about marching with Powell as a little girl. Another woman sometimes passed out flyers bearing his portrait and the words Harlem: Then, Now, and Forever. Other flyers reminded As Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., proffered knowingly, “What’s in your hand?” THE VOTE. Do not be afraid to exercise it. Vote out politicians who do not protect you as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., did!

  The statue is in the shadow of the State Office Building, a nineteen-story office tower built as a pet project of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller. But this great public work was controversial even before it was built. First proposed by the governor in 1966 to revitalize Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots, the building is located where Lewis Michaux’s famous nationalist bookstore once stood. The propagandist and agitator accepted compensation from the state for the loss of his property and was promised a new retail location inside the new tower, which never materialized. For three months in 1969, a group called the Harlem Community Coalition blocked the construction effort by occupying the building site with a continuous sit-in; a two-day long convention between Rockefeller and community groups led to the outright rejection of building plans. At least one chronicler of Harlem recalls that Powell himself was outraged by the project: Congressman Powell averred that if the office building was erected he would quit Harlem and leave the country. “I fear even to state what’s going to happen if the Governor does not reverse his decision,” declared the Harlem Congressman.

  Lewis Micheaux’s National Memorial African Bookstore, also known as the “House of Common Sense and Home of Proper Propaganda,” 1964. (Courtesy of Bettmann / CORBIS)

  The story is probably more complicated than what that historian offered—all this was happening around the same time that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was being run out of Congress. In the eyes of his detractors, he was already spending a great deal too much time outside the country. But some version of the ominous outcome predicted by Powell did come to pass. The long-delayed construction recommenced in 1970, just weeks before Powell lost his seat to Charles Rangel (a supporter of Rockefeller’s building project). Powell moved to the Bahamas and died in 1972, at the age of sixty-three. Two years later, the Harlem State Office Building was dedicated; the ceremony attracted a thousand protestors. Barely a decade passed before the building Powell detested was renamed in his memory. The building and the statue honor the leader while upholding a tradition of controversy being smoothed over by tokens and symbolism.

  Some years before I started passing out flyers near the Powell statue, I was receiving them. Buy Black was the message of that earlier afternoon. The bearer of the message sat at the base of the statue, with an attitude that deserved its own mount. Interested takers
presented themselves before him like supplicants; he did not make any pursuit.

  I approached him for a flyer and read it. I don’t remember why we started to speak or what we said. Maybe it was an exchange based on presumed familiarity—perhaps he thought we’d met before, and, as usual, it was not true. I want to tell you his name, but I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to, so I will say that he is known by the name of a heroic African warrior. I will call him the Chief, because the flyers he passed out show a picture of him from forty years ago in the upper right-hand corner. “Chief” is the title that appears in the caption giving his name. He is a member of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement. A photo in the upper left-hand corner of the same flyer shows one Carlos A. Cooks, the founder of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM), but no special title precedes his name. I can tell you the name of Carlos A. Cooks because he is dead. I already knew his name when I met the Chief because I’d read about him in the library. He is not one whose name is immortalized by way of a street sign.

  On the flyer, in those pictures from the 1950s or 1960s, both Carlos A. Cooks and the Chief wear leopard-skin hats and black military dress jackets with epaulets and leather braces strapped across their chests. I’d seen the same picture of Cooks in a book at the library, where the caption identified him as