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  The Chief did not use the small pin on his lapel showing Lumumba’s face as another exhibit in the tribunal on my political commitment. He only mentioned that the murder of Lumumba had happened when he was a young man. He didn’t say anything more. I figured it was probably the kind of thing that led him to acquire a platform.

  I returned to my work, and the Chief went over to the computers where he had an appointment to use the Internet. Once again, the reading room was quiet, so I was confronted by my own silence in the face of firepower, the A-bomb, getting in line, the natural resources of Africa, the revolutionaries of Haiti, Lumumba, Harlem, and Texas. Long after that day I recalled some words of Frantz Fanon that I wished had come to mind at the library, despite Fanon’s having been denounced by the Chief. They express an ideal of physical and intellectual freedom—which means they are, perhaps, the closest I will ever come to having a political platform:

  Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!

  We were protesting on a picket line in front of Melba’s restaurant on Eighth Avenue, a relatively new establishment celebrated for its upscale version of chicken-and-waffles and its ebullient hostess. We were not protesting the cuisine or hiring practices of the restaurant. On that afternoon—just a week after the 125th Street rezoning proposal passed the city council with only two dissenting votes—Melba’s hosted a political fund-raiser for the councilwoman from Harlem who had recently made headlines as a staunch and impassioned defender of her neighborhood. In a speech in City Hall chambers, she had styled herself as a latter-day Harriet Tubman, just before brokering a deal to pass the proposal virtually unmodified from the version put forth by the Department of City Planning. This intervention was lauded because 46 percent of projected new housing would be “income-targeted” for residents of varying incomes. But only 200 of the projected 4,000 new units to be built on 125th Street would be affordable to that overwhelming majority of Harlem residents who make less than $30,000 per year.

  I did not have a notepad and pen, I had a sign. I stood in the picket line, I joined the chants, and I tried to invent a pithy but nonpoetic chant of my own to express the fraud perpetrated by the vote. The council was full of self-congratulation for having passed a proposal with more affordable housing than ever accomplished in previous development plans. Two hundred units! I yelled. It didn’t catch on. We all shouted until our voices grew hoarse.

  Many people passed by in buses, in cars, and on foot, taking flyers and nodding in support. Most didn’t join the line, but they stood at its perimeter or shouted from cars, She sold us out! A group of three young boys came up to ask what was happening. I stood by as one friend explained to them that we were protesting the councilwoman for representing Harlem so poorly. Another protester patiently tried to give a definition of gentrification appropriate for a third-grade level. Taking all of this in, one boy looked at the others and said: Don’t you know that’s why they’re planting trees on our block?!

  Most likely the child had not heard about the arts-and-culture corridor; he was not aware of various requests for proposals about monuments that were meant to celebrate his heritage. Most likely he had not been to the “open session” in which invited members of the community and several members of the city’s urban planning staff discussed the intricacies of sidewalk furniture, among other things. (Meetings were held on a variety of subjects; none were held to discuss the question of housing.) But the child had noticed trees turning up where before there had been no trees. He’d seen trees where, before, his presence and the presence of everyone he knew had not seemed to warrant an occasion for trees. It is possible this child was only mimicking a tone of indignation voiced in his presence by an adult. But is also possible that he knew enough of this place and its landscape—and had observed enough changes in that landscape—to suspect that the new trees, and their beautifying, shade-enhancing, air-purifying qualities, were not necessarily for his own enjoyment or use.

  I would like to reach for a more hopeful tone. I would like to write of legacies, of torches being passed, of mantles being worn, and of flags raised high after the standard bearer has fallen. I would like to feel uplifted by the monument to Harriet Tubman that stands at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and 122nd Street, near a police precinct. Some controversy attended its unveiling when people noticed that the figure was facing south toward lower Manhattan instead of north toward freedom. Well, there can’t be a wrong direction for her because she came and went on many occasions, a politician insisted, offering excuses for what was probably a careless mistake. Yes, she was the Moses of our people, but she wasn’t Moses who apparently led all of his people out at once and did not have to go back. The monument shows Tubman with some kind of pocketbook strapped across her chest, but without her trademark rifle, which was used to ward off the bounty hunters on her trail and to urge on fearful escapees who wished to abandon their flight.

  The artist who made that memorial reached for a hopeful tone. The words of an old Negro spiritual linking Tubman to the original Moses are inscribed as a plaintive incantation ringing the base of the statue, just below a strange sculptural feature meant to illustrate the proverbial ancestral roots. When time breaks up eternity, O let my people go! We need not always weep and mourn, O let my people go! And wear these slavery chains forlorn, O let my people go! In this artist’s rendition, the physical portrayal of those metaphorical roots connects the southward-facing, forward-lurching Tubman to the earth and to history. But they seem to reach out as an impediment, against the Exodus, pulling her down and back. O let my people go What a beautiful morning it will be! O let my people go What a beautiful morning it will be! O let my people…

  Harold Cruse, the cultural critic and historian, came to New York as a child from his home in Virginia. He had been to many meetings in Harlem—including brief affiliations with factions of artists, communists, and nationalists—by the time he made the following assessment in his 1967 epic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:

  Harlem is a victim of cynical and premeditated cultural devegetation. Harlem is an impoverished and superexploited economic dependency, tied to a real estate, banking, business-commercial combine of absentee whites who suck the community dry every payday. In short, Harlem exists for the benefit of others and has no cultural, political or economic autonomy. Hence, no social movement of a protest nature in Harlem can be successful or have any positive meaning unless it is at one and the same time a political, economic and cultural movement. A Harlem movement that is only political or only economic or only cultural or merely a protest movement—has to fail.

  … But the hour for Harlem is late, insofar as autonomous, self-directed social change from the bottom up is concerned. Under capitalism, the dynamics of time and tide wait for no one.

  Late in the course of things, when the struggle over 125th Street had already been lost but I was still going to meetings, a leader from Harlem’s chapter of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) objected to what he saw as the underestimating of his group’s contribution. In the midst of a discussion to plan yet another town hall assembly, someone suggested that the NBPP be asked to provide security. The request was met with mild offense: We’re not just security. As an example of their other activities, he described an initiative that he called Affirmation Marches, in which members of the party march throughout the neighborhood in military formation while shouting uplifting slogans. They were, he said, letting people know that black is still beautiful.

  I wrote this down in the margin of a page separate from the one I was using to record the meeting’s minutes. The comment was not immediately germane to the agenda or to organizational business, but it seemed to summarize, quite deftly, the magnitude of the current crisis.

  Every year, the birthday of Marcus Mosiah Garvey is celebrated on or around August 17 with a march that circuits central Harlem. One year, in advance of the parade, graffiti appeared on the plywood barrier to a construction site on 125th Street: Happy Birthday to the “H
onorable” Marcus Garvey. The graffiti remained there long after the parade had come and gone, hailing the leader in perpetuity, but the construction taking place behind the plywood barrier itself seemed to be in a state of suspended operation. Before the most recent parade there was a schism between the organizers, and two different celebrations were taking place. I didn’t attend either one.

  The previous year, I did go. I had not yet begun to frequent meetings in Harlem, and I was not yet aware of the 125th Street rezoning proposal. I did not get in line. When I arrived at the meeting point in Marcus Garvey Park, I stood to the side with my reporter’s pad and pen. Most people there were wearing black, and I was wearing blue. A tall man held a large red, black, and green flag above the heads of the assembly.

  Just as the march commenced, it began to rain. We left the park, going west across 122nd Street, down Lenox Avenue across 116th to Seventh, up Seventh all the way to 135th Street. It began to rain harder, but the parade continued, its ranks a loose phalanx comprising the remnants of a number of Pan-Africanist and black nationalist organizations whose histories stretched back to the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to representatives of the UNIA, resurrected as the Universal Nubian Improvement Association, there was a contingent from the Ethiopia World Federation, which had been founded in Harlem in the 1930s to support the cause of Haile Selassie against Benito Mussolini’s fascist and imperialist encroachment. There were also the New Black Panthers, who, it should be said, have been disavowed by prominent members of the old Black Panthers, including the widow of Huey P. Newton. The assembled groups made a ramshackle pageant of the history of black resistance. Although these groups cannot claim a mass constituency, they still claim to speak for all black people, perhaps as much as they speak for the history from which their organizations were born. They are not obsolete, because many of the conditions that attended their founding persist and because many of the original aims have not been achieved.

  But at that moment, the persistence of history was expressed through our persistence through the rain. Some bystanders stopped to cheer; others pumped Black Power fists from the sidewalk. People took pictures with their camera phones, and a few teenagers flashed the middle finger. The marshals in charge of the parade urged the marchers to continue. Black Power! they said. Close the ranks! I ran to keep apace. Soon there was no distinction between the sideline and main line.

  The weather didn’t stop the parade, but it did inspire an impassioned chant. At some point, instead of the typical cheers (Black Power! and Buy Black! or No Justice No Peace! or Free the Land! or Africa for the Africans! and Freedom or Death!!), someone began to lead the marchers with the shout Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm! This chant caught on, propelling the crowd across 135th Street to Lenox Avenue again, down to 125th Street, and then east to Fifth Avenue.

  The words of that chant were taken from a 1925 letter from Marcus Garvey to his followers, written from an Atlanta prison when he was about to be deported for mail fraud.

  Look for me in the whirlwind or storm, look for me all around you, for with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.

  The marchers’ inspiring battle cry was drawn from Garvey’s clearest articulation of defeat. He answered the persistent charge that he was swindling his followers by means of messianic illusion with words befitting a messianic illusionist. At the moment of his deportation (which some say was carried out at the behest of or with the aid of black leaders as highly placed as W. E. B. DuBois), Garvey makes a rhetorical shift from the physical (land, economics, politics) to the metaphysical (an army of the dead, led by himself, whose powers match or outdo those of the risen Christ and the 144,000 at the Rapture). That day, the thunder and rain signaled that a reckoning was at hand.

  Upon reaching Fifth Avenue at 124th Street, the parade completed its circuit and was once again at Marcus Garvey Park. The group stopped at the entrance of a condominium that had been built on an empty lot. The New Black Panthers fell into formation and raised Black Power fists in the air. The condominiums were the source of a controversy that was then overheating. After moving into the new complex, many residents were dismayed to discover that the park hosted a Harlem tradition of thirty years’ standing, a drum circle that takes place in the park every Saturday during the months of temperate weather. (African drumming is wonderful for the first four hours, but after that, it’s pure, unadulterated noise. We couldn’t see straight anymore, one new resident was quoted saying in a national paper. Some of these drums are prayed over, blessed in Africa, countered a musician.) The police, not expecting the spontaneous protest, scrambled to the parade organizers, insisting that the crowd disperse.

  We returned to the meeting point next to the park. A man introduced as an original Garveyite from Jamaica was ushered forward to conclude the occasion. His melodious delivery of a reverent invocation, which included gratitude to the police who escorted the march, was interrupted when a member of the New Black Panther Party grew impatient with his formalities: Make it plain! she told him, before snarling something about crackers. The old Garveyite, who stood with the assistance of a cane, began to bristle with indignation. The young woman had offended his sense of history as much as his sense of propriety. But Garvey wouldn’t have said that! he protested, asking her to remain cord-i-al for the rest of the evening, but she continued to challenge him. The sadness and frustration of the old man collided with the sadness and frustration of the young woman for more than a few tense moments before the concluding remarks could proceed.

  A celebration in honor of “The Redeemer” was held later at a nearby Masonic lodge. Dinner was available for a small charge. Libations offered to our ancestors inaugurated a long agenda of speakers—presenting in order of eldest first, according to the program handed out that night. The program also announced that there would be the annual edition of the Afrikan (sic) Natural Standard of Beauty Contest, but it was not held, and no explanation was given. Perhaps there had been too many speakers, or maybe there was no one present who deserved the honor.

  When I arrived at the Masonic lodge, an older man was entering at the same time. I recognized him from the parade. Together we passed through the iron gate of the lodge. As we descended the stairs into the building, he paused, turned toward me, and posed a question I was not equipped to answer: Harlem is a city of Masons, he said. How could we lose Harlem?

  A rock formation erupts from the center of Marcus Garvey Park. This is Mount Morris, after which the park was originally named and after which the historical district, the Mount Morris Park Historical District, and the neighborhood association, the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association, are named still. (It is, perhaps, the persistence of the original name on the historic district and the association that gives rise to recurrent rumors that wealthy residents of the area—white and black—are conspiring to have Marcus Garvey’s name stripped from the park.)

  The houses on the western perimeter of the park are some of the finest in Harlem, the focus of an annual tour of homes that takes place every spring. Around its northern limit are large apartment blocks—equally grand but less glamorous abodes. One, an ornate building called the Sans Souci, is an SRO. On one visit to the city, before I moved to New York, I was attracted to this building because it shared a name—which means carefree—with the palace built by Haitian emperor Henri Christophe. The Haitian palace, along with its nearby citadel, are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, touted as the first monuments to be constructed by black slaves who had gained their freedom. But the buildings were constructed by black slaves who had gained their freedom and then worked for a monomaniacal emperor who imposed the corvée, a system of unpaid labor also used in ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. When I went up the steps of Harlem’s San Souci to ask if there were any apartments available, I was shooed away from its doo
r by the security guard on duty. Do you know what kind of place this is?

  A new building has risen just south of the park, where Fifth Avenue runs uptown and divides itself into the abbreviated avenues known as Mount Morris Park West and East before joining again to cross 125th Street. The vast tower is called Fifth on the Park. A mixed-income development featuring units valued up to $3 million, it is advertised as being located in New Harlem and South Harlem. Also touted is its proximity to Mount Morris Park. It sits on land that was owned by a church, and developers purchased the “air rights” from another piece of land owned by the church in order to achieve the building’s thirty-story height, unprecedented in Harlem. The church received $12 million, a number of “affordable” housing rental units (one-bedrooms starting at $1,800), and a state-of-the-art worship facility inside the new tower. Development has also come to a former jail that occupied a purpose-built structure at 121st and Mount Morris West—now it’s a condominium. On the same side of the park, two blocks north, the old house that was for many years the headquarters and synagogue of the black Jewish sect the Commandment Keepers is also being renovated, reclaimed for residential use. According to an article lamenting its fall, it was sold for development after a long-running internal dispute over the leadership of the community, and the temple was closed without the requisite religious ceremonies. The writer concludes: Thus, the memory of that building has now become a monument to self-destruction. In the course of construction work, to effect the desecration or resecularization of the old Commandment Keepers temple, the Star of David was removed from above the threshold. A large Dumpster parked nearby received the contents from within.