B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  The summit of Mount Morris is the province of junkies and derelicts, or so I have been warned. A male friend who I’d always assumed would escort me to the top described a recognizance mission in which he successfully gained the height of Mount Morris. The plateau there is called the Acropolis, borrowing the word—meaning city on the edge—that ancient Greeks used to designate the citadels they built at the highest point in a settlement to defend against invasion. There, my friend met a scene of oblivion. Even in the light of day the place was full of people nodding off in different stages of sleep and intoxication. My friend said he had no business up there. On seeing him approach, someone had cursed loudly; he’d been mistaken for an undercover cop.

  Because Mount Morris was the highest point in Harlem, a watchtower was installed there in 1857 (it was then known as Snake Hill), to protect upper Manhattan from fire. Already in 1896, about a decade before black settlement in Harlem began, the tower was considered a symbol of the neighborhood, with a former watchman sharing his lamentation in the New York Times:

  It is a shame for the authorities to let the tower go to ruin, as it is one of Harlem’s oldest and most historic landmarks. At one period it governed time in all of Harlem and the surrounding villages. All watches and clocks within sound of the bell were regulated by it. It was proposed several years ago to tear the tower down on account of its shaky condition, but the residents raised such an opposition that it was left standing.

  Harlem Fire Watchtower, Marcus Garvey Park, ca. after 1968. (Photo by Stephen Zane / Courtesy of Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress)

  In the 1960s, concerned residents acted to preserve the watchtower as an emblem of the enclave, and it received landmark designation. In winter, the skeleton of the tower is visible from a distance, seen from below through bare tree branches.

  I have not been to the top. Instead I imagine the view from there. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, absentee slumlords colluded with arsonists to set fire to their own property all around Harlem, driving tenants into the street and collecting insurance money. That scorched-earth campaign—along with the more common, more time-consuming, and less actively violent tactic of neglect, in which buildings were abandoned, boarded up, and left to rot for decades until they nearly collapsed—created the empty lots that pocked the neighborhood’s landscape. This condition later came to be known by the passive, indeterminate, and oddly agricultural term “blight,” and to reverse that blight, many of those empty lots would be developed as luxury condominiums. From the top of Mount Morris, high in the watchtower, it must have been possible to see the catastrophe blazing night after night—but no alarm could bring relief. Now, the preserved tower—an attraction for the intrepid tourist clutching a guidebook—is of little use as other dangers approach.

  7

  Back to Carolina

  MS. MINNIE DIED. It was May 23, a Thursday. On or around that day, I’d fallen asleep thinking to slip a get-well note beneath her door, something her son could take to the hospital. I’d use the blank card propped up on my desk; the front showed an English still life from the 1600s. Its long and detailed title explained the subject matter: An urn containing flowers, including tulips, roses, daffodils, narcissus, carnations, morning-glory, love-in-a-mist, hyacinth, larkspur, anemone and medick, with a butterfly and two birds and a goldfinch. I didn’t get around to writing the card or slipping it under the door. She had already been in the hospital for months, and I had not gone to visit.

  Ms. Barbara delivered the news. I came out of the building, saying hello to everyone gathered near the stoop. Ms. Barbara pulled me aside and led me away from the group. We stood near the curb and she whispered, Minnie is gone. Not everyone knew, she said. The service would happen the following Thursday, at the funeral home less than half a block down Lenox Avenue.

  We said to each other the things one says at such moments: that we had not known how ill she was and that she would be missed. I thanked Ms. Barbara for letting me know and left her in front of the building. Walking up the block, I was guided by my familiarity with the path—my eyes had ceased to focus on anything in particular. What I did see was filtered through the operation that begins at the very instant one hears the news of death. The mind makes a frantic attempt to integrate the information into everything perceived, as if the most solid particles of the universe must rearrange themselves in the wake of the departed. There is the corner store, Ms. Minnie is gone. There is the stoplight, Ms. Minnie is gone. There is the subway, Ms. Minnie is gone. There is the hospital, Ms. Minnie is gone. There is the library, Ms. Minnie is gone.

  In the next days, when I walked by the funeral home where her service would take place, I could not rush quickly past, knowing I’d be there soon with all my neighbors to say good-bye to Ms. Minnie. It was a place I passed on an almost daily basis, weaving around or through crowds lingering at the end of a service. This was necessary when passing any of the funeral homes on Lenox Avenue after a service: their doors flung open, and the crowd spilled out. Sometimes they were crowds of elders, full of dark suits, dress coats, and smart hats. But often they were crowds of the young, not dressed especially for the occasion. At least once, I passed a crowd where the mourners were being led out of the parlor by a man playing an African drum.

  I cannot remember, in any occasion over several years, passing a throng filled with weeping people. I am certain of this because when approaching such crowds, preparing to weave around or through, I almost always braced myself. I was anticipating some flood of sentiment, in the presence of which—not having any connection to the people or the event other than just passing by—I should try to make myself nonintrusive. The emotion I expected among the mourners was never present. There was only a somewhat subdued calm and the sense that these people were bound together by what had just taken place. The only agitation was mine.

  Once, Ms. Minnie greeted me in the street just after she’d emerged from such a crowd. Her declarations might have explained the absence of heaviness I’d seen before. It was a beautiful funeral, she told me. She praised the skill of the preacher and the selection of songs. She told me that the deceased wasn’t someone she knew well, but I gathered that her attendance had been a function of custom: one pays respect to the dead, even the dead who are not well known to you. And, perhaps, going to the funeral that day had been an activity, something to do. This did not diminish the event, nor the impression it had made on her. She rhapsodized on its beauty, its feeling, the size of the assembled crowd.

  A few days after Ms. Barbara told me of Ms. Minnie’s passing, a flyer appeared on the door of our building. It gave details for the funeral and showed a picture of Ms. Minnie. I had seen similar flyers on others doors. Such signs alert the neighbors that one was now gone from their midst and that everyone will soon gather to pay respect to the dead. Some of the signs I’d seen on the doors of other buildings solicited funds to cover burial costs. If the dead had left behind young children, there might be a request to help provide for their care.

  The news of death: I overheard it often, sitting on the bus while someone spoke on the phone, standing on a corner waiting to cross the street, watching the momentary meeting of two friends who had not seen each other in a while. Usually the angel of death swooped into an otherwise relaxed chat in the form of an assumption: You heard about ____, right? But the other person had not heard. They had only just seen ____; they did not know ____ was ill; they asked how long ago it had happened; they were sorry for the family. I would exit the bus or crossed the street as the particles began to rearrange themselves and would not hear the rest of the mutual consolation.

  The news of death was borne on T-shirts mass-produced by the local copy shop for the occasion. This seemed to be a ritual of young people mourning one of their own. A picture, taken during prom or a house party, showed the dead young man or woman looking full of confidence and age-appropriate immortality. The birth and death were given as Sunrise and Sunset, though the dates were too
close together to have allowed the full passage of a day. I saw these T-shirts individually—when some people wore them incorporated into their normal wardrobe long after the funeral—and in groups, a uniform for those mourners stationed in clumps outside the doors of one of the funeral parlors on Lenox.

  Newspapers or the radio sometimes announced the time and location of a funeral service if the deceased was a famous jazz musician or had been killed in a crime that had captured the attention of tabloids. Reading such announcements, or hearing them, the information first struck me as noteworthy. Perhaps I, too, should go and pay my respects, even though the dead person was a stranger.

  I never did go to one of these public funerals. But once, walking home at night via 125th Street, I came to a gathering by the benches in front of the State Office Building. I thought it was a political meeting of some sort, so I stopped. It was a political meeting of some sort, but it was also a memorial service. Speakers took turns standing on a bench to address the small crowd which had formed a semicircle on the sidewalk. They were there to honor a man named Yusuf, who had been a regular occupant of those benches and had died of a sudden illness several months before. A poster-sized portrait of him leaned against one bench. I studied it, trying to recognize him from the many times I had passed the spot. Several of the speakers assured the small crowd that even if you don’t think you knew Yusuf, you probably did, and they spoke of the kindness he showed to anyone he met at those benches, his commitment to his neighborhood, and his love of his people and his religion. Soon, the prayers and eulogies gave way to announcements: of various meetings, of an opportunity to join the bus caravan to Jena, Louisiana, to protest the treatment of the Jena 6. At the end, the man who’d organized the service handed out the melted remnants of tiny tea-light candles. Some had been burning throughout the assembly, but others had been snuffed out in the wind.

  In the dark of one night I saw a collection of funeral flowers arranged behind a gate on 114th Street. There were a great lot of them, elaborate arrangements propped up on wire stands and on an arbor. Two were designed in the shape of numbers—1 and 23—but there was no way of knowing if these digits referred to the age of the departed, the number of a favorite sports jersey, or the date of death. When I passed some weeks later, all the flowers were gone but the wire stands were still there. The arbor was empty except for a piece of synthetic tulle wound about it, an invitation to pass through.

  On Lenox Avenue a bouquet of synthetic yellow roses is fastened to a tree with strong cellophane tape. Above this offering is a photo of a young man who stares hard at the camera while embracing a pit bull. The image is laminated to withstand the elements, and it has survived for many months. Someone seems to be tending the empty cardboard box that, turned on its side as a makeshift altar, shelters the votive candles that are readily available from bodegas, botanicas, and ninety-nine-cent stores. Often they are blown out by the wind. One night, passing such an arrangement and seeing that all the candles had succumbed, I searched my purse for matches to light them again. Similar memorials are found on trees, on corners, near subway stations, in front of a building or a favorite hangout spot. Someone had been there, in that spot. That person was not there any longer. But the significance of location expanded in my mind when my neighbors told me, in the midst of our customary greetings, that a young woman had been stabbed to death the night before on the corner of our block, and a few days later, a wreath held aloft on a stand, festooned with red ribbons and roses, marked the spot where she fell.

  Just across from there on 133rd Street, a black-and-purple swag draped the doorway of St. Andrew’s Church, a small congregation whose sanctuary occupied the parlor floor of a brownstone. The banner stayed in place for months. When it first appeared, I assumed it announced the death of some member of the flock; later I wondered if it was the sign of some festival of the liturgical year. The decoration remained in place longer than would be necessary for a period of mourning or a religious season. A piece of paper appeared on the door. Seeing this from the sidewalk, I knew it announced—like similar signs on the doors of small churches I’d passed—that the church had stopped having services. I don’t know if the congregation moved or was dissolved. Even after this, the black-and-purple swag remained above the threshold, greeting vanished congregants of the vacant church.

  I almost didn’t notice when the banner disappeared. The realization came when I finally registered that the blue-trimmed white facade that had set the church building apart from the rest of the houses had disappeared too. It was painted brown to cohere with the other recently renovated brownstones on the block. But there was one trace remaining of St. Andrew’s. Even after its external transformation, the imitation stained-glass windows that had distinguished the building as a house of worship remained intact for months. Recently I saw they’d been smashed, some shards still held up by the window frame. They were probably destroyed by the construction crew that was working inside.

  Raven Chanticleer died just a few weeks before I moved to Harlem, on March 31, 2002. I must have seen the notice of his death in the New York Times, but I don’t recall having heard about the time and place of his funeral. I am no longer sure if I learned of his existence at the same moment I read of his death, or if I had arrived in Harlem having already heard of his African American Wax and History Museum. I do know that at some time during those first months of living here, after he had already died, I looked up the museum in the phone book, and even called, but did not get an answer.

  Chanticleer’s museum was celebrated as the first wax museum dedicated to the famous figures of black history. Established in the early 1990s, it was a completely independent endeavor. Its founder was also its chief docent, head fund-raiser, artist-in-residence, and maintenance man. From the very beginning, the museum garnered lots of media attention. In Harlem, Raven Chanticleer was already something of a celebrity. He was a theater director, performer, and fashion designer known for his glamorous “garbage bag glamor fashions” creating high fashion from plastic bags. Notables who had purchased his work were said to include Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, and Muhammad Ali. As an artist he enjoyed solo shows in Rome, London, Montreal, and Hawaii. In the 1970s, Chanticleer performed in The Wiz, House of Flowers, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Long before he founded the wax museum, his notorious fashion sense was the stuff of legend. He made a memorable entrance at the 1971 “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and George Frazier at Madison Square Garden, wearing an ermine and chinchilla cape and leopard skin briefs. At a Harlem film premiere at the old Victoria Theatre, he was immaculately attired in a Russian sable outfit, complete with cape, brocade boots and diamond bejeweled skullcap, alighting from an old-fashioned white carriage drawn by 2 prancing white horses.

  Chanticleer said the inspiration for the museum had come when he was living abroad. I got into my wax thing in London, after seeing Madame Tussaud’s. He was immediately captivated by this wondrous vibrant art form. Another report tells the story differently. I was impressed by Madame Tussaud’s on a field trip to Paris but she had no black “herons or sherons”—they were all lily-white…. I said “I won’t take this for an answer; I will open the first black wax museum in the world.”

  The first figure immortalized by Raven Chanticleer’s secret formula of plaster, papier-mâché, and beeswax was Raven Chanticleer himself. His effigy was soon joined by others: a figure of Harriet Tubman wearing aviator glasses; Fannie Lou Hamer in a leopard-print evening gown. The wax likenesses were not arranged by chronology or specialty—according to some reports, many were not even strict likenesses. There was Michael Jackson next to Magic Johnson next to Martin Luther King Jr. Malcolm X was next to Whoopi Goldberg, who was next to Josephine Baker. Local herons and sherons like Mayor David Dinkins, Mother Hale, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. also formed a part of Chanticleer’s pantheon, in addition to African leaders Nelson Mandela and Haile Selassie. A 1998 article in the New York Times report
ed that Chanticleer’s wax renditions of Mike Tyson, Michael Jackson, and Biggie Smalls were on loan to an exhibition in Europe. The next year saw the unveiling of two new statues, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes.

  Many of the newspaper articles promoting the museum portray Chanticleer next to his creations, often surrounded by children from the school groups and youth groups that frequently visited the museum. In the photos, he always wears a broad and knowing grin. Besides the wax figures, the museum featured art in other media, much of it also by Chanticleer. There was a portrait of the singer Madonna, depicted with black skin. Perhaps not referring to that particular incarnation, Chanticleer had said, Every black home should have a black Jesus and a black Madonna. Other religious work included a version of the Last Supper featuring the likenesses of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Paul Robeson.

  A group of oil paintings on the wall illustrated the hardships in slavery. One painting on the wall showed a picture of cotton-fields in the south; another showed shanty-life in Haiti. Not on regular display were some skeletal bones that Chanticleer says are of African ancestors.

  When I first came to Harlem, I noticed the great number of funeral parlors. There were at least four on Lenox Avenue, and many more on the other main thoroughfares and side streets. This seemed to be a high ratio of funeral homes per capita. Perhaps it is a stable business, like beauty parlors and ninety-nine-cent stores. The signs in front of most were weather-beaten, as though they’d been operating for many years.