B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

One of the funeral parlors on Lenox advertises its services on its awning with a slogan: “Where Beauty Softens Your Grief.” Another one, just a few doors down, does not carry a sales pitch. Its sign reads Mickey Funeral Service, The Carolina Chapel. I always wondered about the origin of its name. Mickey’s is located within a graceful mansion on Lenox between 121st and 122nd, near other fine town houses occupied by SROs and churches. Sometimes I would pass when a funeral was taking place, when mourners were arrayed along the stout staircase that curved gently from the front door to the pavement.

  But mostly, when I passed, the parlor was empty. It was as if no one was dying. The windows of the Mickey funeral home were hardly ever lit, but I imagined the interior: heavy drapes, overstuffed sofas, thick carpet, faux-wood paneling on the walls, and the kind of sturdy potted houseplants that scoff at inattention. A small window in a door of the garden-floor entrance displayed the funeral home’s OPEN or CLOSED sign. A WILL BE BACK clock alerted visitors when the owner was briefly away from the premises; if in need, one would know the undertaker was returning shortly, and thus not seek out the parlor a few doors down the avenue. Most times when I passed the Carolina Chapel the office was closed, so I began to take note of the clock’s message. Other times, when the sign read OPEN I nearly went in, but never followed the urge.

  This same absurd drama played out at a different location, the St. Helena Funeral Home on 136th Street. I have also paused out front on the sidewalk. I have exchanged anonymous and courteous hellos when passing its proprietor as he stands outside when I enter and exit the Countee Cullen Branch library across the street. The windows of its upper floor face 136th Street. They are long, narrow, and set high into the wall, so the only scenery visible from the desks is the line of cornices crowning the houses across the way. Sitting there staring out over the rooftops, I could pick out the blue cornice belonging to the funeral home.

  I crafted my own version of its history. I assumed it was named for the barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, which is the stronghold of Gullah culture and the ancestral home of many Harlemites whose roots are in that state. It was also the location of the Port Royal experiment, an episode during the Civil War when the Union Army, having driven the slaveowners off the land, organized the freedmen to manage and operate the plantations they had already been running to create income that would help fund the Union’s effort.

  I became convinced, based only on my fantasies, that each funeral home in Harlem had a very specific following, determined not by quality of service or membership in a certain church or lodge, but by the place from which one’s family came. According to my explanation, the services of each particular chapel included preparing the body, arranging the services, and then carrying the body back home. Attached to this last fantasy was a fugitive factoid from my earliest researches at the Schomburg Center as a student visiting New York. It crossed my mind whenever I passed the Carolina Chapel; though it was not exactly appropriate, the memory could not be suppressed. Back when I’d been frantically researching the Scottsboro Boys, and black madonnas, and eighteenth-century executions of slave children, I was also looking up the dramatic structure of old minstrel shows. I jotted down the following words, which were often spoken as the curtain was about to close: And now, kind friends, as all good things must come to an end, so too must this part of our entertainment come to an end, and thanking you one and all, we’ll say farewell, for we are going back to Carolina.

  Putting an end to all this speculation, one day I happened to pass the Mickey funeral home on Lenox and finally saw a man standing outside. His elegant dress and the way he commanded the expanse of sidewalk directly in front of the building’s entryway made me certain he was the undertaker. I decided that instead of those unfruitful hellos with the owner of the St. Helena parlor, I would take my chance. I greeted him and asked if he was the proprietor. When he assured me he was, I explained my curiosity about the name of his establishment. Why was it called the Carolina Chapel? He confirmed my suspicion that the owners had come from the Carolinas. When I asked him what year they’d arrived in Harlem, he said he wasn’t sure, maybe in the 1930s, but they had come to New York earlier and had gone to Brooklyn first.

  After he answered my question, and I thanked him brightly for solving my riddle (Oh, I had always wondered about that), our conversation did not continue. There was no invitation beyond the gate. I proceeded up the avenue, proud of myself for having defeated my fancies, yet knowing I’d only produced a bit of trivia.

  By then, having hesitated at the door of those two funeral parlors so many times without entering, without reason, I created a logic for my apprehension, or at least an excuse. One should not venture into a funeral home without cause, I told myself. It was a convenient superstition, invented especially for the occasion.

  The Harlem rituals of death have parallels with those of the ancient necropolis of Egypt. They are in the continuum of those on the Nile of four thousand years ago. Thus begins Camille Billops’s introduction to The Harlem Book of the Dead, which collects the funeral portraits made by James VanDerZee. In addition to the parade pictures and studio portraits for which he became famous, VanDerZee also made pictures of dead people in their coffins. It was a common practice at the time, and a good source of income.

  In these pictures, death is recorded as yet another milestone of life—along with baptism, graduation, or marriage. At the time, a portrait was a common way to commemorate another rite of passage. A newly arrived southerner might pose in his finest clothes for a picture that could be sent to the family left behind. The photographs of the dead are also for the left behind. In VanDerZee’s funeral portraits, the dead are sometimes pictured alone; sometimes their essential aloneness is pierced by the presence of mourners posed impassively nearby. The coffins are lined with gleaming satin and taffeta and piled with arrangements of mums, roses, carnations, and lilies. The corpses wear cakey makeup and fine clothes.

  Usually, the portraits are enhanced with one of VanDerZee’s special death portrait innovations. When producing the prints, he superimposed embellishments onto the picture. Sometimes these were stock images of angelic orders hovering above, unfurling scrolls that contained a few lines of poetry or a prayer. Sometimes he merged the past with the present, double-exposing the funeral image with an old portrait of the same person while alive. The death of a soldier is commemorated in a picture decorated with an American flag. At times VanDerZee’s interventions are not technological, but merely a matter of arrangement. One picture shows a dead man with his arms folded around a newspaper that announces the 1927 death of Florence Mills. The funerals took place on the same day. To make this dead gentleman look more natural, his family wanted the paper put in his hand, to make it appear he had been reading and had just dozed off.

  But sometimes, despite arrangement and embellishment, the pictures still told their own story. A father cradles a dead infant in his arms, as if the child is still alive. I wonder if this was according to VanDerZee’s instruction. The father smiles ever so slightly, as if proudly admiring his child on the day it was born. The mother, perched on the arm of the photography studio’s prop chair, leans over her husband’s shoulder, also looking at the baby. But VanDerZee’s carefully composed domestic scene failed to conceal the odd look on her face, which reads as derangement mixed with accusation.

  In an interview featured along with the portraits, VanDerZee mentions Mickey’s funeral home as one of the places where he worked regularly. It is only a passing detail among many passing details. At the prompting of the interviewer, VanDerZee recounts small snippets from the stories of the dead, whether the circumstances of their death, the repercussions of their death (an inheritance), or how he had come to produce a certain effect within the frame. Indeed, throughout the interview, he sometimes seems a bit annoyed by the probing questions of the archivist, Camille Billops. Perhaps for VanDerZee the book consists of photographs of people who have no relation to each other or significance beyond proxi
mity of circumstance and time: They had lived in Harlem, they had died, and they had died in Harlem while James VanDerZee was making some portion of his living by fulfilling the demand for funeral portraiture, then in fashion.

  VanDerZee offers the half-remembered details surrounding the death of one young beauty, her fair skin somewhat mottled by an exuberant application of mortuary makeup. Her fate is obscured by the satin ripples and mounds of flowers. She’d fallen ill at a party, complaining of stomach pain. When her friends took her to lie down, loosening her clothes for comfort, they discovered that she was bleeding from the abdomen. She’d been shot in the midst of the revelry by a silenced gun. Asked to identify her assailant as she was dying, all she said was, I’ll tell you tomorrow, yes, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

  The woman’s murder and her last words, giving her disgruntled lover enough time to escape, provided the point of departure for Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz. The novel, an imaginary version of the circumstances surrounding the young woman’s fate, does more than fictionalize fact. In weaving a complete story from the woman’s fragmented deferral, Morrison unravels the trick this woman played on the living at the moment of her death. It is a commonplace that the dead tell no tales. But no cliché has been invented to capture just how troubled we are by those who take their truth beyond the grave.

  On Lenox Avenue, a brownstone owner took special care, when restoring his property’s facade, to uncover and preserve a sign. Thick black letters spelling “G&G Photo Studio” stand out against a white background that is streaked with residual brown paint. When the sign was first uncovered, it was a marvel: That is VanDerZee’s studio! That is where he worked! The physical excavation of that sign made the fact more urgent than if I’d just found the address in a history book and then gone to stand at the door. I imagined the process of uncovering it, precise as the deft brushwork used at excavations to unearth a fossilized skull preserved by volcanic ash.

  Until recently, the old VanDerZee studio housed a new real estate office specializing in condos and brownstone conversions. But the agent must have had poor business, because later I saw a sign posted in the window announcing that the marshal had taken possession of the premises. The customized awning that advertised the office is still there, but the name has been painted out. Elsewhere in Harlem, other long-gone storefronts also retain their signs. These are not acts of preservation or additions to the tourist trail, they are simply the last traces of failed enterprises. As with the sign above VanDerZee’s studio, the letters are only meaningful to one who knows. And even then, they only mean so much. That is where he was, he is not there any longer.

  In The Harlem Book of the Dead, when VanDerZee is asked why people had stopped taking pictures with their dead loved ones, he answers bluntly. I didn’t know they had stopped. They’re still doing it today. Sometimes the family wanted to be there to show the other relatives just how the deceased had been put away.

  If funeral portraiture captured images of the dead that were of more use to the living, the traditional books of the dead for which the collection of VanDerZee’s funeral pictures is named are oriented more insistently toward the hereafter. They examine not only how to manage the passage in a psychological and metaphysical sense, but actually how one might, by ritual, transcend earthly existence, defeat death, and penetrate eternity.

  The Egyptian death rites cited in the introduction to The Harlem Book of the Dead are based on the epic lamentation of Isis, who scoured the four corners of the earth in search of the dismembered parts of her murdered husband, Osiris. In putting him back together again and achieving his resurrection, she helps him gain immortality, establishing him as Lord of the Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. The incantation of Isis’s lament formed the foundation of all burial ceremonies in ancient Egypt. Mourners, in preparing the body, also accomplished the resurrection of their dead. The belief was that each man buried according to those original rites would also live forever and, in death, become the risen god.

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead is also a carefully conceived ritual for immortality, meant to be read aloud to a person who is dying; it includes a description of various regions of the afterlife, particularly the bardo, that territory between the end of one life cycle and the rebirth which begins the next. This description of the landscapes that one would pass through after leaving earth was preparation for the journey. This may be a kind of comfort, but it is also an initiation. Another important part of the Tibetan philosophy of death is that the soul must depart the body in a certain manner, so that the condition of the spirit in the next life could be elevated. A person had to know how to die in order to achieve this transcendence, leading to eventual liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Perhaps participating in the ritual deathbed reading, engaging the earthly part of the passage, was one occasion to learn.

  In 1981, after living downtown and abroad, Raven Chanticleer returned to his native Harlem. I had to come back, he told one journalist. I imagined myself as some kind of pioneer, he told another. And I figured that if those people in their covered wagons withstood all those Indians and the cold winters, then so could I. He’d been working at Bergdorf Goodman when crossing West 110th Street one day I felt the pulsation—the beat of the drums—call me forth to give my people the wax form.

  Chanticleer’s pioneer homestead in Harlem was in the midst of a drug-infested block of West 115th Street. He purchased two town houses next to each other, living in one and turning the other into his museum. But he was spurred on by memories of his Harlem childhood, in a cultured home on Sugar Hill. His father was born in Haiti and was a school principal; his mother was from Barbados and had been a concert pianist.

  It felt like Harlem was the center of the world, he recounted to one reporter.

  Walking around his neighborhood he would see Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Louis Armstrong. He recalled seeing Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Billie Holiday in the long-forgotten nightclubs and at the Apollo Theater. “White people would come up to Harlem then to see these black gentlemen and ladies who were the best in the world…. It wasn’t hard then for a black youngster to dream of great things.”

  Once Raven Chanticleer had been around the world and achieved some of those great things, he felt compelled to return to his roots. Harlem is coming back… and I’m doing my part. I could have gone anywhere and lived in luxury, but I’ve come back home where I belong.

  I discovered all this about Raven Chanticleer in a file at the Schomburg Center. After exhausting the limited sources available about him and his museum on the Internet and in newspaper databases, I’d asked a librarian if she knew where I could find any other details. She directed me to the typewritten index cataloging a collection of materials called the “vertical files.” These files contain clippings of newspaper articles, an antiquated system from the pre-Internet days when the library had an entire department devoted to that task. I was delighted when I found that there was, indeed, a clippings file devoted to Raven Chanticleer’s African American Wax and History Museum. It was overflowing with all the newspaper articles and ephemera from which I have constructed the story above. In one of those articles, attention was called to the existence of the file itself: His work is cataloged in the Schomburg collection, mentioned one article, in a reverent tone.

  Later, when I went back to continue my research, one of the librarians handed me the file with an amused look on her face. Oh yeah, I remember him. She remembered Raven Chanticleer because he was a regular visitor to the library, where he spent many hours creating and maintaining the very file I was consulting. She described his fantastical outfits, his outré manner. And she mentioned having seen him outside the library on one occasion, when he dominated the proceedings of a meeting held about property ownership in Harlem, advocating for an elderly woman who was in danger of losing her home.

  Another librarian also remembered Chanticleer’s visits. She mentioned a woman who began to appear at the library after
Chanticleer’s death and spent many hours maintaining the clippings file. She said she didn’t know the relationship between the woman and Chanticleer, but she remembered that this library patron often wept uncontrollably as she went about her task. This woman returned repeatedly, as if tending the flowers at a grave, but the librarian said she had not been seen there in a while.

  At first I thought it would be wonderful to find and interview this unidentified weeping lady. I even managed, through some details found in the files, to identify her name. But after several visits with Chanticleer’s file, I decided that I had enough information. I also decided not to contact his friend and unofficial executor, fearing my questions would somehow distress her and disturb her bereavement.

  On the Thursday afternoon of Ms. Minnie’s funeral, I emerged from our building feeling solemn and official in a black dress. I had never gone to a funeral outside of Texas—my attendance had always been within the context of family, or friends with family connections. I glanced around to see if anyone from the block was heading over. I didn’t see anyone, so walked alone to Bailey’s Funeral Home just a few doors down the avenue. I had passed there so many times, winding through its crowds and avoiding the path of its hearse, which used the city sidewalk as a private driveway. It was strange to now be greeted at those doors as a mourner. I was surprised by the pristine interior. The wood veneer of the wall paneling and benches shone under the room’s bright lights. The employees of the funeral home gave great attention to formality, ushering guests in a manner at once sincerely tender and highly scripted.

  It was time for the viewing. I slipped into a bench next to the nearest familiar faces, just behind Ms. Barbara and next to Ms. Freddie Mae Baxter. Ms. Freddie Mae was a childhood friend of Ms. Minnie’s. I remember clearly the first time we met. I was talking with Ms. Minnie in front of our building, and this smartly dressed woman came sidling up to us with a mischievous look on her face. Something about their interaction let me know, immediately, that they had been girls together. Ms. Minnie often mentioned to me that her friend Freddie Mae had written a book about childhood in their hometown and her adult life in Harlem. At the funeral home, Ms. Freddie Mae sat with another friend, and they were talking. I said hello, but I didn’t make an effort to join their conversation, because by then I’d looked to the front of the room and seen Ms. Minnie in the coffin, wearing a pink suit. When I saw her body I began to cry, and seeing that no one else at the wake was crying, I began to feel self-conscious.