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  Then, my response was only to try to suppress my tears. Now, when I think of it, I realize it was the kind of moment when belief, or lack thereof, exposes itself. I looked around at the other mourners, who calmly waited for the service to begin. There were no hysterics in the crowd. Maybe they’d gone to more funerals than I had, or maybe they’d had a chance to say good-bye to Ms. Minnie. Maybe it had to do with a faith I could not summon on command—a lack of certainty about the regions that the dead pass through.

  More people arrived for the viewing, and I sat there a bit longer. Then I got up to attend a town hall meeting.

  A shooting spree had taken place a few days before the funeral, the weekend after Ms. Minnie died. It was Memorial Day weekend. Eight people had been wounded on Lenox and Seventh Avenues in a maelstrom that progressed up the blocks between 125th and 131st Streets. No one was killed. Later, I heard rumors that the violence was part of a gang initiation or had begun with a fight after a concert in Marcus Garvey Park. The night of the shooting, I was at home, working at my desk. I made a note, night—almost midnight. Below that, enclosed within brackets, [a helicopter is circling the area.]

  The reason for the helicopter’s flight was revealed the next morning in the newspaper. Upon learning the news of the shooting spree, I made another note:

  I had been thinking that the sounds were changing as summer approached. But last night, except noting the helicopter seeming lower and more prolonged than I’d ever noticed (had I ever noticed?) I did not hear any sounds from the street. I did not hear any shots, didn’t hear any screams, didn’t hear the noise of the crowds said to have formed on the avenue, with “scores” of cops dispatched to disperse them.

  Not having seen this scene—only having heard the sounds of its consequence—and noting it, but not going out to investigate, then waking to read about it in the news: staying inside is safety; staying inside is to avoid being a witness.

  It was this feeling of having avoided my duty that led me to rush over—in the interim between the end of Ms. Minnie’s wake and the beginning of her funeral—to that town hall meeting about the shooting. Not much said in the meeting added to my understanding of the event, or helped to avoid its repetition. It was, like many meetings I’d been to, something of a ritual, a place for the community to come together to share shock, outrage, and sadness. I didn’t take any notes. A preacher gave a long invocation; earnest and sincere teenagers of the sort who were involved in after-school programs, not in shootings, stood up to speak about the state of their peers; parents shouted anguished calls to action. After listening awhile, I slipped out of my seat to return to the funeral.

  The program had already begun by the time I made it back. I paused with another latecomer at the front door before we were ushered inside to seats at the rear of the chapel. I saw some of my neighbors in the pews, as well as people in the front row I assumed to be Ms. Minnie’s relatives. There was testimony from a niece, and a message of condolence read aloud that had been sent from the family’s home church in South Carolina. Ms. Barbara got up and spoke directly to Ms. Minnie and not about her, thanking her for being such a good friend. After the preacher gave his eulogy, the obituary was read. It was spare and gave basic details: the year she had been born, the year she came to New York, her work in the garment district, her having one son.

  Ms. Minnie’s son was seated in the front row with her sister and a niece, the ones she had always spoken of. The ushers began to direct us for the procession past the body, inviting one row at a time to the front of the room. Throughout all of this, I was aware of a struggle going on inside me. I was trying to stop myself from taking note of what was happening. I was trying not to be an observer but a participant: to participate in the prayers, the songs, the proper etiquette. Some part of this attempt to stop the recording instinct was successful, because now much of what happened is a blur that resists being shaped into words. What is certain: I did not know the words to the ancient lamentation. I was uninitiated in how to die and how to mourn the dead.

  When the service ended, we all went outside and stood in front of the funeral home. We remarked upon how beautiful the service had been, the skill of the preacher, and the selection of the songs. Soon we were laughing, because Willie, who always flirts with me but is old enough to be my father, began to flirt again. I began to scold him as I normally do, and as Ms. Minnie sometimes did on my behalf. I told him that if Ms. Minnie had been there, she would’ve told him off. Someone pulled out a camera, and Willie, Ms. Barbara, and I posed, smiling, against the backdrop of Lenox Avenue.

  Afterward, and for the next several days, a line in a song from the service persisted in my mind. It picked up on a theme from the preacher’s eulogy. The organist, who was also the singer, led the assembled mourners in several rounds of this repeating chorus. The song had the sound of a march, with descending and ascending chords. Its lyrics assume the voice of the dead upon reaching the gates of heaven, faced with that record of deeds written on the angel’s scroll: Let my life speak for me…

  Several copies of the New York Times obituary announcing the death of Raven Chanticleer are included in his carefully curated file. This was one element of the archive he could not control. At least one copy had been added by a librarian, bearing the date and source in neat handwriting. Other copies seemed to have been added later, perhaps by the friend of Raven Chanticleer. One of the librarians had told me that this mourning friend of Chanticleer had asked the library to start a file archiving her own life. She said that Raven had instructed her to do so. Strangely, some artifacts about this woman, lacking any information about Raven Chanticleer, were mixed up in the file about the wax museum.

  The newspaper obituary included some details of his life that the other articles had missed. It serves as a corrective footnote to the official record on Raven Chanticleer as collected and preserved by himself.

  Raven Chanticleer, who was born and raised in Harlem and resides there to this day was actually born James Watson on September 13, 1928, in Woodruff, South Carolina. His parents—mentioned in several earlier profiles as Henri and Abbie Chanticleer, a Haitian-born school principal and a Barbados-born concert pianist and couturier respectively, who lived on Sugar Hill—were, according to the Times obituary, sharecroppers. He had not graduated from the Sorbonne or the University of Ghana. Most likely there were no old mentors from the University of Timbuktu. A niece is quoted in the obituary stating that she intended to keep the museum going, once the family had sorted out some of the legalities.

  As early as 1993, one reporter was suspicious of Chanticleer’s tale. Chanticleer gave an interview to the New York Post very soon after the birth of the museum. Pointing at the various items he’d created, he announced that one of his furniture designs had won a prize at the 1940 World’s Fair. The reporter remarked that, according to the 1936 birth date Chanticleer had provided, the achievement would have been prodigious—he would have been four years old.

  I could read and write when I was four, Raven countered sharply before changing the subject. The article proceeds with the reporter’s tongue placed complicitly in cheek. Pointing to an idealized rustic scene à la Woolworth’s—complete with utopian cabin—[he] continues, “That’s the house in Alabama where I lived when I joined Martin Luther King’s Freedom Ride.” Sensing the reporter’s wariness, he asks, “You believe me, don’t you?”

  I looked up the census on a computer program available at the library, used mostly by people searching out their own ancestry. I hoped it would yield other information about this James Watson. He appears in 1930 as the one-and-a-half-year-old youngest child of Henry and Abbie Watson. Henry was thirty-five years old in 1930, Abbie was thirty-three. Their family included Sam, age nine; Leroy, age seven; Irene, age six; and Fred, age three. Also listed in their household were two boarders, both twenty-three years old, by the names of Geneva Moore and David Watson. Henry and Abbie Watsons were renters. Henry’s occupation is listed as a laborer in public works, an
d Abbie took in laundry at home.

  Looking at the facts of the Watson household as revealed by those few lines scrawled by a census taker, I began to understand why their youngest son might have embroidered his history. We are used to the idea that to forget, obscure, or embellish is to forsake. Such was the forgetfulness which Chanticleer tried to abolish with his museum, and that Arthur Schomburg tried to abolish with his library. But Raven Chanticleer’s forgetfulness was also his transcendence. Forgetting, obscuring, and embellishing were vital to Chanticleer’s self-creation. He transcended his earthly birth to become the first figure immortalized in wax at his museum.

  Raven Chanticleer included his parents in his mythology—he mentioned them in those newspaper accounts, gave them new countries of origin, new accomplishments, and his new name. This could be seen as a disavowal, a rejection of his origins. Or it could be seen as an act of love. His invented Haitian patrimony provided Chanticleer with a strain of racial heroism, and the fiction of his mother’s musical career gave him an artistically inclined pedigree. But he’d also provided his parents with an alternative existence, a different future.

  But what about all of his siblings? Were they also given illustrious new biographies? And what of all the other sons and daughters of sharecroppers from the South among whom Raven Chanticleer lived in Harlem, and who were to be uplifted by his museum—had he transcended them, too?

  I didn’t find a specific moment when James Watson disappears from public record and Raven Chanticleer takes his place. It is not possible, from the facts available at the library, to know when this man—who was not, in fact, a native son of Harlem—actually arrived up north and uptown. It is not possible to know what he saw when exiting the subway station. The shock of it, the distance between the world he was entering and the one he’d been born into, might have been enough to make him want to rewrite his entire history. Walking those streets, where he did not—as a child at least—see Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and Louis Armstrong, may have given him the feeling of being born again. Life as he had lived it up to that point was obliterated. This new life was one in which he was the parent and the child, the artist and the creation.

  The census document on the computer didn’t unlock any door to the past. I left the Watson family in 1930 and considered the name Raven Chanticleer had chosen for himself. The last name is a word taken from Old French, meaning “clear song.” Chanticleer is the merry and colorful rooster made famous in an episode of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This wily cock outwits the fox who hunts him, tricking death with a last-minute escape. Raven Chanticleer’s first name honors another trickster bird. In many Native American stories, the raven’s powers include shape-shifting and creation.

  Or perhaps the new name stood for nothing but his transcendence. Maybe Raven Chanticleer just liked the sound of those words as they flew from his tongue. It would be reason enough. Keen to shake that suspicious Post reporter from his tail, Raven Chanticleer insisted on being known by his true name: I’m an artiste… stress that. I’m not an artist, I’m an artiste. And flamboyant. Yes? Naw! The word is totally inadequate.

  Sometime before the day when she invited me into her apartment, I’d mentioned to Ms. Minnie that I might need to interview her to help with research for this book. The request was a truce, settling the war I was having with myself. I was not sure I wanted to interview anyone, but if I asked, I’d have to do it. An eminent essayist I respected said (in an interview) that she didn’t trust interviews and did not conduct them. This supplied me an excuse, for I had the distinct suspicion that the very act of posing a question irrevocably alters the answer you receive. There was a difference—perhaps especially in Harlem—between what people told you from memory, unbidden and of their own volition, and the nostalgic tones that crept in when you asked them a question, no matter how specific, about The Past. Perhaps this discrepancy was a function of my interview skills, but I did not think it should be a matter of interview skills. I did not want to be haranguing my neighbors with a tape recorder and reporter’s pad. When I asked Ms. Minnie, it was because I thought I should give interviews a try—in the name of a method more respectable than memory. I told her I’d slip a note under her door with a formal request.

  My misgivings won out. I never slipped that note under her door. Instead, I continued to see Ms. Minnie in the ways to which we were accustomed: in the hallway checking our mailboxes, or crossing paths when she was coming in for the day after her morning excursion while I was just going out. We complimented each other, me remarking on how well she looked, her telling me about the secret product she used for smooth skin, or about making soap in her childhood yard with lye and lard, or about piling into a car with girlfriends, going from South Carolina to dances in Georgia. She pulled my coat closed as the winter approached, and was pleased when we met and I was properly bundled. We told each other how glad we were to be neighbors, we said hello, we said goodbye and that we loved each other. She would tell me about various characters on the street, and she told me to stop and stare.

  None of these things are “material” of the sort I would have gained had I interviewed her. The archive of oral histories at the Schomburg is surely bursting with such material. Now that Ms. Minnie is gone, the part of me that wants to be a more obedient student of history regrets not having conducted a formal interview. But there was something else gained in the conversations we did have. It was not just a transaction of information; there was also the care she gave me, and the care I hope I gave her. And, sometimes, in those moments we had together, something passed between us that could not have been caught on tape yet bears witness to something too vast to be contained on paper.

  One day when we stood in front of our building, Ms. Minnie was telling me about her hometown, Denmark, South Carolina. She told me it was a black town and her sister-in-law was mayor. Then she shared a detail I had not known in our years as neighbors and acquaintances. It is a detail that I would not have necessarily asked about and that she would not necessarily have told me had I ever slipped the note under her door formally asking for her stories and her time. She told me that Davis was her married name. Her family name was Sojourner. I said it was a beautiful name, and she told me that not many people knew about her true name—only those who knew her from home. She looked me squarely in the eye before continuing. That’s not a slave name.

  I went to West 115th Street to see Raven Chanticleer’s house. Finding it did not require the exact address. I recognized the building from a photocopy in the files, because the house had once graced the cover of Italian Vogue. For the occasion, Raven Chanticleer had posed outside, wearing a fur coat. The house is still painted with the exuberant mural. A dream landscape on the stoop shows a tropical scene—a beach, a little fish, an ominous shark. Another mural shows an Egyptian fantasia, with the Sphinx, the pyramids, and the same palm trees as shown on the beach. I love beautiful things, Raven Chanticleer once said. I just have to make things around me beautiful. An example of his inclination was a pair of trash cans near his stoop, decorated with the faces of a king and queen. Showing those same cans to a reporter, Chanticleer had declared: In the midst of ugliness, I find beauty.

  When I visited, the low, winding staircase leading to the front door was blocked at the sidewalk by a high gate. The gate was closed and secured by a chain. A fine cobweb drawn over the padlock added the appearance of abandonment—perhaps the gate had not been unlocked in some time. But the uppermost windows facing the street were open, as if to ventilate the house during the summer’s heat. A fan was visible through one open window. I could not see any lights inside. The only way I could have made my presence known was to begin rattling the gate and shouting up to that open window. I was not inclined to do so.

  At that moment a man appeared from the garden level of the house directly adjacent—a house built of sandstone, a staid aristocrat beside its neighbor, the garish painted lady. The man asked me if I needed any assistance, and I told him I was just loo
king at the museum of Raven Chanticleer. He told me that I was looking at the wrong house. His own building had been the actual museum—Chanticleer had lived behind the elaborate facade next door.

  When I asked the man if he knew what had happened to the contents of the museum, he shrugged. He thought they’d been placed in storage after Chanticleer’s death. When I told him I’d noticed that the number for the museum was still listed in the phone book, he smiled with mild embarrassment. He had always intended to call the phone company to have the listing removed, he said. He was responsible for the illusion that the museum was still open.

  He told me that relatives of Raven Chanticleer, a niece and nephew, now lived in the house with the murals. Thinking of the cobweb I’d just seen, I was surprised to hear this; it must have been the busy work of a spider earlier that morning. The man said Chanticleer’s relatives were very friendly and would probably be happy to help in my research. He gave me their names, and I thanked him for taking the time to speak, apologizing for lingering outside his door.

  I knew, even as he suggested it, that I would not leave a note at that gate or call the niece and nephew to get additional details beyond what Raven Chanticleer had so carefully curated at the library. I might have discovered more of the official story, but it seemed like a trespass. I had not been invited beyond the gate.