B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa

  When the cowboys ride, that’s the end of the parade. They arrive as night falls. These are members of the Federation of Black Cowboys, who have a ranch in Brooklyn. I met one of their members once, while waiting for the subway at 135th Street. Seeing his hat, boots, belt buckle, and other authentic gear, I must have had a hankering for home. I asked him if he was a cowboy, and he told me he was in charge of the chuckwagon. He invited me to the ranch in Brooklyn to ride, and when he learned where I was from, he was even more eager to have me visit. He warned me that the other women who run with the Brooklyn cowboys might be jealous because I am from Texas. I never went to the ranch, but every year when the cowboys finish off the parade, I run to keep up with them, trying not to let them out of my sight, whooping and hollering as they charge up the avenue. They actually do ride off into the sunset.

  Once they pass, everyone begins to pack up their folding chairs and break through the barricades into the street. People who walked in the parade then mingle with the crowd, finding their way to the family and friends who’d come to see them march. The people who watched the parade from the perches of their windows and fire escapes above Seventh Avenue go back inside their homes; the out-of-town firefighters go back to the suburbs; my beloved Panamanian drummers and bugle players go back to Brooklyn. At the end of the parade, when everyone who has come from around Harlem to crowd onto Seventh Avenue from 110th to 145th Street goes back to their own blocks, when others who came from far away scatter back to their homes, it seems that Harlem is bigger than it was at the beginning of the day. All the spectators take a piece away with them, and they return every year to be renewed and restored.

  Last year I would I have run with the cowboys all the way to the end of the parade, but their ride suddenly changed course. They made a right turn, heading east on 135th Street, missing the end of the parade route by ten blocks. I followed behind. At Lenox they turned south, galloping quickly, as if they were heading all the way back to the beginning. I couldn’t keep up, so by the time I reached my corner at 133rd Street I gave up the chase.

  Ms. Shirley was standing at the stoop. I asked if she’d been to the parade. She said that she never goes because folks don’t know how to act. I stood with her for a while at the front door but did not go inside. The parade was done, but I wasn’t done with the parade. After many hours out-of-doors, I still wanted to be in the street, among people. I crossed 133rd Street back toward Seventh. As I reached the end of the block, a view of the avenue opened up, revealing a scene much different from what I had just witnessed. It had not been very long since the cowboys’ ride, but the uptown side of the street was already cleared of people, and where those people had been, discarded plates and bottles and flyers and many other varieties of trash lay strewn about. The median where many onlookers had just stood was empty, too. Only the trampled plants and debris indicated the agitation that had recently been.

  But in this hour after the parade, a new event was about to start. Across the median, the downtown side of Seventh Avenue still swelled with people. They had all been there before—these were the teenagers who, during the parade, were too cool to take much interest in the main event. While the parade was on, this side of the street had the atmosphere of a fairground, with tables of food stalls and trinket vendors. All day long, young people had strolled the downtown side of Seventh. They were dressed in their finest gear for the occasion—the spectacle of each other. Their seemingly aimless milling was part of a courtship ritual. Small clusters divided by gender passed each other slowly, feigning indifference while making split-second appraisals.

  During the day, the cops had been there, too, but I had not noticed the police tower that was planted on that side of the street, waiting for nightfall. During the day, the cops had been policing intersections so that people would not run into the middle of the parade. After dark, their force was redirected. Now, their task was to police the groups of promenading teens. At nightfall, by virtue of the force now dedicated to controlling their movement, those youth were transformed into a throng.

  From where I sat on the median, it appeared that the throng had a purpose—or if not an actual purpose, then certainly a destination. The destination was south—this was where the police were herding everyone. As with the mysterious turn of the cowboys, at nightfall, the northward aspiration of the parade was reversed. Because everyone was being pushed and prodded in the same direction, the people in the crowd moved as a unified body.

  My memory of the next thing has faded. I don’t remember if I was ordered to remove myself from the median—taken as a stray who had escaped the pack—or if I joined the mass voluntarily. Whether this propulsion occurred by an inner or outer force seems crucial, but the outcome was the same. Soon I was among them, being pushed along with them, goaded by the voices of the cops, if not by the threat of the nightsticks some twirled in the air and others held with both hands—each gripped at either end of the weapon, ready to engage. The police observation tower cast a bright light upon the street. Although the sun had long set, the scene was illuminated by a white glare.

  We continued moving south, but just before we reached the crossing of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue where the statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., stands, gunshots sounded. This incident did not send panic through the crowd. There was no stampede. Instead among both the police and the young, there seemed to be an attitude that violence was to be expected. Paddy wagons formed part of the police retinue. As I moved with the crowd, I’d noticed that the teenagers and the cops seemed to regard each other almost with indifference. What was going on was, for both, business as usual. The teenagers were used to hostility from the cops, and the cops were used to hostility from the teenagers. The similarity in their attitudes did not translate to equity in power. This postparade roundup was probably also an annual event. I had never witnessed it before because I had always gone inside once the parade ended, when it was getting dark.

  Although the mood of the crowd didn’t change—and I am not sure how it could have changed, without releasing the coerced crowd into mayhem—the direction shifted. Once we had reached the intersection of 125th and Seventh, we were stopped from continuing south, diverted from the scene of the shooting. The course of our progress changed like a train spontaneously jumping its tracks—we were pushed west, across 125th Street toward the river.

  On 125th Street, the arbitrariness of the police directives was exposed. Some groups of cops stood around telling people walking west via the sidewalk to get off the sidewalk and walk in the street, although vehicle traffic was still flowing. Cops in the street yelled at people to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk. A young man next to me, who had been ordered first into the street and then onto the sidewalk, protested the contradictions to one cop, but then he relented quickly, muttering to himself, Man, y’all are trippin’. People who wanted to go home but whose home was neither south nor west also tried to reason with the nearest officer, but walking in the wrong direction was cause for confrontation. I noticed a few people walking the opposite way, allowed to go in the direction we could not. These people were white.

  It must have been when shots came from the west that I exited the crowd and wedged between a lamppost and a mailbox near the curb; I was barely on the sidewalk but not in the street. I continued to watch the people flowing in the direction from which the shots had come. It became clear that, in part, the violence that had broken out was related to the movement of the crowd. When we were herded south, shots rang out in the south. When we were herded west, shots rang out from the west.

  Seemingly out of the way of the cops who wanted people on the sidewalk and the ones who wanted us in the street, I continued to note what I heard and what I saw. But this activity drew the attention of an officer. It isn’t necessary for me to find new words to describe what happened after that, because the next morning I wrote it up when filing an official complaint.

  In the aftermath of the African American Day parade on Sunday, September 16
th, I was ushered south via Lenox Avenue and then West via 125th street, along with a large crowd of African American youth. I am a freelance reporter, so I had my notepad out to record the incident. I stepped out of the way of the crowd, and was positioned next to a mailbox (i. e., not obstructing traffic or causing commotion) making notes when the community affairs officer came up to me and brusquely asked me what I was doing. He said that I had to leave and I said that I was a reporter doing my job. He became belligerent and said, “I’m very happy for you but you have to leave.” He said that the area was closed. The area was clearly not closed because there were people walking back and forth in both directions. He said, “Do it while you are walking. I’m giving you a lawful order to move down the block.” This “lawful order” was made in a snarling tone, with the officer imposing himself toward me in an intimidating manner. I was not disrupting police work or in any way involved with the crowd. Because of his belligerent, unprofessional, and discourteous attitude I asked him his name. He said: “I don’t have to tell you my name.” Because he was becoming increasingly hostile, I decided to move, but I told him I would find out who he was.

  The officer’s refusal to identify himself was a minor violation, but it is upon such a breach that greater abuses stand. Perhaps my indignation at the incident only reveals my relative innocence about such common, daily aggression. But I had previously noticed the police walking their beats in Harlem, standing four in a line on street corners. Their presence seems to increase in correlation to the number of new condominiums—raising questions about who is being protected and who is being patrolled. I had seen them stop a carload full of young black men on 132nd Street. I’d paused nearby to see what would happen next, only to watch as the men were released back to their car, having been stopped for no reason and having done nothing for which they could be detained. Witnessing that may have had no use; writing down my complaint may have had no use. Is it possible to confront a force that operates under the cloak of normality, a force that refuses to pronounce its own name?

  Once, I needed scrap paper to make notes while at the library. I pulled a few sheets from the container provided for that purpose. Later, one of those scraps fluttered out from among my papers. It was sheet I had not used, so seeing its blank front, I turned to the other side to check for any notes before throwing it away. On the other side was a picture of a parade. It was a picture I’d seen before, a parade of Garveyites from the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The caption reads A UNIA parade, Harlem, 1924… North-east corner of Lenox. In the picture, one convertible moves down Lenox Avenue in a blur, exiting the frame. The only passenger visible sits in the backseat wearing a straw boater hat that matches those worn by almost everyone else in the crowd of onlookers. Another car, also a convertible, is just making the turn from 135th Street onto Lenox. It is in the middle of the intersection, at the crossroads, and the sign held by its passengers reads THE NEW NEGRO HAS NO FEAR. The straw boater hat of every spectator is pointed toward that oncoming car, as if all are reading the sign, absorbing its message, before the car and the parade continues heading south, down the avenue, followed by the cloud of exhaust already visible at its rear.

  In 1917, two years before the 369th Regiment made its jubilant northward march returning to Harlem, a parade traced the same route on Fifth Avenue, only that time, it headed south. This display was not intended just for the pride of Harlem, it was also directed at the rest of New York, and the rest of the world. It was the “Silent March” organized to protest bloody race riots in East St. Louis and the lynch mob terror then rampant throughout the South. Its participants wore all white; they did not shout any slogans, they had no musical accompaniment except for a beating drum. They carried placards declaring their cause:

  Universal Negro Improvement Association Parade, corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, 1924. (Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)

  We march because the growing consciousness and solidarity of race, coupled with sorrow and discrimination, have made us one, a union that may never be dissolved…

  We march because we want our children to live in a better land and enjoy fairer conditions than have been our lot.

  Moving away from the hostile police officer, I headed west, rejoining the throng as it continued toward the river. I don’t know what ultimately happened, how far they were pushed, or whether any more shots rang out that night. What comes next is not a metaphor. I had not reached the end of the first block when I turned around, heading back toward Lenox. I went against the crowd, against the command of the officer, determined to make my way home.

  Acknowledgments

  “It is the grace of scholarship. I am indebted to everyone.”

  —SUSAN HOWE

  These pages owe so much to so many. My debts extend beyond scholarly matters, as these five years have found me sustained by a more generalized grace, while stumbling toward some notion of how to write and how to live.

  Michael Vazquez, the executive editor of Transition magazine from 1995 to 2006, was very much involved with the genesis of this project. In 2002, soon after arriving in Harlem, I constantly regaled him with stories of the people I met in the street. Mike asked me to write an essay from those stories; our conversations were such an important part of my process that I could only begin to work after writing the words “Dear Mike.” That essay, “Lenox Terminal” (2004), was the seed of this book. Writing for and thinking with Mike was a rigorous and singular apprenticeship, to say nothing of his place in my life as a treasured friend.

  A number of other editors, including Kate Tuttle and Zakia Spalter of Africana.com; Jon Garelick of the Boston Phoenix; Jennifer Schuessler, then of the Boston Globe; Amy Hoffman of The Women’s Review of Books; and Betsy Reed of The Nation, were also important teachers, pushing my limits while offering me a way to earn some fragment of a living as a writer. The editor Paul Elie encouraged this book before it was written. He understood what I was aiming at when I barely understood it myself.

  At age seventeen, having traveled to Cornell University for a summer seminar called “Geography and Literature,” without any idea what that meant, I met professors Barry Maxwell and Shelley Wong. They put Ann Petry’s Harlem novel, The Street, in my hands; they taught me Walter Benjamin and the word flâneur. They demanded I be more precise with language and disabused me of a vague teenaged disdain for things political. It is only a slight exaggeration to say this book began that summer, under their influence.

  I was fortunate to be mentored by several artists who were my teachers at Harvard: Adrienne Kennedy, Ross McElwee, and Isaac Julien each left a deep impression. Though I’ve ended up neither playwright nor filmmaker they remain guides for this work. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth advised me on an extracurricular research project with devotion and intensity. In a class on Haiti, Laurent Dubois gave us Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which changed everything. I am grateful to my professors in the Department of Afro-American Studies for providing such a fertile ground during those heady years; pursuing a life of the mind seemed like the only possible option.

  In more than seven years in New York, I refused to be called a New Yorker, partly to do with my allegiance to a great number of people in Texas—where I was born and raised and where I intend to return. Margaret Crawford and Nancy Eisenberg encouraged my writing at Episcopal High School and were great guides in the love of literature. The vibrant group of community-based and socially engaged artists who are my mother’s contemporaries—including Vivian Ayers-Allen, Kimberly Lakes, Bert Long, Rick Lowe, and Floyd Newsum—provided a model of creativity and commitment. Jesse Lott is chief among them and a giant among men; his influence on my life is without measure. Texas is the land of my maternal family, so I honor the Williamses and Robertses of Cedar Creek, the Rhodeses of Fort Worth, and the Bradshaws of Austin. Gratitude is due to my extended / adopted families
, the Zermeños, the Merciers, the Browns, the Newsums, the Allibones, and many more—all of you helped grow me up.

  During work and lamentations for lack of work I received the generosity of so many organizations that I doubted my worthiness. The Lannan Foundation gave me ten weeks in Marfa, Texas, setting my Harlem thoughts to roam under the high desert sky, unveiling a hidden corner of my native state, and allowing me to plant a garden in which to putter when my pen would bear no fruit. The Rona Jaffe Foundation saw ahead to my next project with the honor of its award specifically for emerging women writers. I interrupted the earliest phase of writing to take up a scholarship from the U.S. – U.K. Fulbright Commission, landing me at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland as the only student in a historiography course. This quixotic pursuit and many walks across woods and fields in Britain were an unlikely proving ground for my notions about the streets of Harlem, thus I attempted the first words of this book while living in a hilltop cottage in Fife. Much later in the writing process the New York Foundation for the Arts; the Common Fire Foundation in Tivoli, New York; the Centre International d’Accueil et d’Échanges des Récollets, Paris; and A Studio in the Woods, New Orleans, provided monetary support and safe harbor.