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  Michael Henry Adams, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Thomas Wirth are scholars whose contributions to the study of Harlem are widely and deservedly celebrated; I am grateful to all three for conferring small nuggets from their vast treasuries of knowledge and resources. Michael and Brent also contributed gifts for the soul: Michael often demanded I abandon my desk to join him for dinners and parties, while Brent filled gaps in my musical library with generous donations from his own. CUNY Graduate Center PhD candidate in English Lavelle Porter did some stealth undercover work to put me on the trail of a hard-to-locate photograph. Less concretely, this book is buoyed by near-invisible strands of lively conversations conducted over coffee, tea, lunch, dinner, loud music, long walks (and the very rare alcoholic beverage) with some formidable artists and thinkers who are also cherished friends: Naomi Beckwith, LeRonn Brooks, Sarah M. Broom, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Ntone Edjabe, Leslie Hewitt, Arthur Jafa, Darryl Pinckney, Emily Raboteau, Greg Tate, and Shatema Threadcraft, among many others. Their wisdom and warmth have nourished me. On the very day I missed my first deadline and was deep in a pit of self-loathing, Emily arrived for tea bearing pastries and perspective, observing that I was not the first writer ever to do so.

  My everyday life in Harlem was quite mixed up with writing about it, but plenty of times, when the writing offered no comfort at all, I was enveloped and protected by the friendship, care, and welcome of Barbara James, Bessie Smallwood, Julius Nelson, Ms. Shirley, Mr. Monroe, Willie, Rob, Sonny, Bing, Bobby, Ramadan, Marvin Lofton, Valerie Price, and many others, including those with whom, in the intimate informality of Lenox Avenue, I exchanged greetings on a daily basis but never exchanged names. Neighbors in my building, especially Donna Kiel and Ahmed Kiel-Kamil, Laaraji Nadananda, Nadi Burton, and Ernest Davis (son of Minnie Davis), at times made our five-floor tenement feel like a family house.

  My landlord, Henry M. Greenup, rented me the last decently priced two-bedroom apartment in Harlem, in which an underemployed freelancer could afford to have a home office. For this I am eternally grateful. Mr. Greenup must also be publicly thanked for waiting patiently during the times when the underemployed freelancer couldn’t afford the affordable apartment; under such circumstances he acted as an unofficial patron of the arts! A native New Orleanian, World War II veteran, and longtime Harlem businessman, Henry Greenup has been an education and a blessing to know.

  When I returned to Harlem from Scotland, I found the neighborhood under siege by the onslaught of Columbia, the 125th Street Rezoning, and luxury condominiums. I attended meetings first to take notes and ended up taking minutes, becoming part of the organized resistance to a wrongheaded policy. By joining this struggle I benefited from the wisdom of many I am proud to call comrades and friends. Abdul-Kareem Muhammad; Katherine Adora Samuels, MD; Brenda Stokely; and M. Ndigo Washington must be singled out as particular inspirations during the months of the rezoning campaign. I am glad an early chapter of the effort brought me the friendship of Alana Atterbury and Barbara Smith Graves. I honor the steadfast commitment of Bertha Aiken, Peter Anderson, Nellie Hester Bailey, Carlton “Chuck” Berkely, Sharon Bowie, Francine Brown, Fatima Faloye, Imee Jackson, Patti Jacobs, Agnes Johnson, Akinlabi Mackall, Carole Nelson, Sandra Rivers, Shaka Shakur, Shikulu Shange, Ameena Shareef, the late Gloria Swanson, Julius Tajiddin, and Alex Williams, among many others. All of these people were working for Harlem long before I arrived and continue to pursue a vision of beloved community where those who made the neighborhood famous, sustained it during difficult years, and have raised generations of families are not displaced, disinherited, and disenfranchised by supposedly benign market forces.

  Rosten Woo, co-founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and Mitch McEwen, founder of architecture and art enterprise SUPERFRONT, are both old friends. In the midst of the rezoning fiasco, their professional expertise gave me much-needed insight about the city’s urban planning apparatus.

  In the course of researching and writing this book, I spent countless days at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; it is as much a community center as a library, and a little bit of home. I wish to thank the librarians and staff of the Schomburg, including Sharon Howard, Sharon Jarvis, Betty Obadashian, Genette McLaurin, Michael Perry, Troy Belle, and Steven Fullwood. Many library assistants performed their repetitive tasks with smiles and diligence, and the security staff always ushered me in and out with kindness.

  Other libraries and archives also aided my work. I wish to thank the following individuals and institutions: Louise Bernard, Moira Fitzgerald, and Nancy Kuhl at Yale’s Beinecke Library; Anne Coleman Torrey of the Aaron Siskind Foundation and Barbara Puorro Galasso of George Eastman House; Eleanor Gillers and Jill Slaight of the New-York Historical Society; Tom Lisanti at the New York Public Library; Susan Hamson at the Rare Books and Manuscripts department of Columbia’s Butler Library; Bruce Kellner of the Carl Van Vechten Trust; and anonymous workers of the Library of Congress and Bettmann / Corbis.

  I thank the estate of Langston Hughes for permission to reprint his poetry; Craig Tenney of Harold Ober Associates and Jennifer Rowley of Random House helped facilitate this process.

  I want to thank certain other friends for the love that has sheltered me over many years: Alice Albinia, Gini Alhadeff, Amiri Barksdale, Leslie Bennett, Jon Caramanica, Nucomme Davis-Walker, Cheryl Follon, Aaron Goldberg, Jamil Higley, Carmelo Larose, Jesse Lichtenstein, Rebecca Lubens, Brina Milikowsky, Beatrice Monti della Corte, Laura Moser, Miranda Pyne, Shirley Rumierk, Angela Shaiman, Claire Tancons, and Caecilia Tripp. Jomo K. Alakoye-Simmons has his own Harlem book to write. The instruction and guidance of Jill Satterfield, Ethan Nichtern, Sherene Schostak, and Margot Borden helped keep body, soul, and mind in one piece.

  Although I have been among them for a very short time, I give thanks for several people in New Orleans, where I lived for a brief period while refining the proposal for this book in spring of 2005, and where I’ve returned as this work reaches its conclusion. Gia Hamilton of Gris Gris Lab, Melanie Lawrence, Pamela Broom of the Wanda (Women and Agriculture) Group, Greer Mendy of Tekrema Center for Art and Culture, the founders and staff of A Studio in the Woods, the New Orleans African-American Museum, and the New Orléans Afrikan Film & Arts Festival have all welcomed me into a community where creative work, social justice work, and regenerative and necessary soul work exist on a powerful continuum. Living here has been restorative and instructive, and I am glad to call you all friends.

  Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency has been a teacher, advocate, counselor, and friend; I marvel continually at her talent. I am grateful to her colleagues Katherine Lewis, Jacqueline Ko, Katherine Marino, Charles Buchan, and to everyone else at the agency who has worked on my behalf.

  Little, Brown and Company took a chance on this book; for a good while after committing to write it, I was frightened into silence upon realizing how great a chance it was. A vast army of people make things happen there, many whose names I don’t know. My friend Nneka Bennett was hired as a designer around the same time I began the book; the talent displayed in her cover design is only a sample of her multidisciplinary gifts. Helen Atsma and Vanessa Hartmann did important thankless tasks at the beginning of this process as has Vanessa Kehren at the crucial middle and end. Peggy Freudenthal and Peg Anderson heroically smoothed out my many wrinkled bits. As I write this, Elizabeth Garriga, Valerie Russo, Heather Fain, Amanda Tobier, Laura Keefe, and Brittany Boughter are helping this work make its way in the world. Above all, my editor Pat Strachan presided over the chaos of this book’s creation with patient forbearance, waiting for me to get out of my own way. When there were finally pages to edit, her gentle interventions were revelatory. She offered precise and thoughtful guidance, cutting a path through the overgrown fields of my rough drafts toward a clearing at the end.

  Finally, I bow in deep gratitude to my mother, Rhonda Rhodes, my father, Steven Pitts, and my sister, Syandene Rhodes-Pitts. My parents’ journeys in art and social justice make my own explora
tions possible. Specific to the writing of this book you have each supported me materially, morally, and spiritually at crucial moments. Beyond the book and into life, your love fills a territory my words cannot describe.

  For any whose names I have forgotten, your thanks are written in my heart. It has been a humbling passage to pursue this work. To quote a most eloquent Harlemite, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, “Only the mistakes have been mine.”

  Reading Group Guide

  HARLEM IS

  NOWHERE

  A JOURNEY TO THE MECCA

  OF BLACK AMERICA

  by

  SHARIFA RHODES-PITTS

  A conversation with the author of

  Harlem Is Nowhere

  Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts talks with dream hampton of

  Life and Times

  I believe I’ve read you talking about your mother’s book collection, and in particular her black women’s fiction from the early ’70s through the early ’90s. Do you remember spending more time with any particular author or piece of work than others?

  My mom is a visual artist and an avid reader. She came of age during that moment when black women were really claiming the artistic stage in America. So her shelves were full of those books; I took them for granted. The summer I was eighteen, I had a job so I could save for college, and during my lunch hours I disappeared with three books taken from my mother’s collection: Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, June Jordan’s Civil Wars, and Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. They fortified and grounded me as I was about to leave home to attend college in New England. Creatively, the mix of history, personal experience, and politics in those books inspired me and solidified my interest in essays as a form. Later, I abandoned those beginnings—I read widely, across gender, race, nationality, and genre. The writers I found on my mother’s shelves were a foundation, and then I had to broaden my tribe. In that camp, some crucial writers are: W. G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Hardwick. But lately I’ve had a desire to go back to some of the black women’s literature I began with…. I have a lot of reading and rereading to do.

  New York is a walking city, and some of your book is about being in the streets on foot and overhearing conversations. In a city as noisy as New York, what about a conversation makes you tune in—to listen? Do you have a favorite pair of listening shoes?

  Hmm. So much of that is about kismet, you know? Being on a certain corner at a certain moment when some improbable tale flies out of someone’s mouth. Or stopping to talk to someone when I could have kept walking. I had a meditation teacher talk once about every human encounter having the potential for resonance. When I first arrived in Harlem, I walked really slowly and made eye contact with everyone and was so obviously not a New Yorker, and this provoked all kinds of experiences. I would usually follow those moments where they led, so there’s some kind of faith in that. No favorite listening shoes, but I spend summers in Dr. Scholl’s; in other seasons I do a lot of time in clogs. I’m happiest of all in the countryside, feeling invincible in sturdy boots.

  It appears you spent time studying maps while researching this book. Part of what you discover and argue is that Harlem is constantly shifting, both in the imagination and then again in reality, with certain physical and/or corporate encroachments, as with, say, Columbia University. Harlem is of course named for Holland’s Haarlem, and even though it was once Dutch farmland, do you think that efforts to protect it as a literal black space are important?

  Yeah, the question of whether the physical space is worth protecting is really crucial. Once, I was visiting the studio of my friend, the visual artist Leslie Hewitt. It’s near the old Renaissance Ballroom on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The Renaissance was built by Garveyites who put their money together to start an establishment where blacks could be entertained, since the most famous nightclubs, like the Cotton Club, were segregated. We provided the entertainment and labor but couldn’t go there. So the Renaissance is this incredibly symbolic space, where self-determination in Harlem was expressed physically, through this enterprise. But in the early 1980s, it closed and fell into ruin and was neglected for decades by its subsequent owner, the Abyssinian Development Corporation. A few years ago, they argued against having this historic building named a city landmark because they wanted to build a high-rise condo there. And they won that battle. Sitting with Leslie just a few steps away from this half-demolished building, I started ranting about how it was a perfect example of the need to preserve the physical traces of our history. But she had a whole different take on it, challenging me to consider how, as a people, our relationship to space has always been fugitive, always threatened. And how we’ve always had to claim space in other creative ways. But I still have an attachment to land. When I moved to NYC, I actually could not comprehend that someone would buy a piece of real estate, an apartment, that was nothing but a floating piece of sky without land attached to it. That’s a Texas perspective. I’m obsessed with that Malcolm X quote: “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”

  As a woman raised in the South, are boundaries important to you? Do they affect your interviewing style? Are you careful not to pry? Or do you ask difficult questions straight-out?

  In certain ways, I have no boundaries. I’m constantly talking to strangers. But I’m fairly passive about it. I didn’t do interviews for the book. Any conversation that is mentioned happened in the course of my life. It was my life. It wasn’t research. I’ll have to approach that differently for other books, perhaps. I think I’m actually bad at interviews, but I’m told I’m good at listening. I listen a lot more than I ask questions. I observe and stare a lot, too. Whether or not it comes from being Southern, I do have a sense of propriety and privacy that means I don’t push or pry in the way a journalist would. I’m more interested in the person than in “getting the story.” So things unfold. Or they don’t. Maybe that’s a limitation. But it seems to me people reveal what they want to and need to in their own time. And what people don’t say, their silence, often interests me, too….

  Did you go to Harlem with the intention of writing Harlem Is Nowhere? If so, were you surprised at yourself when you ended up in advocacy meetings about fair housing with your neighbors?

  My move to Harlem in 2002 was improvised. I’d graduated from college two years before and saved money to travel (in India and Europe), then went home broke to my mother in Texas. I started working an office job while I figured out how to become a writer. When I didn’t want to live at home anymore, I went back to the East Coast. I arrived in Harlem with ideas and notes for a historical novel set in Texas; writing about the neighborhood was not on my agenda. The writing came about because of my experiences: I was always meeting Harlemites who seemed as obsessed with history as I was. Based on those early encounters, I wrote a long essay. When it was published, it got a strong response and I started thinking about a book. I was absolutely surprised when I joined the organized resistance against gentrification in Harlem. My parents were both activists in the ’70s—that’s how they met—so I grew up around a lot of politics and was prematurely jaded. I never had a romanticized idea about the Revolution; I wasn’t throwing fists up in the air. Though I saw myself as politically committed and informed, I had never joined a movement. In 2007, I began attending community meetings, expecting to do my regular thing: listening, observing, taking notes. Then I was asked to stand up and give testimony at hearings about development in Harlem. And then I was asked to lend a hand—I threw myself into it. I stopped writing the book because I was organizing and going to meetings. I didn’t plan to write about those experiences at all. Later, when the campaign was over and I was burnt-out and trying to get back to work, I realized I had just lived through something that was part of an ongoing story about land, power, and politics in Harlem.

  Can you please explain to me your vision for these three books? As I understand it, thi
s is a trilogy of black utopia where you write about three places. Was there any other collection or even single work that inspired you or that you referenced when conceiving yours?

  The trilogy project is about three places: Harlem, Haiti, and the Black Belt of the South (in that order). Once I wrote that long essay on Harlem, the path for the book was pretty much set. My interest in Haiti is long-standing, way before the earthquake—I’ve been researching its history for years. So I had the notion for the Harlem book and the glimmer of an idea for a Haiti book that would meld history and travel. I was talking to a mentor, who said, “It’s three books—what’s the third place?” At some point I realized, Duh… after going away to other places, I’ d eventually need to reckon with home. All three places hold power in the hearts and minds and souls of black folk, our political, creative, spiritual, aspirations. There’s Harlem: the black Mecca. And Haiti: the first black republic. I want to trace the relationship between black Americans and Haiti and the ongoing American interventions in the country. In the South, I’m concerned with the idea of the Black Belt as a separate nation within America. This idea has a long history. I’m also interested in the all-black towns that cropped up before and after the Civil War. I imagine it as more of a roadtrip book, traveling from place to place but also traveling in time. At the end of the road I’ll be in Texas. I don’t know if this project was influenced by any writer or work in particular. I just want to follow a set of ideas across space and history, and use my own experience as the frame through which those stories are told.