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Page 29

by Rhodes-Pitts, Sharifa


  He made a memorable entrance: Ibid.

  immaculately attired: Mel Tapley, “Visit Raven Chanticleer’s Wax Museum,” New York Amsterdam News, December 4, 1993.

  I got into my wax thing: Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”

  wondrous vibrant art form: “Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,” New York Times, November 5, 1993.

  I was impressed: Adam Tanner, “Madame Tussaud Could Learn from Harlem Wax Artist,” Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 1995.

  The first figure immortalized: “Wax Museum on New Track,” New York Daily News.

  His effigy was soon joined: Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”

  Local herons and sherons: John O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud: Artiste Mixes Wax and Fiction at Black Museum,” New York Post, December 7, 1993.

  on loan to an exhibition in Europe: Anthony Ramirez, “At a Wax Museum, Black History Runs in Red,” New York Times, April 12, 1998.

  Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes: New New York Beacon, “Statues Symbolize the New Harlem Renaissance,” September 2, 1999.

  the singer Madonna, depicted with black skin: O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”

  Every black home should have: Nathan Jackson, “Paying Homage to Black History,” New York Newsday, February 21, 1993.

  a version of the Last Supper: Ibid.

  cotton-fields in the South: Ibid.

  shanty-life in Haiti: Tim Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic,” New York Spirit, June 3, 1993.

  some skeletal bones: Jackson, “Paying Homage.”

  the Port Royal experiment: Willie Lee Nichols Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

  And now, kind friends: Unattributed.

  The Harlem rituals of death: Camille Billops, James Van Der Zee, and Owen Dodson, Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978), 1.

  To make this dead gentleman: Ibid., 82.

  I’ll tell you tomorrow: Ibid., 4.

  the point of departure for Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz: Gloria Naylor, “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,” Southern Review 21 (1985): 567 – 93.

  I didn’t know they had stopped: Billops et al., Harlem Book of the Dead, 82.

  the epic lamentation of Isis: James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillian & Co., 1919), 12.

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead: See Karma-Glin-Pa and Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Dead (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  I had to come back: Jackson, “Paying Homage.”

  I imagined myself as some kind of pioneer: “Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,” New York Times, November 5, 1993.

  crossing West 110th Street: Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”

  His father was born in Haiti: “Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,” New York Times.

  It felt like Harlem was the center of the world: Ibid.

  Harlem is coming back: Dennis Wepman, “Harlem Waxes Proud,” New York Daily News, February 7, 1991.

  His work is cataloged: Gloria Smith, “A Profile of Raven Chanticleer,” The New Voice of New York (Jamaica, NY), September 30, 1999.

  The reason for the helicopter’s flight: Eric Konigsberg and Christine Hauser, “Eight Wounded in Harlem Shootings,” New York Times, May 27, 2008, sec. The City/NY Region. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html?ref=nyregion (accessed May 11, 2010).

  born and raised in Harlem: Smith, “A Profile of Raven Chanticleer.”

  actually born James Watson: Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”

  old mentors from the University of Timbuktu: Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic.”

  A niece is quoted in the obituary: Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”

  I could read and write: O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”

  He appears in 1930: Year: 1930; Census Place: Woodruff, Spartanburg, SC; Roll 2213: Page 5B; Enumeration District 70; Image 263.0. Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database online]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2002.

  considered the name: for chanticleer, see Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, edited by Alfred W. Pollard (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1907), 402 – 26. For raven mythology in Native American cultures, see Eleazar Meletinsky, The Poetics of Myth (New York: Routledge, 2000), 170 – 72.

  I’m an artiste: O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”

  I love beautiful things: Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic.”

  In the midst of ugliness: Ibid.

  I started the museum: Wepman, “Harlem Waxes Proud.”

  I created these wax figures: “Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,” New York Times.

  The wax museum has been my dream: Melinda Clare, “Raven Chanticleer’s African American Wax Museum,” The Shield (New York), April 19, 1994.

  just in case something should happen to me: Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”

  Matter of fact: Angela Briggins, “Raven Chanticleer Takes Wax to the Max,” The City Sun (New York), May 17, 1993.

  Chapter 8: We March Because…

  “One of the songs played”: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Random House, 1981), 15.

  “W. E. B. DuBois summarized”: W. E. B. DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, Vol. 18 (May 1919): 13.

  “We march because”: Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History (New York: New York Public Library, 1967), 200.

  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. A Colony of Their Own

  2. Into the City of Refuge

  3. Searching for the Underground City

  4. Harlem Dream Books

  5. Messages

  6. Land Is the Basis of All Independence

  7. Back to Carolina

  8. We March Because…

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A conversation with the author of Harlem Is Nowhere

  Questions and topics for discussion

  About the Author

  Extraordinary acclaim for Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s HARLEM IS NOWHERE

  Credits

  Newsletters

  Notes

  Copyright

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

  Reading group guide copyright © 2013 by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Little, Brown and Company

  Cover design by Nneka Bennett

  Cover photograph by Geraint Lewis / Alamy

  Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First e-book edition: January 2011

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  ISBN 978-0-316-04033-4

 

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