B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (12 page)

History must restore what slavery took away.
The imperative of these words has chased me since the first time I met them on the page. I was not the only person thus affected: in the copy of
The New Negro
at the library, some other reader, perhaps decades ago,
had underlined those very same words. Schomburg proposes a daunting task for the student of history, one that may be beyond satisfaction. Yet when I look up at the various students, scholars, hobbyists, and crusaders working at Mr. Schomburg’s library, I know he was accurate in describing the melancholy that compels us all: a yearning for the past from which our ancestors were irrevocably torn. Thus, Rufus Schatzberg, thus Khemet. We are all looking for the underground city. Sometimes it seems the library
is
that city, and we at the library wander its unnamed streets—alone yet in a crowd—walking with our heads down to solve mysteries written on the pavement.

The emblem on the
ex libris
of the older books in the library—the bookplate that labels them as property of the Schomburg Collection—is a new interpretation of the Egyptian winged orb, adapted for some personal myth.
The original symbol once guarded
the entrances to all the temples in Egypt, thresholds to the underground domain of pharaohs and gods. The symbol celebrates the victory of Horus over Set, the victory of light and goodness over darkness and evil. In the version depicted on the Schomburg bookplate, the traditional orb at the center of the symbol is replaced by a simple drawing of an opened book, with the typically Egyptian wings unfurling from its pages. The Egyptian symbol is also associated with Freemasonry; the bearer of this sign has attained the highest degree of knowledge.

When we consider the facts
, certain chapters of American history will have to be reopened.
Schomburg had an unyielding faith in the facts, a faith in some latent power to be unleashed once all the facts have finally recovered from oblivion. And now? The facts are there at the library, open for consideration. I have only scratched the surface, stumbling through Mr. Schomburg’s labyrinth. I have not even ventured to touch the audio recordings of oral histories and photo collections, the complete correspondences and the
boxes archiving the exhaustive research of various long-ago scholars for books that were never written. Schomburg was delighted by what he called
the
dust of digging
. But I confess to sometimes feeling buried by it.
So the Negro historian today
digs under the spot where his predecessor stood and argued.

But I remember what Julius Bobby Nelson told me:
Watch the walking, not the dead.
Langston Hughes’s ashes are interred under the lobby of the Schomburg Center. Often, the poet’s remains are mentioned along with other notable items in the library’s holdings, as if they are merely another item on the miles of bookshelves. I am not sure if it was the poet’s own desire for his earthly remains to spend eternity beneath the feet of library patrons. I walk gingerly across the expanse of tile beneath which his ashes are sealed, observing as much decorum as possible, when taking a break from various labors in the underground reading room. Fragments of Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” ring the cosmogram on the floor created in his honor. It is a map of the world, but not an easy one to read. Blue streaks flow from the center. In the poem, the rivers tell time: the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, the Mississippi.

The Langston Hughes Atrium is available as a rental facility, so that Hughes’s resting place is also the location for receptions, conferences, and cocktail parties. Once I came up from the reading room to find a reception and conference taking place there. It was attended exclusively by Senegalese and was being conducted in French and Wolof. It seemed to be a conference focusing on business and real estate development in Senegal. I would have ignored it, but one of the many displays crowded into the space caught my eye. It showed the map of a vast city. I recognized its name, Touba. Along the stretch of West 116th Street called Little Senegal there is a shop called Touba Wholesale, whose business involves shipping goods to Africa. It is adjacent to a restaurant that advertises
its dual specialties in “Jamaican and Southern Style Cuisine.” Several other African stores on 116th share the name Touba; it is also a brand of coffee sold in those same shops. The store windows are filled with shelves bearing cans of Touba coffee stacked in alluring displays, among other dry goods imported to supply homesick West Africans. The picture decorating the package shows a tall minaret rising from the mosque at the city’s center.

Touba is the holy city of the Mourides, a sect of Sufis in West Africa. There is a concentration of Mouride faithful in Harlem’s Little Senegal. Touba means “bliss,” referring to the eternal life afforded the pious. The city’s mosque holds the shrine and burial place of the Mouride saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba. It is now the destination of a pilgrimage so grand that detractors charge it as blasphemous for attempting to compete with Mecca.
During the life of the Cheikh
the same land was a vast wilderness; it was the place where he launched his teachings on how seekers could keep to the spiritual path by emphasizing work and generosity, along with other teachings that made him an enemy of French imperialism. According to the conference brochures, a massive suburb was being developed in the neighborhood of Touba—
un projet de réalisation de 12,000 logements à Touba
—presumably allowing those Mourides who are both faithful and well heeled to dwell as near as possible to the resting place of their ascended master.

On another occasion, I visited the library and found that a large gathering was taking place in the auditorium just beyond the Hughes memorial. It was a public hearing convened by the United Nations special rapporteur on racism, who was then traveling the country to take testimony that he would present in a report to the international body. The hearing went on for hours, with hundreds of people signing up to bear witness to historic and contemporary experiences of injustice, violence, and indignity.
These ranged from the treatment of Haitians seeking asylum to inequalities in education and housing, and from the plight of mothers whose children had been taken by a sometimes draconian child welfare system to the difficulties faced by ex-convicts who wished to find work. Some speakers presented their testimony with the cool detachment of academics. Others, relating the more immediate horrors of their daily lives, approached the rapporteur as if he were endowed with the power of direct intervention. The rapporteur listened to them all, and when the hearing was done, he thanked everyone profusely but took great care to mention that his only power was to listen and then to submit a written report to the larger body. He said he hoped the facts would be taken into consideration.

Around the same time, the library hosted an exhibition in its gallery on the art of that Senegalese mystic sect whose saint’s shrine is found at Touba.
Their holy men minister with words
. If you are in need of guidance or are in ill health, the priest will write out a prayer that is also a prescription. The ink is washed from the wooden board where he writes; you are cured by drinking the water that washed away the words. In other instances, he might write out the remedy on a cloth. You make a shirt from it and wear it till it falls apart, or wrap yourself in it and, while covered in this shroud, are healed as you sleep.

There are many things you will not find at the library. I am thinking of my friend Ms. Bessie. At some point early in our friendship, she told me that she used to write home every week in the days after her arrival in New York, at nineteen, from a town called Scotland Neck in North Carolina. I have often wondered what she said in her letters home. She did not elaborate; she probably mentioned those letters in a sharp-eyed aside between asking after
the health of my mother back in Texas and lamenting the unfortunate constellation of the number that had just hit.

Dear Family, all is well here,
I imagine they began.
Do not worry, the winter is not so tough. I am putting away money for a new coat and here is a bit for you.
She told me she lived on Lenox Avenue when she first came here, around 126th Street, and at some point I walked past that location and it looked as though a very long time had passed since anyone had called it home.
The apartment is nice, sister is here, on Thursday nights we go dancing, the lady at the job is not so mean.

The lady at the job would make her clean a spot and then clean it again and stand over her watching as she worked. This lady was a
Russian Jew,
Ms. Bessie told me without malice.
That lady is long gone,
she said.

The boss lady is long gone, and so is young Ms. Bessie, on her knees scrubbing a floor somewhere on the Upper East Side during the middle 1950s. Also gone are Ms. Bessie’s letters home not describing that scene as it was happening—this perhaps, was not the kind of news you sent home in the weekly letter.
Dear Family, New York City is full of charms and I miss you.

Ms. Bessie once said that there wasn’t anyone left, that she would like to go home but there wasn’t anyone at home. If there isn’t anyone there any longer, there is almost no question that her letters weren’t preserved. They are all scattered; they are all gone. If she hadn’t mentioned them to me, I would not have thought to ask. Ms. Bessie’s letters are not at all the kind of thing you can expect to find in Mr. Schomburg’s library, because they are not, in his sense, evidence of anything of much importance. They would give evidence of a girl going from a small place to a much larger place; evidence of the people she left behind and those she came to know; of the places that gave her shelter that are no longer there; of the cruelties she suffered at the hands of people who
are
long gone.
But not evidence that could be lodged in an argument about a people’s humanity or claim to civilization, or a refutation of the charge that black people have no history. The letters of Ms. Bessie and the other dutiful daughters writing home to North Carolina and South Carolina on a weekly basis would be summed up as a footnote in a story about migration and boll weevils and the war-driven manufacturing boom.

The letters are gone, and so is the building across the street where Ms. Bessie once lived. She points to the towers of Lenox Terrace. They were erected where tenements and brownstones once stood, razed during the hyperactive
slum-clearance programs of the 1950s
. Ms. Bessie remembers all of the addresses of all of the buildings where she’s ever lived in Harlem. She sometimes plays their digits in combination for the daily number, along with the addresses of the buildings where her sisters lived, and the birthdays of her sisters, and the birthdays of her dead husband and dead children.

My neighbor Bing always asks me how this book is going.
How was your day? How is the library? How is the writing?
Once, after many months of asking those questions, Bing greeted me as I came out of my building on the way to the library. He took my shoulders firmly in his hands, sent me off with a kiss on the cheek, and said he hoped I’d finish the book soon. On another occasion, when I arrived home in the evening, I found him at the stoop, and he asked me how the day had gone. A younger man, whom I did not know, was standing nearby. He was interested in the book, too, and upon hearing I was writing about Harlem, he began to be excited.
Everything you need to know you can just ask him,
said the younger man, indicating Bing, somehow acting as a broker for all that Bing knew. I agreed, saying there was a great deal I would like to learn. But Bing protested that everything I possibly needed to know was in the library. The younger man didn’t listen
to me or to Bing. He eagerly began to list what Bing could tell me about Harlem, about all the famous writers and artists and musicians and athletes that had lived here, about the riots and the hustlers and much more, but I had stopped listening to him and Bing was staring across the avenue into the dark.

Eventually the younger man left. Bing sat down next to the door in one of the discarded dinette chairs that serve as sidewalk furniture. There was a second empty chair, so I sat down, too. I told him I would like very much to hear about his youth. He told me he had grown up on 135th Street, where the hospital is now, where his tenement building stands no longer. He said I’d find in the library a picture of the building the way it used to look. (I did not realize it then, but I had already found such a picture; that apartment building looms in the background of the photo labeled
Within Thirty Seconds Walk of the 135th Street Branch
). I told Bing I’d look it up next time, and that he would have to tell me more about it. Though he nodded at the suggestion, Bing resumed staring. After a few moments during which neither of us said a word, he declared it was time for dinner and that he would be going in. I went inside, too. I did not return to the library the next day, or for many days thereafter.