B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (17 page)

Likening Podhoretz and other would-be white interpreters of black life to
absentee owners of tenement buildings [who] exploit the abstract sociological “Negro” as a facile means of getting ahead in the world,
Ellison issues a decree banishing trespassers and pretenders from the realm of his culture and his thought, demanding that members of other cultural groups

Ellison directly addresses some of the dilemmas of interpretation and orientation found in Hurston and Baldwin. In claiming the
sacredness and inwardness
of his position as a black writer concerned with black lives, Ellison rejects the position of tour guide or interpreter. His activity—defining, glorifying, affirming, criticizing—takes place behind a curtain of mystery. Crucially, in this 1967 essay Ellison raises, once again, the question of reality, that conundrum that he tracks through the Harlem streets in 1948 and runs from in the pages of his 1952 novel. For Ellison in 1967, reality is still
in question
. Perhaps even more so because this is the moment when Ellison was at his height as author of
the most distinguished American novel
written since World War II,
and also was being denounced by young writers who, like Amiri Baraka, were getting up to some
nowhere shit
in the name of a programmatic, didactic notion of the role of the black artist. Additionally, as far as his sense of reality was concerned, this was also the period when Ellison was stumbling into the deferrals, excuses, and diversions that prevented his ever completing another novel.

Which brings us back to “Harlem Is Nowhere.” Among his dizzying haunted-house descriptions of life in the neighborhood, one of the most intriguing pronouncements is that
this is a world in which
the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination.
This causes the crises leading to that free psychiatric clinic. But, Ellison also acknowledges, that energy also led to various other forms of creative response, including the slang of his title. In the 1967 polemic where Ellison so defiantly stakes out the claim of his intellectual territory, his insistence on
sacredness and
inwardness
reads like his own attempt to overcome such frustrations, groping toward that inward and sacred space where literature is possible.

“Harlem Is Nowhere” was not published by the magazine that commissioned it in 1948. It did not appear in print until 1964, when it was published in
Harper’s.
As the editorial note preceding the piece observes,
how little has changed in the everyday life of the ghetto in the past sixteen years. Ellison’s essay helps explain, and in hindsight justifies, the impatience of the American Negro in 1964.
The essay was published in August. Perhaps by coincidence, that issue must have hit the newsstands around the time the third major riot in Harlem occurred. It is unclear if
the impatience of the American Negro in 1964
is an oblique reference to this event or an uncanny presentiment. The explanation and justification mentioned in the editorial note are worth a mention. Interestingly, the version of the essay that appeared in
Harper’s
omits the section about the Lafargue Clinic, which had been the very impetus for the piece in 1948. Possibly it was no longer in operation and the editors didn’t want to include anything that wasn’t, according to that maddening adjective of the magazine trade, timely.

But in the original essay (published in full in
Shadow and Act
), the clinic is the scene where the madness of white supremacy could be overcome. The clinic was a place where its clients could
explain
and
justify
to themselves the conditions inside their minds and in the world. Unmoored from the setting of the psychiatric clinic, Ellison’s essay becomes another occasion to
explain
and
justify
the
whole unsuspecting Negro people
to the same readers of
Harper’s
who were already used to being—variously—horrified, soothed, chastised, and exhorted by James Baldwin.

We find Ellison carefully watching the perimeter, defending his right to live and create from beyond a veil, but also oriented outward, toward maintaining his position upon the elevated dais
of various panel discussions, a dignitary in the republic of letters, a spokesman even—the most exceptional Negro novelist of his generation. To the degree his call for inwardness coincided with his talent turning in on itself, Ellison occupied a negated position, a nowhere.
One “is” literally
, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a “displaced person” of American democracy.

In the best of circumstances, that dazed wanderer is also the dreamer, creating a world that hasn’t yet come to be. Utopia, after all, means nowhere. Ellison’s biographical note in
Harper’s
stated,
He is best known for “Invisible Man,” a novel about “one Negro’s effort to find his place in the world.”

In 1948, Ralph Ellison heard the street slang
Oh, man, I’m nowhere
and heard the identity crises, negation, and psychic despair provoked by daily life under white supremacy.

In 1961, James Baldwin, writing “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” perhaps writing from Paris, remembered a different greeting:

Baldwin’s greeting also referred to a state of negation, but now it was expressed in reference to the lives of certain young men in Harlem, who, unemployed and without prospects, were spending their lives at their mother’s house, watching daytime TV.

In 1981, when Aaron Siskind’s photos were published as
Harlem Document,
the writer, photographer, and director Gordon
Parks contributed a brief introduction to the volume. His piece fulfils the typical obligation of writing about Harlem—offering pronouncements that Harlem is this or Harlem is that. His reminiscence of Harlem also includes something he heard on the street.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence that these three writers emerge from their descent into Harlem with the trophy of a greeting from which to derive a metaphor about all of black existence. I think it has more to do with the instrument of the writer’s art, a blade that is sometimes destructive and reductive, though it also flashes light. Perhaps those greetings and their interpretations say more about the interpreters than about those who are purported to use them.

Don’t get corrupted.

The town house at 2144 Fifth Avenue is located within the boundaries of James Baldwin’s turf—near the corner of 131st Street, where Baldwin grew up. The house has a varicolored brick facade on its two lowest levels, with typical brownstone above. Someone has carefully painted the bricks in alternating shades of pastel blue, green, and pink. For years I passed that building, noting its strange decoration, noting the plate-glass window that looked out onto Fifth Avenue from the second floor, noting how
the windows above never gave any indication of lives lived within. A minimum of business was transacted in the appliance, furniture, and lamp repair shop operating at street level.

Later, I found out this had once been the location of L. S. Alexander Gumby’s Book Studio. Then I passed the building with more curiosity, wondering how to gain entry and what would be the proper way to approach, thinking that I should take a companion because I might disappear into one of those dark upper stories. My relationship with the building went on like this for a long while: it was the setting of my worst single-girl-doing-research fantasies. In the meantime, I collected information about the life of the man whose ambitions had reached their height inside the confines of that room with the plate-glass window looking out over upper Fifth.

Alexander Gumby came to New York from Baltimore around 1906. According to an unpublished autobiographical essay, immediately he
became a New Yorker in spirit
and principle,
having discovered
more freedom of action than [he] had ever known before.
A passionate theatergoer, he collected Broadway playbills, pictures, and newspaper clippings as souvenirs. He made scrapbooks of the material, a carryover from a childhood hobby, and when he worked at Columbia waiting tables, he made scrapbooks about Columbia, too. He worked as a butler and caretaker for a banker in Riverdale. The banker was also a collector, so Gumby’s responsibilities included the stewardship of
pottery, bronzes, ivories, etc.
Upon leaving that situation, he was armed with a letter of introduction recommending him highly on account of services rendered:
I have been going to Europe
for a number of years,
wrote his employer,
and have left him in full charge of my house and all its contents and I have never had occasion to regret it.

Gumby’s impulse to compile, collect, and curate the detritus of his reality matured when he found himself overwhelmed by what
he called his
overflowing collection of clippings.
He attacked the problem with intense seriousness, describing it in a detailed statement of purpose:

The birth of Gumby’s Negro Scrapbook, or “Negroana” as it was later called, came just before two other significant developments in his life. First, he became
acquainted with a young man
who was a few years my junior.
A bawdy song by Gumby, written in 1907, using the voice of his alter ego Count DeGumphry, perhaps tells us something about their meeting:

In his typewritten memoirs, Gumby describes this relationship as a
staunch friendship
that lasted nearly three decades. The man, a scion of a New York business family, was Gumby’s lover and patron. It was with the help of this friend, Charles W. Newman, that Gumby began to amass a collection of rare editions, manuscripts, and ephemera to complement his scrapbook productions. Hardly anything is known about their relationship—whether it was a true love that had to be suppressed because of its challenge to the racial and sexual order, or whether it was a less tender transaction. Alexander Gumby’s story, when it is told at all, is usually mentioned as a minor footnote to other more celebrated queer lives of the Harlem Renaissance era. There is Richard Bruce Nugent, with his bohemian disregard for neckties and socks, throwing off his bourgeois pedigree with defiant dishevelment. There is Countee Cullen, marrying the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois in a lavish ceremony and then leaving her behind to embark on their European honeymoon in the company of his alleged lover, the Harlem man-about-town Harold Jackman. There are the rumors about A’Lelia Walker and Langston Hughes, and rumors about many others. Those rumors serve a purpose for the history of love that mirrors a similar tendency in black history to insist upon its “firsts,” and to speculate about the African blood coursing through the veins of historical figures like Beethoven. But while the life of Gumby is known—and, thanks to Gumby himself, ferociously documented—it is not much celebrated. It is
not necessary for rumors to swirl about Gumby’s sexuality.
In a letter to his friend Bruce Nugent
, Gumby was frank about the many charms of Columbia University to be found outside the library. Perhaps part of the silence around Gumby is that the terms of his relationship with a white man mirrored the patronage relationship going on throughout Harlem, where art was paid for by white enthusiasts and fetish-collectors, and where black gangsters paid tribute to the white mob. Perhaps the open combination of white patronage and sex in Gumby’s life accounts for the way his story has disappeared. Or maybe the silence also has to do with the fact that Gumby’s story is, in part, a narrative of failure.