B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (6 page)

This was not a city of realities but of dreams.
This is a curious and perhaps dangerous proposition, one we might fly over if riding Locke’s enchanted carpet. What does a preference for dreams over realities portend for life in this
new world of possibility
?

One of those Negro poets, students, artists, and thinkers streaming into Harlem was Langston Hughes, in the thrall of dreams that preexisted his arrival:

Despite his enduring love for the place, Hughes admitted that this
youthful illusion that Harlem was a world unto itself
did not last very long
. There was the city of dreams and the city of realities.
White downtown pull[ed] all the strings in Harlem
.

Many years later, in 1965, another poet arrived uptown; this was Amiri Baraka. He was then still known as LeRoi Jones, but he was already storming the gates of Harlem in order to found the Black Arts movement, having abandoned his interracial life downtown after the assassination of Malcolm X. Baraka seems to have paid close attention to Locke. His memory of that entry to Harlem preserves the fevered expectation of the New Negro movement, tempered by equal parts jive and hindsight:

From Locke to Baraka and beyond, a single dream persisted, even in the face of reality. But the persistence of such a dream is not only a testament of endurance. It is also a testament of unfulfilled dreams. The wished-for thing had not been attained. Harlem was in the eternal process of becoming—in 1925 and 1965 and now—that place which, according to Locke, represented
the Negro’s latest thrust towards Democracy.
The original reasons why the place existed (white supremacy, segregation) endured. The place endured. The fact that, like many of the by-products of American oppression, from chitlins to Christianity, black folk recuperated a dire situation, causing Harlem to be extolled, celebrated, and converted into a proud symbol, does not undo the original circumstance. It does help explain the persistence of this city of dreams: a kind of utopia to which dreamers continue to flock, bringing that quality of aspiration that Baraka characterized as
nowhere shit
. It is also, often, known as hope.

Upon arriving in Harlem, the narrator of Ellison’s
Invisible Man
is initiated into that lineage of hope, and admonished about how easily it could slip away:

I had only been in Harlem for about six months when my landlady announced I had to leave the apartment; she wanted the top floor of the brownstone for her own family’s use. I later heard a rumor that she’d rented it to a number of undocumented workers. If this is true, they probably ended up paying more money than I did, while living in far greater density.

That winter I looked for a new place, sometimes taking to the street with no guiding principle except the fever brought on by every
FOR RENT
sign in sight. I called the numbers from apartment listings in the
Amsterdam News
. When I didn’t receive an answer, I would go directly to the addresses in the paper, hoping for some improbable sidewalk meeting with a landlord. If I liked a house because of its stained-glass fanlight transom or because of the tower window of its top floor, I’d send a letter to that address, telling the owner how I hoped there might be a vacancy because I had always wanted to live in a house with a window like that.

These methods did not yield any results. By then, in desperation, I began to consider the brokers who showed me tiny, overpriced studio apartments and also the listings in the
Amsterdam News
for rooms rented by the week. I knew these were single-room–occupancy (SRO) brownstones, mansions whose grand quarters had been carved into rooming houses. They are identifiable by a board, usually nailed to the side of the doorjamb, bearing an incredible number of jerry-rigged doorbells, one for each resident of the house. On the brink of their apotheosis/restoration
from being SROs to their original bourgeois destiny as single-family homes, these brownstones eventually feature in a different class of real estate listing, where they are presented with an ominous sales pitch:
Can be delivered vacant
.

I answered an ad for one of the weekly rentals. That particular SRO building had no doorbells at all—and no doorknob. There was a hole in the door where the knob should have been. The entry was unsecured, which should have sent me away immediately. Instead I went inside and called up the stairs to see if anyone was home. When no one answered, I waited in the vestibule for the owner to appear for our appointment—prepared to explain my presence if someone emerged from within. Eventually the owner did come—she was a Caribbean woman and she had a sweet-faced daughter with her. Both of them were wearing knitted skullcaps drawn tight around the head without an inch of hairline showing. In my short time in New York I had already identified this as a style particular to immigrants from the islands, abandoning all vanity in desperate protection against unfathomable cold.

I remember very little about the house. I remember going up the stairs and seeing the many doors that led to the various lodgers’ rooms. I don’t remember the bathroom, or whether the bathroom was within the quarters or down the hall. I don’t remember the kitchen, or whether there was a kitchen. I do remember that once we were inside the available room, I could scarcely stretch out my arms. On its shortest side it was as wide as I was tall.

I remember the ornate mantel of an inoperative fireplace. It had details of turned wood spiraling toward the ceiling; white paint obscured what was probably the rich natural tone of a fine wood. The mantelpiece was a thing to be appreciated from a distance, from the comfort of a grand armchair placed across the room where one could catch a view of the fire and the woodwork. There could be no fire in this small space; to light a fire in such a
space would produce an infernal heat, and you would be sitting so close you could scarcely focus on the woodwork.

Though the asking price for that tiny hovel was more than I was willing to pay per week, for one moment I was foolish enough to think that my search had come to an end, that my days would be improved by glancing at that mantel upon waking, that to be in the presence of this fireplace would effect a change in me, even if I could not light a fire to be appreciated from a safe distance.

I have caught myself indulging this same tendency when marveling at old architecture in cities like Havana or Cochin—places described in guidebooks as possessing “faded grandeur,” which means the buildings left behind by colonizers are now blistered by saltwater and underdevelopment. In that SRO apartment, I chastised myself for swooning with architectural necrophilia in a place where aesthetics were probably of little concern. But my inclinations were not so far off. Many have noted that in the age of the New Negro the quality of the housing stock had been one of the delights of Harlem, where former sharecroppers sometimes found themselves in distinguished houses originally intended for various levels of suburban bourgeoisie. Later, speaking to a man outside my doorstep after I’d moved to Lenox Avenue, I asked how he’d felt upon arriving in Harlem from down south. With the astonishment of his initial impression still intact, he said that he
could not believe people lived like that
.

Nella Larsen, in
Quicksand
, foreshadows the eventual tragedy of her heroine’s inflated outlook when Helga Crane searches for her first domicile in Harlem:
She eschewed the “Y” as too bare
, impersonal and restrictive. Nor did furnished rooms or the idea of a solitary or a shared apartment appeal to her
. When Helga has the good fortune to be taken in as the houseguest of a Harlem society maven, Larsen devotes lavish detail on
the furnishings which so admirably graced the big cream-colored rooms
.

Despite such refined surroundings, Helga slips into a malaise that erodes her belief that she had found, in Harlem, a haven of peace and contentment.

Helga Crane, and Lutie Johnson, of Ann Petry’s
The Street,
are separated by nearly two decades, about twenty blocks, the strictures of intraracial social caste, several shades of skin color, and perhaps as many degrees in expectations. When Lutie searches for
a place to live and raise her son, she does not consider existential disenchantment. She is already resigned to her limited options when being shown, by a lecherous building superintendent under the beam of a flashlight,
the dark, dirty, three rooms
called an apartment.
The wretchedness is evident even as she climbs the staircase, littered with trash. Before she has even reached the rooms, which are, predictably,
barely large enough to walk around in,
Petry’s scene of Lutie’s ascent illustrates the same sense of enclosure that Helga found in Harlem’s streets:

Now when I think of the room I did not rent, I think of the wall that made it so narrow. It must have been a false wall, a partition to divide a formerly grand parlor into two small units. I had read of the warm-bed system by which, during the height of the Great Migration, lodgers doubled up in rented rooms all over Harlem, sharing sleeping arrangements according to whether they worked day or night shifts. I had read also of the time-honored practice in Harlem of charging too much for quarters too cramped for a peaceful existence. Despite having read all that, my astonishment was opposite to that of recent arrivals in decades past: I could not believe people lived like that. On the other side of the wall in that SRO, there might have been someone sitting in
another room. It, too, was too narrow, and too short. There was no original fireplace—and, perhaps, also no dream of fire.