[Little, Brown; 2011]

by Max Rivlin-Nadler

My father tells a story, of a mother of one of his childhood friends, who would keep a map of the neighborhood on the wall of her Flatbush home, marking the movement of the black families swiftly populating the surrounding area. She’d point to the map and declare, “They’re pushing us into the ocean!”

Above is a rough, illustrative comment on population shift in New York City, where displacements are abound, a city that has had a housing shortage since soon after the beginning of the twentieth century and well before it actually declared one some sixty years later. Neighborhoods have completely changed in a matter of years, not decades, according to forces that occur deep within the recesses of the trade and real estate giants who alternately take turns bankrupting and patronizing the city.

At the beginning of last decade, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a brilliantly observant scholar and journalist, moved to the “Mecca of Black America.” In Harlem Is Nowhere, she describes how she found townhouses and brownstones swiftly being converted from SRO’s (a status they’d held since even before the scorched-earth seventies and eighties), to single-family homes. The fortunate of New York City, it seemed, under the firm hand of two successive security-minded mayors, had finally begun a push northerly beyond the confines of Columbia University and into Harlem proper.

But instead of dwelling on all the circuitous and race-baiting dimensions of what is termed derisively as “gentrification” and favorably as “renewal”, Rhodes-Pitts has focused her considerable skill on connecting the present-day Harlem to its literary and spiritual past. In Harlem is Nowhere, she offers a genuine mental exploration of a location, a journalistic and solemn report that reads like young Orwell in Paris or, appropriately, like Baldwin.

The book is divided into eight chapters that address a different aspect of Harlem through the compilation of profound episodes from Rhodes-Pitts’ studies, early reading, and day-to-day experience. Rhodes-Pitts prefaces her work with a quote from Flannery O’Connor, “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location”. It is the rootedness in place, in a historic and profound geography, where Rhodes-Pitts writes, rhapsodizing about black nationalists of the past while interacting with the present-day occupants of this seemingly promised neighborhood. Beginning with the premise, quoting from Ellison, who himself is paraphrasing the street-slang of “Oh, man, I’m nowhere”, that Harlem might be unreachable (or at least, to this particular reviewer, unavailable), a premise that places Harlem in the subliminal. Rhodes-Pitts’ quotes Ellison’s Invisible Man, “This was not a city of realities, but of dreams”.

Formatted like a work from a University press, released by a major publisher, and shifting from historic to personal narrative, the book presents an interesting categorical problem, if categorizing is important. It is neither an exhaustive history of Harlem’s culture, or a description of its wrenching rezoning and eventual re-branding. Instead, in a masterful move, Rhodes-Pitts’ relates it as an observer of a swift parade, where even she admits that many dimensions go unexplored- the Caribbean experience, el barrio, Church-life, and Bill Clinton (who has just made a quiet exit from 125th). Harlem is Nowhere reads like a latter-day Federal Writers Project, where smart young writers, like Ellison, Hurston, and Wright were paid to describe our country with great craft and minimal fanciful embellishment.

We need more books like this. As Americans in a swiftly changing and displaced nation, the project of walking and talking, reading and wondering must be done with great seriousness. The South, which hovers over Harlem, gifts us, by way of Walker Percy, the term “Wander Seriously”. In interviews Rhodes-Pitts has said she intends to continue her serious wandering through two more books on “African-Americans and Utopias” (Harlem is nowhere).

In the chapter, “Land Is the Basis of All Independence”, Rhodes-Pitts describes a hearing about Columbia University’s aggressive expansion into Harlem:

“Seeing my notepad, an older man approached, eager to be recorded. He wore a wrinkled suit and white socks with his black dress shoes, but he had not arrived early enough to be allowed inside the hearing. At first he spoke to me in a mix of Spanish and English, and then he leaned close and said in a low voice: They are going to drive us into the river.”

The Diaspora persists.


 
 
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