Old Harlem

"Over and over you can be sure/ There will be sorrow but you will endure/ Where there's a flower there's the sun and the rain/ Oh and it's wonderful they're both one in the same"

-- Frankie Beverly & Maze, “Joy & Pain"

So boom right, I’m on the corner of two-fifth and Lenox when this woman comes up to me like: You look like you know where you're going. What street are we on? She’s a transplant --- a not so unique breed of American who trades in the greener pastures of Oklahoma or Georgia or Washington State for the rats and roaches of New York City. You can spot them by their furrowed brows and dangling jaws as they try to make sense of the mess the city has made by investing in the myth of Harlem as opposed to its people. The powerful’s obsession with symbols over substance leaves me and a consequential stranger at the intersection of 125th Street, Dr. Martin Luther Boulevard, Lenox Avenue, and Malcolm X Boulevard. She points up at the street signs in frustration, past the homeless dude panhandling outside of Starbucks, past the dope fiend leaning damn near halfway to the ground, and past the locals looking ahead to avoid the inevitable disappointment of looking around. A trio of white boys in pastel polos skip through the mayhem rapping “Mood Swings” by Pop Smoke and their joyful irreverence in the midst of such visible suffering reminds me how fickle the concept of home can be in the largest city in America. It ebbs and flows with each new wave of immigrants and transplants until the Mecca of Black Culture in America becomes a real-life lesson in gentrification gone wrong.

Home used to be Black Jesus hanging from my living room wall, a brown-skinned dude with locs sitting shirtless under Harlem sunsets. I remember the way its rays rendered divine, perfect light over the concrete playground where double-dutch and booty-tag topped our favorite pastimes. I hoped for enough time to ask the Rastafarian’s daughters why they never stood up for “The Pledge of Allegiance” before the streetlights came on. This was a ghetto bat signal of sorts that told you to go home, go to bed, and go to school the next morning and face the flag of a country that won’t claim you. We didn’t know shit about how broad stripes and bright stars could butcher black bodies until Jose “Kiko” Garcia and Nicholas Heyward Jr. and Anthony Baez and Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond and Ousmane Zongo and Timothy Stansbury Jr. and Sean Bell were lynched by the New York City Police Department. After that, and perhaps even before, the only flags that mattered were red, black, and green. Yellow bone, redbone, light-skinned, dark-skinned, caramel chocolate or mocha, All Black is beautiful was the central organizing concept in Harlem.

Although the new reality pales in comparison to my memory, I remain perfectly content still galivanting along the 1400 square miles that make up these Harlem streets. After all, it is here that I learned that despite, or perhaps because it is so endangered, Black life is sacred in America. I attended the Harriet Tubman Learning Center and the Frederick Douglass Academy where Black teachers and principals ushered bright-eyed Black boys and girls into overcrowded classrooms adorned with Black history memorabilia. They knew as James Baldwin once noted that “a child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.” We hungrily devoured the folklore and recited tomes to our Black idols in rhyme and verse at each morning assembly.

Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff
Wasn’t scared of nothing neither
Didn't come in this world to be no slave
And wasn’t gonna stay one either

As far as my music teacher, Mr. Hill was concerned James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was the United States national anthem. He rearranged the classic with church stomps and soul claps that roused “The Greatest Love of All” and even if it's just for a moment “I Believe I Can Fly.”

I’m lost in a Harlem that no longer exists when the woman’s nervous pleas transport me back to the present. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’m trying to call an Uber and these signs are ridiculous. What street is this? I want to tell her the more pressing question might be: Whose streets are these? Whatever happened to the penny candy store on Lenox or the record store on Fifth? When exactly did they close down the arcade on Sugar Hill? Was it before or after Cousin Day-Day got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas and we nearly killed each other over a remote control? All I know is that it was some time before they converted Dead Man’s Hill into a dog park. I know this because there were no more shards of glass to dodge on my way through St. Nicholas Park. Only dog poop.

I want to be closer to my version of Harlem, although I know my version is not the only one worth remembering through stories passed down from my mother, and her mother, and her mother before her. My great-grandmother Lydia “Mama” Harris arrived in Harlem by way of Guyana, South America on April 17, 1947. A Pan American Airways Passenger Manifest lists her occupation as a housewife to Thomas “Grandaddy” Harris and mother to Olney Harris, their eight-year-old daughter. The latter would grow up to become Grandma Arlene, the matriarch of the Harris family and my own personal Caribbean American Florida Evans, gap and all. By the time she receives her United States citizenship in the late 1980s, all hints of her Caribbean twang are gone with the exception of a stern refrain reserved for the naughtiest among us: Eh-eh. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Grandma Arlene makes 19 pies for each of her 19 grandchildren, breathing burdens she inherited from her daughters that become the best part of her short stay on Earth. On her deathbed, she prays to a God that never listens to cure the Cancer from her breasts so that she might live another day to spoil 19 boys and girls whose 19 broken hearts are buried with her in a shallow grave. She is dead before I can ask when she transformed from a little island girl named Olney into a Harlem heroine named Arlene? All that survives are faint whispers of her story at family reunions, barbecues, and holiday feasts, and sloppy scribbles on a decades-old document from the United States Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Aircraft: NC-88889
Departing from: Rio De Janeiro. Date: April 16, 1947
Arriving in area at: New York Date: April 17, 1947
Family Name: Harris
Given Name: Olney Elva
Country of which citizen or subject: Great Britain
Place of Birth: Georgetown, British Guiana
Race: NE
Complexion: Dark
Height: 3 ft, 2 in.
Able to read: No
Length of intended stay: About 6 months

According to legend, Grandma Arlene met Grandpa Bobby in front of the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building on 125th Street in the late 1950s. He arrived in Harlem shortly before by way of Galveston, Texas following a stint in the Korean War. The great-grandson of American slaves, his was a different immigrant story. Although born in the United States, the concept of the American Dream was altogether foreign to a black boy in the segregated South. He attended Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and upon completing his undergraduate studies, had no desire to work his hands bloody planting crops on a farm nor wring his neck broken hanging limp from a tree. As Frederick Douglass so eloquently put it, “Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave,” and so after the war, Grandpa Bobby set his sights on Harlem, one of the only places where it was, and still remains, relatively safe to be Black in America. In 1954 he met Carlos Cooks, local leader of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, an unsung vanguard of the Black Power Movement, and purported mentor to Malcolm X. Together they would form The African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, an atheistic, scientific, orthodox sect of Black Nationalism that dominated the grassroots in Harlem with Cooks at its helm, and Grandpa Bobby his second in command. I imagine that when Grandma Arlene stops to listen to his soapbox speech at the State Building he is touting his signature “Buy Black” picket sign. I imagine he denounces “that ominous appellation ‘Negro’” and redefines his own identity as a “Black” man in America. I imagine he promotes group economics and urges a return to the continent of Africa. But perhaps most importantly, I imagine his sandy brown natural hair is perfectly coiffed into a neat halo.

In my earliest memories, Grandpa Bobby is a statuesque ode to an idyllic black past. He is tall and big and strong and his dashiki and afro stand out like a sore thumb amidst the gold chains and Coogi sweaters on display at Jimmy Jazz. He is Black and proud and occasionally tactless. Among my mother’s favorite stories about him involve him insulting a white man.

On the day you were born, your grandfather came to visit me in the hospital, and just to fuck with him I pointed out that you were born on George Washington’s Birthday. He scooped you up with one hand and as you stretched your little arms in the palm of his hand, he looked me in my eyes and said: ‘Don’t talk to me about that white honky dog.’

My grandfather's disdain for white America was palpable and intense. According to rumor, he once begrudgingly admitted that there were white people in our family before quickly affirming that we would never meet them. I wonder how it is possible to hate one’s own kin, but I do not know what atrocities he survived, how many times a white man called a nigger or a boy, or who he loved that may have been lynched. I only know that, despite his contempt for his oppressors, he died still bearing the name of Master Harris of Harris County Texas.

What would Grandpa Bobby think of me? Black Nationalism is a separatist movement and I am an obvious benefactor of integration in this country, educated by white-funded institutions, and trained to perform Blackness in a way that makes white people at ease. There is little room for black liberation at the very bottom of the American mainstream. Within the first week of my first full-time job, I attend a happy hour where a white colleague asks me a question that baffles me to this day: How does it feel to be a Black woman? Although my answer escapes me now, I wonder if any response could communicate all of the complexity and nuance of what it means to be Black and a woman in a culture where being white and male is the norm. How does one explain or reconcile that to be Black is both beautiful and dangerous, that Black womanhood yields both struggle and abundance, and that something that has brought me tremendous pain has also given me great joy?

You can’t talk about Black joy without talking about Black pain. Deep struggle informs how we experience deep joy. It’s a running cliche that Black folks in America have been making lemonade from lemons for over 400 years. When they kicked in our knees to pray to their god, we remixed the good book we couldn’t read and made Moses a black woman. When they twisted our tongues to mimic their speech, we cooked up a vocabulary so on fleek that twerking is a national hobby. Everyone wants our rhythm, but nobody wants our blues. Black joy is creating a way from no way. Even in dark times, it emerges in manners that are unapologetically beautiful and brave.

Black joy is freedom. In many ways, freedom is synonymous with joy. One does not exist independently of the other; rather the two intersect in a web of emotions broadcast with belly laughs and toothy grins. Nina Simone once described freedom as the absence of fear. I mean really, no fear! Black joy is a place where Black folks can go and not be afraid to be who we are. All shades and types of Black are welcome here for safekeeping.

Black joy is nuanced. Black folks are not a monolith and our expressions of joy are as diverse and complex as our experiences. We do not embody Blackness to affirm or resist racist stereotypes about the inherent inferiority of our kind. We are who we are on our own terms and in our own words, and we deserve to be portrayed authentically and three-dimensionally in our joy. When we are unapologetically ourselves, we invite others to be free as well. I see you and you see me and that recognition ignites a vibration that transcends race; it’s spiritual. Black joy is magic. Magic is what we do.

Black joy is work. You can’t ice skate up a hill, and similarly, you don’t get free or choose joy without doing the work. This often ignored aspect of Black joy can be found in the ways we hold space for one another to feel safe or feel seen. We are each other’s keepers, and so we do the work to bring Black joy not only to ourselves but to others. Black joy is not reactive; it is revolutionary. We use the tools available to us to salvage our humanity and create models of Blackness beyond the white gaze. We ask ourselves, Who am I outside of the white imagination? and the answers are complicated and surprising, with each of us crafting a story that honors our unique backgrounds and perspectives but is no less authentic. Sometimes Black joy can be self-care so that we are available to do the work. We heal ourselves first so that we can be there to help others along the way.

Black joy is engaging our elders. If you don’t know who we are, Google it. At a time when we are reliving events we thought we’d only read about in textbooks, we turn to the past to remind us that while change is slow, it is also incredibly resilient. Black history breeds Black pride, but it also exposes deep inequities and so we pour out our libations to commemorate our fallen ancestors who died so that we might live to experience the abundance of Black joy. We say to them with grateful hearts, in the words of Lucille Clifton, come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. From Tulsa to Birmingham, from D.C. to Dallas, from Oakland to Atlanta, but especially in Harlem, Black joy springs eternal.

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