Searching for Harlem, and more

A Journey to the Mecca of Black America

By Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Little, Brown. 304 pp. $24.99

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Reviewed by Karen E. Quiñones Miller

As a teenager growing up in Texas, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts read all of the classic literature about Harlem - books by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, to name just a few. Harlem fascinated her. She wanted to visit there. She wanted to live there. And in 2002, she got her chance.

When she first moved there, Rhodes-Pitts, a Harvard University graduate, worked as a researcher for a Harlem-based publisher. Somewhere along the line she decided to write her own book, and Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America is the result.

It reads like part essay, part memoir, and part anthropological study, and is quite fascinating and informative - especially for those who are unfamiliar with the history of Harlem. It's well-written, full of anecdotes, and generally entertaining, but, unfortunately, is also sometimes off-putting. There is often a distinct feeling that Rhodes-Pitts is writing from the view of someone who is studying a community of which she is not a member.

Rhodes-Pitts borrowed the title from a 1948 Ralph Ellison essay: "Harlem is Nowhere," which reads in part:

"Negro Americans are in search for an identity. Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, they feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, and Where? Significantly in Harlem the reply to the greeting, "How are you?" is often, 'Oh, man, I'm nowhere' - a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word."

Titling her book Harlem Is Nowhere suggests that Rhodes-Pitts believes Harlem is a community still in search of an identity - not accepting the status given to it by others and looking to define itself. Neither the goal nor the focus of the book is stated or ever made clear, but in reading the book, it is easy to surmise that Rhodes-Pitts is not just seeking the definition of Harlem, past and present, while trying to find her own status within that definition.

When someone asks, how long must one live in Harlem in order to write a book about it, Rhodes-Pitts gives no answer. And when she asks an acquaintance if by moving to Harlem she has contributed to the gentrification and is told no - because she's both black and poor - she leaves dissatisfied with the answer.

After settling into her cramped Harlem apartment, she begins taking steps to settle within the community. She states there is a pecking order to be followed: Make friends with the neighborhood women first, then you can become friendly with the men. To this end she makes the acquaintance of Ms. Minnie, and Ms. Bessie, a couple of elderly women who live on her block.

Ms. Minnie, we find out, hails from South Carolina, and used to love automobile treks from her home state to Georgia for a night of dancing with her girlfriends. Ms. Bessie was originally from Scotland Neck, N.C., and told the author of the many letters she wrote home when she first arrived in Harlem.

Once having met these neighborhood women, Rhodes-Pitts was able to meet some of the men, such as Monroe, who once lived near a river in Mississippi, and Bing, who insists he knew everything that anyone could ever want to know about Harlem.

Fascinating characters, and if Rhodes-Pitts had actually interviewed them and written their full stories, what a wonderful book Harlem Is Nowhere would have been. But you get the feeling Rhodes-Pitts listened to their stories with as much bemusement as interest. And that is the reader's loss.

It's remarkable to note that while Rhodes-Pitts is in her early 30s, she seems to make no attempts to befriend anyone her own age. The book lacks any of the energy of young Harlem: the music, the fashion, the manner of speaking, and, most important, the views. In the one instance when she mentions being in their company, it's after a parade, and police are herding the crowd as if they were cattle, allowing them to move in only one direction while whites have the freedom to move as they want. Rhodes-Pitts becomes indignant, but finds her indignation does nothing to help her escape being identified with the herd.

Rhodes-Pitts spent many days doing research at the Schomburg Museum, and often ventured through the streets of Harlem seeking out some of the places she'd come across in her research. It's because of this that we learn about little-known but colorful characters of Harlem's past, like L.S. Alexander Gumby, a former butler who, in 1907, became the kept man of a male white benefactor, and started scrapbooks about Negro Americana that are now housed in the Schomburg.

And then there was Raven Chanticleer, who started what he called the first wax museum dedicated to famous figures of black history. (The founders of the Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, however, might dispute this claim.) He was a flamboyant man who said that if upon his death, "they" didn't carry out his wishes for the museum, he would "come back and haunt the hell out of them."

Both made significant contributions to cultural Harlem, and if Rhodes-Pitts had decided to write a book about them and other overlooked figures of Harlem, how delightful this book might have been.

Rhodes-Pitts sprinkles her book with passages from the works of various writers, such as Ellison, Hughes, Claude McKay, and Ann Petry. And if she'd decided to write a book of colorful excerpts of famous authors - again we would have an appealing book to add to our personal libraries.

But it is perhaps the lack of focus that makes Harlem Is Nowhere fascinating. You get the feeling that Rhodes-Pitts is searching, but not quite sure herself what she is searching for. Because she's not sure of the questions, the book lacks any answers.

And so, Harlem is still, just as the title tells us, nowhere. To our disappointment, Rhodes-Pitts has not found it. But she has to be commended for looking.