But in Harlem, on this first visit, the chicken served in Small’s Paradise, with waffles, was a bewildering combination of tastes, a wonder that became a natural marriage of chicken and flour. I think only a black man from Harlem, meaning a black man who was born in the South, could, in these times of torment, have come up with this combination. When I bit into the first piece of Southern-fried chicken, I could hear the voices of darkies in cotton fields, singing to make the labour more bearable, mixing their anger and their fatigue in a chorus that confused the men who enslaved them, into thinking that these were “happy darkies.”
I was given permission to borrow a Nagra tape recorder from the CBC New York office. I remember the manager in the Rockefeller Center was Dorothy McCallum. And I remember that she gave me a lesson on how to operate the Nagra. And I remember not wanting to appear stupid, so I told her I understood the working of this machine, whose fidelity was so good that it was used for the recording of the audio in movies … I told her I understood how to operate the Nagra. The Nagra is the heaviest portable tape recorder ever made! You can imagine, therefore, what it was like, in the hot weather, to walk about Harlem, with a Nagra, and a reasonable supply of twelve-inch audiotape, to match the emergency of a sudden interview with a man on the streets in Harlem.
The streets of Harlem were sleepless. Congested, romantic as in those fairytale days of the Harlem Renaissance, angry, black, and rebellious; with the new culture of nationalism, asking itself, “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” — repeated three times for emphasis and seriousness of identity; and sweet with music. Music in the speech which sounded like music played in bars, in night clubs, at the Apollo Theatre, and with a cockiness which even though they did not all stand and look up at Malcolm X, on his soap box outside Mr. Michaux’s book store, The House of Proper Propaganda, at least they were injected by his voice and the rebellious, shocking, new thinking of blackness and Islam and discipline. Most of all discipline, and the amazing calling back of black masculinity from homosexuality, Harlem was now a picturebook copy of a street in Nairobi, in teeming Nigeria. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya. The colours of Africa, and the colours of Marcus Garvey’s “back-to-Africa” bombast; women wearing dresses made in haste, by themselves sometimes, but with an African style, and a crown of black shining hair, the Afro. And men wearing the Afro, too. No one those days dared to suggest that black people were illiterate. And even if they were, even if a sizeable percentage were, they were all being schooled and unschooled bending over boxes of books, turning pages, yes, looking at the photographs of their “ancestors,” recognizing these ancestors, through a scar on the face in Harlem, got in a knife fight, in Africa, a tribal scar deliberately got with a knife; and creating other ancestors, based upon nothing more reliable and authoritative than the cosmetic similarity to the flatness of a noise, the bushiness of hair, scars marching across the lower cheeks, at the eyes, teeth at the front with inordinate spaces … does it mean sexual appetite here as it connotes back in Barbados? And just in case … just in case, you are really from Ghana, or from Nigeria, or from Kenya, you had better change your name; get rid of that motherfucking slave-name, Jack. Free yourself, brother! Power to the motherfucking people, Jack. Castro did it. Harlem can do it. Harlem judged your “relevancy,” your “coolness,” said you were “together,” really hip. And all because of the size of your Afro. “Your ’fro, bro!” The glitter in your necklace made out of polished, cured beans. Any kind of beans, so long as they could be laminated. Lima. Red. White. Beans you did not know existed until you got some taste of brotherhood from Native Americans. And you adopted the “pimp walk” to match your new revolutionary ideology. You were black. You were a Zulu. You were a Kikuyu, all because you had heard of heroic acts performed by these tribes. And you wanted to be associated with, and to be publicly known to be related to these tribes. For ease, at the beginning, you were now X. Later on, as you grew comfortable in this alien identity cribbed from books, you gave yourself at your own re-Christening a real African name. Ali Kamal, Ali Kadir Sudan. The name, the sound of it, the country that bears its name, made you “relevant.”
“And because you black, brother, you relevant! Power to the people! Yeah!” You’re your clenched fist. Show your slapped palm. Show your beans, and ruffle your dashiki. Walk in your robes as if you are a priest, along the streets of Sweet Harlem, and you don’t give a goddamn that the name, Harlem, comes from Haarlem, a place that enslaved those very ancestors you want to climb into the same crib with. Harlem is yours now. You can claim a territory, own it, simply because it has been transformed by your culture. Harlem is black. And the man doesn’t mess with you, at this time of black cultural nationalism.
Chapter Eleven
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And let all Black People speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD.
— From “Black Art,” by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
Roi, as he was known in these Harlem days, when he started The Black Arts Theatre in Harlem, the author of that poem, Leroi Jones, was regal. A king. A lion. And you should have heard him reciting this poem, in the musical and artistic vein and disposition that John Coltrane blew in “Chasin’ the Trane.”
“Crane blow his ass off, baby! Trane!”
Now, he is Amiri Baraka. The King of Newark, formerly Poet Laureate. Those of us who know Roi, or Baraka, could only smile when he and the Mayor Rudy Giuliani of “clean-the-streets-of-black-motherfuckers” fame, tried to engage in an intellectual argument with Roi, and naturally lost. But the bigger point was that Giuliani didn’t know what “the motherfucker he was talking. It was all power with Giuliani. Power and unachieved privilege.”
In these black artistic days, Roi wore the largest Afro, had the coolest African robes, suitable for an Imamu, had the space between his two front teeth, and he became a Sunni Muslim. His close ace-boon friend, Larry Neal, was contented to wear a brimmed felt hat pulled down in the same way as I had seen snapshots of his neighbour, Ralph Ellison, wear his; tweed jackets custom-made, button-down collars of shirts; and a constant smile that betrayed the poetical torment consuming his young body; and the gigantic talent it let out, in too few publications before his untimely death. I never did find out what he died from.
I first read an opinion piece by Allan Lomax, who came upon the scene of black intellectuals like a meteor, and in that same swiftness disappeared — like a comet. But he filled up the television interviewees in his time, more than any other black celebrity. But I was more taken up listening to the best blues played on a jukebox, and of course, Trane and Miles and Bird, and Billy Eckstein, and Sassy Sarah Vaughan, and, because it was proper, the Duke and the Count — neighbours I was made to understand of both Larry Neal and Ralph Ellison, these two giants of Sugar Hill, in the marbled vestibules, the wrought-iron concertina-like gates of the lift… in this part of the black world, you did not say, “elevator.” The lift. Iron and marble, and red brick, built into the “brownstones,” reminders of an earlier gracious, secure, wealthier past. The past of the Harlem Renaissance. But Harlem was wealthy, not only from an obvious visible and conspicuous materialism, not only famous for the longest Cadillacs and “Bruicks,” and clothes fit for an emperor, leading the parade in men’s and women’s fashions and style, as they do today, but wealthy in the head, and in the mind. What other place, urban or suburban, country, Southern rural from the hicks, could boast of having in its midst at the same time, Marcus Garvey; W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Father Divine, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Lar
ry Neal, Ed Bullins, Robert Earl Jones (the father), and James Earl Jones (the son, the actor), and Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Sun Ra, Bird, Ellington, Basie, Errol Garner, Elvin Jones, Paul Chambers, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln; Paule Marshall, John Henrik Clarke (no relation), and, passing through on his way to France, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes? Arna Bontemps? What other city can boast of this quality of citizen. What about Charles Mingus? Cecil Taylor? Paul Chambers? And what then is the effect of all this “beautiful blackness” in one concentration, in Harlem, upon the mind of a young man from the Island of Barbados, wanting to be an author?
There are no words capable to do literary or narrative justice to the effect this “university of the street” had upon my development.
In this cultural and racial maelstrom, from the Theresa Hotel, I walked across the street to a restaurant, where I would bathe myself in the cuisine of the slave: grits and scrambled eggs, Canadian bacon (Americans showed taste in this regard!), hash browns, and innumerable cups of coffee, which in these days in the sixties, was extremely fine, anticipating the special coffee shops you get in upper-class neighbourhoods; and from the restaurant, I walked to the offices of the Amsterdam News. Here I know I would get help in locating James Baldwin, who was, after all the reason for my presence in Harlem. Somebody in the editorial department must know how to find Baldwin. I had already scoured the Red Rooster, day and night.
The man who would provide this information was the most unlikely one on the entire staff. He was probably also, apart from the office cleaner, the lowest-paid on the newspaper’s staff. He was the telephone operator. The man whom every person who called in, had to talk to. The man who listened to every call: protest, complaint, congratulation, and, as an extracurricular activity, a bonus on the monotony of saying, “Good morning, the Amsterdam News!,” and when it was proper, and appropriate, “Power to the people, Brother!,” making a date with a voice he speculated belonged to a body “built by Fisher,” a woman who might turn out to be “foxy.” Fred.
Fred accompanied me, after his shift ended at five o’clock, first to Small’s Paradise, to have Southern-fried-chicken-with-waffles, and, of course, a double shot of Cutty Sark and soda water; then through the barbershops, where the gossip is more reliable than the news in the New York Times, where you got another lecture on blackness, where you got your shoes shined, polished so diligently that you could feel the blood coursing through your feet, with your shoes still on, and a haircut if needed, as you relaxed in the womb of black culture, second only to the so-called Negro Church. Here, in this barbershop, one of many along Lenox Avenue (I am ’membering from years past), is the uncle of the Right Honourable Errol Walton Barrow, prime minister of Barbados, from whom I learned everything about Barbadians and other West Indians living in Harlem, many illegally: their hardships, their successes, and their hostility toward American Negroes, as the term went, and their bragging that their “enslavement,” which is not the name they gave to their colonization by the English down in the West Indies, was “better” than American slavery. This enmity begun then, perhaps earlier, certainly was crystallized between W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and extended to a third proponent of black proficiency in occupations such as carpentry, masonry, and small-scale farming, to give the Southern whites a better image of the Negro, that he was not a rival for white jobs, that he was not an insurrectionary like Nat Turner, Booker T. Washington, whose motto, and modus operandi was “Head, Heart, and Hand.” Perhaps Marcus Garvey felt that Booker T. Washington was reverting to the declared image of the American Negro, as a “fetcher of water.” Head, Heart, and Hand! There is a privately run high school in Barbados that has “Head, Heart, and Hand” as its motto. Nobody knew its origin.
And across the street from Mr. Barrow’s barbershop was another Barbadian, a bibliophile, a man who petitioned the mayor of New York, who wrote letters to the New York Times, for years, pleading, arguing, threatening, and eventually winning his case to have the officials of New York change the name for its black population, not only in New York, but throughout America, step by step, from “nigger,” and from “Nigrah,” from “coloured,” from “negro” (with a common n), to “Negro” (with a capital n). And from “black” (with a lowercase b), to “Black” (with a capital B). From “Afro-American,” to “Afro American,” without the hyphen. From “black American,” to “African American.” But the appellation had stopped, satisfactorily at “Afro-American.” And then the critics disagreed with the hyphenation, and settled, perhaps after this persistent correspondent died, for “African American.” This man was Richard B. Moore, a man who liked the books he sold; and liked them better than the customers he served. He would refuse to sell a book that a customer asked for if he felt it contained a history of African culture, in which he was interested.
Mr. Moore lived in Brooklyn. In his bookstore on Lenox Avenue, there was hardly any room to move about between the shelves. In his home, there was no room, either. Books, books, and more books. And he gave the impression that apart from writing letters to the New York Times, he spent his evenings and weekends, reading.
A woman comes into the Frederick Douglass Book Center.
“Mr. Moore, boy, how?”
“How?”
“I looking for a particular book, boy.”
“What’s the name of this book?”
“I don’t know. But it’s about Africa. And the origin of names, and I trying to see if I have a’ African name. You know how I mean? You know how it is, these days, boy…”
“How you mean, ma’am! I know how you mean.”
“You could find this book in your bookstore for me? You think you could put your two hands on it, for me?”
Mr. Moore goes into the back, and I can see him, looking at the shelves that reach the ceiling, and miraculously he finds the book the customer is looking for. I can see him from where I am sitting in the congested store. And he dusts the clouds of particles from the book, front and back. And he puts the book away. And he returns to the customer. The customer is counting her chickens. But the news is sad.
“I sorry to tell you that I don’t have such a book. I can find you a book that look similar, though, ma’am. But I will keep looking, ma’am. I will keep looking …”
“You keep looking,” she tells him, encouraged. “Keep looking. ’Cause I want to find out if I am a’ African. I tired with being called Negro, in the papers!”
And gaily, like a woman giving herself the promise that the lottery ticket she has just bought will bring in the “dookey” to her, she leaves the store, and swings back toward Seventh Avenue with a smile of emancipation on her black face.
“I couldn’t sell she this book, man. This book is too important,” Mr. Moore says, holding the book to his chest, with both hands.
The book is Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture. It is written by Janheinz Jahn. It was published by Grove Press in 1961. It was first published in German in 1958.
I wonder how this woman, who, from the way she looks, if one can make such a generalization, is a simple woman; and whose language, in her short conversation with Mr. Moore, does not exhibit a post-secondary education, has become so intellectually fascinated with Africa and African names? But you know from her appearance, bright-coloured print dress, long to the ankles, with an African pattern, strong black features, as my mother would describe her, a mark like a tribal slash on her left cheek — probably an accident suffered in childhood, more than an initiation into womanhood, back in Africa — and fierce, black, shining hair coiffed into an Afro, and shining beads made of cured lima beans, painted red, black, and green round her promising, luscious neck, showing just that suggestion of sexuality round her breasts, you know this woman will get her way with Mr. Moore, and someday get her own copy of Muntu.
“This is philosophy!” Mr. Moore says. “Heavy reading! She couldn’t understand what Janheinz Jahn is saying, anyhow.”
I hold the book in my hand, and glance at the
headings of chapters: SKOKIAN? VOODOO. RUMBA. NTU. NOMMO. KUNTU. HANTU. BLUES. And I read the opening:
“I. QUO VADIS AFRICA?
“Africa is entering world history. There is a flow of books and articles dealing with this process in its political, economic, sociological, and psychological aspects. But all these expositions have in common a single conviction; they are persuaded that one single pattern of cultural change is forming. Through the influence of Europe, it is believed, Africa is adapting herself, giving up her traditions and adopting foreign ideas, methods of work, forms of government and principles of economic organization. The time of transition, whether short or long, is thought to be a time of crisis which will confront all Africans with the decision either to accept modern civilization and survive, or to perish with their own traditions.”
Mr. Moore was not a man who used profanities. But if he were, he would have said, “This is some heavy shit, brother!”
But all he said, was, “Coming up on Friday night? I making cou-cou and steam’ red snapper.”
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