Harlem is Nowhere

It was Saul Bellow who invented the term “noticer” to denote someone who looks and sees, stands back and takes note. In this, her first book, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts marks herself out as a first-rate noticer with the gift of being able to allow us to notice things exactly when she does. Her lyrical prose flows like the human gaze: a glimpse here, a longer look there, a quick turning away when something is too contradictory, or too difficult to sort through.

Rhodes-Pitts’ book began as a newspaper article and it is her journalist’s eye that takes us on this journey of discovery and homecoming. The book is full of vignettes, character portraits and little-known facts, laced through with the kind of anecdotes that a reporter with a handy notebook might jot down.

As a transplanted Texan, she brings to her story of Harlem, the self-styled “Capital of Black America”, a love of the expanse, the wide open, the void. She sees vacant lots tucked away in heavily built-up areas; long stretches of landscape where others only see the urban skyline.

The buildings the author notices are those without locks on the door, leading into a wide and open darkness; those that stood at the end of the 19th century, Victorian and majestic alongside open fields, fields that she can still see and celebrate.

Rhodes-Pitts arrived in Harlem to take up a job researching the photos of James Van Der Zee, that great chronicler of Harlem life in the 1920s. Her word portraits resemble Van Der Zee’s work: warm, often beautiful, but with the distance of the observer composing the shot. Like a book of photographs, the book consists of written snapshots, often full of wit and pithiness. There is her encounter with the Chief, a Chicagoan whose heyday was the militant 1960s. He cannot understand why the author does not have an African name: “The Chief told me that I needed to go to Africa and join the struggle ... I mentioned that perhaps people in Africa did not want me showing up to interfere ... the Chief said that this was part of the problem.”

Her Harlem is like this: “full”, like a city such as Paris is full.

We can see it all: the ubiquitous funeral parlours, those cornerstones of African American commerce; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a great storehouse of knowledge; the poets, the elders, the organisations, the little children, the hustlers, the preachers, the bookshops, the beautiful women, the wise old ladies, the wise old men, the yearning. There is so much yearning, and there is pride, too, maybe above all – the great pride in being a citizen of Harlem. Because Harlem is a nation, a world, even.

And yet it is nowhere. The “Nowhere” of the title refers to Thomas More’s Utopia or “nowhere” – a place that can never exist. Before I knew this, I thought that “nowhere” referred to the invention of bebop in the late 1940s, that master school of jazz that was about playing faster, living faster and eluding the “white man”, all wrapped up in a black people’s existentialism that used “nowhere” to denote above and beyond the mundane. Rhodes-Pitts touches on this deep “nowhere” but never quite nails it. It is one of Harlem’s qualities, its essential secret: that it can vanish in the blink of an eye, while laughing in your face.

She gives us the iconic writers: Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston. They used Harlem as a backdrop to their writing and their longing for a utopia in which they could be free. Rhodes-Pitts especially loves Hughes and she cites him in many ways, from a young man who happens to mention that he is living in the poet’s house, to her observation of the casual footfall on the floorspace over the poet’s ashes, which are housed under the floor at the Schomburg Center.

Like the author, Hughes was obsessed with Harlem’s beauty and freedom, yet he could see through it too. He wiped the smile off Harlem’s public in the late 1920s, with his collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew.

Not only did the title get him in trouble but so did the contents. The poems are a relentless chronicle of dreams destroyed, of a longing even for the harsh reality of the Old South, a reality that destroyed that rose-coloured view of Harlem that even Hughes promulgated in his latter life in a work whose title says it all, “Simply Heavenly”.

The book ends with Rhodes-Pitts turning away from a parade celebrating African Americans and going back to a place she has finally accepted as home: Harlem. It is where she belongs.

There is a moment in the book when she wonders whether Hughes would have liked his ashes beneath the floor of a library, trodden upon. Of course he would have. Hughes loved libraries, his people and Harlem. To have been laid to rest in an African American centre of learning, among books in a public place frequented by ordinary people, would have been, for him, the best place to be.

And he would have enjoyed Harlem Is Nowhere, a great introduction to a rich and complex community, as much a state of being as a place on the map.

Bonnie Greer is author of ‘Langston Hughes: The Value Of Contradiction’ (BlackAmber)

Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Granta, RRP£14.99, 304 pages