B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (29 page)

I would like to reach for a more hopeful tone. I would like to write of legacies, of torches being passed, of mantles being worn, and of flags raised high after the standard bearer has fallen. I would like to feel uplifted by the monument to Harriet Tubman that stands at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and 122nd Street, near a police precinct. Some controversy attended its unveiling when people noticed that the figure was facing south toward lower Manhattan instead of north toward freedom.
Well, there can’t be a wrong direction for her
because she came and went on many occasions,
a politician insisted, offering excuses for what was probably a careless mistake.
Yes, she was the Moses of our people, but she wasn’t Moses who apparently led all of his people out at once and did not have to go back.
The monument shows Tubman with some kind of pocketbook strapped across her chest, but without her trademark rifle, which was used to ward off the bounty hunters on her trail and to urge on fearful escapees who wished to abandon their flight.

The artist who made that memorial reached for a hopeful tone. The words of an old Negro spiritual linking Tubman to the original Moses are inscribed as a plaintive incantation ringing the base of the statue, just below a strange sculptural feature meant to illustrate the proverbial ancestral roots.
When time breaks up eternity, O let
my people go! We need not always weep and mourn, O let my people go! And wear these slavery chains forlorn, O let my people go!
In this artist’s rendition, the physical portrayal of those metaphorical roots connects the southward-facing, forward-lurching Tubman to the earth and to history. But they seem to reach out as an impediment, against the Exodus, pulling her down and back.
O let my people go What a beautiful morning it will be! O let my people go What a beautiful morning it will be! O let my people
…

Harold Cruse, the cultural critic and historian, came to New York as a child from his home in Virginia. He had been to many meetings in Harlem—including brief affiliations with factions of artists, communists, and nationalists—by the time he made the following assessment in his 1967 epic
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:

Late in the course of things, when the struggle over 125th Street had already been lost but I was still going to meetings, a leader from Harlem’s chapter of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) objected to what he saw as the underestimating of his group’s contribution. In the midst of a discussion to plan yet another town hall assembly, someone suggested that the NBPP be asked to provide security. The request was met with mild offense:
We’re not just security.
As an example of their other activities, he described an initiative that he called Affirmation Marches, in which members of the party march throughout the neighborhood in military formation while shouting uplifting slogans. They were, he said,
letting people know that black is still beautiful.

I wrote this down in the margin of a page separate from the one I was using to record the meeting’s minutes. The comment was not immediately germane to the agenda or to organizational business, but it seemed to summarize, quite deftly, the magnitude of the current crisis.

Every year, the birthday of Marcus Mosiah Garvey is celebrated on or around August 17 with a march that circuits central Harlem. One year, in advance of the parade, graffiti appeared on the plywood barrier to a construction site on 125th Street:
Happy Birthday to the “Honorable” Marcus Garvey.
The graffiti remained there long after the parade had come and gone, hailing the leader in perpetuity, but the construction taking place behind the plywood barrier itself seemed to be in a state of suspended operation. Before the most recent parade there was a schism between the organizers, and two different celebrations were taking place. I didn’t attend either one.

The previous year, I did go. I had not yet begun to frequent meetings in Harlem, and I was not yet aware of the 125th Street rezoning proposal. I did not get in line. When I arrived at the meeting point in Marcus Garvey Park, I stood to the side with my reporter’s pad and pen. Most people there were wearing black, and I was wearing blue. A tall man held a large red, black, and green flag above the heads of the assembly.

Just as the march commenced, it began to rain. We left the park, going west across 122nd Street, down Lenox Avenue across 116th to Seventh, up Seventh all the way to 135th Street. It began to rain harder, but the parade continued, its ranks a loose phalanx comprising the remnants of a number of Pan-Africanist and black nationalist organizations whose histories stretched back to the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to representatives of the UNIA, resurrected as the Universal Nubian Improvement Association, there was a contingent from the Ethiopia World Federation, which had been founded in Harlem in the 1930s to support the cause of Haile Selassie against Benito Mussolini’s fascist and imperialist encroachment. There were also
the New Black Panthers
, who, it should be said, have been disavowed by prominent members of the old Black Panthers, including the widow of Huey P. Newton. The assembled groups made a ramshackle pageant of the history of black resistance. Although these groups cannot claim a mass constituency, they still claim to speak for all black people, perhaps as much as they speak for the history from which their organizations were born. They are not obsolete, because many of the conditions that attended their founding persist and because many of the original aims have not been achieved.

But at that moment, the persistence of history was expressed through our persistence through the rain. Some bystanders stopped to cheer; others pumped Black Power fists from the
sidewalk. People took pictures with their camera phones, and a few teenagers flashed the middle finger. The marshals in charge of the parade urged the marchers to continue.
Black Power!
they said.
Close the ranks!
I ran to keep apace. Soon there was no distinction between the sideline and main line.

The weather didn’t stop the parade, but it did inspire an impassioned chant. At some point, instead of the typical cheers (
Black Power!
and
Buy Black!
or
No Justice No Peace!
or
Free the Land!
or
Africa for the Africans!
and
Freedom or Death!!
), someone began to lead the marchers with the shout
Look for me in the whirlwind
or the storm!
This chant caught on, propelling the crowd across 135th Street to Lenox Avenue again, down to 125th Street, and then east to Fifth Avenue.

The words of that chant were taken from a 1925 letter from Marcus Garvey to his followers, written from an Atlanta prison when he was about to be deported for mail fraud.

The marchers’ inspiring battle cry was drawn from Garvey’s clearest articulation of defeat. He answered the persistent charge that he was swindling his followers by means of messianic illusion with words befitting a messianic illusionist. At the moment of his deportation (which some say was carried out at the behest of or with the aid of black leaders as highly placed as W. E. B. DuBois), Garvey makes a rhetorical shift from the physical (land, economics, politics) to the metaphysical (an army of the dead, led by himself, whose powers match or outdo those of the risen Christ and
the 144,000 at the Rapture). That day, the thunder and rain signaled that a reckoning was at hand.

Upon reaching Fifth Avenue at 124th Street, the parade completed its circuit and was once again at Marcus Garvey Park. The group stopped at the entrance of a condominium that had been built on an empty lot. The New Black Panthers fell into formation and raised Black Power fists in the air. The condominiums were the source of a controversy that was then overheating. After moving into the new complex, many residents were dismayed to discover that the park hosted a Harlem tradition of thirty years’ standing, a drum circle that takes place in the park every Saturday during the months of temperate weather. (
African drumming is wonderful
for the first four hours, but after that, it’s pure, unadulterated noise. We couldn’t see straight anymore,
one new resident was quoted saying in a national paper.
Some of these drums are prayed over, blessed in Africa,
countered a musician.) The police, not expecting the spontaneous protest, scrambled to the parade organizers, insisting that the crowd disperse.

We returned to the meeting point next to the park. A man introduced as an original Garveyite from Jamaica was ushered forward to conclude the occasion. His melodious delivery of a reverent invocation, which included gratitude to the police who escorted the march, was interrupted when a member of the New Black Panther Party grew impatient with his formalities:
Make it plain!
she told him, before snarling something about
crackers.
The old Garveyite, who stood with the assistance of a cane, began to bristle with indignation. The young woman had offended his sense of history as much as his sense of propriety.
But Garvey wouldn’t have said that!
he protested, asking her to
remain cord-i-al for the rest of the evening,
but she continued to challenge him. The sadness and frustration of the old man collided with the sadness and frustration of the young woman for more
than a few tense moments before the concluding remarks could proceed.

A celebration in honor of “The Redeemer” was held later at a nearby Masonic lodge. Dinner was available for a small charge. Libations offered to our ancestors inaugurated a long agenda of speakers—presenting in order of eldest first, according to the program handed out that night. The program also announced that there would be the annual edition of the Afrikan (
sic
) Natural Standard of Beauty Contest, but it was not held, and no explanation was given. Perhaps there had been too many speakers, or maybe there was no one present who deserved the honor.

When I arrived at the Masonic lodge, an older man was entering at the same time. I recognized him from the parade. Together we passed through the iron gate of the lodge. As we descended the stairs into the building, he paused, turned toward me, and posed a question I was not equipped to answer:
Harlem is a city of Masons,
he said.
How could we lose Harlem?