North Toward Home

By R.Z. Sheppard

THIS WAS HARLEM: 1900-1950 by Jervis Anderson Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 390 pages; $17.95

Thirty years ago, the nameless hero of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man emerged from the subway for his first impression of Harlem: "I had never seen so many black people against a background of brick buildings, neon signs, plate glass and roaring traffic . . . They were everywhere. So many, and moving along with so much tension and noise that I wasn't sure whether they were about to celebrate a holiday or join in a street fight."

Ellison's Harlem began where Jervis Anderson's ends, in the sunset of the uncontested Negro Capital of the World. Much has changed, even the word Negro. Blacks, or Afro-Americans, now have an anonymous skyline of high-rise housing; the postwar wave of Caribbean immigration has altered the street rhythms; legendary ballrooms and theaters have been razed; the suburbs have replaced Harlem's Sugar Hill as a goal for the ambitious and fashionable; and the tradition of great black leadership is taking a breather. Like Ellison's underground man, Harlem now seems invisible.

Anderson, a Jamaican-born staff writer for The New Yorker, is restoring some faded images and definitions at an interesting time. The boundaries betweeen Manhattan and its city within a city are narrowing. From 110th Street, Harlem's southern edge, one can watch the house-hungry paleface renovate northward.

It is possible. Real estate is, after all, history by other means. Consider: at the turn of the century, a building boom in what was then all-white Harlem left landlords with more rentals than tenants. Downtown, in neighborhoods with such raffish names as Hell's Kitchen, the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill, Negroes were becoming regular targets of mob violence. Harlem building owners were quick to offer their surplus space as havens. White residents were not pleased, but their efforts to block the influx were doomed by the free enterprise they piously defended on other occasions. The newcomers gladly paid a premium for security.

By the early 1900s, black businessmen, like Philip A. Payton Jr. and his Afro-American Realty Co., had a piece of the action, and Harlem was on its way to becoming what the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. of the Abyssinian Baptist Church called "the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere." His son later preached freedom and hope in high style from pulpit, nightclub table and congressional seat.

Style, in fact, became one of Harlem's major exports and an important tourist attraction. No matter that the majority struggled along in traditional families. went to church and spanked their children for the usual transgressions. Outsiders thought of Harlem as a night town of song, dance and an imperfectly understood negritude.

The aesthetic was complicated. Intellectuals and artists sought African roots, though many of their brethren preferred the wax fruit of white culture. Unguents like Black-No-More and Fair-Plex Ointment promised entree to the envied circle of the lighter skinned. Mme. C.J. Walker's College of Hair Culture promised a "passport to prosperity."

The ticket to prosperity was Prohibition. In cabarets like Barren Wilkins' Exclusive Club, wrote one journalist, "a hundred-dollar bill will not go very far and is not intended to do much service." The Cotton Club and Connie's attracted rich whites from all over the world. The list of famous singers and musicians heard there would fill a small phone book. Everybody danced the Charleston, and by 1926 the pages of Vanity Fair announced that the Negro was "in the ascendancy."

This was news to those stuck on society's ground floor as washerwomen and office sweeps. Anderson's half-century survey follows the threads of discontent, from the black veterans of World War I through Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement and A. Philip Randolph's efforts to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The literary counterpart of the political "new Negro" is found in sketches on Poets Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, plus lesser-known writers like Wallace Thurman, who looked askance at Downtown's infatuation with Harlem. There were dangers. In 1926 Critic and Salonier Carl Van Vechten published a roman `a clef based on his black friends and acquaintances. The novel became a bestseller, in no small part because of its unfortunate title, Nigger Heaven.

Anderson prefers a spiritual and cultural home where Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Count Basie, Father Divine and Joe Louis seemed like members of an extended family. In many ways This Was Harlem is a family album, strong on the recognizable, sometimes out of focus and underexposed, but a welcome and valuable record. --By R.Z. Sheppard

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