New York beckoned, and they came. One came as a child, brought by immigrant parents. The other two came as adult women seeking the freedom to create themselves and their art.
They were shaped by this city: their sense of the possible, the movement of their bodies, their style. They walked. They looked. They listened. They gave to the city. They danced for it, wrote it, set it to music. New York beckoned; they came.
New York told them anything was possible, told them there were no boundaries. There were. Though the city welcomed them as visitors, students, teachers, and entertainers, as residents they were not always received with enthusiasm. So at some point, they all lived in Harlem: the Black Mecca, born of the migration of black peoples from the Caribbean and the American South, the antiblack violence that erupted in other parts of the city, and the entrepreneurial energies of African American real-estate developer Philip A. Payton Jr. Harlem, race capital. Eventually, the immigrant’s daughter moved to another historic black neighborhood—Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
Harlem: Who wanted to live anywhere else? If given the choice, they probably would have chosen Harlem, but they would have liked having the choice. So each, in her own way, protested the limitations placed on her life and her people, meanwhile helping to build a city within a city: a place full of black and brown faces speaking a multitude of languages, living high and living low, making love, making music, making word-worlds, making new peoples. It was a city of swinging rhythms and bebop changes; a city of weary brown-faced children and adults—some enraged, others resigned; a city that danced the Lindy Hop, modern choreography, and African isolations.
Certainly, these women were not Harlem’s only architects; nor were they its best known. But they, like others, tried to leave their mark on New York. They built a city where people mattered. They were concerned about poor and working people, about women and children, about the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. They brought a radical vision from the 1930s into a new decade, helping to create a political culture that would inspire people worldwide. Thanks to their efforts and the efforts of others like them, Harlem, in the 1940s, sent the first black New Yorker to Congress; helped to elect an Italian Harlemite to that august body, too; and sent a member of the Communist Party to New York’s City Council.
This energetic optimism was often tempered by the ongoing reality of American racial prejudice, even in New York. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, their city feared for itself. It experienced a patriotism so broad that even the mob offered its services. Their city saw its boys (and girls) enlist, and saw its patriotic black sons consigned to a segregated military and sent to the Jim Crow South for boot camp. Their neighborhood joined in the urban uprisings of 1943 that spread from Los Angeles and Texas to Detroit. After the riots, Harlem watched its middle class move to Queens and the Bronx and its white habitués abandon its nightlife. Both would have a devastating impact upon the neighborhood’s economy.
Still, New York beckoned. It recognized their differences as a source of originality. You should come, the city told them; you should be here, you belong, you are invited, you are welcome, stay a while. You are smart enough, beautiful enough, hip enough, tough enough, enterprising enough. You are mine.
And—as with every heart that races at the speed of New York streets, every eye struck with awe at the grand façade of an elegant apartment building or the sheer audacity of a skyscraper, every mouth that smiles at a brief encounter, an overheard conversation, or the constant chatter—these women fell in love with this city. At times, they grew tired, a little weary, and sojourned away from the chaos and confusion of urban life. But always, they couldn’t wait to return, to be back in the crowd, in the thick of it. New York beckoned, and, yes, they came, again and again. Amid the noise, the rush, the thrill, and the trepidation, they came, they settled, they made homes, and they made art.
There was also a cherished quiet. The still silence of a small apartment, where a woman sat at a typewriter in the hour just before dawn. A dance studio where a young woman marked her steps before her students or other members of the company arrived. An early-morning walk through the northern tip of Central Park, where newly fallen snow muffled the sounds of the city and revealed a striking magenta hat. On a pink-covered twin bed in a Sugar Hill apartment, a woman tried to notate the sounds in her head so that she might eventually sleep in peace. These women were alone but not lonely. They knew solitude, welcomed it and the gifts it bore. They welcomed the rare chance to hear their own thoughts, before the city stirred, before rousing from that pink-covered bed.
Their city is a place that nurtures, produces, and challenges not only their art, but also their ideas, their thought, their aesthetic. In their city, they wear pompadours and platform shoes. One woman makes her clothes; one dresses like a bobby-soxer, complete with ankle socks and saddle shoes; and one is inclined to the fashionable life, with her Dior gowns, B. Altman shoes, furs, and orchid corsages. Platforms and pompadours sweep them up high, revealing foreheads and intelligent eyes. Not hiding behind bangs, they are forthright, honest—and the added height doesn’t hurt. Platforms and pompadours “splendidly uprising toward clear skies.”1
Their New York is Sugar Hill, Strivers Row, The Hollow, Upper East Side, The Village, and Bed-Stuy. Their New York speaks Spanish and Jive, French, and West Indian–inflected Queen’s English, in dialects born of the Yankee North and the Black South. And some Saturday mornings the Italians, Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Jews, and southern migrants leave their own Harlem to mingle under the bridge on Park Avenue from 111th to 116th—the open-air markets beneath the railroad tracks. There, the writer tells us, the vendors “quarrel, bargain, exchange insults with customers in Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and American ranging from tough East Side, New York to the soft accents of the Old South.” Under the bridge, “stalls piled with . . . a bewildering variety of foods . . . long-grain Carolina rice, Spanish saffron, chili powder, fresh ginger root, plantains, water cress, olive oil, olives, spaghetti and macaroni, garlic, basil, zucchini, finocchio, white corn meal, collards, mustard greens, black-eyed peas, big hominy and little hominy, spareribs, hot peppers, pimentos, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes.”2
New York, in all of its delirious deliciousness, beckoned, and they came.