Authors: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
“Bring my daughters with you”
:
Ibid.
one of the greatest
:
Carlos A. Cooks, “There Is Going to Be a New Day,”
The Black Challenge
, 1961, 9.
Oh my body
:
Frantz Fanon, “By Way of Conclusion,” in
Black Skin, White Masks
(New York: Grove Press, 2008), 206.
Well, there can’t be a wrong direction for her
:
The speaker is New York State Senator Bill Perkins, quoted in Herb Boyd, “Several Plazas Planned for Harlem,”
New York Amsterdam News,
October 25, 2007.
“Harlem is a victim of cynical”
: Harold Cruse, “Mass Media and Cultural Democracy,” in
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership
(New York: NYRB Classics, 2005), 86.
the New Black Panthers… have been disavowed
: The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. “There Is No New Black Panther Party: An Open Letter from the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation,”
www.blackpanther.org/newsalert.htm
(accessed May 18, 2010). See also Dean Murphy, “Black Panthers, Gone Gray, Fight Rival Group,”
New York Times
, October 8, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/08/us/black-panthers-gone-gray-fight-rival-group.html?scp=1&sq=black+panthers&st=nyt
(accessed May 3, 2010).
Look for me in the whirlwind
:
Marcus Garvey, “First Message to the Negroes of the World from Atlanta Prison, February 10, 1925,” in
Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey,
239.
African drumming is wonderful…. Some of these drums are prayed over
:
Verena Dobnik, “African Drummers Face ‘New Harlemites,’ ”
USA Today
, August 11, 2007.
the first monuments to be constructed
:
UNESCO. “National History Park – Citadel, Sans Souci, Ramiers – UNESCO World Heritage Centre.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Official Site.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/180
(accessed May 18, 2010).
corvée
:
Nathan J. Brown, “Who Abolished Corvée Labour in Egypt and Why?,”
Past and Present
144 (1994): 116 – 37.
A new building has risen
: Josh Barbanel, “Harlem’s Newest Beacon,”
New York Times,
March 11, 2007.
“The vast twenty-eight-story tower”
:
www.5thonthepark.com
(accessed August 29, 2010).
Thus, the memory of that building
:
Rabbi Sholomo Ben Levy, “The Destruction of Commandment Keepers, Inc.” Black Jews,
http://www.blackjews.org/Essays/DestructionofCommandmentKeepers.html
(accessed May 8, 2010).
“It is a shame for the authorities”
:
New York Times,
“Watch Tower of Harlem: The Old Landmark in Bad Condition, Liable to Succumb to Heavy Storm,” September 13, 1896.
the notice of his death
: Andy Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax,”
New York Times,
April 8, 2002.
high fashion from plastic bags
:
New York Amsterdam News,
December 12, 1987.
Notables who had purchased his work
: Hilton Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities,”
The New Yorker
(June 13, 1994), 39.
he enjoyed solo shows
: Raven Chanticleer curriculum vitae from Raven Chanticleer File, Schomburg Center, New York.
Chanticleer performed
: “Wax Museum on New Track,”
New York Daily News,
November 24, 1997.
He made a memorable entrance
: Ibid.
immaculately attired
:
Mel Tapley, “Visit Raven Chanticleer’s Wax Museum,”
New York Amsterdam News,
December 4, 1993.
I got into my wax thing
:
Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”
wondrous vibrant art form
:
“Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,”
New York Times,
November 5, 1993.
I was impressed
:
Adam Tanner, “Madame Tussaud Could Learn from Harlem Wax Artist,”
Christian Science Monitor,
January 30, 1995.
The first figure immortalized
: “Wax Museum on New Track,”
New York Daily News
.
His effigy was soon joined
: Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”
Local
herons and sherons
:
John O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud:
Artiste
Mixes Wax and Fiction at Black Museum,”
New York Post,
December 7, 1993.
on loan to an exhibition in Europe
: Anthony Ramirez, “At a Wax Museum, Black History Runs in Red,”
New York Times,
April 12, 1998.
Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes
:
New New York Beacon,
“Statues Symbolize the New Harlem Renaissance,” September 2, 1999.
the singer Madonna, depicted with black skin
: O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”
Every black home should have
:
Nathan Jackson, “Paying Homage to Black History,”
New York Newsday,
February 21, 1993.
a version of the Last Supper
: Ibid.
cotton-fields in the South
: Ibid.
shanty-life in Haiti
:
Tim Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic,”
New York Spirit
, June 3, 1993.
some skeletal bones
:
Jackson, “Paying Homage.”
the Port Royal experiment
: Willie Lee Nichols Rose,
Rehearsal for
Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
And now, kind friends
:
Unattributed.
The Harlem rituals of death
:
Camille Billops, James Van Der Zee, and Owen Dodson,
Harlem Book of the Dead
(Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978), 1.
To make this dead gentleman
:
Ibid., 82.
I’ll tell you tomorrow
:
Ibid., 4.
the point of departure for Toni Morrison’s novel
Jazz
:
Gloria Naylor, “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,”
Southern Review
21 (1985): 567 – 93.
I didn’t know they had stopped
:
Billops et al.,
Harlem Book of the Dead,
82.
the epic lamentation of Isis
: James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(London: Macmillian & Co., 1919), 12.
The
Tibetan Book of the Dead
:
See Karma-Glin-Pa and Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz,
Tibetan Book of the Dead
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
I had to come back
:
Jackson, “Paying Homage.”
I imagined myself as some kind of pioneer
:
“Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,”
New York Times,
November 5, 1993.
crossing West 110th Street
:
Als, “The Talk of the Town: Afrocentricities.”
His father was born in Haiti
: “Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,”
New York Times
.
It felt like Harlem was the center of the world
:
Ibid.
Harlem is coming back
:
Dennis Wepman, “Harlem Waxes Proud,”
New York Daily News,
February 7, 1991.
His work is cataloged
:
Gloria Smith, “A Profile of Raven Chanticleer,”
The New Voice of New York
(Jamaica, NY), September 30, 1999.
The reason for the helicopter’s flight
: Eric Konigsberg and Christine Hauser, “Eight Wounded in Harlem Shootings,”
New York Times,
May 27, 2008, sec. The City/NY Region.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html?ref=nyregion
(accessed May 11, 2010).
born and raised in Harlem
:
Smith, “A Profile of Raven Chanticleer.”
actually born James Watson
: Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”
old mentors from the University of Timbuktu
:
Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic.”
A niece is quoted in the obituary
: Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”
I could read and write
:
O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”
He appears in 1930
: Year: 1930; Census Place: Woodruff, Spartanburg, SC; Roll 2213: Page 5B; Enumeration District 70; Image 263.0.
Ancestry.com
. 1930 United States Federal Census [database online]. Provo, UT:
Ancestry.com
Operations, 2002.
considered the name
: for
chanticleer,
see Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” in
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
edited by Alfred W. Pollard (New York: MacMillan and Company, 1907), 402 – 26. For raven mythology in Native American cultures, see Eleazar Meletinsky,
The Poetics of Myth
(New York: Routledge, 2000), 170 – 72.
I’m an
artiste
: O’Mahony, “Move Over, Mme. Tussaud.”
I love beautiful things
:
Cavanaugh, “Waxing Poetic.”
In the midst of ugliness
:
Ibid.
I started the museum
:
Wepman, “Harlem Waxes Proud.”
I created these wax figures
:
“Rebuilding Dreams in Wire and Wax,”
New York Times
.
The wax museum has been my dream
: Melinda Clare, “Raven Chanticleer’s African American Wax Museum,”
The Shield
(New York), April 19, 1994.
just in case something should happen to me
:
Newman, “Raven Chanticleer, 72, Artist and Self-Made Man of Wax.”
Matter of fact
:
Angela Briggins, “Raven Chanticleer Takes Wax to the Max,”
The City Sun
(New York), May 17, 1993.
“One of the songs played”
: David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York: Random House, 1981), 15.
“W. E. B. DuBois summarized”
: W. E. B. DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,”
The Crisis
, Vol. 18 (May 1919): 13.
“We march because”
: Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby,
The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History
(New York: New York Public Library, 1967), 200.
3. Searching for the Underground City
6. Land Is the Basis of All Independence
A conversation with the author of
Harlem Is Nowhere
Questions and topics for discussion
Extraordinary acclaim for Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s
HARLEM IS NOWHERE
Copyright © 2011 by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Reading group guide copyright © 2013 by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Nneka Bennett
Cover photograph by Geraint Lewis / Alamy
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-316-04033-4