“then I moved to Harlem”: The Worlds of Ntozake Shange

Barnard alumna Ntozake Shange (BC ’70) is both the perfect subject for a #HarlemSemester course and a vexed one. One of her most enduring collaborations began in Harlem with choreographer Dianne McIntyre at the Sounds in Motion studio, which in the 1970s and 80s was the only Modern Dance studio in Harlem. However, her best-known evocation of Harlem is of street harassment:

I usedta live in the world
a woman in the world
i hadda right to the world
then I moved to Harlem.

The refrain “then I moved to Harlem” in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf captures the dilemma of black women caught between the special promise of belonging for blacks in Harlem and the gendered estrangement and depersonalization we often face in its streets. To have Harlem in mind while studying Shange is to bring her loving attention to black womanhood, gender, space, and movement to a place—like so many—where black women’s concerns are overlooked.

Our first official Harlem Semester class was actually held in midtown as part of our partnership with The International Center for Photography (ICP). While conducting archival research at our Harlem partner, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the students will learn the basics of photography and digital editing at ICP. Bradly Treadaway, an artist and my ICP co-teacher, introduced us to the photographic traditions behind Roy DeCarava/Langston Hughes’ Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955) and Ntozake Shange’s collaboration with the Kamoinge collective/Frank Stewart, The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family (2004). These works, dialogues between photography and image set in Harlem, launched what will be a semester long conversation about how one combines text and image to “make” art and scholarship. When we chose Sweet Breath of Life to start the semester, we had no idea that at this very moment Kamoinge would be experiencing a resurgence of public attention. The week before class, ICP was gifted Timeless, the first major catalogue of Kamoinge’s work, and next week the Schomburg is hosting Visually Speaking: The Timeless Art of Kamoinge, an event devoted to their fifty-year history of black image-making.

We were extremely fortunate that Bradly has been much influenced by photographer Roy DeCarava who he says was “grossly under-recognized” by the art world for much of his life. Born in Harlem in 1919, DeCarava was the first African-American to win the prestigious Guggenheim award to document a year of Harlem life. His images revel in the beauty of everyday black life, ranging from the now-iconic sight of boys playing in open fire hydrants to the intimacy of a women enjoying a moment of solitude in a window, to a couple at a house party. Looking at them now, we can see the brilliance of his artistry, but to understand why his focus on the ordinary was so remarkable and so misunderstood, it helps to remember that his images existed against a background of the popular black stereotypes and images of black poverty even more dominant than now.

DeCarava was not able to find a publisher for his work: it was only when Langston Hughes agreed to lend his voice to the photographs that Simon and Shuster agreed to publish an inexpensive edition. Out of the images, Hughes creates a story told through the voice of Sister Mary Bradley, a transplanted South Carolinian living at 113 West 134th Street at the dawn of integration. She is called “home” to heaven, but refuses the message because “I might be sick, but as yet I ain’t no ways tired.” The images are in dialogue with her ruminations about her family and Harlem life: we meet Rodney, the troublesome grandson, “Ella’s mother,” and her “middle boy.” Hughes text makes visible in DeCarava’s photographs an idea of Harlem as an extended family in the black diaspora (something James Baldwin also noted as an “almost African” quality of Harlem (I Remember Harlem).

If Sweet Flypaper of Life is bracketed by transitions from South to North, segregation to integration, and life to death, Sweet Breath of Life is literally framed by black girlhood, a state of beauty and possibility that drives Shange’s art. The first pairing of text and image foregrounds two major themes: the significance of black girlhood and the need for black adornment/self-creation:

a girl needs quiet to get to herself
my made self decorated with my braids

Shange’s work always makes space for black girls: she knows how often the world forgets their need to “get to herself”–to dream, ponder, imagine– away from outside definitions (and the catcalls) that come with black womanhood. As with Hughes’ dialogue with DeCarava’s photographs, Shange gives us a lens for seeing qualities that might be hidden to the inattentive. If we couldn’t see the girl’s momentum, her multiple positions, her connection to family and Harlem history in the Lon Draper photograph, we know from the poem that the everyday black girl is a sacred creature, full of possibility: she is a “grand lil girl in all of her glory.” The playful typography projects variation and movement, unique like her:

grand ol’ houses that have seen better days
but never anyone like me.

She is, as much as the ivy embellished walls, rooted in Harlem:

my dreams
ivies up the walls of this grand ol’ house /rushin’
out the corner of my eyes / do you see
something out there for me?

For more information about Harlem Semester, email harlemsemester@gmail.com

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