Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

In this dream Harlem, the avenues are even wider and more grand. I visit elegant lounges that have mahogany fittings and floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the avenue—striped silk curtains billow in the breeze. In that dream Harlem, that nowhere Harlem, I reach the campus of City College by ascending the face of a ragged cliff many times more treacherous than the steps of St. Nicholas Park. In these settings unfold various plots of which I am not quite the author.

A man came up to the row of benches and began dashing back and forth in front of us, and then into and out of the street. He was dressed in athletic clothes and possessed by a remarkable purpose: he was shadowboxing while delivering rhyming couplets.

… there they are marching, and there is the man who brings a van from North Carolina loaded with sausage links, boiled peanuts, pickled eggs, and peaches and sorghum syrup and collard greens, which he sells from the street. There are the girls playing double-dutch, there is that man who kept a tiger in his apartment, and yes, oh, there is Bill Clinton, we see him so infrequently at his office on 125^th Street! There is this week’s winner of Amateur Night at the Apollo, there are the Korean American owners of Harlem’s most popular chain of soul-food buffet restaurants, there are those socialites going to the fabulous Harlem Renaissance parties, which I am quite tired of hearing about. They are all gathered at the parade.