High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [81]
The Harlem they arrived in had not always been black. In the federal days and well into the nineteenth century, blacks in New York City had lived downtown and then in the area now known as Greenwich Village. As the city grew, they moved north. By the late nineteenth century, the majority of the black population had moved uptown to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties, to an area called the “Tenderloin.” Following that, folks moved as far north as the San Juan Hill neighborhood, near West Fifty-third Street, where they had the opportunity to live in bigger and better-built apartments. Finally, around the turn of the twentieth century, the move uptown began. Harlem, originally spelled “Haarlem,” was a suburb for the Dutch and German bourgeoisie that had been overbuilt. Landlords had difficulty finding tenants for their new buildings. The move of blacks into the neighborhood began slowly at first, centered on one or two buildings east of Lenox Avenue; then gradually the line moved west. It met with resistance and with reprisals and created bitter battles. When the tipping point was reached, white flight resulted and left Harlem wide open to new black tenants.
In Harlem, as in other northern communities around the country, the newly arrived had to survive on what African American writer Ralph Ellison called “shit, grit, and mother wit.” They found their way and soon established their bailiwicks, as—like many of the developing black neighborhoods around the country—Harlem divided itself between the sacred and the profane: The Sunday saints were firmly on one side of the divide, and the Saturday-night sinners, with their bars and clubs, were equally firmly on the other.
Herlem soon offered a vibrant network of African American churches of myriad denominations that became the mainstay of the new communities, offering guidance in negotiating the complex byways to employment and serving as gathering places for the newly arrived by providing contact with others in like circumstances. Church functions became the social bedrock for those on the ecclesiastical side of the community divide. Births, weddings, funerals, and all of life’s stages were accompanied by the resounding “Hallelujahs” and “Amens” of fellow brothers and sisters. Southern churches partnered with their Northern counterparts and pushed the move north as well by forming migration clubs—groups that monitored newspapers for jobs and cut through much of the red tape for those who were unskilled, often illiterate, and unable to negotiate the bureaucracy. Letters from the faithful in the North encouraged the journeys of those remaining in the South, and the umbilicus was maintained between Up North and the folks left back home.
The Saturday-night sinners also created their own Northern world: one where the juke joints and Saturday-night stomps of the South were transformed into blues clubs and jazz dens of the North. It was a time of progress but also a time of homesickness and uprootedness—when a pigfoot and a bottle of beer could bring relief from the travails of the Northern world that was not the promised nirvana. The Northern migrants found sustenance and like company in the small eateries that were being formed in newly nascent black neighborhoods. Often run by women who catered out of their rooming houses or apartments, these spots grew into small mom-and-pop restaurants known to those in the neighborhood for providing fried chicken and okra, hog maws and collard greens—in short, the comfort food the displaced Southerners craved.
Whatever side of the