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By Root 447 0

divide the migrants to New York occupied, all were subjected to higher rents than those living in other sections of the city. The Harlem apartments to which they were flocking had been hastily subdivided with flimsy walls and narrow hallways. Many were railroad flats with one room leading directly into the next and no privacy for those who lived there. Coldwater flats were the norm, and often the toilets were shared with others who lived down the dark hallways. Bathing facilities, if they existed beyond a galvanized tub, were in the kitchen, and often the bathtub might do double duty as a bed for an additional tenant to supplement the rent. Kitchens used coal stoves, with only the most modern landlords slowly changing over to piped-in gas in the 1920s and 1930s. Whatever refrigeration existed was provided by the ice man, who hauled blocks of ice up tenement steps for use in iceboxes, where it chilled food until it melted and had to be replaced again a few days later.

Blacks, though, were anxious to establish a foothold; they accepted the conditions and worked to make a good life amid the decay. Small entrepreneurs again turned to the skills they’d acquired doing domestic work and day labor in the South and used them to develop small businesses, which they grew into larger enterprises. In the creation of these small enterprises, they evidenced the same resourcefulness that had enabled generations to survive enslavement. Patsy Randolph used the castoffs of others to create pickles, pepper sauces, spices, and relishes, which she then sold. According to Frank Byrd, who cataloged some of Harlem’s ways for the WPA:

The biggest seller of this entire lot, incidentally, happens to be pickled watermelon rind. Her profits on this Southern delicacy amount to something well over ninety-five percent because the rinds cost her absolutely nothing. She has obtained the permission of store owners who sell individual five-and ten-cent slices at their street stands to collect all the rinds she wants from their baskets. At the height of the summer season, she takes these rinds home, prepares and packs them in fruit jars, and sells them to a highly appreciative buying public that has long since been accustomed to this fine “downhome” dish that adds a tasty flavor to meats, especially roast pork or the more widely favored pork chops.

Others also improvised and took to the streets as vendors selling Southern favorites like the individual described by author Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man. Although his book is a work of fiction, Ellison, like Byrd, had conducted interviews for the WPA with Harlem denizens of the 1920s and 1930s and based the character on reality. Echoing the thoughts of more than one Harlem migrant, he wrote:

Then far down at the corner I saw an old man warming his hands against the side of an odd-looking wagon, from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia. I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back. At home we’d bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them cold to school for lunch; munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World’s Geography. Yes, and we’d loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw—yams and years ago.

Ellison’s evocation of the world—conjured up for the lonely northern migrant by the aroma of roasting sweet potatoes—was reenacted day in and day out on the streets of Harlem and other Northern metropolises where traditional Southern foods were offered to the newly arrived by a multiplicity of vendors selling from stalls and carts along the main thoroughfares of the black neighborhoods.

Life in crowded, less-than-welcoming apartments made Harlem residents take to the streets and provided the uptown neighborhood with a life and vibrancy that was commented