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I felt that I was walking among the ghosts of Harlem's past, that I was
coming here as they had come here, as Langston Hughes had come and Duke
Ellington had come, as they all had come: the washerwoman and the seamstress;
the heiress and the showgirl; the hard-laboring man and the vagrant; the high
and mighty, the lowly and disregarded; the leaders and the followers; artists
and intellectuals -- coming home, coming to find peace, coming to gain in Harlem
a sense of self and a new way of defining oneself, blackness, black culture,
black awareness, that was independent of the white world's limiting influence
and strictures and prying eyes. Here they and we and I could live completely
within ourselves, in a world all black, all our own and of our own making. Editions
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