Harlem Shuffle

In James Baldwin’s 1974 novel ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, his native Harlem is a place both of the city and apart from it. Early on, his narrator Tish remembers being a little girl, coming downtown with her sister and father: “We’d watch the people and the buildings and Daddy would point out different sights to us and we might stop in Battery Park and have ice cream and hot dogs. Those were great days and we were always very happy – but that was because of our father, not because of the city. It was because we knew our father loved us. Now, I can say, because I certainly know it now, the city didn’t. They looked at us as though we were zebras – and, you know, some people like zebras and some people don’t. But nobody ever asks the zebra.”

Any consideration of the Harlem cinema of Beale Street’s era should begin with Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), which begins with its own sense of charged perception of people and place. The opening credits play as a Rolls Royce chugs down 125th Street, Harlem’s main drag, past storefronts and street life, the neighbourhood