Tag Archives: Ralph Ellison

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“So, Harlem?” a friend said to me recently, when we ran into one another near our sons’ Upper East Side high school. She was referring to my family’s recent move to St. Nicholas Avenue and 146th Street, officially Sugar Hill, a once wealthy African American enclave immortalized in Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train” and home to such Harlem Renaissance luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Duke Ellington, Thurgood Marshall, and W. E. B. Du Bois. “Good for you.”

I tried to parse the meaning of the compliment, which I knew, because I love this friend, was paved with the best intentions. Good for me because she knew we’d been hit hard by the recession, and we needed to move to a cheaper neighborhood, so we moved? Or good for me because we’d been squeezing three children into a two bedroom apartment and now, for significantly less rent every month, we have three bedrooms, an office, and a deck? Or good for me because I’m now a white denizen of a predominantly black neighborhood, and that, along with a black man in the White House, is a sign of progress?

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