Harlem Duet

“SHE: Harlem’s the place to be now. Everyone who’s anyone is coming here now. It’s our time. In our place. It’s what we’ve always dreamed o […] sn’t it?”

She expresses the dream of Harlem—a homogeneous locale where Black people can flourish intellectually, creatively, and socioeconomically. Because She speaks in 1928—the height of the Harlem Renaissance—the words are even more meaningful.

“AMAH: Oh, I can’t rent your ground floor. They won’t give me any insurance ‘cause I don’t have a license. And I can’t get a license until I get a cosmetician’s certificate. And I can’t get a cosmetician’s certificate until I finish this two-year course on how to do White people’s hair and make-up. I told them ain’t no White people in Harlem. I’d learn how to do work with chemical relaxers and Jheri curls. Now, I do dreadlocks. And do they teach that? Oh, no. They’re just cracking down on people who do hair in private homes—something about lost tax revenues. I don’t kno […] want my own salon I can taste it. ‘The Lock Smiths.’”

Amah speaks of her ambition of opening a hair salon in Harlem, but she is facing obstacles imposed by regulations designed and dictated by white decision-makers. Required to take irrelevant classes in white skin and hair care—services that she wouldn’t be delivering in Harlem—her dream is on hold. She opens her speech by telling Magi that she can’t rent the ground floor of the building for the salon she wants so desperately, but the meaning of this statement runs deeper: these obstacles are preventing her from gaining access to the ground floor of entrepreneurism and, by extension, economic autonomy.

“HER: They probably go to a special place though—Cleotis and Venus, Emmett. Purgatory. Venus and Cleotis fall in love, marry, but have no tools to consummate it. Must be a lot of us there walking around in purgatory without genitals.”

Billie’s 1860 precursor speaks of the enslaved people who suffered pain, humiliation, and death at the hands of white supremacy. While she tries to imagine a happier end for them in the next life, she recognizes that they have been irrevocably damaged in this one. Moreover, she sees them in Purgatory as opposed to Heaven, as this is where some branches of Christians believe expiatory purification occurs as preparation for Heaven.