UPTOWNflavor

110th Street between Eighth and Fifth Avenues is where Central Park begins or ends, depending on your perspective of New York City. For sure, though, that is where Harlem begins. I grew up just four blocks north on 114th Street between Eighth and Seventh Avenues in “downtown Harlem.”

My friends and neighbors were people of African descent who had fled the southern United States of America, some beginning after World War 1 – such as my great uncle Bob, who fought in France with the famed 369th out of Harlem. Others were from Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and other Spanish, or French- and English-speaking Caribbean, Central or South American countries.

We had some white and near-white people too, including Jews from West and East Europe. In fact, my family shared an apartment building with blacks, mulattos, and other partially white families who were referred to as quadroon or octoroon.

In pre-rap Harlem, music was everywhere: gospel, blues, jazz, classical and what we called “Latin” – the sounds of Mother Africa that called our spirits through the conga drum, bongos, timbales and cow bells.

From our Latino and other Caribbean brothers, we learned how to make the drum – how to soak and stretch the sheep skin and how to choose and treat the wood; and, of course, how to play the “spirit” rhythms and sounds. (On the U. S. A. slave plantations, Africans were denied the drum so they could not communicate with each other nor with the spirit world they knew.)

We also learned to dance the mambo, son, cha-cha, bolero and meringue and added a Harlem style to the Cuban, Puerto Rican and Dominican. Spending a week or two with friends in the Caribbean and Central America during New York’s cold January and February was a custom for many Harlemites back in the day. And we always longed to visit Cuba.

From the prospective of East Harlem, the South Bronx and Washington Heights in New York, it was a foregone conclusion that Latinos were mostly black to near-white in skin color.

Read the rest of the article: South Florida Times

By: Al Calloway