Ah, Harlem! You seductress. You dress up so fine in your cinnamon silks, your bronze brocades, your parties adorned by dazzling diamond wit that sparkles like chilled champagne.

I’ll admit I get lulled by your siren song. The one that calls me on that Negro sea. But your plan is to dash me on the rocks. Don’t fool yourself: you put us all in our places, where the mechanical gods have been replaced by brown replicas and where uplift is achieved only through exclusion. What chance had Helga with you? With no pedigree, no illustrious past? The friends like Anne enforced their own segregation: no whites, no sensuality, no disagreement with the political paradigm.

Trust me, I’ve seen it all before. Back in Chicago, I had some fine, society friends like Helga’s at Wendell Phillips High. High falutin’, we should have called it, with our studies in German, Algebra, Ancient History, and the classics. But just like in Harlem, the circles were defined and fixed. The underground fraternities and sororities, however much they might have respected my mind, never sought out the company of working-class me with my struggling, immigrant parents. I saw many of them again in my time with you up on 135^th Street, but what we called the “Chicago club” never invited me to their get-togethers.

But you don’t need my story to be convinced. Remember the wedding? The wedding? Countee Cullen and Yolande DuBois. (Let’s say that again in hushed, reverent tones.) Your Negro tide rushed in: 1300 invited guests. Another thousand pressed and baited outside the church. Sixteen bridesmaids and ushers the likes of Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Canaries singing in gilded cages (though we all are as captives in your gleaming streets), and W.E.B. just barely talked out of releasing 1000 doves to mark the occasion. Yes, an event of brotherhood and sisterhood and unity and racial rising and the best of the best of the talented tenth.

But scratch the surface of that talent, and gilt it is indeed. All of us in the know knew that Countee would rather have honeymooned with one of the ushers. None of us were surprised with the divorce just two years later. That’s why I threw a cocktail party instead of attending. Better a cool drink than all that hot air.

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