“Grief-stricken for months
The Girl decided to go as far away as possible
From the haunted house on Central Avenue
So she crossed the continent to Harlem
And went to work at a hole-in the-wall restaurant.

When the Greek went out of business
Sue took over the place,
And it wasn’t long before her chittlings
Became the talk of Lenox Avenue
The black folk came from all parts of Harlem ,
And the white folk followed.

If you haven’t eaten in the Chittling Palace ,
You’ve missed one of the delights of life.
Chittling Sue has five apartment houses on Striver’s Row.”

These stanzas from “Chittling Sue” appear in Melvin Tolson’s A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, one of the writer’s most hilarious and provocative collections. Perhaps by now you’ve heard of Tolson. Denzel Washington portrays him in the movie, The Great Debaters. While Washington does a wonderful job evoking Tolson the teacher and mentor to his triumphant Wiley College debaters, viewers learn little about Tolson the poet.

To a great degree, Tolson’s reputation as a poet rests mainly on his book-length Harlem Gallery: Book 1, The Curator, published in 1965. While this poem is a challenging organization of metaphors, images, and cultural references, A Gallery of Harlem Portraits is “loose and sprawling…and brief dramatic portraits of Harlem life,” according to Robert Farnsworth, Tolson’s biographer.

Tolson was a student at Columbia University in 1931 when most of the characters in the book were depicted, and many of them resembled famous Harlemites. Students of Harlem ’s history will immediately identify Chittling Sue with Pig Foot Mary or Lillian Harris, an enterprising southerner who parlayed the selling of pig feet and chitterlings into a vast real estate empire. (Tolson probably knew of her by legend since she had died two years before he came to Harlem .)

If Tolson had stayed around more than a year, he might have caricatured even more notables from Harlem ’s first generation of settlers. One can only speculate on how he would have viewed Philip Payton, John Nail, and Henry Parker, three prominent African American realtors, all of whom were contemporaries of Pig Foot Mary.

We may not possess Tolson’s perception but we are smart enough to see a template in his musings, and it is a useful guide toward highlighting some of the personalities who helped to develop Harlem ’s early years.

Philip Payton (1876-1917) was widely known as the “Father of Colored Harlem.” Born in Massachusetts , Payton arrived in New York City in 1899. Trained as a barber, he chose instead to try his hand as a realtor after a succession of menial jobs. He was managing tenements for a white landlord when he decided to form his own company. With the Black community pushed further and further up the island, Payton recognized that Harlem was the next big real estate market.

By 1904, Payton and his associates had founded the Afro-American Realty Company, capitalized at $500,000 (50,000 shares sold at $10 each). Things were running smoothly until the white-owned Hudson Realty company sought to evict black tenants from property they had purchased from Payton and replace them with white tenants. “Payton, in turn, ‘blocked them’ by buying two other houses on ( 135 th Street ) and evicting the white tenants in them,” wrote Gilbert Osofsky in Harlem :The Making of a Ghetto .

Soon, a good portion of 135 th Street belonged to him, a veritable Payton’s place, (at a time when paying $18.00 a month for rent was considered exorbitant) but he pricked his own balloon by promising investment returns that he could not fulfill. Within four years the company was bankrupt and Payton was reduced to working again for other realtors.

Payton never saw how the trail he had blazed mushroomed into a community of 50,000 soon after his death in 1917. He was aware, however, of the success of John Nail (1883-1947) and Henry Parker, who made their own mark mostly from managing the real estate affairs of St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Nail, a native New Yorker, was the son of a popular saloon owner, and this was his introduction to business. By 1907, he and Parker were well on their way to facilitating the movement of vast numbers of African Americans from lower and midtown Manhattan to Harlem .

Nail’s cultural cache was embellished when James Weldon Johnson married his sister. Later he would become the first president of the Negro Board of Trade in Harlem and the first black elected to the Real Estate Board of New York. He held several other prestigious positions (in the 1920s he was on the board of directors for Black Swan Records) before his death in 1947.

Nail and Parker and Payton were shrewd operators, but they could have taken some lessons from Pig Foot Mary (1870-1929). Lillian Harris was born in a shanty in Mississippi , but the state could not contain or limit her ambitions. She left and arrived in New York City in 1901, two years after Payton. With the $5 she earned as a domestic worker, she purchased an old baby carriage, a large wash boiler, and some pigs’ feet—and she was in business. A midtown saloon owner let her cook the pig feet on his stove. She then hawked her products on the streets of Manhattan .

It wasn’t long before folks were hooked on her delicacies (expanded to include corn on the cob and chitterlings) and the ever frugal Harris soon had a sizable nest egg. Hurrying to keep up with her patrons, she joined the wave of blacks headed to Harlem where she set up her stall at 135 th Street and Lenox Avenue . Her stall was right next to John Dean’s newsstand. They soon merged their businesses in marriage. This provided Mary with the additional funds she needed to begin investing in property.

Mrs. Dean bought a five-story apartment house at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 137 th Street for $44,000, James Weldon Johnson related in his essay “The Making of Harlem,” in Alain Locke’s The New Negro. “Later she sold it to the YWCA for dormitory purposes. The YWCA sold it recently to Adolph Howell, a leading colored undertaker, the price given being $72,000,” Johnson added. She flipped this property and purchased others, including houses at 69-71 West 138 th Street , 164 West 144 th Street , and 2324 Seventh Avenue . Among her objectives was to have a place where she could open an old folks’ home and where she could spend her remaining years. But this prospect was way down the road and long after her marriage to John Dean whom sheconvinced to plunk down $42,000 to buy the apartment building. Mrs. Dean was merely following in the footsteps of Madam C.J. Walker, who by the time of her death in 1919 was considered one of the richest women in America , and the first black woman millionaire.

These investments were just a few of several good ones that Mrs. Dean would make as she accumulated a real estate empire that would be worth more than $375,000. Much of this vast wealth was the result of her keen business acumen that brooked no lag in payments she was due. “Send it and send it damn quick,” was her admonition to her tenants and agents.

While she was raking in the money from her real estate holdings and other ventures, she found ways to give back to the community through an assortment of charitable events. Annually, she “entertained the Working Women’s League with an old fashioned pig foot dinner,” cited a story in The New York Age.

Mrs. Dean was on vacation in Los Angeles (she owned property here and in Pasadena ) when she was stricken and had to undergo surgery. She died on July 16, 1929 , several months before the stock market crash. Her body was shipped back to Harlem for burial. She had been retired from active business for over ten years, spending much of leisure time traveling about the world. Like Florence Mills two years before her and A’Lelia Walker two years afterward, Mrs. Dean’s body lay in state at Howell’s Funeral Parlor. Hundreds attended her funeral where her minister The Rev. Dr. J. W. Brown of Mother AME Zion Church and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. officiated. Both ministers extolled her thrift and her desire to help her people.

From Pig Foot Mary to Mrs. Dean, she amassed a fortune, and no matter the era for such wealth, this was a remarkable achievement, particularly when you consider that she could neither read nor write.

The storied careers of Philip Payton, John Nail and Pig Foot Mary were often chronicled in the New York Amsterdam News, founded by James Anderson in 1909, the year the NAACP came into existence. Anderson resided in San Juan Hill when he started the paper with $10, five dollars more than Pig Foot Mary had when she began her venture. Named after the street where he lived, the Amsterdam News blossomed into a very competitive paper, often exceeding the circulation of some of the city’s older black publications.

In 1926, right in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance era, Sadie Warren bought the paper. Her husband had been one of the first publishers. Ten years later she sold it to Clelan Bethan Powell and Philip Savory, two doctors from the Caribbean . Both were astute businessman and the paper quickly realized a broad readership, distributed all over the world. A lengthy book is required to enumerate all of the Harlem’s significant pioneers—“The Father of Black History” Arturo Alphonso Schomburg , World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson, Rose McClendon, Marcus Garvey, the trailblazing trailblazing actress & dancer Anita Bush, and the photographer, James Van Der Zee.

Concluding this essay with a few words about James Van Der Zee (1886-1984), “Mr. Picture Taking Man,” is apropos since he more than any other photographer captured the diverse style and essence of the community’s first generation. Like Philip Payton, Van Der Zee was a product of Massachusetts . He opened his studio in Harlem in 1916, just in time to immortalize in photos the returning veterans of the 369 th Regiment who served so gallantly in Europe .

Van Der Zee’s portrait of Needham Roberts and Henry Johnson, members of the Harlem Hell Fighters in uniform posing in front of a fireplace in his studio at 272 Lenox Avenue contrasted greatly to the dead people in coffins he photographed. Often presented with double exposures, these were Van Der Zee’s way of capturing both the living and the dead of Harlem , simultaneously. And he did not discriminate. A shoeless, virtually homeless prophet was just as likely to appear in his studio as the esteemed Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church .

In 1938, Van Der Zee took a portrait of a Black woman—who had inherited her wealth from her employer— in a finely appointed bedroom. The setting is resplendent and luxurious, the kind of opulence that Pig Foot Mary attained before her death. There is no evidence that he took photos of Pig Foot Mary or John Nail or Philip Payton, but he emulated their pioneering real estate zeal by subletting rooms in houses that he and his wife had rented. Van Der Zee’s camera was ubiquitous, and from his hundreds of photos one gathers a lasting impression of Harlem during its early years, years that provided the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance and the succeeding decades that gave the community an international reputation.