I graduated from college in 2020, which means that a global pandemic upended what was already going to be a deeply transitional time of my life. In that haze of existential crises, I decided that I wanted to be an actor. And I knew that if I wanted to be an actor, I might want to live in New York, even if I had only ever spent eighteen hours there, half of them asleep. I’m a Black girl from the South, so after four years in Boston, I wanted to live where the Black folks stayed at. When I made the move to the city, I landed in Harlem.
In my naivete, I assumed that every time I stepped above 110th Street, I would be rejuvenated and inspired, knowing that people like Zora Neale Hurston and Marian Anderson and Lena Horne had roamed these streets before me. There were certainly days when that felt true, like when I walked down streets lined with brown faces on brownstone stoops. There were other days when that felt very untrue, like when I saw a Black Lives Matter sign posted up in the window of a condominium most Black folks couldn’t afford to live in.
The untrue days wo…