A Welcome America love story: How one July 4 in Philly led to a marriage, a book, and a shared sense of community

On July 4, 2009, author Nina Sharma came to Philadelphia from New York to visit her friend Justine — not to celebrate the holiday, but to celebrate Michael Jackson, who had died nine days earlier.

That night, she met the man she would eventually marry.

Quincy Jones — Justine’s friend — was a poet who had grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs in Willingboro, N.J. After finishing his undergraduate degree at Brown University, he moved back to the city to attend grad school at Temple and was teaching at Arcadia University.

Trying to get to a friend’s barbecue as The Roots played the Welcome America concert, Jones drove Sharma and Justine through “a mess of detour signs and orange traffic cones, a maze designed to make Ben Franklin Parkway into a public square and the Museum of Art’s ‘Rocky Steps’ a concert stage,” Sharma writes in her book, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown.

She, a daughter of Indian immigrants and doctors from New Jersey. He, a poet whose family runs Overbrook’s Yarborough & Rocke Funeral Home, one of the oldest Black-owned funeral homes in the city.

It was a Welcome America meet-cute.

Sharma’s book chronicles their relationship, which winds in and out of Philly over the years. It’s an account of solidarity between communities of color — particularly Black and South Asian communities.

It’s also a Philadelphia time capsule.

On an early date-like hang at the now-shuttered South Street nightclub Fluid, Justine, Jones, and Sharma saw Questlove DJ by an empty dance floor. “The Roots aren’t yet the 11:30 house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, but they aren’t that far off,” Sharma writes.

They had gotten to the club early because, bound by a post-Prohibition-era law, all alcohol sales in Philly must end at 2 a.m. Sharma, hoping to spend more time with Jones, put on a tube dress.

“And it felt so ordinary,” she said. “Quincy and Justine were starstruck as well. But they were also like, ‘Oh yes. This is Philly.’ Musicians are part of the fabric of the community, especially The Roots. That was lovely to witness.”

Nightlife in Philly, she said, has two incarnations. Once the clubs closed at 2 a.m., they’d go over to Chinatown’s David’s Mai Lai Wah or hang out at a friend’s house.

“There’s this kind of rich after-hours community in Philly that I love,” she said.

On a later date, Sharma asked Jones to take her to his favorite place. He brought her to the corner of North 63rd and West Oxford Streets — the site of the family’s funeral home, founded in 1928.

“My grandfather worked there after World War II. It passed to him, then to my aunt, to now my cousin,” said Jones. “I’ve always loved it. Most people are going there to grieve, but it is a place where I could pop in and just hang out.”

His cousin lives next door, he said, and the place often gets used for parties.

Much like Fluid — a space for those who love hip-hop — the funeral home is a place for the community to gather.

“I’ve been there for parties,” said Sharma. “Quincy’s grandmom has pulled me on the dance floor and we’ve done the Electric Slide.”

“My book is about solidarity,” she said. “And I think having spaces like that is what solidarity is about; spaces that embrace Blackness, having all of us from the margins coming and supporting those places.”

From Eastwick, the book — and the couple’s lives — moves through Bala Cynwyd, a marriage proposal in Cape May, and then, as Sharma puts it, “across City Avenue [to Mansion at Bala, the apartment complex], so we had to start paying sewage tax.”

“I call it City Avenue and everyone knows I am not from here,” she said. “They just call it ‘City Line.’”

That condominium is what the couple considers their first home together.

“They’d done the floors, and we didn’t know that. So we just stepped on them and for the longest time, her footprint and my little shoe print was embedded on this nicely polished floor,” Jones said.

“Like we were a baby couple with that footprint,” said Sharma.

The city is also where her book took shape.

“I wouldn’t have been the writer I am if it wasn’t for Philly. If it wasn’t for [Mount Airy’s] Big Blue Marble Bookstore where I worked, if it wasn’t for the mentor who I took memoir classes with.”

“Philly was a lot quieter than New York,” she said, “and I needed that stillness to become a writer.”

The couple has since moved to New York, where both now teach at Barnard College. While The Way You Make Me Feel is Sharma’s first book, Jones has written two poetry books: The T-Bone Series (2009) and How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children (2021).

Every time Jones comes to Philly, “they greet me like they saw me yesterday.”

“That to me is how much of Philly I have in me. Cities change, they grow, and yet in Philly, it feels like we haven’t left. We’re family.”

“Philly nurtured both of us,” said Sharma.

Sixteen years since that Welcome America gridlock, are they still a Philly couple with a Philly love story?

“Oh yeah, listen. The July 4 concert on the Parkway. I never went there in years because it’s too many people and they have cameras right on stage. Why would I want to go all the way down there in the heat? The one time I go, I meet my wife,” said Jones.

His wife gushed, sitting on a chair.

“My God, this feels like you fed him something for me. It just makes my day.”

An earlier version of the article misstated the location for Yarborough & Rocke Funeral Home. It’s in Overbrook.