Having read Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, I cannot wait for the third novel in this series. Whitehead has me hooked on Ray Carney and Pepper, men you hate and yet can’t help but respect and care about. These novels had me reading through the night, damn whatever work I had the next day!
Harlem Shuffle is the first of the series, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It introduces the reader to the primary protagonist, Ray Carney, a black man who grew up and lives in Harlem, NYC. Carney is a successful business owner selling furniture, both new and gently used. His product is both legitimately sourced and… well, less so. The novel revolves around his world and the choices he has to make as a black man living in a white world, in a community where the lines between the licit and illicit are and have always been fluid. His wife, Elizabeth, for example, works in a travel agency who designs agendas for black folks in need of safe passage through white territory governed by Jim Crow legislation and prejudice. This is an era in which lynchings are common. A world before the American Civil Rights movements began.
The novel revolves around Carney and his immediate circle of friends, employees, and family, including his shiftless cousin, Freddie and his overbearing, “politics of respectability” in-laws. Split into three parts, each segment taking place three years apart, the novel is a collection of events that define Carney’s legitimate and less-legitimate career. Each segment revolves around a specific heist or… shall we say, project Carney gets involved in, willingly or otherwise.
Crook Manifesto follows the same format, except that it picks up where Harlem Shuffle leaves off but three years later in 1971. It is a new era in Harlem now. New York City is a different world than what it had been, but little has changed in Harlem. It is still a white man’s world, still a world in which the boundaries between the legal and illegal are fuzzy. Carney finds himself still doing the Harlem shuffle. Carney’s “projects” are criminal and noble, focused on vengeance and utterly righteous. He is a man of many talents and flaws, the kind of man everyone knows because that’s who we are: good and bad and everything in between.
The main attraction of the novel and the series as a whole is not the characters and their stories, or even the world of Harlem in the mid-20th century — though any one of these draws is enough for me — but Whitehead’s delicious prose and witty turn of phrase. Whitehead can evoke an image with just a handful of words, delivered with the kind of finesse only a slick Harlem player possesses; the prose is as smooth as the cons and crimes carried off in the novels. Whitehead’s words pack a punch, sharp and powerful like the ones Pepper throws. The words flow like music, like funk, and you, Reader, you will find yourself dancing to Whitehead’s beat long into the night.
The characters, and Whitehead’s smart crafting of their stories, does warrant mention. Carney, Pepper, Freddie, Marie, Munson, Zippo, Elizabeth, and Big Mike are each their own literary masterpieces. These are real people, visible and tangible. There is an enormous cast, but as the novels build, the reader will find that they make up the urban village that is Harlem, this closed and vulnerable world, an enclave of blackness in white New York. In Harlem Shuffle we fall in love with these characters, understand them and their desires. In Crook Manifesto Whitehead reprises them and we get a deeper view into their vulnerabilities, their powers, their strengths.
Whitehead’s attention to history and the culture of the past is also commendable. Events of the past are woven into the fabric of the story, as it was in reality, a necessary foundation for the way things end up shaking out. No world, even Black Harlem, exists in a vacuum; the events of New York politics as much as Civil Rights events happening in other parts of the country reverberate in Harlem, in the Carney’s living room, in Carney’s furniture showroom.
I. Cannot. Wait. For the next installment in this series.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 