It’s All Freddie’s Fault

American literature, race, the art of narrative

Harlem Shuffle a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Anchor Books.  318 pp.  $17.00. *****

Colson Whitehead, it seems, can do anything as a writer.  The Underground Railroad—which first brought the writer to my attention—was a wild fantasy about life under slavery and about the African American experience.  It won the National Book Award and was made into a film series by Barry Jenkins.  The Nickel Boys, if anything, was even more devastating, about a kind of reform school for young (supposed) criminals in Florida.  It won the Pulitzer Prize.  I had huge admiration for both of these novels, and for the skill with which they were written, but found them emotionally difficult to read.

Now comes something altogether different.  Harlem Shuffle is a crime caper, set in Harlem in the Sixties.  It’s not that it doesn’t deal with race at all; the third section takes place in the midst of riots that began because the police had killed a young black man, making it seem very contemporary.  Actually, though, the Harlem of this novel is much different from that neighborhood today, and the story focuses on a single character, Ray Carney, and his earnest attempts to escape a life of crime.[1]

Ray when we first meet him owns a furniture store on 125th Street.  He has some quality furniture and some formerly used stuff, and his business is hanging by a thread.  He does have good business sense, and seems poised for success.  His problem is his cousin Freddie, who always got him into trouble when they were young (for a while they lived under the same roof) and has an uncanny knack for doing that again, even while he’s trying to help.  Freddie has gotten entangled in plans for a major robbery, and in an attempt to help his cousin, he mentions Ray as a possible fence for the goods they come up with.  Ray is not really in that business, though he has sold a few pieces of furniture that fell off a van.  If you do it with furniture, why not with other things, Freddie reasons.  He’s trying to ingratiate himself with his partners, also do a little something for his cousin.

Both men are the children of criminals.  We discover eventually that Ray’s father was not only a substantial criminal, a known man in Harlem, but he inadvertently left Ray the money to start his business, a fact that we don’t discover until well into the novel.  If you believe in karma, or the sins of the father being visited on the children, you begin to see that there was something slightly corrupt about Ray’s business from the get-go.  There’s also the fact that his cousin has gotten him into trouble all his life.  He can’t seem to escape those two things.

There are three distinct sections to this novel, three acts to the play, and in a certain way the second is the most interesting to me.  Ray by that time has two children by his beautiful wife Elizabeth, has moved to a nicer apartment partly because of the “help” that Freddie gave him, and he’s in a place where he can legitimately aspire to join the Dumas Club, an organization for prosperous African American men which his father-in-law belongs to but Ray had never hoped for.  His in-laws in general are a problem; they look down on Ray not only for his past, but were even rather scornful if his business in its early days, his father-in-law referring to him as a rug pusher (I myself don’t see what’s wrong with that).  It’s partly to show up his in laws that Ray wants to get into the Dumas Club (another unspoken factor is that the club seem to take only light-skinned men, and Ray is darker than Elizabeth and her family.  It’s one more reason they look down on him).  A prominent banker gives Ray the impression that he’ll get him in for a little bribe.  Again, there’s that hint of corruption.  Ray goes for it, gives the man the money, then doesn’t get in.

At that point, Ray’s father’s spirit rises up in him.  He wants to burn the man’s house down, figuratively if not literally.  He doesn’t just want his money back, though he tried to get that.  He wants revenge.  And he goes about that with the ruthlessness of a seasoned criminal.  I wasn’t sure what he would do, or if it would work, but his plan was ingenious.

The truth is that we’re rooting for Ray the whole time.  We want his furniture store to make it in the first section; we want him to get back at these bigoted and superior people in the second, but in the third section, with Freddie’s help again, he gets involved in a truly major crime.  By that time that he has become the fence that Freddie said he was, regularly taking stolen goods to a man named Moskowitz in the jewelry section of Manhattan.  In that third section, though, Ray brings Moskowitz an item that even he won’t touch, and which has ruthless high stakes people after him, who wouldn’t think a thing of taking him out.

There were two nights in my reading where the suspense was so strong that I didn’t want to stop.  If this were a cheaper kind of crime caper, I would have skimmed through to the end.  But Colson Whitehead is such a good writer that I didn’t want to do that.  I’d rather live with the suspense and take my time with the prose.  This is Raymond Chandler, not Agatha Christie.  You read this book for the writing, and the characters.

The novel’s climactic scene is ultimately sad, that there’s a moment in it that is one of the most emotionally satisfying things I’ve ever read in a novel.

On his website, which claims that nobody ever reads it—hah! I have—Whitehead reveals that this novel is the first of a trilogy, with the next volume coming out in 2023.  Great news!  I also look forward to checking out Whitehead’s earlier novels.  I started reading his books out of a sense of obligation, because I wanted to understand the African American experience, but I thereby discovered one of the most talented and entertaining novelists around.  I now just want to read his work.

[1] In a bizarre way, I’ll mention this now and drop it, it reminds me of The Godfather, which is high praise as far as I’m concerned.  It’s a similar situation where the son of a criminal is trying to escape that life for himself.  But there is a hint of corruption in what he’s doing from the start, and as he continues, he becomes entranced by the power it gives him.