I guess I’m just about as white as you can get. I still recall the trepidation I felt in anticipation of my first visit to Harlem, back in the late 1970s, on an art research project. It’s a good thing I had not read Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle” before going there; if I had, I might never have dared set foot in that fabled quarter of New York City… Joking? Not entirely. (I was actually warmly welcomed; never felt a moment of anxiety. My fear was the product of pure prejudice). Whitehead’s, though, is the street Harlem of the late 50s, early 60s, a sprawling, teeming urban underworld of petty criminals, hookers, druggies, con men, stone cold killers—people, in other words, who are all struggling to survive in an urban jungle. They are human beings, all; and remarkably this writer (whose “Underground Railroad” was made into the popular television series of the same title) manages to allow every one them a kind of nobility in their humanity.
Ray Carney, Whitehead’s protagonist, is the nearest thing to a law-abiding citizen. He runs a regular furniture store, but needs to supplement his income with a little fencing of goods of doubtful origin here and there. He has a wife and family to support and like everyone else in the story is constantly on the hustle. It’s what everyone must do to simply get by. This is the social norm of a community sidelined by the dominant white culture to the south; everyone gets creative in their need to escape abject poverty, neglect, injustice, squalor, even hunger. Whitehead introduces us to a cast of criminals great and petty, vicious and simple-minded, cruel and compassionate, powerful and weak. The cops are venal, on the take like everyone else. Their killing of an innocent, unarmed boy sets off a riot. Sound familiar? Even Harlem’s wealthy Negros (the then-current term) have a mutual back-scratching Society that supports them in their effort to maximize their profits.
It's a social structure based on contingency in which everyone has learned to play their part. Favors given require favors in return, and if not honored require payback or revenge. Carney’s conscience is malleable—but he has one. His great desire is to find a place for his family to live on respectable Riverside Drive, and he’s stubborn, patient, willing to do what it takes to fulfill his dream. Unhappily, this leads him ever deeper into the morass of crime, dragged to ever lower depths by his peripatetic, drug-addled cousin, Freddie, who whines constantly, after each worse disaster, “I didn’t mean to get you into this”; and by his resource of last resort, Pepper, a steely old criminal associate of Carney’s father’s and a man who does not hesitate to kill if he sees the need.
What keeps the reader’s head above this exceedingly polluted water is the sympathy the author shares with us for all his characters. A handful of them, to be truthful, are just plain evil—and for the most part these are not Black. The white power structure of mid- and lower Manhattan real estate moguls, financiers and lawyers are the inevitable winners in this Gotham City; they are no less venal than their less privileged fellow-citizens to the north, and with less reason to be so. But they thrive with impunity. They don’t get nabbed by the cops and packed off to jail.
If all this sounds familiar, I’m sure that it’s no accident. Whitehead is as powerful a creator of fiction as he is a social observer, historian and critic. His observation and evocation of detail, not only that of human behavior but of the seething reality of New York City’s streets is acute, spot-on, compelling. One of the deep pleasures of fiction is to be transported into an unfamiliar world and live there for a spell, entranced. Here we are, in Harlem, at a period in history not long after the great Negro cultural resurgence of the Harlem Renaissance, not the only moment in history when riots seem the last, inevitably futile recourse of the socially repressed in their struggle for equality and justice, and Whitehead has us live the experience in all its anguishing realism. His book is a great read. His prose is tough, complex, colorful, enlivened by wry humor at life’s vicissitudes. Reading, I found the realization of the Harlem that my white timidity so fearfully projected, all those years ago—not only its lawlessness and squalor, its inexorable Blackness, but more importantly the innate courage and dignity of human beings struggling to survive, and their memorable, deeply flawed, profoundly moving humanity.
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