Return to Harlem
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead coming to KiMo Theatre
“Crook Manifesto” is Pulitzer Prizewinning author Colson Whitehead’s sturdy, swerving sequel to “Harlem Shuffle.”
The time is the 1970s. The principal location is Harlem. And the protagonist is Ray Carney, African American owner of a successful furniture store at 125th Street and Morningside. Carney is out of his side job as a fence. For the moment. On one level it’s a crime novel, but in Whitehead’s clever hands it is so much more. It swirls with a social history of New York City, slices of Black family life, a jumble of the movers and con men on the street and imperious bad guys in suits and uniforms.
Whitehead thematically divides the novel into thirds.
The first third is set in 1971. In this segment are incisive re-creations of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army and police reaction to them.
Carney returns to his side work as a fence. His return is triggered by a simple request. His teenage daughter wants tickets to a Jackson 5 concert at Madison Square Garden. So Carney is forced to call Munson, a well-connected very dirty cop for whom he used to unload stolen merchandise. Carney had also paid him protection.
Calling the cop pays off: “Munson’s Garden connection had come through with primo tickets.”
One paragraph vividly and compactly describes the concert and the crowd: “The young girls screamed at every flirty remark from the stage and smacked their hands together at the choreography. The music was loud, the clothes louder. The Jackson boys captured and twirled in tight costumes with multicolored zigzag patterns. Rainbow vests with layered spangles swished and snapped, and the guitarist’s red satin applejack cap was big enough to smuggle in a Christmas ham. …”
Whitehead deftly shifts scenes as he returns to characters that dredge up past and current criminal entrepreneurs, usually through Carney’s voice. The author accomplishes this while keeping the reader glued to the weaving storylines.
Bars are comfortable for some crooks. One bar, Donegal’s, is the “preferred watering hole and refuge from family for an older generation of uptown crooks.”
Carney’s father, himself a crook, was a regular at Donegal’s and had sometimes brought along his son. Carney felt at home there among the “retirees and fellow dropouts from the game” though his dad sometimes slipped out on business.
Whitehead writes, “They traded gossip about the big scores, the latest capers, and dispensed wise and rueful jokes about fat deals, bonehead crooks, and the nefarious workings” of the police. A Donegal bartender acted as the longtime answering service for many of the regulars.
Moments such as these observations of saloon life through Carney’s eyes are precious and priceless. They are to savor.
The middle segment is set in 1973. The focus is on the growing popularity of Blaxploitation films, but also looking at temperamental actors in front of the camera and the hustlers behind the camera. Some scenes of the film titled “Code Name: Nefertiti” are shot in Carney’s furniture store, bringing attention to his business.
The final segment, titled “The Finishers,” is set in 1976, and it’s about the plague of fires that seem to consume blighted building after blighted building of Harlem. Arsonists are getting a lot of work.
Building owners are making money off the fire insurance payoffs. Investors connected to City Hall are bringing in big dollars off the urban renewal projects built on the burned-out empty lots.
Old tenants out. New tenants in. An endless cycle Whitehead cleverly nicknames “Churn, baby, churn.”
Another theme of this segment is the 200th birthday of America and how businesses and government are using it as a marketing tool. Carney finally figures out a sardonic slogan he’ll use for his store: “Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It.”