Charles Petzold

In the opening pages of Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead takes us to Radio Row as it existed in 1959, a little neighborhood of radio and electronics stores in the Lower West Side of Manhattan near the Cortlandt Street subway stop.

If you’ve never heard of Radio Row, it’s because the whole neighborhood was demolished in 1966 to make way for the World Trade Center. But with this reference to Radio Row, Colson Whitehead transports us into a New York City past that no longer exists, but which still has a connection to the present, in a cycle of demolishment and rebirth.

Over the past two decades that Colson Whitehead has been writing novels, his fiction has taken an odd trajectory, beginning with novels with a magical realist tinge, such as The Intuitionist (1999) about competing philosophies of elevator repair, Apex Hides the Hurt about a nomenclature consultant, and culminating with The Underground Railroad in which the famous transport to freedom is much like a child might imagine it: an underground network of tunnels and tracks with actual trains. This mix of realism and fantasy helped the novel uniquely capture that yearning for freedom that set men and women in the antebellum south on their own journeys into strange and unknown lands.

Whitehead’s fiction took a sharp turn towards realism in The Nickel Boys, which tells a riveting story: A studious 17-year-old high-school student in early 1960s segregated Tallahassee is enamored of the Civil Rights movements and the speeches of Martin Luther King. He’s on his way to take some college courses when he inadvertantly stumbles into a crime and ends up in the Nickel Academy reform school. Dedicated to killing his spirit, hope and intelligence, the reformatory is exactly the place he doesn’t belong, and yet it won’t let him out of its grasp.

Harlem Shuffle continues Whitehead’s realist turn, taking place mostly in a wonderfully evoked Harlem of 1959 through 1964.

Ray Carney has done well for himself, owning a furniture store on 125^th Street and marrying a woman from a more upscale background than his own, a family from the neighborhood called Striver’s Row. Ray’s wife works with Black Star Travel publishing guides of hotels, restaurants, and towns in the South that are friendly to Black tourists, a fictional version of the now-famous Negro Motorist Green-Book.

Yet, Ray can’t quite escape his relations or his past. Ray’s father was a violent hood, and his father’s criminal colleagues still float in and out of his life. A bigger problem is his cousin Freddie, who ever since their childhood has been drawing Ray into crazy schemes that invariably end with Freddie pleading to Ray “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

Ray would probably prefer to run a totally legitimate enterprise. He loves his wife and young daughter, another child is on the way, and he wants nothing more than to move his family to a better neighborhood. Yet, his connections with the criminal underworld provide an extra margin of income, for he is frequently called upon to get rid of stolen property. While Ray Carney is best known around the neighborhood for his furniture store, he is also a not-quite-reluctant fence. This is what brings him to Radio Row in the early pages, and what drives the first of three sections in Harlem Shuffle.

Ray’s cousin Freddie has become involved in a heist of safes in the real-life Hotel Theresa, which Wikipedia describes as “a vibrant center of African American life in the area and the city.” He has dragged Ray into the heist by proposing him as a fence to unload some of the bounty. This immersion into the world of small-time hoods with their colorful names and wisecracks suggests the world of Elmore Leonard, but unless I’m not remembering something, Elmore Leonard never got anywhere near Harlem or the harsh realities of that environment.

In the third section as well, Freddie drags Ray into a messy situation. Freddie has been hanging out with a druggie from a rich and famous New York City family who gets the brilliant idea of plundering his family’s safe. This third section takes place in the wake of the Harlem Riot of 1964. This was not the first riot Ray Carney had experienced:

He was thirteen during the riots of ‘43. A white cop shot a Negro soldier who’d intervened in the arrest of a Negro lady who’d had one too many. For two nights Harlem was aboil. His father went out ‘shopping’ and returned with new duds for the two of them. Shopping of the sort where you step over the broken glass of the front window and don’t need help from the salesclerk.... To this day whenever he walked past T. P. Fox or Nelson’s, he wondered if his father had stripped the clothes from their mannequins.

Two decades later, another police shooting triggers another riot from a neighborhood that just can’t tolerate it any more. Ray has recently brought his family to the 1964 World’s Fair, and that contributes to his reflections:

The Space Park showcased full-size replicas of the Saturn V rocket, the Gemini spacecraft, a lunar landing module. Here were impossible objects that had been to outer space — and come back safely, traveled all that distance.

You didn’t need to journey far, certainly didn’t need three-stage rockets and manned capsules and arcane telemetry, to see what else we were capable of. If Carney walked five minutes in any direction, one generation’s immaculate townhouses were the next’s shooting galleries, slum blocks testified in a chorus of neglect, and businesses sat ravaged and demolished after nights of violent protest. What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.

But I think my favorite section is the middle one. As an up-and-coming Black businessman, Ray is invited to a gathering at the Dumas Club, a fictional hobnobbing club named after the mixed-race author of The Count of Monte Cristo. Ray’s father-in-law belongs but Ray is certain he won’t be accepted because the Dumas was known as “a paper bag club,” meaning they only accepted people with skin tones lighter than a paper bag. But when Ray is rejected with an extra-special insult attached, he takes a hint of what to do from Dumas’ most famous novel.

What makes this whole middle section somewhat spooky, though, is that Ray is carrying out most of his plotting during the period in the middle of the night that in ancient times separated two shifts of sleep. “It was a respite from the normal world and its demands, a hollow of private enterprise carved out of lost hours.” In medieval France it was called the dorveille and was a mysterious time when normal rules of reality and behavior don’t apply, but Ray first hears the word as “dorvay” and that’s the title of this middle section.

The first sleep was a subway train that dropped him off in different neighborhoods of crooked behavior and the second sleep returned him to normal life with a rrumble. The Dorvay Express? That was too fancy, galloping and gleaming in the moonlight. Here was a local: rattling, grimy, and it didn’t take you anywhere you hadn’t been before.

The period detail of Harlem Shuffle is only one aspect of Colson Whitehead’s evocation of the Harlem of 60 years ago. It is also the age-old story of striving to transcend one’s upbringing in a world that constantly changes, yet not as much as we might hope.