Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021

Harlem Shuffle is set in the 1950s and 60s. Raymond Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. Carney’s father was disreputable. Carney raised himself after his mother died. He has a business degree from Queens College, a wife and kids, and dreams. He longs to move to a larger apartment in a nicer building, a dream he entertains as he walks the streets of Harlem, inspecting the buildings that he passes and imaging life inside their walls, a dream he defers whenever his savings shrink.

The Harlem atmosphere is as important to the novel as the plot. Harlem is changing. The World’s Fair promises a better future, but upward mobility for some results in misfortune for others. Through the course of the novel, Carney sees buildings that offer affordable housing torn down by developers while landmark businesses close. Some blame rioters for businesses that were destined to fail anyway, leading Carney to ask: “How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?” Carney keeps his business open, knowing the protests will pass and that protests won’t stop white cops from killing Harlem residents. The parallel between Harlem protests against police violence and similar BLM protests in recent years illustrates Colson Whitehead’s point: everything changes — “the textile warehouses and women’s hat stores and shoeshine stands, the greasy spoons” are reduced to rubble to make way for the World Trade Center — but nothing really changes, including police violence.

The plot follows several years in Carney’s life, years marked by upward mobility that is only partially attributable to his success selling high quality furniture, often on credit, some of which has been “gently used.” It’s not an easy business and Carney worries that his wife would leave him if she learned how he supplements his income.

Carney and his cousin Freddy ran together when they were young. Carney got his life together but Freddy’s life was “a haze of lost seasons” filled with aimless loafing, burglaries, running numbers, and a stretch of jail time. On occasion, Carney fences goods that Freddy steals, although Carney doesn’t ask whether they are stolen so he can imagine himself to be honest. And for the most part, he is. No worse, at least, than the cops to whom he pays protection money or the city workers he bribes for permits.

Freddy’s life takes another wrong turn when he joins a plan to rob the Hotel Theresa, a decision that brings “guns and hard men” into his life. Freddy proposes Carney as a fence for jewelry recovered from the hotel’s safe deposit boxes, but Carney refuses. Unfortunately for Carney, Freddy gets him involved anyway, connecting Carney to a hard man who becomes a source of grief while promoting Carney’s career as a middleman between jewelry thieves and a white midtown jeweler who gives Carney a fair deal on the stolen goods.

The story travels through peaks and valleys. Two peaks involve threats or acts of violence directed toward Carney or Freddy. Carney is not a violent man but he knows where to find a violent man when he needs help. Another peak involves a banker who took money from Carney in exchange for a favor the banker didn’t deliver. Carney executes a plan with several moving parts to take revenge against the banker.

Favors are the grease that lubricates all business in New York. Envelopes of cash assure that the police don’t bother Carney or buy their assistance when he needs to set his plan in motion. A cop talks about “a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keep the city running.” Carney later contemplates the chain of events that depend on an exchange of envelopes. “Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”

After reading two Pulitzer Prize winners from Whitehead, I was surprised to read something that almost falls within the genre of crime fiction. But the “almost” is important. Harlem Shuffle reminded me of The 25th Hour, in that crime is the context that drives a deeper story. Harlem Shuffle is the story of a man divided, a man who (like many others, as he is surprised to learn) preserves an illusion of honesty while knowing that’s he a criminal, a man who struggles to draw a shifting line between crimes he is willing to commit — crimes that are no worse than those committed by a wealthy white family that drive the novel’s last act — and crimes that are far removed from his nature. The themes of change and personal struggle and the Harlem atmosphere transform a fairly ordinary crime story into something special.

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