Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on July 18, 2023

Crook Manifesto is a sequel to Harlem Shuffle. The combined novels tell the story of Ray Carney, but in doing so they tell the story of Harlem. While Crook Manifesto takes the form of three solid crime stories — they often read like literary thrillers — the two books combine to trace changes in culture, race relations, and urban politics in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is also a story of resilience and fortitude, showcased in one character but present in an entire community, an entire race.

Carney’s father was killed by the police while committing a robbery. Carney both followed in his father’s footsteps by turning to crime when he needed cash and surpassed his father by getting a business degree and opening his own furniture store. The business allowed him to prosper, but during desperate times he paid the bills by developing a side business as a fence. That criminal career drives the plot in Harlem Shuffle.

By the end of Harlem Shuffle and at the beginning of Crook Manifesto, Carney thinks he has gone straight. He misses the excitement or glamor of fencing stolen property, but he has a family to raise and doesn’t miss the risk of imprisonment. Unfortunately, a return to crime is inevitable. “Crooked stays crooked.”

The first of three criminal episodes involves a bent cop named Munson. Like all New York cops, Munson has been shaking down criminals and legitimate businesses (including Carney’s). The police are out of sorts because the Black Liberation Army is committing crimes to raise cash and may have killed a cop. Munson tries to frame the BLA when he commits a serious theft from an underworld boss. The scheme goes sideways when Munson tries to screw his partner out of the partner’s share. He wants Carney to fence some hot jewelry because Carney’s no longer in the business and will not be an immediate suspect. Carney becomes Munson’s de facto partner in a criminal escapade that puts them both at risk. Carney doubts that Munson will allow him to live when the day comes to an end.

The second part takes its theme from the blaxploitation movies that were popular in the 1970s. A Harlem filmmaker wants to make a movie featuring a black actress who has had small roles in Hollywood movies. She’ll be a “black lady secret agent in the cracker-killing business.” The filmmaker is shooting a scene in Carney’s store and has hired Carney’s friend Pepper to provide security. When the actress disappears, Pepper goes on a Harlem adventure to find her, eventually tangling with one of the underworld bosses.

The novel’s last act takes place at the intersection of arson and political corruption. The media blame black activists for fires in Harlem that are actually caused by poor wiring or arson-for-profit schemes. A Harlem politician is behind many of the schemes. Tenements burn down, the owners cash in on insurance, the city acquires the deeds, the property gets sold for redevelopment, and various politicians and bureaucrats get a slice of the profits. When a boy is hospitalized in one of the fires, Carney decides to find out who is responsible. He hires Pepper to help him investigate. Both men pay a price for noticing entrenched corruption.

All three stories are classic crime dramas, complete with fistfights, death threats, and an occasional chase scene. Without slowing the action, Whitehead tells a bigger story about race and changing times in Harlem. It is a story of violent cops, political corruption, entrenched racism, and accepted sexism (particularly concerning black women). Yet Whitehead doesn’t beat the reader over the head with polemic. Carney is something of an everyman (or more specifically, an every black man) who faces the same family and business issues as everyone else who strives for success, but takes it as a given, hardly worth noticing, that he must overcome additional barriers because of his race.

Carney uses music (a Jackson 5 concert), movies (Superfly), black standup comedians (edgier than Bill Cosby), and headlines (Vietnam, white fear of a race war) to take the reader back in time. They also set the scene for Carney’s journey. He realizes that kids hear songs of heartbreak at a young age to prepare them for the reality of adult life. “You sing the sad songs first, then you act them out.” He understands that black entertainers are looking for a way out of lives that offer fewer opportunities than white people expect. Expressions that are popular in the 1970s add to the atmosphere. Pepper likes the phrase “getting over” as an expression of black people finding “a way to outwit white people’s rules.”

Pepper has lived a rougher life than Carney, although Carney and his wife have reserved a room for “Uncle Pepper” in their home. Pepper grew up wondering what it would be like to live in a home like Carney’s. He values the acceptance he feels in Carney’s home, but he never feels entirely comfortable. His is a life of the street, albeit a life that is governed by a moral code. Pepper is a powerful character and an interesting contrast to Carney.

The book highlights changes in society that are reflected in Harlem. The city is burning, “not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas but because the city itself was sick, waiting for fire, begging for it.” Thanks to arson, urban renewal is gentrifying the neighborhoods. Bars that cater to criminals are harder to find. “They are dying off, the old crooks and hustlers and flimflam artists, or upstate after an ill-advised scheme to cover medical bills or six months’ back rent or new teeth.” The city is breaking down. Blue collar jobs are gone and white collar jobs are reserved for white skin. “The blacks and Puerto Ricans are squeezed into smaller and smaller ghettos that were once thriving neighborhoods.”

Still, by the third story, Carney has made a comparatively good life for himself. He belongs to a Harlem social club and associates with high rollers, although he no longer remembers why he wanted to keep their company. When he faces another catastrophe, he takes it is stride because catastrophe is all he can expect from life. He might still find a way to get over.

Resilience is the book’s overriding theme. Black men came to New York from Alabama because in Harlem, they could be men. Black musicians are “beat down, their skulls full of dead-end thoughts,” but “they keep playing.” Carney won’t stop striving until he’s dead. “The city tried to break him. It didn’t work. He was genuine Manhattan schist and that don’t break easy.” The story is inspirational in its message that endurance is a way to win a battle, that progress may be incremental but it can never be stopped.

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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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The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on July 16, 2019

The Nickel Boys is set in the 1960s, while Jim Crow was still the rule in the South. Blacks are jailed because of their skin color. They die in jail because of their skin color. They are beaten for wearing a military uniform because of their skin color. They are denied educational opportunities because of their skin color. They get sent to reform school for the offense of homelessness because of their skin color. An atmosphere of fear and injustice permeates the novel.

The story follows Elwood Curtis, who begins the novel as a dishwasher in Tallahassee. Elwood istens to recordings of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and looks forward to the day when Dr. Kinng's dream of equal opportunity will come true. In high school, Elwood moves on to a job in a tobacco shop, hoping to save money for college. Dr. King’s admonition that “we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity” inform the life Elwood is trying to achieve.

Elwood lives with his grandmother, who fears the civil rights movement as much as she appreciates its achievements, including being able to sit wherever she wants on the bus. When Elwood marches with college students to protest a theater that won’t serve black customers, his grandmother worries that he is putting his life at risk. She is “a survivor but the world took her in bites.”

Elwood enrolls in a junior college and seems be walking the streets with a sense of dignity when he hitches a ride with a man who is driving a stolen car. That misfortune sets the scene for the heart of the novel.

Elwood is sent to Nickel Reform School. A prelude, set in the present, explains that archeology students have interred bodies in the Nickel Reform School cemetery that show clear evidence of abuse. Even more troubling are the bodies buried on school property, outside of the cemetery, the unacknowledged dead. The prelude foreshadows a difficult time for Elwood as a Nickel boy.

In his acknowledgements, Colson Whitehead tells the reader that Nickel Reform School is inspired by the story of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys. Whitehead’s fictional account of the Nickel Reform School echoes the horrific reality of Dozier, including the investigation of grave sites.

Like Dozier, the fictional Nickel Reform School separates black and white inmates. Its purpose is to instill docility and obedience. Elwood learns that standing up for the weak against the bullies is likely to lead to a beating by the bullies and another by the staff. Such are the moral values instilled by reform schools.

The novel explains the fate of a boy whose body is disinterred fifty years later. His story is still told by rings screwed into trees in the woods, rings to which boys were shackled before being whipped: “Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”

Inspired by the teachings of Dr. King and the actions of Rosa Parks, Elwood wants to do his part to encourage nonviolent reform of the evils he sees at Nickel. Will he have the courage? The novel suggests that the unlikeliest people, when oppressed, can find courage. Even fruitless efforts can inspire the kind of dignity that Dr. King deemed essential to the human spirit.

The Nickle Boys is not a feel-good fantasy about a young man who overcomes adversity, although it does acknowledge the possibility of defeating internalized demons. Places like Nickel ­— described as one of hundreds “scattered across the land like pain factories” — existed to break an inmate’s spirt. Opportunities lost might never be regained. With perseverance and luck, an intelligent person can build a life, even achieve a semblance of success, but that life will be shackled to the past. Survivors of institutions are “denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary.”

This is a short novel, all the fat trimmed away to tell a compact but far-reaching story. The ending comes as a complete surprise. It is a fitting resolution to a captivating novel. Like The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys illustrates Colson Whitehead’s ability to personalize the history of injustice. The story is gut-wrenching and emotionally charged. The Nickel Boys reminds readers of how far the nation has come and how much farther it must go to honor its promise of equal justice under the law.

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