Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  You got used to the subway. He said that all the time.

  Carney disagreed with Alma’s assessment of their neighbors, but yes, Elizabeth—all of them—deserved a nicer place to live. This was too close to what he’d grown up in.

  “No need to rush,” Elizabeth said.

  “They can have their own rooms.”

  The apartment was hot. In her bed-rest term, she often stayed in her housecoat all day, why not? It was one of the few pleasures left to her. She wore her hair in a bun, but some strands had gotten loose and were plastered to her sweaty forehead. Tired, skin flushed red under brown in her cheeks. She flickered then, as Ruby had that morning, and he saw her as she was on that rainy afternoon under his umbrella: almond-shaped dark eyes under long lashes, delicate in her pink cardigan, edges of her mouth upturned at one of her strange jokes. Unaware of the effect she had on people. On him, all these years later.

  “What?” Elizabeth said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “The girls can share.” She had decided the baby was a girl. She was right about most things so had a certain bravado with this fifty-fifty proposition.

  “Take her Caw Caw and you’ll see how much she likes to share.” For proof, he reached over and plucked a piece of chicken off May’s plate. She howled until he plopped it in her mouth.

  “You just finished telling me you had a slow day and now you want to move. We’ll be okay. We can wait until we can afford it. Isn’t that right, May?”

  May smiled, at who knew what. Some Jones girl course of action she’d planned.

  When Elizabeth rose to start the girl’s bath, Carney said, “I have to step out for a bit.”

  “Freddie show up?” She had pointed out that he only said step out when meeting his cousin. He had tried varying his phrasing, but gave up.

  “He left a message with Rusty saying he wanted to see me.”

  “What’s he been doing?”

  Freddie had been scarce. Lord knew what he’d gotten his paws into. Carney shrugged and kissed them goodbye. He carried the garbage out, trailing greasy dots all the way to the sidewalk.

  * * *

  * * *

  Carney took the long way to Nightbirds. It had been the kind of day that put him in the mood to see the building.

  This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty but it was coming back, their parts in the symphony and assigned solos. On the corner, two white cops recapped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days. Threadbare blankets lined fire escapes. The stoops bustled with men in undershirts drinking beer and jiving over the noise from transistor radios, the DJs piping up between songs like friends with bad advice. Anything to delay the return to sweltering rooms, the busted sinks and clotted flypaper, the accumulated reminders of your place in the order. Unseen on the rooftops, the denizens of tar beaches pointed to the lights of bridges and night planes.

  There had been a bunch of muggings lately, an old lady carrying groceries hit on the head, the kind of news Elizabeth fretted over. He took a well-lit route to Riverside Drive. He went around Tiemann Place, and there it was. Carney’d picked 528 Riverside this month, a six-story red brick with fancy white cornices. Stone falcons or hawks on the roofline watching the human figures below. He favored the fourth-floor apartments these days, or higher, after someone pointed out that the higher views cleared the trees of Riverside Park. He hadn’t thought of that. So: that fourth-floor unit of 528 Riverside, in his mind a pleasant hive of six rooms, a real dining room, two baths. A landlord who leased to Negro families. With his hands on the sill, he’d look out at the river on nights like this, the city behind him as if it didn’t exist. That rustling, keening thing of people and concrete. Or the city did exist but he stood with it heaving against him, Carney holding it all back by sheer force of character. He could take it.

  Riverside, where restless Manhattan found itself finally spent, its greedy hands unable to reach past the park and the holy Hudson. One day he’d live on Riverside Drive, on this quiet, inclined stretch. Or twenty blocks north in one of the big new apartment buildings, in a high-letter apartment, J or K. All those families behind those doors between him and the elevator, friendly or not, they live in the same place, no one better or worse, they were all on the same floor. Or maybe south in the Nineties, in one of the stately prewars, or in a limestone fortification around 105th or thereabouts that squat like an ornery old toad. If he hit the jackpot.

  Carney prospected in the evening, checking the line of buildings from different angles, strolling across the street and scanning up, speculating about the sunset view, choosing one edifice and then a single apartment inside. The one with the blue window treatments, or the one with the shade half down, its string dangling like an unfinished thought. Casement windows. Under those broad eaves. He wrote the scenes inside: the hissing radiator, the water spot on the ceiling where the rummy upstairs let the bath run and the landlord won’t do a thing about it but it’s fine. It’s nice. He deserves it. Until he tired of the place and resumed his hunt for the next apartment worthy of his attentions, up or down the avenue.

  One day, when he had the money.

  The atmosphere in Nightbirds was ever five minutes after a big argument and no one telling you what happened. Everyone in their neutral corners replaying KO’s and low blows and devising too-late parries. You didn’t know what it had been about or who’d won, just that nobody wanted to talk about it, they glance around and knead grudges in their fists. In its heyday, the joint had been a warehouse of mealy human commerce—some species of hustler at that table, their bosses at the next, marks minnowing between. Closing time meant secrets kept. Whenever Carney looked over his shoulder, he frowned at the grubby pageant. Rheingold beer on tap, Rheingold neon on the walls in two or three places, the brewery had been trying to reach the Negro market. The cracks in the red vinyl upholstery of the old banquettes were stiff and sharp enough to cut skin.

  Less dodgy with the change in management, Carney had to allow. His father’s city disappearing. Last year the new owner, Bert, had the number on the pay phone changed, undermining a host of shady deals and alibis. In the old days broken men hunched over the phone, hangdog, waiting for the ring that changed their luck. Bert put in a new overhead fan and kicked out the hookers. The pimps were okay, they were good tippers. He removed the dart board, this last item an inscrutable renovation until Bert explained that his uncle “had his eye put out in the army.” He hung a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. in its place, a grimy halo describing the outline of the former occupant.

  Some regulars beat it for the bar up the street, but Bert and Freddie hit it off quickly, Freddie by nature adept at sizing up the conditions on the field and making adjustments. When Carney walked in, his cousin and Bert were talking about the day’s races and how they’d gone.

  “Ray-Ray,” Freddie said, hugging him.

  “How you doing, Freddie?”

  Bert nodded at them and went deaf and dumb, pretending to check that there was enough rye out front.

  Freddie looked healthy, Carney was relieved to see. He wore an orange camp shirt with blue stripes and the black slacks from his short-lived waiter gig a few years back. He’d always been lean, and when he didn’t take care of himself quickly got a bad kind of thin. “Look at my two skinny boys,” Aunt Millie used to say when they came in from playing in the street. If Carney hadn’t seen his cousin, it also meant Freddie’d been staying away from his mother. He still lived with her in his old room. She made sure he didn’t forget to eat.

  They were cousins, mistaken for brothers by most of the world, but distinguished by many features of personality. Like common sense. Carney had it. Freddie’s common sense tended to fall out of a hole in his pocket—he never carried it long. Common sense, for example, told
you to not take a numbers job with Peewee Gibson. It also told you that if you took such a job, it was in your interest not to fuck it up. But Freddie had done both of these things and somehow retained his fingers. Luck stepped in for what he lacked otherwise.

  Freddie was vague about where he’d been. “A little work, a little shacking up.” Work for him was something crooked, shacking up was a woman with a decent job and trusting nature, who was not too much of a detective when it came to clues. “How’s the store going?”

  “It’ll pick up.”

  Sipping beers. Freddie started in on his enthusiasm for the new soul food place down the block. Carney waited for him to get around to what was on his mind. It took Dave “Baby” Cortez on the jukebox with that damn organ song, loud and manic. Freddie leaned over. “You heard me talk about this nigger every once in a while—Miami Joe?”

  “What’s he, run numbers?”

  “No, he’s that dude wears that purple suit. With the hat.”

  Carney thought he remembered him maybe. It wasn’t like purple suits were a rarity in the neighborhood.

  Miami Joe wasn’t into numbers, he did stickups, Freddie said. Knocked over a truck full of Hoovers in Queens last Christmas. “They say he did that Fisher job, back when.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He broke into a safe at Gimbels,” Freddie said. Like Carney was supposed to know. Like he subscribed to Criminal Gazette or something. Freddie was disappointed but continued to puff up Miami Joe. He had a big job in mind and he’d approached Freddie about it. Carney frowned. Armed robbery was nuts. In former days his cousin stayed away from stuff that heavy.

  “It’s going to be cash, and a lot of stones that’s got to get taken care of. They asked me if I knew anyone for that and I said, I have just the guy.”

  “Who?”

  Freddie raised his eyebrows.

  Carney looked over at Bert. Hang him in a museum—the barman was a potbellied portrait of hear no evil. “You told them my name?”

  “Once I said I knew someone, I had to.”

  “Told them my name. You know I don’t deal with that. I sell home goods.”

  “Brought that TV by last week, I didn’t hear no complaints.”

  “It was gently used. No reason to complain.”

  “And those other things, not just TVs. You never asked where they came from.”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “You never asked all those times—and it’s been a lot of times, man—because you know where they come from. Don’t act all, ‘Gee, officer, that’s news to me.’ ”

  Put it like that, an outside observer might get the idea that Carney trafficked quite frequently in stolen goods, but that’s not how he saw it. There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people’s lives, from here to there, a churn of property, and Ray Carney facilitated that churn. As a middleman. Legit. Anyone who looked at his books would come to the same conclusion. The state of his books was a prideful matter with Carney, rarely shared with anyone because no one seemed very interested when he talked about his time in business school and the classes he’d excelled in. Like accounting. He told this to his cousin.

  “Middleman. Like a fence.”

  “I sell furniture.”

  “Nigger, please.”

  It was true that his cousin did bring a necklace by from time to time. Or a watch or two, top-notch. Or a few rings in a silver box engraved with initials. And it was true that Carney had an associate on Canal Street who helped these items on to the next leg of their journey. From time to time. Now that he added up all those occasions they numbered more than he thought, but that was not the point. “Nothing like what you’re talking about now.”

  “You don’t know what you can do, Ray-Ray. You never have. That’s why you have me.”

  A bunch of hoods with pistols and what they got with those pistols was crazy. “This ain’t stealing candy from Mr. Nevins, Freddie.”

  “It’s not candy,” Freddie said. He smiled. “It’s the Hotel Theresa.”

  Two guys tumbled through the front door, brawling. Bert reached for Jack Lightning, the baseball bat he kept by the register.

  Summer had come to Harlem.

  THREE

  He preferred the street-side booths but Chock Full o’Nuts was busy. Maybe a convention upstairs. Carney hooked his hat on the stand and sat at the counter. Sandra was on patrol with her pot and poured him a cup. “What else can I get you, baby?” she asked. In younger days she’d danced in the top revues, Club Baron and the Savoy, head girl at the Apollo. You’d still think she danced professional from the way she glided on the cheap gray linoleum. Certainly she hadn’t quit show business, waitressing being a line of work where you had to play to even the cheapest of seats.

  “Just the coffee,” he said. “How was your son’s visit?” The Hotel Theresa’s Chock Full o’Nuts had been part of his morning routine since he opened the store.

  She sucked her teeth. “Oh, he came. Not that I saw him. Hanging out with those friends of his the whole time.” She let the pot dangle without spilling a drop. “Left me a note.”

  The hot spell was unbroken, which was unfortunate. The heat from the kitchen made it worse. From his stool, Carney got a view of Seventh Avenue, where the hotel entrance hopped with checkouts. Bellboys blowing whistles, yellow cabs pulling up in staggered approaches.

  Most days Carney wouldn’t notice the hotel’s patterns, but his meeting with Freddie had him twisted. He’d been with his cousin the first time he’d witnessed the sidewalk choreography in front of the Hotel Theresa, during an outing with him and Aunt Millie. Carney must have been ten or eleven, if she was minding him. That unsettled stretch in his life.

  “Let’s see who it is everybody’s fussing over,” Aunt Millie had said. She’d taken them for ice-cream sodas at Thomforde’s to celebrate, Carney couldn’t remember what, and they were walking home. The crowd outside the Hotel Theresa’s blue canopy drew her in. Young men in their hotel uniforms corralling gawkers and then the big bus pulling up. They went over to see.

  The red carpet outside the Waldorf of Harlem was the theater for daily and sometimes hourly spectacles, whether it was the sight of the heavyweight champ waving to fans as he climbed into a Cadillac, or a wrung-out jazz singer splashing out of a Checker cab at three a.m. with the devil’s verses in her mouth. The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

  Management had no choice but to open its doors, and well-to-do Negroes had no choice but to stay there if they wanted the luxury treatment. All the famous Negro athletes and movie stars slept there, the top singers and businessmen, taking supper in the Orchid Room on the third floor and throwing soirees in the Skyline Ballroom. From the Skyline’s thirteenth-floor windows you could take in the lights of the George Washington Bridge one way, the Triborough another way, and the sentinel Empire State Building to the south. Top of the world. Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, and the Ink Spots lived upstairs. So went the lore of the place.

  That Thomforde’s afternoon with his aunt marked the return of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. A public relations firm—or a concierge on tabloid payroll—tipped photographers to ensure an adequate commotion. The bandleader’s name flowed across the side of the tour bus in gigantic white letters, stained faintly where crackers had thrown eggs at them in some Podunk, could’ve been worse. The bystanders screamed when the musicians stepped onto the sidewalk, dapper and cool in their powder blue suits and bug-eye sunglasses. Freddie joined in—flashy dressers impressed him even then. Cab himself arrived later that night. He kept a lady in D.C. who had a knack for down-home breakfasts and other early-morning pleasures, or so it was said.

  The band entered the lobby in
a hepcat line as if strutting onstage, for this display was as much a gig as any of their nightly concerts, a show of glamour, an affirmation of Negro excellence. Show over, the audience split and the sidewalk was quiet until the next celebrity landed. Aunt Millie liked to read out Theresa items from the gossip columns: We hear a certain velvet-voiced Lothario kicked up quite a ruckus last week at the fabulous Hotel Theresa with one of the Savoy’s beige beauties. Seems his wife decided to surprise him for his birthday and blew out all the candles on that little cake…Carney lived with his aunt and Freddie for a couple of years after his mother passed. He was in the kitchen when Aunt Millie squealed at the Courier’s coverage of the Calloway orchestra’s arrival, even if the account puzzled her. “I don’t think there were hundreds of people there, do you?”

  The night Carney signed his lease on the store, the movie studio Twentieth Century-Fox held their premiere party for Carmen Jones at the hotel. Three blocks over on Seventh, the massive spotlights tilted and swerved. The traffic down 125th was honking molasses, cops angrily waving at the cars. The white light coming around that corner was so bright it made you think the earth had split open, like some miracle eruption was underway. Carney’s new arrangement with Salerno Properties Inc. received less fanfare. It didn’t make the papers, but he chose to believe it was momentous in its own way. Like all those bright lights were for him.

  The sidewalk action was rare these days. Downtown hotels recognized the profit in opening to black patrons and the years of sordid carousing, late-night gambling, and gossip-page shenanigans diminished the hotel’s reputation. At the bar, you were more likely to find yourself bending elbows with a pimp or a working girl instead of Joe Louis or a grande dame of Negro society. The coffee shop where Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used to charm the waitstaff was bought out by Chock Full o’Nuts. The coffee was better and so was the grub, so Carney figured no big loss. It was still the Hotel Theresa, headquarters of the Negro world, and its thirteen floors contained more possibility and majesty than their parents and grandparents could’ve dreamed of.