Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  Four days, unless Chink Montague rooted one of them out and they put Carney’s name out there.

  Four days for Carney to come up with an angle.

  SIX

  “See how quiet it is?” Leland said. “The dealer says it has one of those new compressors.”

  The Westinghouse was bolted into the parlor window. Carney had never seen an air conditioner in someone’s house before; according to Leland Jones, theirs was the first on the block, though his father-in-law was a shameless exaggerator. They crowded around the unit’s plastic grille, Elizabeth up front flapping her face with her hands. She’d almost fainted that morning and a treatment was in order. May sneezed as the sweat on her body cooled. Carney had to admit it felt good.

  The AC was one part of the treatment, Elizabeth’s old house another. She’d grown up in the Strivers’ Row townhouse, and a visit never failed to fortify her. Her room was as she’d left it, on the second floor overlooking the alley. W. C. Handy used to live across the way and Elizabeth liked to tell the story of watching the Father of the Blues in his study, his hands like doves fluttering in the air to the songs on his Victrola. The artist surveying a kingdom that only he could see. As far as views went, it beat the elevated and its discordant symphony of metal on metal. Her favorite blanket on the bed, the annual marks on the doorframe that tracked her height. Carney held no such nostalgia for the apartment he’d grown up in.

  Leland turned the AC’s dial to demonstrate. “You should look into one of these,” he said, aware that Carney’s budget forbade the expense.

  “One day,” Carney said.

  “They have payment plans,” Leland said.

  Elizabeth grabbed Carney’s waist. He put his hand on May’s shoulder. He didn’t know what she made of today’s round of jousting between her father and grandfather, but she sure understood that cool air. She exposed her belly to the contraption and looked off into a dream.

  Despite the company, he liked coming up to his in-laws’ place on Strivers’ Row. As a kid he’d admired the neat yellow brick and white limestone houses, plopped down in the middle of Harlem. Looking over from Eighth Avenue, the sidewalks were always swept, the gutters unclotted, the alleyways between the houses strange domains. What kind of block had its own name? What would they call his old stretch of 127th? Crooked Way. Striver versus crook. Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was. But perhaps Carney was being too stark. Plenty of crooks were strivers, and plenty of strivers bent the law.

  His father-in-law, for example. Leland Jones was one of black Harlem’s premier accountants, squaring the books of the best doctors, lawyers, and politicians, all the big Negro-owned 125th Street businesses. He’d get you off the hook. He bragged about his collection of loopholes and dodges, the fat-envelope bribes passed over in the drawing room of the Dumas Club. Brandy and a cigar: I got you. Let’s keep this between us, but he didn’t care who spoke of it because it was cheap advertising. “I eat audits like cornflakes,” Leland liked to say, grinning. “With milk and a spoon.” He was a tall man, with a wide, moon face and thick white mustache and muttonchops. His grandfather had been a preacher, and a taste for the lecture had been passed down, the righteous address from the front of the room.

  Alma called them to dinner. It smelled good from the kitchen and looked good on the nice china: a big ham with sweet potatoes and greens. Carney slid May into Elizabeth’s old high chair, courtesy of a defunct mail-order company that the Jones family held in high esteem, from how they cooed and clucked at its name. It creaked. Leland sat at the head of the table and tucked a light blue napkin into his shirt. He asked when the baby was due.

  The conversation permitted Carney a return to his dilemma. That morning, Rusty had asked why he wanted the front door closed on such a hot day. Carney felt exposed with the store open to the street, not that an unlocked door provided any defense. He steeled himself each time a customer stepped inside. No one stayed long—the store was too hot, the owner’s twitchy approaches off-putting. The dead time allowed Carney to run scenarios, like the ones performed at the end of the month to find the combinations of sales that’d put him into next month’s rent: One dinette, three couches…one complete Argent living-room set, five lamps, and a rug…

  Scenarios:

  Chink Montague discovers the identity of the thieves and takes his revenge but it doesn’t reach Carney. Freddie is killed.

  Chink Montague roots out the crew, including tangential party Ray Carney—is he off the hook if he’s merely the fence? Freddie is killed. Or just maimed, squeaked an optimistic voice that sounded like Aunt Millie.

  Chink Montague roots out the crew, but there’s enough time for Carney to get out of town. With his family? By himself? Freddie is killed.

  Carney goes to Chink Montague himself, tells the mobster he had no idea what was going on. Carney is taught some variety of lesson. Freddie is killed. Or just maimed.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Oh, I got maimed a little once.”

  He closed the store an hour early and stalked Riverside Drive to calm himself down. This apartment, that apartment, he couldn’t focus. A sedan nearly hit him as he stood in the street looking up. Then he picked up the girls for the trip to 139th Street.

  Alma reeled him into the dinner table with a mention of Alexander Oakes.

  “Alexander was accepted into the Dumas Club,” Alma said. She dabbed at the corner of her mouth. “Your father said it was unanimous.”

  “It was,” Leland said. “He’s been doing very well for himself. We’ve been trying to recruit that younger generation for a long time.”

  “Good for him,” Elizabeth said. “That’s the sort of thing he likes.” She and Alexander had grown up together. His family lived three doors down and socialized in the same hoity-toity atmosphere. Alexander had gone to a Catholic high school, so Carney didn’t know him from those days, but over the years Alma had filled him in. Football team, president of the debate club, then on to Howard where he continued his Talented Tenth scrabbling. His law degree got him a prosecutor’s job with the Manhattan district attorney. He’d be one of the city’s Negro judges when it all came together, write-up in the Amsterdam News with a grainy photo. Shady enough to go into politics. Membership in the Dumas Club meant he’d get help from fellow members—and lend a hand if trouble came someone else’s way.

  He attended Carney and Elizabeth’s wedding. The look in Alexander’s eyes when Carney shook his hand on the receiving line: still in love with her. Tough shit, buddy.

  “Perhaps one day you’ll join, Raymond,” Alma said.

  “Mommy,” Elizabeth said, glaring. The Dumas was a paper bag club, so this was a dig: Carney was too dark for admittance.

  “The store keeps me pretty busy,” Carney said. “Though Leland makes it sound very enjoyable. From all his stories.” A bunch of stuck-up mummies, as far as he was concerned. Even if he had lighter skin, his family story was another barrier. Also his profession. His humble store wouldn’t cut it—he’d have to own a whole department store, a black Blumstein’s, to join their fraternity.

  The Jones family lineage was impeccable. By their own standards, anyway. The preacher grandfather had been one of the Seneca Village elders, ministering to the free Negro community downtown. Carney had never heard of the place before he met the Joneses, but they maintained the legend. Seneca had been a couple of hundred people, mostly colored with a bit of Irish—the mongrels always lived on top of one another. Landowning free black men and women staking out a life in the new city. Three churches, two schools, one cemetery. Nothing like it anywhere else in the country, Mr. Jones said, although Carney knew that wasn’t true. He’d read about thriving colored communities back then in Negro Digest. Pockets in Boston, Philadelphi
a. Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn’t, we’d have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

  Then someone came up with the idea for a grand park in the middle of Manhattan, an oasis inside the newly teeming metropolis. Various locations were proposed, rejected, reconsidered, until the white leaders decided on a vast, rectangular patch in the heart of the island. People already lived there; no matter. The colored citizens of Seneca were property owners, they voted, they had a voice. Not enough of one. The City of New York seized the land, razed the village, and that was that. The villagers dispersed to different neighborhoods, to different cities where they might start again, and the city got its Central Park.

  You’ll find the bones. Dig under the playgrounds and meadows and silent groves, Carney supposed, you’ll find the bones.

  Carney admired the story. Less so the haughty complacency of those who kept it alive. Alma came from similar stock: teachers and doctors for generations, an uncle who was the First Negro to attend this Ivy League college, a cousin who was the First Negro to graduate from that medical school. First this, First that other thing. Race-conscious and proud, up to a point—light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white. Carney spooned Gerber baby food into May’s mouth, saw his hand against her cheek. She was dark, like him. He wondered if Alma still recoiled when she saw her granddaughter’s skin, felt dismayed that she hadn’t turned out light like Elizabeth. He saw her flinch in the hospital room after the delivery. All that hard work and then look at what her daughter marries. Did she stare at her daughter’s belly and wonder whose blood would win out this time?

  “Ray,” Elizabeth said. She noticed his mind had drifted. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, tugging him back. Elizabeth had seen straight through him during school, even when he sat next to her or walked her home in the rain, but he was grateful she saw him now. That night at Stacey Miller’s rent party, she offered a coy apology for not remembering him when he told her that they’d gone to school together. He’d finished college and had been putting in the hours as a stock boy in Blumstein’s furniture department. It was the first party he’d attended in a long time. Freddie tried to coax him out, to a night spot, a get-together, but he’d been too embroiled in his studies—Carver High School hadn’t prepared him for the rigors of Queens College—and once he started the department store job, he was too tired. He fell asleep nights to the news station as the whoops and laughter of uptown snuck in the windows.

  But the night of the party he’d saved up for a new suit—a brown pinstripe number that fit perfectly off the rack. Freddie took him to the party and introduced him around. It was different than before, being out. The talk and interaction took less out of him; finishing his studies, his industry, had made him more confident. Currents plopped him next to Elizabeth in the line outside Stacey Miller’s bathroom. Someone smoking reefer in there. Freddie had told him to piss off the roof. Ignoring his cousin’s advice had always been a good policy; that night it placed him next to his future wife. He had not been one of those boys in his grade who’d had a crush on her. Those Alexander Oakeses with their ploys. She was out of his league so he never wasted a thought on it. “Of course!” Elizabeth said that night outside the bathroom, as if she suddenly remembered him. Lying. They spent two hours on the lumpy couch by the fire escape—apartment full, rent met—and he asked her out to dinner.

  She had been at Black Star Travel for two months. He liked the earnestness in her voice when she talked about work, the urgency of her mission. Black Star arranged tourist and business trips for black travelers, booking them into black-owned and desegregated hotels in America and abroad, mostly the Caribbean, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The company provided entertainment options; tips on banks, tailors, and friendly restaurants; pamphlets on which theaters in New Orleans or some other destination provided colored seating and which ones wouldn’t let you in the door.

  America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life. Best to stay at the Hanson Motor Lodge, fifty miles away, and hit the road by five p.m. to make it back in one piece. It wasn’t medicine or law, like her parents had envisioned, but it was service, practical and meaningful. “I want them to be safe,” Elizabeth said. Carney reached across the table and took her hand. They went to the movies the next night, and the night after that.

  Carney met her parents. They’d had their ideas about young men from broken homes. “What did your father do?” Leland asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear how he’d put it. Which was, “Odd jobs.” He had to allow that in retrospect, maybe they had a point. After all, he had mobsters chasing him these days.

  “Who’s going to finish that up?” Alma asked. The ham, of course, would last for days, that’s what ham was for, but they’d almost taken care of everything else. A few bites of candied sweet potatoes remained.

  “I know you like sweet potatoes,” Leland said to Carney. “Right?”

  Carney took the bowl and thanked him.

  “Didn’t you have a story about them, Carney?” his father-in-law asked. He snuck a look at Alma.

  “Sorry?”

  “It was a Christmas one. With your father on Christmas morning?”

  Carney had, over the years, shared anecdotes about his upbringing. About his mother’s death when he was nine, his father’s disappearances, and how his aunt Millie took him in for a few years. How his father returned, and various hard-knock occasions. Getting bit by rats, deloused by the school nurse, the winters without heat, the time he woke up in Harlem Hospital with pneumonia and had no idea how he got there. He told the stories without self-consciousness; why should he be ashamed to have lived for so long on his own?

  It had been hard. Others had it worse.

  Over the years, on nights like this around this very table, Carney told them about those times because they were true and a part of him, and now these people were family. Only too late did he realize he was exposing too much of himself, soft places where someone might stick in a piece of steel. His stories were his in-laws’ entertainment, a vaudeville act. Yes, there was the story of the time he woke up one Christmas and he and his father had one mealy sweet potato to share between them, they cut it in half and put it on two plates, and he saw his white breath before him because the heat was out again that frigid morning, and his father took off at noon and didn’t return for a week. Well, maybe the tale possessed a colorful majesty in retrospect, but maybe also he didn’t need to be so free with that part of his life anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Jones smiled slightly and sometimes laughed when he told those stories, and why not, they were funny in a miserable way. Perhaps there was something amusing in his delivery, or so he told himself. It was long ago. These days, what he got out of telling that kind of story—a sense of pride in having survived it—and the delight Leland and Alma received from hearing him tell it were small compared to what he had in his life now. He had Elizabeth and May, and if he got a hankering to enumerate his troubles, he had more pressing ones than a sad Christmas morning years ago.

  He declined the invitation. The jester called in sick. He told Leland he didn’t know what he was talking about and said he’d seen a lot of posters for Porgy and Bess on the subway, which sent his in-laws relating, as he knew it would, how one of Leland’s clients got them opening-night tickets for the Broadway revival some years back.

  “I’m tired,” Elizabeth said. The home treatment had worked, the patient had revived, but it was getting late. “It’s time we got May in bed.”

  For once, the Joneses forwent a comment on his pickup truck. He’d had it painted recently, midnight blue. Leland and Alma waved from the front steps, muttered something to each other that
Carney couldn’t catch, and returned to their cool bubble.

  It was a quick drive but long enough for him to decide. Two phone calls. The first to one of Chink Montague’s spots to give them Arthur’s name. The second to Arthur to tell him the gangsters were coming. The safecracker would have to leave town—he was sensible. Arthur had time to get the stash from wherever he was hiding it, or not—it didn’t matter to Carney. He didn’t care if Arthur split the take with the crew later on or whatever arrangement they decided; it was not his concern. Dropping a dime would insulate him, and he figured it was his best chance to keep Freddie’s name out of things. He was like Elizabeth—plotting a safe route of travel for his cousin. As he had in the old days, keeping Freddie away from an Aunt Millie hairbrush spanking. He’d sleep on it, work out the kinks, but he suspected that morning would find him resolute.

  Freddie was pacing across the street from Carney’s apartment when he pulled up. They were surprised to see him—Carney alarmed, Elizabeth delighted.

  “Freddie,” Elizabeth said. “It’s been a while.”

  “How you doing, lady?” Freddie hugged her, making a jokey show of avoiding her big belly. Carney carried May and Freddie kissed her on the cheek. His niece regarded him under heavy lids.

  “Don’t want to wake her,” Carney said.

  Freddie’s face went overcast. “I ain’t the bogeyman,” Freddie said.

  “Let me get the girls upstairs,” Carney said. As the front door closed, he turned. Freddie was gone. When he came back down his cousin was across the street, on the stoop of the flophouse. There’d been a fire—a junkie smoking in bed—and char haloed the empty windows.

  “I saw your lights were out so I waited.” Freddie scanned the street and stuck his shaky Zippo to the cigarette.

  “What is it?”

  “Arthur’s dead.”