Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  “Make a little dam, that’s what I do,” Pepper said. He stuck a toothpick in his mouth. “Where’s this Betty live?”

  Carney made a dam. “At the Burbank,” he said, “140th Street.”

  “What apartment?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pepper shrugged. “Your cousin’s okay, sounds like.”

  “He usually is.”

  Pepper walked into the showroom.

  “Wait,” Carney said. “What do I do with him?”

  Pepper yawned. “You got a truck, right? You’re Mike Carney’s son. You’ll figure it out.”

  Carney leaned against the office doorway as Pepper closed the front door. He headed for the river. Two young men passed by the front window going the other way, joking and howling.

  The night proceeded down its avenue. It was physics.

  His father’s truck came in handy. By sunrise he had dumped the body in Mount Morris Park, per the local custom. From the way the newspapers wrote about the park, he thought there might be a line. It was easier than he thought, getting rid of a body, or so he told Freddie when his cousin returned from his vacation down in the Village. Carney was almost caught by two men copulating under a birch tree, a worn-out hooker scouting wee-hour johns, and a man in a priest’s collar who cursed at the moon and did not sound like a man of God at all. Plus he was out the money for the Moroccan Luxury rug he rolled the crook up in, but still: easier. If there was one thing he’d learned in recent days, it was that common sense and a practical nature are a great boon in the execution of criminal enterprises. Also that there are hours of the night when other people are less visible, so vivid are one’s private ghosts. He cleaned up the blood in the office. He climbed into bed next to Elizabeth and May. Out cold two seconds later.

  The story of that Saturday night made Freddie shake his head and sigh. He had a hungry look. Then he asked, “In a rug?”

  It ended up being a good month once the heat broke. Customers returned and he and Rusty closed some nice sales. Some of them were repeat. Sell quality goods, and people come back. The two Silvertones found takers one Thursday afternoon, one after the other. More where that came from, Aronowitz told him.

  Elizabeth didn’t have any more fainting spells, and if her mother told her about the argument that night, there was no sign. That bill would come due in time.

  About a month later Carney received a package. He got an odd feeling and closed his office door and drew the blinds to the showroom. Inside the box, wrapped in newspaper like a fish, was Miss Lucinda Cole’s necklace. The ruby glared at him, a mean lizard eye. Pepper’s handwriting was childish. The note said, “You can split this with your cousin.” He didn’t. He sat on it for a year to let the heat die down. Buxbaum paid him and Carney put the money away for the apartment. “I may be broke sometimes, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself. Although, he had to admit, perhaps he was.

  DORVAY

  1961

  “An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”

  ONE

  Five hundred dollars, onetime payment. As far as bribes and payoffs went, the onetime nature argued in its favor. Detective Munson came knocking for his weekly envelope, every Friday Delroy and Yea Big came to the store to pick up Chink Montague’s—Carney didn’t have the heart to calculate how much he’d paid out to those crooks the last two years. Operating expenses. The price of doing business, like rent and insurance and Ma Bell. Squint at it, the five hundred to Duke was an investment.

  “It’ll pay off down the road.” That’s how Pierce had pitched membership to Carney, when the lawyer caught his reaction to the words Dumas Club. Carney’s expression: a braid of disdain and revulsion. “I’m not the right color,” Carney said.

  “It’s not that bad anymore,” Pierce said. He grinned. “Look at me.”

  It was true that Pierce was a blacker variety of berry than the average Dumas member. Certainly the lawyer wasn’t as stuffy or stuck-up as, say, Leland Jones.

  “That’s your father-in-law?”

  “Yes,” Carney said.

  “Sorry, brother.”

  They first met at the inaugural meeting of the Harlem Small Business Association. Basement of the St. Nicholas AME Zion Church. Terrance Pierce was on hand to lend his legal expertise, pro bono. “We’re not going to rise unless we all rise, right?”

  Carney sat in the front row, as he had as a student. Pierce arrived five minutes late and took the only seat left, next to him. Instead of clapping for the speakers, Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on a monogrammed silver cigarette case. He was a tall man, with wavy black hair that focused his features into something eagle-like. His suit was expensive, gray with silvery pinstripes; Carney had been mulling a wardrobe upgrade and later inquired about his tailor.

  They got to talking between the plans and appeals of uptown merchants, restaurant owners, and local pols. Hank Diggs, the president of the Diggs Pomade Company and originator of the slogan “Dig This Shine!,” took the podium. “With all the brain power we got in this room,” he said, “we could light up Times Square!” He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice that evoked his own low wattage and undercut his point. His hair looked great, though. Carney took the cynic’s view when it came to groups, specifically groups and results, but Elizabeth had pushed him to show up. It wouldn’t hurt to increase his profile, she told him. Even if nothing came of it, it was good to put a face to the name on the sign. The letters on the new sign he’d just paid for tilted upward like a jet taking to the sky.

  Adam Clayton Powell Jr. even popped in toward the end to cheer on the crowd. Regal and dapper. Carney admired the man’s hustle; one of these days they were going to name a street after him, you watch. “It’s a new day in Harlem,” the congressman said. “We have President Kennedy down in D.C., promising a New Frontier—why can’t we have our own New Frontier in our own backyards, on the streets of Harlem, one the world has never seen before?” He’d used the same analogy last week, at the opening of a supermarket on Ninth. Carney’d read about it in the Harlem Gazette. An assistant materialized, whispered in Powell’s ear, and he left the merchants to foment economic revolution.

  The association fizzled out after the third meeting—the treasurer running around with the vice president’s wife—but Pierce and Carney continued to meet for lunch at Chock Full o’Nuts. They were the first in their families to go to college, although Pierce’s father was a solid citizen, working the line instead of working people over, busting his ass for forty years at the Anheuser-Busch bottling plant in Newark. Pierce attended to his studies and got a scholarship to NYU, then graduated with honors from St. John’s Law School. “I wanted to be the Negro Clarence Darrow,” Pierce said, shrugging.

  Franklin D. Shepard, the colorful uptown lawyer, gave him a desk. “Once I got in there, I was in there like a tick!” Shepard liked to see his name in the paper, and it turned out the boy from Newark had an affinity for civil rights cases, the kind that made headlines. The NAACP retained Pierce for crusades against discrimination in public housing, union jobs, and lending. He represented the Dyckman Six against the City of New York—brown water in the pipes and gray rats in the hallways—and lost the notorious Samuel Parker police brutality case, though it was “still good advertising.” By 1958, when Mayor Wagner announced the city’s antibias housing law and unveiled the Commission on Intergroup Relations, Pierce was a familiar sight in the newspapers, standing next to NAACP leadership with his dandy suit and steely smile.

  Pierce could have been on the radio, the way he spoke. Over apple pie, Pierce recounted how a high-school English teacher had hipped him to elocution classes. “He told me, ‘You want to make it, you need to speak right. None of this Newark shit.’ Like Newark was a different language, but I knew what he meant.”

  Carney nodded—his freshman-year economics professor Mr. Liebman had to
ld him the same thing, substituting street for Newark. Liebman was a Lower East Side Jew who declaimed from behind the lectern like a Boston WASP and knew whereof he spoke. Carney couldn’t afford to take courses—he was on his own and where was he going to get that kind of scratch? Instead he studied CBS News Radio and William Holden double features. Step back and the world is a classroom if need be. He watched his mouth in the mirror as his jaw worked over white whale. Hard stop on the t, puff of breath on the w. Whenever he pronounced “Heywood-Wakefield” on the showroom floor, he saw those old reflections: his tongue pressed against his front teeth as the air-shaft light limped through the opaque glass of the bathroom window.

  Unlikely characters: Pierce in the courtroom, and Carney running his store. “Neither us of is supposed to be where we are,” Carney told Elizabeth, “from where we came from. That’s why we get along.” Like Carney, the lawyer was a family man, joy quickening his features when he pulled out photos of his wife and kids. Carney didn’t have any pictures to share in turn, and made a note to pick up one of those new cameras. Finally get a few pics of May and John. Capture his son, with his ten-word vocabulary and two teeth, and his daughter, whose dark intelligence intensified behind her brown eyes every day.

  Pierce putting him up for membership in the Dumas was a surprise. Guys like them didn’t belong to places like that.

  Pierce had been in the club for two years, he said. Franklin D. Shepard put him up, despite his color and humble origins, and made a point of telling his fellow members that they lived in a new era. Didn’t have to spell out what he meant. For his part, Pierce had been pleased with his Dumas time so far. “Like that Harlem association meeting where we met. Some men only know how to talk about what they want to do—and then there are men who get it done. At the Dumas, these are the men who get shit done.”

  Carney said no thanks.

  His friend was a patient man. “Come to the mixer,” Pierce said. “Have a drink at least. You and me, we’ve been sticking our foot in the door our whole lives, because we know that’s the only way to get into the room. But getting in that room is everything. You get in the room and you will run that room.”

  Carney called his father-in-law to give him a heads-up. Here was the rug peddler, barging in again—first his daughter, now his club. Alma handed Leland the phone and he said, “When Wilfred said you were coming, I told him I was thrilled.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The Dumas Club, according to the brass plaque on the black gate of the townhouse, was founded in 1925. The names of the founders were familiar to Carney; they’d lectured him in high-school assemblies on the value of good work and moral health, were the masters of ceremonies at Fourth of July picnics and Labor Day dances in Mount Morris Park. The building dated back to 1898, when the neighborhood belonged to Italians and Irish. New blood in, old blood out—this Dumas visit marked Carney’s turn as the new guy disturbing the way things are.

  Carney wore his new lightweight tan suit. He checked once more to see if he was sweating through it. Judging from this week’s torments, it was going to be another punishing summer. At the end of the block, an old man shaved off ice for yelping children, bottles of bright syrup dancing in his hands like juggling pins. A teenager in a black suit and tails waited at the top of the club’s steps and beckoned with white gloves.

  To the right of the front hall, the parlor room was full of Dumas men running herd over those they’d put up for membership. The piano player at the baby grand in the corner banged out ragtime, the hectic rhythms a nervous commentary on all the glad-handing. Pierce retrieved Carney and introduced him around. Carney knew Abraham Frye from the newspapers—one of the few Negro judges in the city. Was that a city councilman lingering by the bar, pointing at his preferred gin? Carney couldn’t remember the last time he voted, but he’d doubtless voted for the man, the way the machine had everything locked up. Dick Thompson of Thompson TV and Radio, the Lenox Avenue electronics store, traded dirty jokes with Ellis Gray, who ran the biggest Negro-owned construction company in the city. Sable Construction had performed the recent work on Carney’s store, so he figured he’d paid for Gray’s tie or pocket square at the very least.

  Members wore their club rings on their pinkies. With letters that tiny, you had to own one yourself to make out the seal. Or get real, real close—which Carney had. One of the guys, Louie the Turtle, had brought one to the office for him to get rid of, along with a motley bunch of loot. Louie the Turtle grazed inscrutably and showed up with the oddest things. The words on the ring were Latin and Carney had been incurious as to their meaning. He could’ve gotten something for the gold, but out of spite tossed it back at the Turtle and told him no, too traceable.

  Carney shook the hand of Denmark Gibson, whom he recognized as the owner of the oldest funeral home in Harlem. Gibson had cremated his mother and father.

  “How’s business?” Carney asked.

  “Business is always good,” Denmark Gibson said.

  And Elizabeth’s childhood friend Alexander Oakes, of course, experimenting with muttonchops. Oakes nodded from across the room. It was a Strivers’ Row crowd, no doubt, and Carney the only representative from ’round Crooked Way. Politicians, insurance men at the big-time colored firms, and more than a few lawyers and bankers, such as Wilfred Duke, whose new venture kept coming up in conversation. He’d been a muckety-muck at Carver Federal Savings, overseeing most of the neighborhood’s loans for twenty years. If a Negro wanted to get something going, he had to go through Wilfred Duke sooner or later. It was his new venture that had everybody talking, putting together the charter for a new black-owned bank to compete with his former employer: Liberty National, or simply Liberty, if you were in the know. Mortgages, small-business loans, community development. According to Pierce, half the room was trying to get their mitts in as board members or investors.

  “Just water?” the bartender asked.

  “And ice if you have it,” Carney said.

  Someone touched his elbow. It was Leland, with the smile usually reserved for his grandchildren. “It’s good to see you, Raymond,” he said, and jetted to one of his cronies.

  There was an hour of the typical jockeying, appraisals, and brinksmanship, and then Wilfred Duke stood before the windows overlooking 120th Street and addressed the group. He recognized those who’d stepped down from club leadership, as well as their successors. Those who had recently passed, such as Clement Landford, who’d advised four mayors on the Negro point of view. He announced the endowment drive for a scholarship in Landford’s name, full ride at Morehouse for a gifted New York City student. Everyone clapped. Pierce tapped a Chesterfield on his cigarette case.

  Certainly Carney was not the only one who saw Napoleon. The Harlem Gazette, a Duke antagonist going back to some dispute before Carney started reading the paper, had an editorial cartoonist who liked to portray the banker as the famous general, hand inside jacket, propeller beanie on his head in the place of the military chapeau. Bull’s-eye. Duke was short and slightly built and spoke in a staccato, dictatorial style. Thirty years ago, he would have been a rare bird in Young Negro Harlem, a harbinger of the changing city, it was not difficult to see how he’d clambered to his place of influence. Or how he’d gathered enemies. The Gazette covered Duke’s bank plan as a Barnum-style con.

  Duke smoothed his pencil mustache, those rat whiskers. He welcomed the prospective members. The club was named after Alexandre Dumas, the banker reminded them, son of a French army officer and a Haitian slave, who rose to the top of the literary world. “If you remember the story of the Count of Monte Cristo—and I realize it’s been a long time since some of you were in school”—there was some chuckling—“he was a man who got things done once he decided on a course of action. And that’s the spirit we strive for in our fraternity. The bootstrap spirit that delivered our ancestors from bondage, and now inspires all of us as we try to mak
e a better Harlem.” Hear, hear.

  Duke told everybody to have a drink and he wound his way through the room to commence his inspection of the applicants. Carney was one of the last to be collared. Pierce gave Carney a wink and slinked off.

  They were next to the window, which allowed a slight cross ventilation. “Raymond!” Duke said. “It’s hard to believe we haven’t met before.” The hand was clammy and the cologne first-rate. “How’s Elizabeth—and you have two children?”

  “Great.”

  “You tell that lady of yours her uncle Willie says hello.”

  The street caught his attention. “That’s terrible.” He nodded below, where a disheveled young man staggered and patted his pockets in a grotesque pantomime. The Junkie Shake, that new dance, all the rage. “It’s a scourge,” Duke said. “Some places, lots where I used to play handball as a kid, I wouldn’t walk past at night.”

  “Wagner’s talking about that drug task force,” Carney said. He didn’t believe it, but it was something to say.

  “That fool’s looking to get himself reelected. Against those Tammany hacks? He’ll say anything.”

  “It’s a mess,” Carney said, and reminded himself to call Freddie.

  Duke put his back to 120th Street and asked after the furniture store. Carney assumed the banker already knew all he needed to know about him, but he told him about the expansion into the old bakery next door, just completed. His new secretary was working out fine, although he found it hard to give up tasks he’d been doing on his own for so long.

  “You say goodbye to old challenges and welcome new ones.”

  “That’s being an entrepreneur,” Carney said.

  “Giving that old Jew Blumstein a run for his money, I hope.” Duke had had plenty of dealings with the big department store over the years, starting back with the protests in ’31 over the lack of Negro clerks and cashiers. He was a young man during the Buy Where You Can Work boycott, but even then he knew the importance of the long game. “Blumstein’s wasn’t going nowhere, and neither were we!” he told Carney. It had the ring of a well-used line.