Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  “That’s fine,” Carney said.

  “If they haven’t looted the place,” Alma said.

  “I don’t think burning down the World’s Fair was high on their list, Mommy,” Elizabeth said.

  John said, “They burned down the World’s Fair? Why?”

  “Who knows what they’re liable to do, those student activists,” Alma said.

  “You’re against the protest movement now?” Elizabeth said. “After all those benefits for the Freedom Riders?”

  “It’s not the students I mind,” Leland said, “so much as the shiftless element that attached themselves. Did you see what they did to that supermarket on Eighth, next to the AME church?” His ascot was never less than ridiculous and the July heat turned it pathetic. He panted by the window and sipped his lemonade. “They looted everything one day, picked it clean like vultures, and torched it the next. Why would you do that to your own neighborhood store?”

  “Why’d that policeman kill a fifteen-year-old boy in cold blood?” Elizabeth said.

  “They said he had a knife,” Alma said.

  “They say they find a knife the next day and you believe him.”

  “Cops,” Carney said.

  “I’d like to go to ‘It’s a Small World’ again,” May said, and Elizabeth changed the conversation.

  The riots had petered out. It had been hot—ninety-two degrees—when they started, and the kindling went up quick. Wednesday’s rain extinguished the marches and upset in Harlem, and the violence in Bedford-Stuyvesant died down the next night. Everyone was afraid that another incident or confrontation—by police, by a protester—might spark another round. That next eruption is why they talked about the riots as if they were gloomy weather. Far off now, but turn your head and it’s upon you.

  Carney said he had to go to the office to take care of a few things and excused himself from his in-laws’ visit.

  * * *

  * * *

  The walk to work was longer from the new place, but it allowed Carney to savor a few calm blocks before reinsertion into the Harlem mania. Once you walked under the elevated—look up to see the slats cut the sky like prison bars—and crossed Broadway, you were back in the hustle.

  At the corner of 125th, next to the subway entrance, Lucky Luke’s Shoe Repair was a blackened ruin. Had it been the best shine? No.

  A hulking man in stained yellow dungarees yelled at Carney as he approached, and he steeled himself. Then Carney recognized him—the gentleman had purchased a used dinette set last year, layaway. Jeffrey Martins. Carney waved and grinned. Modern life had put them out of touch with the primitive friend-or-foe sorting but it came back quick. In these aftermath days, folks appraised strangers to see where they fell on the spectrum of outrage. Did their expression say Such strange days, don’t you think? or their balled fists communicate Can you believe they’re going to get away with it again? Had the person before you triple-locked the apartment door and waited in the dark for it to be over, or slashed a cop’s face with a bottle? These were your neighbors.

  Some blocks were untouched and it was the Harlem you recognized. Then you rounded the corner and two cars were overturned like fat beetles, a cigar-store Indian stood decapitated before a line of shattered front windows. The entrance of a firebombed grocery store gaped like a tunnel to the underworld. Sable Construction vans idled outside the addresses of their priority customers and dayworkers tossed drywall and fire-hose-soaked insulation into dumpsters. The sanitation department had done a bang-up job of cleaning up the sidewalk trash and debris, which made the stroll more unsettling, as if the ruined addresses had been shipped in from another, worse city.

  As Carney walked down 125th, he got to thinking about the grand pavilions in Flushing, Queens. A few miles away, the World’s Fair celebrated the wonders on the horizon. Sure, Carney dug all the gee-whiz stuff in Futurama—the sleek moon bases and slowly twirling space stations, the undersea headquarters—but more amazing were the demonstrations of what humanity had already accomplished. In one room Bell Labs had Picturephones that showed you the face of the person on the other end of the line, in another mammoth computers talked to each other through telephone wires. The Space Park showcased full-size replicas of the Saturn V rocket, the Gemini spacecraft, a lunar landing module. Here were impossible objects that had been to outer space—and come back safely, traveled all that distance.

  You didn’t need to journey far, certainly didn’t need three-stage rockets and manned capsules and arcane telemetry, to see what else we were capable of. If Carney walked five minutes in any direction, one generation’s immaculate townhouses were the next’s shooting galleries, slum blocks testified in a chorus of neglect, and businesses sat ravaged and demolished after nights of violent protest. What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands were always busy.

  Harlem was calm again, or as calm as Harlem ever got. Carney was relieved the protests had ended, for many reasons. For everyone’s safety, of course. Only one person had died, a miracle, but hundreds had been shot, stabbed, billy-clubbed, or otherwise smacked in the head with two-by-fours. He’d called Aunt Millie to check on her—Pedro and Freddie weren’t around—and she described the scene at Harlem Hospital as a battlefield. “It’s worse than Saturday-night craziness—times ten!”

  Apart from the long shifts she was doing fine, thanks for calling.

  And he was glad the riots were done for the sake of his fellow merchants. The obvious targets were raided, decimated: supermarkets, liquor stores, clothing stores, electronics shops. They stole everything and then grabbed a broom to steal the dust, too. Carney knew firsthand how hard it was for a Negro shopkeeper to persuade an insurance company to write a policy. The vandalism and looting had wiped out a lot of people. Whole livelihoods gone, like that.

  Most of the destruction lay east of Manhattan Ave; Carney’s Furniture was outside the border. Furniture stores were low on the list of loot-able establishments, given the portability issue—but of course any savvy neighborhood resident knew that Carney sold TVs and handsome table lamps, and what about that irate dude who’d been refused credit and hungered for revenge? Can’t carry a sofa on your back, but you can throw a bottle of gasoline through a front window. Which was why he and Rusty spent four nights in the front of the showroom, cradling baseball bats they’d bought at Gary’s Sports down the block. Security gate rolled down, lights out, on sentry duty in the exquisite embrace of their Collins-Hathaway armchairs, whose virtues the salesmen had not exaggerated over the years, no not at all.

  Half the Negroes in Harlem had that story about their grandfather down South, the one who spent all night on the front porch with a shotgun, waiting for the Night Riders to fuck with his family over some incident in town. Black men of legend. Carney and Rusty sipped Coca-Cola and upheld the tradition of the midnight vigil. In most of those stories, the family packs up and flees North the next morning, their Southern term brought to an end. On to the next chapter in the ancestral chronicle. But Carney wasn’t going anywhere. The next morning he pulled up the gate, flipped the sign from closed to open, and waited for customers.

  Business was slow. It was a good time to be in plate glass.

  Most important, Carney welcomed the peace because he had a big meeting lined up, one he’d been trying to engineer for years: a face-to-face with the Bella Fontaine company. Lord knows what Mr. Gibbs, the regional sales rep, had seen on Walter Cronkite or The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Pillaged storefronts, cops tackling miscreants, young girls with batty smiles chucking bricks at news photographers. Making Mr. Gibbs fight his way through pandemonium was a big ask. Especially given that Bella Fontaine had never taken on a Negro dealer before.

  Wednesday morning, Carney had talked Mr. Gibbs out of canceling his trip uptown
. Do I sound like I am on fire? We are open for business. Carney was small potatoes; if not for Mr. Gibbs’s meeting with All-American on Lexington, in white midtown, and with some Suffolk County accounts, he never would have boarded the plane from Omaha. Uptown was burning but business in white Manhattan proceeded as usual.

  The negro owned & operated sign was still in his window, next to the sun-yellowed time payments negotiable. Carney smiled—from one angle, maybe the two signs went together. Marie had stenciled the “Negro Owned” one and brought it from Brooklyn the Monday after the boy was killed. “So they leave us alone,” she said. When the protests jumped to Bed-Stuy, Carney told her to stay home to look after her mother and sister. He and Rusty could manage. Marie agreed, after a round of sobs and apologies. Thursday appeared to be the end of it and Marie showed up for work the next day on time, as if nothing had happened.

  No harm in leaving the sign, in case.

  * * *

  * * *

  “No sales,” Rusty said. “People are taking a nice long look at the Argent sofa, though. They’re flipping over the herringbone.”

  “I noticed.”

  Five years ago, Collins-Hathaway could do no wrong. Now the customers were going Argent, with those clean lines and jet-set emanations. Take that Airform core, zip it up in the new Velope stain-resistant fabric—they really knocked it out of the park. “You know the Manhattan Project, where they brought in the world’s top scientists?” Carney asked his customers. “That’s what Argent did, but with stain-resistance instead of the A-bomb.” That was usually good enough for a sample bounce on the cushions.

  Carney told Rusty to go home early. Now that Rusty had two kids he was less eager to lock up, and the nocturnal stakeouts had made for a long week. On Tuesday, out of riot-night boredom, Carney gave him a new title: associate sales manager. Knowing his boss wouldn’t get around to it, Rusty went ahead and ordered the name tag. While he awaited its arrival, he taped an interim version onto a Pan Am Junior Captain pin he’d obtained somewhere.

  “What do you think?”

  It looked okay. “It looks great,” Carney said. Business was slow anyway.

  Elizabeth had bought some books for Rusty’s little ones and Carney handed them over. “What’d you, loot these?” Carney had asked when she pulled them out of the shopping bag. That would be a sight: Elizabeth climbing into the window display, stepping over broken glass to grab some shit. Wouldn’t put it past her, if she’d been born a few blocks over.

  Rusty thanked him for the gift and then it was a dead two hours except for cop cars drifting by like slow death out there.

  Carney settled at his desk after he locked up to work on a pitch for the new Amsterdam News advertisement. The old one was getting hoary and on riot watch he’d ruminated.

  The Argent sectional…Carney preferred to be hands-on with advertisements, but there was resistance. The newspaper’s in-house man Higgins laid out the ads and he was a stubborn sort, with an imperious streak one associated with the lowest rungs of New York City civil service. “Is this the message you want to send to the public?” As if Higgins were acquainted with the whole history and contemporary reality of home furnishings. One time Carney used the word divan and it turned out Higgins had a cousin named Devon, and the assistant accounts manager had to break up the scuffle. Bottom line: A man has a mind to place an ad and possesses the means, you run the ad. Save the censorship for the front page.

  Carney grew punchy.

  Designed with today’s Rioter-on-the-Go in mind…

  After a long day of fighting the Man, why not put your feet up—on a new Collins-Hathaway ottoman.

  Presenting the new Collins-Hathaway Three-Point Recliner—finally a sit-in we can all agree on!

  Someone thumped on the Morningside door. None of his regulars had arranged a meet, but it was Saturday evening and a fellow might want some money in his pocket for the night ahead. Carney slid back the cover and looked out the keyhole. He let his cousin in, making sure that no one came up behind.

  “What’s up?” Freddie hadn’t been this scrawny since seventh grade—he had existed as a chicken-armed creature until puberty. His skin was sheened, his red-and-orange-striped T-shirt sweated through. He clutched a leather briefcase with gold-tone hardware and a tiny clasp lock.

  “Where you been?” Carney said. He put his arm on Freddie’s shoulder to test that he was actually there.

  Freddie wriggled loose. “I wanted to check in and see how you were doing—how all you were doing.” He claimed the club chair and leaned back. “People up to some madness the last few days.”

  “We’re fine,” Carney said. “The kids. You talk to Aunt Millie?”

  “I’m heading there right after I see you. Surprise her.”

  “She’ll be surprised all right.”

  Freddie cradled the leather briefcase to his chest. Gentle, like he kept a rooftop coop and the briefcase was his prize flier. Carney asked him what it was.

  “This? I know, right! Listen, I have to tell you how I found out what was going down—I was in it! It was Saturday night, you know, the big one.”

  Freddie had trekked to Times Square to see The Unsinkable Molly Brown—his partiality for Debbie Reynolds was durable and verified—and on the ride uptown a weird vibe swallowed up the train. Everyone jumpy, looking around. The heat sent people barking at one another. Since the murder, the news had been running stories about flocks of youth rampaging through the subway, harassing white people, threatening motormen.

  “It was nine o’clock,” Freddie said. “I get out of the subway to look for a sandwich and the streets are full of people. Raising their fists, waving signs. Chanting, ‘We want Malcolm X! We want Malcolm X!’ and ‘Killer cops must go!’ Some of them hold pictures of the killer cop like, Wanted: Dead or Alive. I’m hungry—I don’t want to deal with all that. I’m trying to get me a sandwich.”

  The Congress of Racial Equality had been out in front since the boy was killed, organizing a rally on Friday, and another on Saturday at the 28th Precinct. “Someone said they were at the station house doing speeches, and I thought to myself—maybe I’m an activist. Why not? You know I like those little CORE girls, all serious and shit, talking about change. Last time I was in Lincoln’s I started rapping with this girl from CORE. Looked like Diahann Carroll? Could have been her sister. But she wasn’t having it. Says she wants herself a college man and I said, I went to college—”

  “UCLA,” Carney helped out.

  “That’s right—University of the Corner of Lenox Avenue!” The old joke.

  Freddie followed the crowd to the station house on 123rd, where a CORE field secretary with dark horn-rimmed glasses and a red bow tie listed demands: Police Commissioner Murphy must resign; set up the long-requested civilian review board. “Got these Negroes out there yelling ‘Killer! Killer! Killer!’ this way, over that way this young brother has a bullhorn going, ‘Forty-five percent of the cops in New York are neurotic murderers!’ It was a ruckus—I should have stayed in the subway, all this going on up here. And you know those cops ain’t having it. They got barricades up, herding people. Wearing those helmets because they know people are going to fuck over them. Fucking cop pulls out the special cop bullhorn and tells us, ‘Go home! Go home!’ And everybody shouted back, ‘We are home, baby!’

  “This old lady elbows me in the stomach, we’re packed in. Hot. All these angry Negroes in one place, and they are pissed—but all I want is a sandwich. I start heading back up to 125th and people are all buzzing, saying the police have beat up and arrested some CORE people. That was that! Boom—it was on! Knocking over the barricades. Niggers on the roof raining down shit on the cops—bricks, soda bottles, pieces of roof. Rocking cars, throwing shit through windows.

  “I’m like, how am I going to get my sandwich in all this mess?

  “On 125th, everybody’s closed or
closing up early because of the unrest. That Cuban place with the pickle they put on the meat is closed. Jimmy’s, the Coronet’s got its lights out. That’s when I really got hungry—you know how you want something more when you know you ain’t going to get it? Negroes are wrapping chains around those security gates and then pulling the gates off with their cars. Then they break the glass and step inside. I’m a simple man. Put something between two slices and I’m happy. But how am I supposed to get a motherfucking sandwich with all that going on? People running up and down, screaming. I’m like, damn, this riot stuff will cramp a brother’s style.”

  Freddie had no recourse but to split uptown and hit Gracie’s Diner. “Got my ass a turkey sandwich, finally. And it was good, too. But that was some wild shit, man,” he said. “You don’t want to be out in that, hell no. Me and Linus decided to ride it out at our place.”

  “Ride it out.” Drop out of the world and get high for a few days.

  “Beats getting beat upside the head. What’d you do?”

  Carney said, “Elizabeth and the kids stayed inside mostly. Their day camp was canceled—it’s on the same block as the station house, so it was in a hot spot. I was here. Rusty was with me a lot.” He told Freddie about the vigil. A mob marched past going east, then returned into view stampeding in the other direction, followed by a gang of white cops. Back and forth. In the end, the store was unscathed, as Freddie could see. “So what’s in there?” Carney asked again.

  “This? I need you to sit on this for a few days,” Freddie said.

  “Freddie.”

  “Linus and me, we pulled this rip-off and it got some people mad. These heavy dudes. And now we got to lay low for a spell. Can you do that for me?”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a lot of heat, that’s all I can say.”

  “You’re nuts,” Carney said. They had extra cops cruising the neighborhood to keep a lid on, prowl cars and cops on corners, and Freddie is walking around with a Madison Avenue briefcase that obviously wasn’t his. Was it drugs? He wouldn’t bring that into his place, would he? “What are you getting me into?”