Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

  “I’m your cousin,” Freddie said. “I need you to do it. I don’t have anyone else.”

  You couldn’t hear the subway from 125th and Morningside, but Carney heard this train. Following its cursed schedule and already pulling into the station and opening its doors whether you were ready or not. “Okay.”

  “What else is that thing for?” Meaning the safe.

  “I said okay.”

  “I’ll be around in a few days to pick it up.”

  “I said okay.”

  Carney spun the handle of the Hermann Bros. safe and slid the briefcase inside. He closed it and rapped on the dark metal for effect. “Where will you be?”

  Freddie gave him the address of an SRO way uptown on 171st Street, room 306. “I’ll pick this up in a few days, Ray.”

  “What if I open it?”

  “You don’t want to do that. Something might fly out.”

  Carney slammed the Morningside door behind Freddie. He regarded the safe.

  It came to him: A comfortable sofa outlasts the day’s news—it’s built for a lifetime.

  Carney knew Mr. Diaz, the owner of MT Liquors, from meetings of the 125th Street business alliance. He was a Puerto Rican immigrant, gentle-natured except on the topic of crime. He despised druggies, purse-snatchers, and muggers. Public urination was a personal crusade, arguing from the anti position.

  When they smashed his front window on Saturday night, Mr. Diaz replaced it the next day. He replaced it when they smashed it the next night. Never mind that the store had been cleaned out and there was nothing to steal but the empty, busted cash register. They broke the window again. He replaced it. They smashed it four times and four times he replaced it. Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?

  TWO

  The next day was Sunday. The plan was to pop out after lunch and check out this season’s Bella Fontaine line at New Century down in Union Square. Get a feel in person, beyond the catalog, a laying on of hands. All-American on Fifty-Third was closer, but he didn’t want to be recognized. For fear of sabotage, or ridicule, for fear their enthusiasm over the product would make him feel rotten if things fell through. The company decal was a spiffy item—bella fontaine authorized dealer encircling an image of Poseidon erupting from the sea, clenching a gold trident. In his mind’s eye he’d already stuck one in his front window, on the left as you walk in. For everyone to see.

  Bella Fontaine had been on a hot streak ever since Life magazine ran those photographs of Jackie perched on their settee in the sunroom of the Kennedy Hyannis Port compound. Carney had dug their stuff since the ’56 Home Furnishings Association convention. It was the first and last time he attended the HFA’s annual shindig—too many white people, too many toupees and plaid sports jackets—but the rush of the convention floor that first day remained. It was like venturing into Futurama at the World’s Fair, that same boggling wonder and plenty. “Bold yet avuncular minimalism.” Scandinavian modern and the new plastics. He wended his way through the booths and exhibits—last year’s Miss Montana in a bikini, perched on a St. Mark patio set—until he arrived at Bella Fontaine’s display. Bring on the sunbeams and heavenly chorus, for surely a divine apparition has manifested inside the Bridgeport Convention Complex off Interstate 79.

  Bella Fontaine’s Monte Carlo Collection gently twirled on the rotating platform, the birch finish of the dining-room set aglow under the fluorescent tubes. The sleek drop-leaf table; the roomy, multi-door sideboard; the slim hutch with the beveled edges and hidden cocktail station—they subverted notions vis-à-vis domestic entertaining. The company tagline was a lullaby from a kingdom of luxury: Furniture that looks beautiful, feels beautiful, stays beautiful—furniture for a whole new way of life. Carney whispered those words into May’s ear when she was a baby, to calm her colic. Start with two pieces and add on later. It usually worked.

  The chatter and hustle of the convention floor started up again. Carney approached the rep to snag a promo catalog. The rep was a pink-faced white man in a powder blue suit who greeted him with a familiar look of racial contempt. “We don’t cater to Negro gentlemen,” he said, and turned his back to attend to two portly men with Texas accents.

  Eight years later, Carney had finagled a face-to-face with Mr. Gibbs. All across the country, one observed signs of racial progress; perhaps the home-furnishing industry kept pace with the changing times.

  Carney was halfway to the downtown subway when a man grabbed his arm and said, “Hold it, brother.”

  The grip was light. The tone held Carney fast. The man was slender, with red-brown skin like he hailed from the islands. When Carney turned to look at him, he twisted Carney’s arm around behind his back, painfully. He wore James Bond sunglasses and a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt over a white tank top. Not lacking a certain style.

  Carney had never been robbed. His low profile helped; no one knew exactly what kind of volume Carney carried. The crooked side of the business remained discreet and off-hour. He cut off the crazies and junkies as soon as their natures expressed themselves. Moskowitz knew what he was pulling in on the high end, but not the rest, the coins and whatnot he laid off on separate brokers across the boroughs. Compared to your typical, flashy uptown crook, Carney looked like, well, a furniture salesman.

  Munson the cop perhaps had an inkling. One night the detective, drunk, had come upon Carney at Nightbirds and proposed a toast to Carney’s health. “To the biggest nobody in Harlem.” A compliment on staying out of the fray, or a comment on how much he was making?

  “If you say so,” Carney had answered, and sipped his beer.

  But this wasn’t Munson putting the snatch on him. The stranger steered Carney to the corner. None of the passersby noticed anything amiss. Would he force Carney back to the office, make a play for the safe? It was Sunday, so Marie wasn’t working. But Rusty was minding the store, and he might start something that got them killed.

  “Over here,” the man said. A lime green Cadillac DeVille vibrated at the crosswalk. He opened the back door and ushered Carney inside the sedan, sliding in after.

  Delroy was at the wheel, so this was a Chink Montague production. Unless the man was freelancing. Or had gone to work for the competition.

  “Say hello to Chet the Vet,” Delroy said. He pulled away, up Broadway.

  Chet the Vet flashed gold canines.

  “Tell ’em about the war, Chet.”

  From his age, Carney gathered he’d been in Korea.

  “Fuck a white man’s army,” Chet said.

  “They call him Chet the Vet because he went to school to be an animal doctor. For a month.”

  “It wasn’t for me,” Chet allowed.

  “Delroy,” Carney said, “what’s happening here?”

  “Have to ask the boss.”

  Carney met his gaze in the rearview mirror. The hood averted his eyes.

  * * *

  * * *

  It had been five years since Chink Montague sent Delroy and Yea Big around the furniture store to recover his girlfriend’s stolen jewelry. The purpose of the visit had been intimidation; its result was a promotion, once Chink started steering business in Carney’s direction for a cut. Delroy and Yea Big dropped by for the envelope every week, and five years was a long time. At a certain point, an outside observer might characterize them as a species of colleague.

  Carney and Delroy, anyway. Some kids throwing a football around one January morning discovered Yea Big in Mount Morris Park, sash-cord wound around his neck. Missing for a week before melted snow gave him up, with the frozen dog shit and cigarette butts. That was last year, at the start of the war between Bumpy Johnson and Chink Montague. Bumpy Johnson got out of Alcatraz in ’63 on mandatory release and had an idea to reclaim the empire he’d lost eleven y
ears before. Jerry Catena, an underboss in the Genovese family, backed his play, while Chink operated under the auspices of the Lombardis, making their conflict a proxy war over Harlem’s rackets. That Chink was Bumpy’s protégé gave the conflict a biblical flair.

  “They got us dancing puppets,” Delroy told Carney when he came around for the envelope. He’d been up for days. He ran a finger along the scar in his cheek as if scraping invisible peas out of a pod. “We kill each other and these guinea motherfuckers sit back and laugh.” It made for a hot couple of weeks until they called a truce and carved up the neighborhood like the messy butchers they were.

  After Yea Big’s death, Delroy came for the envelope solo. He and Carney were linked now—fellow puppets, crooked confederates, and fellow residents of Harlem, USA, God bless. They shared milestones. Delroy was Carney’s first customer when the furniture store reopened after the expansion; the hood needed another dinette set for his latest girlfriend. Some men commemorated a new romance with the gift of a sparkling necklace or a pair of smart earrings from their preferred jeweler. With Delroy, it was dinette sets. “These gals, they don’t even know how to set a table proper. How you going to feed your man, you ain’t even got a goddamn place to eat?” The logic was sound. For a stretch, Delroy’s romantic life was particularly fruitful and he bought three Riviera! by Collins-Hathaway pedestal tables in one year. Carney cut him a break on the last one.

  Did Chink think Carney was shortchanging him? Or had someone set him up?

  Delroy parked on 155th and Broadway, across from Sid the Sud King. The mascot on the sign was a Mr. Clean knockoff, a bald-headed Negro flexing in a white T-shirt. His grin broad and psychotic. Chet the Vet tugged Carney out of the car and led him into the laundromat.

  driest spin in town. White foam pushed against the washers’ portholes in a lazy slosh. Old ladies parceled coins and old men wearing their last clean drawers shuffled around the grimy coin-op. The place was a misery, a death ward for old Maytags, the machines rocked and bucked so. Is there anything you can do, doctor?…Could be days, could be weeks. It’s in God’s hands now. Every nickel shook the washers closer to the nearest junkyard. Or empty lot, more likely.

  The July swelter plus the heat from the mammoth dryers made the room unbearable. You couldn’t hear a word above the machines and the fans that shoved the hot air around. Which was probably the point.

  last wash 7 p.m. Today it sounded like a warning.

  Chet the Vet steered Carney into the office, past the vending machine that dispensed boxes of Salvo, Biz, and Instant Fels. The back room was dim and most of the light came from the door to the alley. Chink Montague sat in a wheeled, green leather executive chair, one leg crossed over the other, his hands interlaced. Gigantic diamond rings bulged on his fingers like warts.

  Chink Montague had made his fearsome reputation with a knife, but no longer conjured the image of a fleet, balletic slasher. People still remembered the audacious sadism of his first campaign, after Bumpy Johnson got sent to Alcatraz. That initial bloody exercise in ambition had served him well over the years, but he’d learned other means of control. Take the publicity trick with the hams. Bumpy had started the Christmas goodwill giveaway, handing out turkeys to the Harlem needy from the back of a truck. Chink followed suit, tossing out free hams the day before Easter, sometimes to people who were unaware that he’d killed their husband or son. Or were too hungry to care. These days he was more likely to hold court than to press steel to some mope’s throat, presiding over his minions at the Hotel Theresa bar or buying a round for everyone at one of his clubs, the 99 Spot or the Too True.

  And this place, behind one of the city’s innumerable fronts, where the operators of power worked their levers and pedals. Sometimes business wasn’t business unless rubes and squares walked outside, oblivious to how they were getting fucked over inside.

  The manager of the laundromat was a scrawny man in a saggy undershirt painted with sweat stains. Launderer, heal thyself. He leaned against the bathroom door and scratched his neck. Chink Montague snapped his fingers and the man scurried away.

  The mobster explained that he was getting the floors refinished at his office upstairs at the 99 Spot. “Contractors,” he said. “They promise and promise it’s going to take not so long, and then you have to double it. It’s hot in here today, but I like the sound of the thumping machines. Like someone’s getting worked over in the next room.”

  A customer hollered through the door to complain that a machine stole his money. Chet the Vet stuck his head out. Whatever his expression was, it ended the dispute.

  “First time we met,” Chink told Carney, “I was telling you to find something. People told me there was a new fence uptown, keeping his head down.”

  “I try to stay out of things,” Carney said.

  “And I was helping out a young starlet—Miss Lucinda Cole. She’s in Hollywood now. You seen any of her movies?”

  “That one about the orphanage, with the singing.”

  “Miss Pretty’s Promise. She wasn’t bad at all in that. Should have been the lead, but they have their own way of thinking.” He smiled to himself. “I could tell them a thing or two about who she really is, anyone wants to listen.”

  There was a poster of Sid the Sud King above the desk, him standing in a genie pose, as if he’d zapped the clean into the clothes of a mom and her two kids, who smiled grotesquely. The yard was one of those you saw in articles about those new Long Island developments, like Levittown or Amityville, that didn’t sell or rent to Negroes. Carney thought, Do I need a mascot?

  “Never did find that property of hers,” Chink said, “but you and me started our association, so good came out of it, right?”

  Carney nodded.

  “You pull a big score, you best give me a taste. And if it turns out someone needs a fence, I might send him by that furniture store on 125th. Something falls into my lap and I think you’re the one to call, I call you, right?”

  Their arrangement had paid for the expansion of Carney’s store and for the move to Riverside Drive. Carney and Chink had only talked face-to-face once before, six months after the Theresa job. Yea Big and Delroy swung by for the envelope and brought Carney out to a cherry red Cadillac parked outside. Chink was in the back. He rolled down the window, looked over his sunglasses, and gave Carney a once-over. “All right, then,” the mobster said, and the Cadillac pulled away. All right, then was a binding contract, signed in ink or blood, take your pick.

  “It’s been profitable,” Carney said. “And your end has always been reasonable. I hope you’ve been satisfied.”

  “That’s why I told Delroy and Chet to be polite. This guy sells couches, bring him by the laundromat and we’ll have a chat.” He rolled up his sleeves. “It’s about your brother. He’s been messing around and I’d like a word.”

  “Cousin.”

  Chink glared at Delroy. “I thought you said it was his brother,” Chink said.

  “Cousin,” Delroy said.

  “That right?” he asked Carney.

  “Yes.”

  “I want to talk to your cousin.”

  “Right.”

  “Not ‘right’—where? Where’s he at?”

  “I haven’t seen him for months,” Carney said. “He’s hanging out with a different crowd. Just talked to his mother because of the riot—she hasn’t seen him either.”

  “His mother,” Chink said. “What do you think about it? All that running around everybody did last week?”

  “It’s the same old thing. They get away with it, and then people want to be heard.”

  “Know what I think? I think they shouldn’t have stopped. All these angry niggers up here. Everywhere. They should have burned the whole neighborhood down and then kept going. Midtown, downtown, Park Avenue.” The mobster mimed an explosion with his hands. “Torch all that shit.”


  “Bad for business,” Carney said. “At least in my line—home furnishings.”

  “ ‘Bad for business.’ ” Chink Montague rubbed his jaw. “You know anything about playing a number? Putting some money down? I see these suckers, I take their money, I know they want to burn shit down. I say, maybe don’t play the same number all the time. Play something else, see what happens. Maybe you been playing the wrong thing this whole time.”

  He nodded at Chet the Vet and Delroy. “You see your cousin, you tell me first. I want him.” Chink turned to the desk and struck up a lovelorn humming of “My Heart Is a Pasture (Theme from Miss Pretty’s Promise).”

  Out on the street, Carney started for the Cadillac. Chet said, “Boss didn’t say nothing about chauffeur service.”

  “I’ll see you in the car,” Delroy told Chet the Vet. The erstwhile veterinary student spat into the gutter and crossed the street.

  Delroy checked over his shoulder and waved Carney close. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “because you gave me a break on that dinette that one time for Beulah. And I want you to listen. I’ve seen that nigger pitch a bitch, I’ve seen him at war. I’ve seen him cut a nigger’s eyelids off for blinking too loud. When he talks like that—weird and calm—shit is right and proper fucked up. You see your cousin, you better step up. For everybody’s fucking sake.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The Cadillac turned east. Carney waited for it to disappear. Then he cut over to Amsterdam and walked up to 171st, where he switched back to Broadway.

  It had been years since Carney visited this stretch of Broadway. Since he stopped buying used furniture. Why did Freddie choose to lam it up here? Because he wasn’t going to run into anyone from the old days. Although he’d been doing a good job of keeping out of sight, downtown with Linus. Then Carney saw it—the old movie theater, the Imperial. With the nickel double features. He and Freddie would spend all day inside, watch the double—cowpoke nonsense usually—and then look at each other: Let’s do it again. No need to speak. They rarely made it through four movies, as some dirty old man usually came lurching up the row to try something, whereupon they ran out screaming and laughing into the street.