What is crime in a state built on it? (2023)

WI was 7 years old then, I went to a nearby corner store with my friends after school. I remember the field trip vividly - not even the brand of chocolate chip cookies I couldn't buy. Just as I decided on Famous Amos, I felt a heavy thump and then heard the words 'Get out! Get out!" We were stealing, said the store owner. "Don't come back!" Not long after, I remember sitting in a cramped car with my grandmother. We were going to one of the duty-free outlet centers in Delaware, but not shopping. When we arrived, my cousin was waiting for us on the edge of the sidewalk by the parking lot. I swear she didn't steal anything, she said, crying, with her head in her hands. My aunt was taken into custody by the mall police for shoplifting.

Sometimes people ask, "When did you become aware of your race?" This was not the time for me, although it was about this time that I realized that my race had marked me as a thief. I know I should be offended, but I've always found robberies glamorous: in terms of rebellion, I preferred to associate theft with high-end getaway cars and wads of money in soft-touch, sandpaper jewelry bags. I imagined, and still do, along with the sneaky cat burglar Selina Kyle (aka Woman Catwoman), Audrey Hepburn inHow to steal a million, i In Vogue naUgasi tosound recording. I'm far from alone. Wherever you look, the world of thieves is populated by elegant and sexy heroines and real playboys who know how to pick locks and crack safes.Even Helen Mirren wants oneFast and furiousfilm.

Colson Whitehead also seems to have fallen for the thief's seductive appeal in his latest novel,Harlem shuffle. When he sat down to work on it, he had just finishedSubway(2016) and hoped that this next book, the story of a reluctant picket fence in early 1960s Harlem, would provide respite. "Subwayit was so difficult that I thought a crime novel would be a good choice for my sanity,"He saidFrom the New York Timesu 2019. All that fun would have to wait, though. Outraged by the never-ending cycle of police killings of black teenagers, Whitehead decided to pursue another idea he had been working on, a darker story that becameDe Nickel Boys(2019), a fictional depiction of real lifeDozier School for Boys, a correctional school in Florida whose inmates were subjected to brutal beatings, sexual abuse and murder. Calling it Nickel Academy in his novel, Whitehead follows two teenagers who are busily planning an escape attempt.

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Whitehead's Harlem caper may seem like a dramatic departure from its two sobering predecessors. Still in his own waySubwayUDe Nickel Boyswere also crime novels, dedicated - just likeHarlem shuffle- the odysseys of a fugitive. Whitehead's latest film is about a young furniture dealer named Ray Carney who gets caught in a jewelry heist that forces him to come to grips with the impossible conditions he faces as a black man trying to get ahead in life. To escape his circumstances, would he do best to simply follow the right path? Are there black marketers like him who can't get bank loans? Or should he rely on the underworld to get what he wants, what he needs? After all, their goals and means seem no less amoral than what he sees practiced by businessmen and the well-to-do elite. "The crooked world, the straight world, the same rules," Ray thinks. - Everyone reached out for the envelope.

Against the background of race riots in Harlem in 1964, looting, gentrification and corrupt black capitalists,Harlem shuffleis a story about property and the difficult relationship African Americans have with it. Indeed, what is theft for people who once owned themselves ("stolen bodies working on stolen land," as Whitehead wrote inSubway), and for whom was their freedom the ultimate robbery?

We meet for the first timeRay Carney, proud purveyor of Carney's Furniture on 125th Street, in 1959 during the civil rights movement, but the progress he's most interested in is his own. With his name emblazoned on Harlem's main street, he's convinced he's finally gotten over his ignominious family background. His father, Mike Carney, was a local conman and petty thief who was shot by the police while stealing cough syrup from a pharmacy. At the beginning of the novel, Ray recalls being bullied at school and, on his father's advice, hits one of his bullies in the face with a pipe. At that moment, he recalls, he promised to chart a new course: "As he saw it, life taught you that you don't have to live the way you were taught to live. You came from one place, but more importantly where you wanted to go.” His store, "scrawled with his wit and industry," marks a new chapter for the Carney name, honest and legitimate (although he has just launched a "gently used" section full of used items, some of questionable provenance). So when his cousin, Freddie, asks him if he can protect the stolen jewelry, Ray refuses. "I'm selling furniture," he insisted, to which Freddie, who had recently brought in a "gently used" television, replied, "Nigger, please."

Ray refuses to see himself as a fraud. He is not so much concerned with stolen goods as simply recognizing "the natural flow of goods in and out and through human lives, from here to there, the throwing away of property." What about the revelation that Ray got money for the furniture business by finding $30,000 in cash in the spare tire of his late father's pickup truck? The blurred distinction between legality and illegality is at the centerHarlem shuffle. Ray is faced with two paths: he can follow Freddie into further crime or try to become a respected member of Harlem's black business elite.

However, the difference between the two slowly begins to blur as Ray realizes that he may need both armed robbers and business card robbers to get what he wants, an apartment on Riverside Drive. Over time, his sense of right and wrong—and, by extension, his sense of himself as Mike Carney's son—is turned upside down. Is Leland, his wife's father and "one of Black Harlem's chief accountants," any less of a fraud than he or Freddie? After all, Leland is always bragging about "his collection of tricks and tricks" to "get you off the hook."

Ray's desire to be taken seriously as a legitimate businessman isn't just about shaking off his father's reputation; he also wants to put his own success in the face of his wife's family. Owners of a townhouse on Strivers' Row in Harlem and descendants of Seneca Village, a community of black landowners in Manhattan thatdemolished to make Central Park, Leland and Alma Jones view their daughter's choice of husband with disdain bordering on shame, calling him "some sort of carpet dealer." When Freddie offers Ray the opportunity to hide the stolen items from a locker at the Hotel Theresa, a "Waldorf in Harlem" and host to the black bourgeoisie, it feels less like a robbery and more like a revenge fantasy.

When he gets the chance to join the Dumas Club, an elite association of black businessmen to which Leland belongs, that fantasy only grows. A member of the club's board, a well-known banker named Wilfred Duke, asks for $500 - which Ray considers a "sweetener" - to make the deal work. When that doesn't happen, a furious Ray concocts an elaborate plot involving a drug dealer, a pimp and a dirty cop to catch Duke, who sees nothing wrong with the transaction: it's an investment gone wrong, in the eyes of a man who "grabbed loans from the bank, excluding hope".

In the moral universeHarlem shuffle, fromsincerelyuhonest workis literal. The novel privileges the perspectives of its avowed criminals—thieves, gangsters, and prostitutes, all of whom have spoken openly about the nature of their profession—over those who have convinced themselves that their dubious machinations are ethical, that is, bankers, real estate developers, and lawsuits. who work to find loopholes for them. When looting breaks out during the riots, Leland laments the "immovable element" that has infiltrated the more respectable student protest movement. Whitehead contrasts Ray's view: When he sees signs protesting the eminent domain where the massive construction of the World Trade Center will begin, he recalls the robbery. That "devastation was nothing compared to what lies ahead," he believes. "If you took the anger, hopes, and rage of all the residents of Harlem and turned them into a bomb, the results would look something like this." Can theft really be a crime, the novel asks us, in a country built on it?

Rayevi vididithey're part of what makes him stunning as a character. Although he is a professional witch doctor himself - until the end of the novel he tries not to think otherwise - he never gives up on the gospel of prosperity or the promise of black capitalism. When the robbery stops, he breathes a sigh of relief; his main concern is not the fate of black teenagers like James Powell (whose murder sparked the riot), but his job and that of his fellow black shopkeepers. Indeed, none of the criminals the novel suggests have a profound moral clarity about the hypocrisy of the ruling classes show any interest in black protest or even black history (which seems particularly important, given Whitehead's recent commitment to the historical novel). "How am I supposed to get a bloody sandwich with all this fuss?" Freddie is disappointed when the rebels close the restaurants. The Theresa Hotel robbery takes place on June 16. The mastermind behind the robbery, a mobster named Miami Joe, doesn't know it's June 16, but he welcomes the coincidence, hoping someone will think it's a racially motivated murder and get off the hook.

Ray exhibits a pessimism similar to that of Jack TurnerDe Nickel Boys. Turner is the counterpart of Elwood Curtis, an idealistic young black man who throws himself into the civil rights movement and writes articles on social justice for Chicago defender. Despite the merciless injustice Elwood suffers, he believes in the innate goodness of people and is convinced that he will close the school if he can just send a letter to state inspectors. Jack is in disbelief. "The key to getting here is the same as surviving outside," says Jack. "You have to see how people behave and then you have to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course." Jack sees Black's survival as something to cling to when those in power look the other way; in short, it must be stolen.

Both Jack and Ray recognize justice and injustice as a false binary. Jack is sent to a reform school run by criminals, and the people who most brazenly steal from Ray don't see themselves as crooks, but as legitimate businessmen. Jack's experience makes him a realist, not an activist. Frustratingly, Ray also remains a pragmatist, never fully denying the charms of the black bourgeoisie—a choice that is, of course, his right, just as it is Whitehead's right to write a novel without rules. His refusal might even be considered radical at a time when readers are turning to black writers for answers rather than art.

Whitehead follows a long tradition of black writers who subversively use crime fiction, using the genre against itself to expose the hypocrisy of the legal system and false moral precepts.determined by capitalism, and the very fact that America itself was born of a theft in which we are all complicit. Indeed, what good is a standard whodunit if the answer is "everyone"? Walter MosleyA simple Rawlins series, which follows a conflicted black private investigator as he reluctantly works for the police, recognizes the richness of African-American life in Los Angeles, often overlooked in classic L.A. noir stories. Pauline Hopkins, whoseHagar's daughter(1901) Considered one of the first works of African-American detective fiction, it uses the resources of the genre to create a Civil War-era thriller about black life, using adaptation to avoid the trope of mistaken identity in order to satisfy. By the satirist Ishmael ReedMumbo Jumbo(1972) has been called an "anti-detective novel" by some because it eschews the classic figure of the white detective as empiricist (Holmes, Poirot, etc.) in favor of PaPa LaBass, an "astrodetective" who conjures up clues using "jewelry, black astrological cards, plants, potions, candles, talismans."

Harlem shuffleI seem to do a little bit of each of these things, and more. What we call a crime and who we call a criminal are clearly things Whitehead is thinking about - and his added twist is the complete omission of the figure of the detective. All agents are paid; the characters fear retribution, not prison. Some readers may find the lack of an actual police presence in the novel a missed opportunity for social commentary, but others—myself among them—can understand that Whitehead's omission allows the people in his book to enjoy the pleasure of being offended. He understands very well how little the world has to offer his characters - black men and women who swear they can buy a piece of furniture in Ray's shop for a fee - he can't bring himself to deprive them of a small part in the hair salon. . A few of his thugs get away completely unscathed (the mobsters and businessmen they represent end up knocking). Still, many get a brief moment to enjoy the climax of the heist, which is close enough.

This article appears inNovember 2021print edition with the title "Colson Whitehead subverts the crime novel".