Some of us who read Harlem Shuffle in 2021, Colson Whitehead’s sometimes hilarious, often violent take on the hustle-and-hype of Harlem life in the 1960s, didn’t know it was the first in a trilogy, the second of which, Crook Manifesto, about Harlem in the 1970s, has just come out. It revisits with the same slangy lingo and bop rhythms some of the lower, middle, and upper-class denizens of this unique neighborhood in the 70’s one of the city’s ugliest and most depressing times. “You knew the city was going to hell if the Upper East Side was starting to look like crap, too,” is an early chapter opening. A time of “decline across the zip codes.” The third novel will concentrate on the 1980s, once again mainly through the perspective of Whitehead’s savvy, likable, criminally complicit protagonist, Ray Carney, whose dubious moral code,” a crook manifesto,” makes it clear that there is a “hierarchy of crime of what is morally acceptable and what is not.”
Ray, the proud, hardworking owner of a successful furniture store on 125th Street, the good guy son of deceased Big Bad Mike Carney, a revered big-time player, subscribes to that code. He’s respected, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend to his father’s old crime buddies and those with whom he still does occasional business – a payoff to a corrupt white detective, and dealing with, as he puts it, “stuff that falls off the truck,” the phrase his straight, well-bred wife has trained herself to say. Though now retired from crime, Ray keeps up with who’s who in the Harlem empire of bookmaking, narcotics, protection schemes, and prostitution” – the cops, the judges - White and Black- who run the game. But then his teen-age daughter wants tickets to a Jackson 5 concert. Ray knows whom to approach, but not what it will cost him.
What Whitehead dispassionately lays out in Crook Manifesto is the extensive criminality of a time and place in New York when emerging Black power – the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, and Black politicos - began to ensure that greed and corruption would be an equal opportunity abuser.
The novel is structured in three sections: 1971, 1973, and bicentennial 1976 – united by pervasive background sirens, the regular sound of Harlem in the earlier sections, and the immediate and personal sound in the last part. Crook Manifesto is darker than Harlem Shuffle, edgier, more cynical. Ray is more resigned but also because of the crook manifesto code, more heroic. Whitehead movingly captures Ray’s ambivalence, particularly his friendship with Pepper, his father’s old partner in crime, and someone his kids call Uncle. Pepper’s bored: “It had been a long time since he had beat a man senseless,” but he’s sharp and fast as ever, sizing up a skinny hood, for example, whose look suggested “an exercise regimen that consisted of hoisting a coke spoon.” Pepper and Ray go way back, which means loyalty. Whitehead’s imagery is priceless, dialogue and set scenes, the heart of his art.
It’s a distressing picture Whitehead paints of Harlem in the '70s but also of the city - in fiscal crisis, reeling from rampant crime and drugs. But Ray’s vision holds. As he says, “today’s messes and cruelties were the latest version of the old ones. Same flaws, different face. All of it passed down . . . self-perpetuating graft, like self-perpetuating fires.” What cultural history Whitehead evokes! The “churn” of stolen goods in Harlem Shuffle, the insurance ”burns” in Crook Manifesto. Who knows what awaits in the 80s but for sure it will be admirably done.
