It is never any easy thing straddling the chasm-like divide between heritage and intent.
Some people, of course, make it look effortless, bringing together who they were raised to be with who they innately are, or at least, desire to be, their lives barely raising a ripple of existential tension.
But others, like Ray Carney, the striving protagonist of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, a novel which, among the many wonderful things it is, is an exploration of how hard it is to balance who your family and neighbourhood possibly destines you to be and who you are aiming to be, especially if you are seeking to distance yourself from the former and embrace only the latter.
Ray lives in early 1960s Harlem when the emerging Black middle class and the Civil Rights Movement have made his business decision to establish a furniture in the discarded shell of another household goods retail venture a wise one indeed.
With clear aspirations to not follow in his father’s gangster footsteps and to create an honest life for he and his family – his loving, down-to-earth wife Elizabeth comes from an upper middle class Black family who live on the aptly named Strivers’ Row – Ray is a man who wants to stake life out on his terms without any of the taints of his familial past.
This is, naturally, easier said than done, and even as the store begins to do well, attracting a loyal if sometimes fickle clientele, Ray is struggling to bring in the money needed to pay the rent, cover business expenses (which include unavoidable payments to local mobsters and crooked police) and to match his striving heart with the material goods necessary to bring it to life.
“Before Carney went up to Convent Ave, he paused to take in his sign. CARNEY’S FURNITURE. If he were arrested, would they seize the store? He’d spent so much time trying to keep one half of himself separate from the other half, and now they were set to collide. But then–they already shared an office, didn’t they? He’d been running a con on himself.” (P. 190)
So, against his better judgement but with an eye on how hard it is to make it as a Black businessman in a world where insurance companies and banks, to name just two, pivot on a clear racial bias, Ray accepts the odd piece of jewelery here or there from his shady cousin Freddie with whom he has been close to since they were kids and who is constantly causing trouble, and meekly apologising for it, for his more responsible relative.
What begins as a ring here and a necklace there, all fenced through contacts in the jewelery trade, all of whom, like Ray wear a respectable face over their more disreputable visage, soon becomes much more as Freddie drags Ray into a robbery of Harlem’s “Waldorf”, the Hotel Theresa, which caters to up-and-coming and made-it Black people and which is seen as proof that it is possible to climb the ladder and stay there.
The hotel is far more than an upmarket establishment and pillar of Harlem society; it is symbolic of a world in which Black and white people overlap but never mix, where Black travel agencies, such as the one that Elizabeth manages, sell holidays to Black people to stay in Black resorts because the white world around them still refuses to see them as equal.
Everything about Ray’s life bear this out, of course, with his concerns every bit as much the same as the white business people with which he comes into contact, but time and again in Harlem Shuffle we bear witness through Whitehead’s wondrously sublime writing, which glides off the page with beauty and powerful meaning, that the wider world still will not admit that.
While Harlem Shuffle is primarily an exploration of what it means to be your own person while being a part of family, both your own and those you marry into, it also casts an eagle eye over social disparities and the compromises that must be made to straddle multiple worlds not necessarily of your own making or choosing.
In effect it is a crime novel but one which focuses less on the underworld of Harlem in the 1960s, though that is brought to glorious life in ways vividly alive and disturbing and more on the people who populate it, less through choice than necessity, and who are all, in their own ways, striving as Ray is.
Much of the book’s emotional resonance comes from the endless tussle within Ray between what the back cover blurb describes as “Ray the striver and Ray the crook”, a battle that in an ideal world Ray would have dispensed with long ago in favour of the striver alone but which professional circumstances and societal realities mean he must continue to grapple with, in secret and alone, and always with the quietly desperate hope that one doesn’t cannibalise the other.
“Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map pf the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.” (P. 285)
As you might imagine, it’s not always the easier of battles to fight.
Using language that is both beautiful, vividly descriptive and emotionally intimate, all of it a feast for anyone who loves words which not only sound good but say something thoughtfully meaningful too, Whitehead bring alive Harlem in the 1960s which will delight and envelop in some impressively evocative worldbuilding, social commentary and examination of family dynamics.
Harlem Shuffle is a perfect blend of a great many things being both incisively observant and empathetically grounded, alive with possibility and weighed down by limits, and understanding of the fact that try as we might to forge our own path through life that our pasts have a way of coming back to pull us back to places we may not really want to go.
The brilliance of Harlem Shuffle is the way it immerses us in the society of the time, and in Ray’s life within it, a love letter to a place and a time that moves you with exquisitely well-wrought language, characters who are as live as the period from which they hail and insights on society, life and humanity which find their affecting distillation in the person of Ray Carney, a man who wants a great deal from life if only it will let him have it on his terms.