Harlem Shuffle

by Colson Whitehead

It was the last time he raised his hand. The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.

Usually when someone mentioned his father it was a prelude to a disreputable story. I saw two policemen haul him away outside Finian’s or He was beating this sucker with the lid of a garbage can. Then he had to figure what to make his face look like.

Carney took the previous tenants’ busted schemes and failed dreams as a kind of fertilizer that helped his own ambitions prosper, the same way a fallen oak in its decomposition nourishes the acorn.

The husband shrank from the merchandise when he came too close to it, as if proximity plucked money out of his pockets.

It was still the Hotel Theresa, headquarters of the Negro world, and its thirteen floors contained more possibility and majesty than their parents and grandparents could’ve dreamed of. Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition.

Arthur was “the Jackie Robinson of safecracking,” according to Miami Joe, having busted the color line when it came to safes and locks and alarms, generally regarded as the domain of white crooks.

Carney’s father was crooked, but that didn’t make him so. It simply meant that he knew how things worked in that particular line.

Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn’t, we’d have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

The colored citizens of Seneca were property owners, they voted, they had a voice. Not enough of one. The City of New York seized the land, razed the village, and that was that. The villagers dispersed to different neighborhoods, to different cities where they might start again, and the city got its Central Park.

He did not go to church. He was his own sermon.

You hear people say, “Oh, when our boy came back from the war, he was changed.” The war didn’t change Pepper, it completed him. He’d lose himself in different, darker caves and ditches when he returned to the States and started his career in earnest.

You want to know what’s going on, you ask the block wino. They see everything and then the booze pickles it, keeps it all fresh for later.

“What made you want to sell couches?” Pepper said, poking at his food. “I’m an entrepreneur.” “Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”

Whenever the fund shrank, so did their apartment: The hallway pressed on him, the living room squeezed.

Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.

“It’s like this,” Munson said. “There is a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keeps the city running. Mr. Jones, he operates a business, he has to spread the love, give an envelope to this person, another person, somebody at the precinct, another place, so everybody gets a taste. Everybody’s kicking back or kicking up. Unless you’re on top. Low men like us, we don’t have to worry about that. Then there’s Mr. Smith, who also runs a business, and he’s doing the same thing if he is a wise and learned soul and wants to stick around. Spreading the love. The movement of the envelopes. Who is to say which man is more important, Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith? To whom do we give our allegiance? Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope—or whom he gives it to?”

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.

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?

“Bold yet avuncular minimalism.”

We’ll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.”

“One thing I’ve learned in my job is that life is cheap, and when things start getting expensive, it gets cheaper still.”