Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Crook Manifesto
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 2023

What would Toni Morrison say? That’s what I wondered when I read Colson Whitehead’s “capercolor” novels, Harlem Shuffle (published in 2021) and Crook Manifesto, now just out and a sequel to Shuffle. “Capercolor” is my portmanteau for crime stories and local color, but since the books are set in Harlem—above the old Manhattan color line--race is also in play. Most of Morrison’s novels are historical, and the best or most prized Whitehead novels—The Intuitionist, Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys—are also historical. Set between 1959 and 1973, the Harlem novels are within contemporary recall, their settings just fuzzy enough for survivor nostalgia and old-timey entertainment. So I think Morrison would say, “Enough bulljiving, Colson, get back, back to serious work.”

For my invented Morrison—and for me—Whitehead is having way too much fun in the two novels. Admittedly, Morrison didn’t show much sense of humor in her novels. As for me, I enjoyed both the Harlem books scene to scene, scheme to scheme, argot to argot—until I finished Crook Manifesto and began to think I’d been reading material for a prestige television comedy series. Turning the pages, though, I shared the fun Whitehead must have had researching Harlem after the Renaissance, the local street life, the clubs, the food, even the furniture his protagonist, Ray Carney, stocks in his store. Also the fun of inventing short back stories and quirky first names for the novels’ numerous capering characters—Notch Walker, Bumpy Johnson, T-Bone Givens, Chickie James, Dizzy Huntley. And when Carney takes some time off from being a fence and focal sensibility, I imagine Whitehead took pleasure occupying the minds of two characters very different from Carney, two muscle men—the homicidal white cop Munson, the Black bruiser Pepper.

Novelist Whitehead might even have enjoyed relief from the continuity constraints of the novel form, for in the Harlem books he is a storyteller: both works are composed of three long stories set in different periods. And within those stories are other tales and riffs and oral tours de force including a Black comedian’s set and a long dialogue in Crook Manifesto about the best chicken restaurant in Harlem. In his relaxed third-person narration, Whitehead writes as if he were there. More than his other novels, the Harlem fictions resemble The Noble Hustle, his rueful non-fiction comedy about participating in a Las Vegas poker tournament where he, like Carney with small-time hoods and big bosses, gets in over his head.

Whitehead is very good at including just enough background from Harlem Shuffle to make Crook Manifesto a stand-alone work, so I’ll concentrate on this new one—and those who have read the first one can decide if they want to continue (The publisher promises a third in the series.) A bottom-up scuffling orphan in Shuffle, Ray Carney is now substantial and successful. With the help of some dirty money, he has expanded his store at Morningside Ave. and 125th street, has hired more employees, tries to no longer fence stolen goods, spends more time with his family in his Strivers’ Row home, and has been inducted into the Dumas Club of Harlem big shots.

In Part One, “Ringolievio,” set in 1971, Carney is desperate to get tickets for a Jackson Five concert for his teenage daughter. He calls the white policeman who has been collecting protection envelopes for years from Carney. It doesn’t take long for Carney to realize his mistake and become Munson’s “partner” which involves listening to his numerous grifter stories, comically and half-heartedly pointing a gun at poker players Munson is robbing, and eventually watching Munson kill his former partner and others who were trying to rip Munson off of his “jackpot” score. The murders shock Carney but not readers: this is a crime novel, of course people will get killed. We don’t know them. Let’s see it happen again.

Like all well-intentioned comic bumblers, Carney is a slow learner. In “Nefertiti T.N.T.” (1973), he allows a Harlem acquaintance from his earlier years to use his showroom for a scene in an arty blaxploitation movie the acquaintance, now a hip downtown director, is making. A gang boss desires the actress, and Carney soon needs a new partner for protection: Pepper, a veteran of the Korean War who is as much of a stone killer as Munson. The baleful Pepper is, however, an amusing font of caper tales, so Carney, Whitehead, and the reader spend many pages with Pepper before his violence exceeds the parameters of the genre movie being shot.

In “The Finishers,” (1976), Carney takes a more active role—still with the help of Pepper—in investigating an arson that has left one of his tenants (yes, now Carney is also a landlord) damaged. This Carney resembles the amateur detective in Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, an elevator inspector looking into high-level New York City corruption. Carney’s ultimate target is a fellow member of the Dumas Club who has worked downtown as a prosecutor—while also taking payoffs and kickbacks that contributed to the burning of Harlem and the Bronx in these infamous years. “The Finishers” ends with two conflagrations (and more murders) that Carney survives for the promised next novel.

Morrison might have approved of this third story in Crook Manifesto--less foolery, more attention to class (Blacks exploiting Blacks) and to race, the programmatic destruction of Black uptown by downtown whites. The white cops who came up to Harlem were always a problem. But in the last two stories, Blacks from Harlem go downtown, forget their community, and return with activities that harm the community. Carney went downtown to fence his hottest and heaviest jewelry but brought white money back to invest in his community-serving furniture store. He tells himself he’s just part of the “churn” of goods. That was before “burn, baby, burn,” whole buildings and blocks becoming “goods.”

I’ll give Whitehead his due. What he shows over the years from Harlem Shuffle through Crook Manifesto is the systemic corruption (as if declared in a manifesto) by the alliance of white politicians, white developers, white police that allow Black arsonists to burn down their community, and Black super-strivers who want some of the available post-holocaust urban renewal funds. These Harlem crooks are not content with what amounts to penny ante from numbers, prostitution, and drugs—not when billions can be had from the state with a righteous hustle, a sophisticated caper. Morrison might well have respected this progressively explicit aspect of Crook Manifesto, but I don’t find Whitehead’s use of sub-literary genres for political critique creating much cultural leverage. The fires rage, Carney rages, but maybe not readers, not when so much of the text is amusing.

In Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Whitehead plays with popular culture, as he did with his zombie novel, Zone One. He uses and reuses the caper genre, tips his hat to blaxploitation films, fools with old Harlem stereotypes and cliches, and scumbles his genial comedy with some shootings and politics at the end. In both novels Whitehead refers to products—such as gangsters’ sex and drugs—“that sold themselves.” Carney’s comfortable furniture is such a product. So is capercolor. There was a popular 1963 song called “Harlem Shuffle.” But “shuffle” is also associated with the entertaining, demeaning routines of Stepin Fetchit to whom Carney is compared when Munson’s partner. Can one still invoke Graham Greene’s distinction between novels and entertainments? Like Morrison, Whitehead used to write novels.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels and Harpooning Donald Trump (essays).