Crook Manifesto: Part Two of the Harlem Trilogy

 

 

 

Crook Manifesto (2023)

By Colson Whitehead

Doubleday, 321 pages.

★★★

 

Crook Manifesto is a mild disappointment, if a work by a brilliant writer with two Pulitzer Prizes for Literature can be such a thing. It is the second book of a planned Harlem trilogy and, like many such efforts, has neither the wallop of Book One nor the anticipated resolutions of Book Three.

 

This one offers snapshots from three years: 1971, 1973, and 1976. Those familiar with New York City in the 1970s know that much about the Big Apple was rotten to the core: rampant crime, street corner hookers, bodies dumped in parks, arson, decay, and politicians as crooked as a shepherd’s herding tool. Things were especially fraught in Harlem, with the revolutionary ideology of Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army adding to the tension. Whitehead divides his book into three sections: “Ringolevio,” “Nefertiti T.N.T.”, and “The Finishers.” At its center is fulltime furniture dealer/part-time fence Ray Carney, whom we met in Harlem Shuffle.

 

Ray would dearly like to get out the moving stolen goods game and might have done so, had it not been for the Jackson Five. His daughter May wants to see them at Madison Square Garden with all her heart , but where’s Ray supposed to get tickets that much in demand, let alone pay for them? He calls upon Munson, the crooked cop who used to shake him down for protection money. Bad move. Munson is a mess–booze, marital discord, and the Knapp Commission breathing down his neck. Munson wants to blow town and will score tickets if Carney moves some hot stones for him. A bit too hot, as it turns out. The section title references a street game analogous to Red Rover involving hunters, prey, and “jail.” It parallels Ray’s forced journey with Munson who squeezes cash from every contact in Harlem. A few he kills and others he should have treated with more respect. The power of Chink Montague, Harlem’s reigning crime boss, is waning and that of Notch Walker is on the rise. Let’s just say it wasn’t healthy to mess with one of Notch’s men.

 

Whitehead switches gears and tone in Part Two. Former porn purveyor Aaron “Zippo” Flood is seeking to go semi-legit by making a Blaxploitation film titled “Nefertiti T.N.T.” that is being filmed in Carney’s showroom. It’s bankrolled by the estate of a white guy who adopted him and paid for his arts education at the Pratt Institute, but Zippo has a problem: his title role star Lucinda Cole has disappeared. Enter Pepper, a tough guy for hire who is unimpressed by Zippo, Cole, Chink, big-shot comedian Roscoe Pope, his manager, rising black politician Alexander Oakes, or anyone else–except Carney.  Pepper gives us the book’s title: “A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches.” All of this happens at an inopportune time as Blaxploitation movies are on the way out and disaster films are all the rage. Heads will roll faster than the film reels and some won’t survive to see it.

 

Part Three is the arson chapter, “The Finisher” being the guy who actually lights blazes (broadly defined). Whitehead writes, “The city was burning… not because of sick men with matches and cans of gas, but because the city itself was sick, begging for it.” It is also the section in which we see how long Carney can burn the candle at both ends of the straight/crook spectrum. Elizabeth is supporting Oakes for Manhattan borough president, but Ray knows that he’s corrupt. Carney has survived by not taking sides or having someone else do the heavy lifting. Does he recede to the background or standup to the likes of Walker and Oakes?

 

Whitehead tells a thrilling tale, but his tripartite structure doesn’t always cohere. This is especially the case in Section II in which Carney nearly disappears. Though Zippo’s   cinematic dilemma and Pepper blowing the lid off Lucinda Cole’s glamorous cover adds a certain amount of historical heft, it feels forced and seems more of a detour along the road to Harlem’s slide into self-interest and dysfunctionality. We wait to see how it impacts Carney. I doubt Whitehead could write a bad novel, but Crook Manifesto smolders too long before it combusts.

 

Rob Weir