Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead5/22/2023 By day, Ray charms customers on the merits of Collins-Hathaway armchairs by night he oversees a steady trade, shifting stolen goods. But Harlem is still the black capital of the world, and its optimism and potential are embodied in Ray Carney, whose fortunes change on discovering, in his dead father’s car, a bundle of cash – enough to open a furniture store on 125th Street.Ĭarney senior was a local hood but his son, Ray, “was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked”. Up at Hotel Theresa, the “Waldorf of Harlem”, you’re more likely to find “a pimp and working girl at the bar than Joe Louis or a grande dame of Negro society”. Gone are the hi-de-ho days of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. At the start of Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead’s dazzling new thriller, it’s 40 years on from the area’s 1920s renaissance. “N othing came close,” Claude McKay observed a century ago, “to the hot, syncopated fascination of Harlem”, with its overcrowded tenements, star-studded theatres, numbers runners, ragtime and jazz.
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