50 pages • 1 hour read
Colson WhiteheadA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
In June 1959, an African American furniture salesman named Raymond Carney drives his truck around New York City. He visits a white radio repairman named Aronowitz and collects a repaired television that he hopes to sell. He also leaves behind a set of stereos that he hopes Aronowitz can sell on his behalf.
Afterward, Ray visits the apartment of a dead woman and purchases a sofa and an armchair from her daughter, Ruby Brown. Ray and Ruby attended the same high school and Ray remembers his schooldays. He specifically recalls dealing with a bully named Oliver Handy by hitting him in the face with an iron pipe, following the advice of his father, Mike Carney. A petty thief, Mike was shot by police while in the act of stealing a bottle of cough syrup from a pharmacy. Inspired by these incidents to be a better person, Ray dedicated his life to becoming a respectable businessman. Ray and Ruby reminisce about their youth, and Ray is worried that she will mention his father. However, Ruby says nothing.
Carney’s Furniture is moderately successful, even though the store’s history seems to be “cursed” (17). Ray’s dependable but dim-witted assistant Rusty complains about the lack of customers. Retreating to his office, Ray examines his accounts book and worries about people late on their payments. The prospect of sending collectors to the customers’ homes fills him with dread. Just before closing time, a young couple enters the store. Mr. and Mrs. Williams are new in the neighborhood, and the latter is heavily pregnant. Ray talks to the couple, mentioning that his own wife is pregnant with their second child. After a long sales pitch, Ray sells the recently acquired sofa on a “generous installment plan” (21).
Ray returns home to his wife Elizabeth, who remembers Ruby from high school. Elizabeth recalls everyone from her youth except for Ray, who is a “blank space” (22) in her memory. They eat dinner with their young daughter, May, and discuss Elizabeth’s meddling but well-meaning mother, Alma. One of Alma’s most common gripes is the small size of her daughter’s apartment; for once, Ray agrees with her, and he mentions the couple who visited his store. He plans to visit their building in Lenox Terrace to see whether any larger apartments are available. For years, Elizabeth’s parents have made their low opinion of Ray clear, as they believe their daughter settled for a man with a bad family history and low aspirations. Ray is determined to prove them wrong, and he agrees that Elizabeth deserves a nicer place to live. Elizabeth wants to wait until they are in a better financial position.
After dinner, Ray steps out to meet his cousin Freddie. Wary of a spate of recent muggings, he takes a well-lit route to a bar called Nightbirds. He passes through the rich neighborhoods and imagines living in an expensive building. Despite its seedy reputation, Nightbirds has grown classier in recent years, as the Harlem that belonged to Ray’s father is “disappearing” (27).
Freddie lives with his mother and is renowned for his lack of common sense and dubious set of morals. He tells Ray about a stickup artist named Miami Joe who approached Freddie with an idea for a big score. Ray scowls at the idea of armed robbery. Freddie wants Ray to help him and Miami Joe steal money and jewels from the Hotel Theresa. Although he occasionally buys stolen goods from Freddie, Ray wants nothing to do with the robbery.
The next day, Ray stops in the restaurant in the Hotel Theresa as part of his morning routine. He drinks coffee and chats with the waitress Sandra. As he sits, he cannot help but watch the entrance to the hotel. The Hotel Theresa was once the only luxury hotel available to African Americans in the area, and Ray remembers being taken there by his aunt to see the local celebrities. In these days, the Hotel Theresa is not as glamorous as it once was, but Ray still regards it as the “headquarters of the Negro world” (33). As such, he believes robbing the hotel would be an insult. He plans to reject Freddie’s proposal, not only because of his respect for the hotel but because he does not have the contacts to move jewels and cash from the safe deposit boxes. However, Freddie had made him promise to “think about it” (35). Usually, Ray acquiesces when given too much time to think, but he has doubts about Miami Joe. He declines Freddie’s offer.
On Juneteenth, the date commemorating the emancipation of African American enslaved people, Freddie and Miami Joe rob the Hotel Theresa. The robbery is “in all the news” (36). Rumors abound about the identity and methods of the thieves. A local gangster named Chink Montague sends his goons to Ray’s store to ask about Freddie. Montague wants people to know that a certain necklace with a large ruby was stolen, and he wants it returned. Ray denies any knowledge of the robbery. After disappearing all day, Freddie appears at the store near closing time. He confesses that he never passed along Ray’s refusal to Miami Joe, who now expects Ray’s cooperation in fencing the stolen goods. Ray is furious and demands to know what happened.
Freddie tells Ray how he became embroiled in Miami Joe’s scheme. He initially promised to be the getaway driver for the robbery and met the crew in a bar. Miami Joe learned about the Hotel Theresa’s safe deposit boxes by talking to one of the waitresses in the hotel’s cocktail bar. They planned for the four-man crew to steal everything in a 20-minute window, changing Freddie’s role from driver to full-blown thief. When the crew treated Freddie with suspicion, he mentioned that he knew a possible way to sell their ill-gotten gains: Ray. The crew disguised themselves and robbed the hotel in the early hours of a Tuesday morning, using guns and threats to cajole the staff into complying with their demands. The hotel guests complained about the noise, but the crew fielded the calls without raising suspicions. With everything going well, Miami Joe instructed them to stay longer than the scheduled 20 minutes. Soon enough, they took their stolen goods and ran away from the hotel into the night.
Miami Joe’s crew are supposed to meet at Ray’s store even though the attention around the robbery is still intense. Miami Joe arrives with Arthur, an elderly career criminal, and Pepper, a tall and gangly thief. As the crew sits in Ray’s office, the presence of “criminal types” (54) reminds Ray of his father. Although Miami Joe did not realize the robbery took place on Juneteenth, he hopes that the police might believe the crime had “a racial aspect” (55) to muddy suspicion. The more pressing issue is Chink Montague. The violent son of a neighborhood knife-sharpener, Montague is paid protection money by the hotel and keeps a set of jewelry in the safe deposit boxes on behalf of his mistress, an aspiring actress named Lucinda Cole. The men agree to remain silent to avoid Montague’s attention. The other matter is Ray. Although he would be the first to admit that some of his merchandise is stolen, Ray does not see himself as a fence. He does not know how to sell the jewelry stolen from the hotel. Despite his refusal, the crew insists that he is the right man for the job. They arrange to split the loot in four days time, giving Ray a window of time “to come up with an angle” (60).
The Harlem inhabited by Ray features an ambient level of crime which constantly makes itself felt. Whether selling stolen televisions, searching over his shoulder for muggers, or fearing any mention of his criminal father, Ray is very aware of the level of crime which is found in his neighborhood. Despite this perpetual criminality, Ray is content in his neighborhood. He feels at home in Harlem and recognizes that he is an integral member of the community. His family lives there and, even when fantasizing about other places to live, he never considers removing himself from the neighborhood. Ray focuses on the crime which surrounds him, but he does not consider this to be the defining quality of Harlem as a whole. Instead, the crime is something of a natural occurrence. Ray views crime in Harlem like the weather; a universal constant which can never be entirely eradicated. Moreover, this illegality is not limited to characters like Miami Joe and Freddie, who fit into the traditional mold of criminality in pop culture. Rather, the supposedly respectable individuals in Harlem—whether they be corrupt police officers or crooked bankers—engage in equally illicit, and arguably more immoral, behavior than the thieves and gangsters.
Nevertheless, Ray compartmentalizes his life into the respectable and the illicit. He views himself as a respectable businessman who happens to commit crimes on a regular basis. Ray’s life is divided into the respectable world in which he is a businessman and the owner of a furniture store and the criminal world in which he sells stolen goods and fences jewels for gangsters. Both worlds exist at once in Ray’s mind; he can hold two competing and contradictory thoughts in his head at once, an example of cognitive dissonance. This cognitive dissonance manifests as self-delusion, which defines Ray as a character. He does not consider himself a criminal, even though he commits crimes. He sees crime everywhere in Harlem but cannot imagine himself living anywhere else. He does not want to be considered his father’s son, but he cannot help but involve himself in the criminal underworld. Ray deludes himself because he needs to nurture his own self-identity. He creates a mythical identity of himself as the strait-laced, respectable furniture salesman, ignoring any thoughts which contradict this.
The main challenge to Ray’s self-delusion is Freddie. While most of Ray’s life is compartmentalized into either the moral or the immoral, the respectable or the criminal, Freddie transcends these boundaries. He is a family member and an accomplice, meaning that he plays into both worlds at once. Freddie is one of the only people who can point out Ray’s hypocrisy with any degree of success. He is also capable of involving Ray in absurd capers which cause trouble. Freddie is a contradiction in himself, as he is the biggest threat to Ray’s careful, respectable life and one of his closest family members.
Finally, these chapters show Whitehead embracing and subverting the tropes of the crime novel. In a 2019 New York Times interview, Whitehead said that following the publication of his thematically-heavy 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Underground Railroad, Whitehead thought that a lighter crime novel “might be a good choice for my sanity.” (Gertner, Jon. “Colson Whitehead Talks About ‘The Nickel Boys.’” New York Times. 19 Jul. 2019.) The author ultimately delayed his crime novel to write another dark, heavy tale of American racism with 2019’s The Nickel Boys. Yet just because Harlem Shuffle is more akin to popular genre fiction than its two predecessors, that does not mean Whitehead is not deeply concerned with serious themes surrounding race and capitalism. As a Black business owner in Harlem with very limited access to capital, criminality is less a temptation for Ray than it is a necessity. As the book shows, joining the ranks of Harlem’s African American elite isn’t so much an escape from criminality as it an embrace of a different, more socially-sanctioned form of amorality.
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