IIn the summer of 1977 a lightning strike struck a substation on the Hudson River, knocking out power throughout New York City. A wave of looting spread over two nights of darkness as teenagers from Harlem and the Bronx stole expensive items from downtown stores. They took the speaker system and turntables to experiment at home. He taught himself to scratch and mix, and sang self-composed scat songs into a stolen microphone. According to urban legend, hip-hop was the child of lightning and a robbery spree.
Ray Carney, the hardened hero of Colson Whitehead’s thriller Cool Machine, the final part of his Harlem Trilogy, believes that this is art born from crime. Or possibly the opposite, given that the man dislikes rap music and has a secret affection for old-school subversion. Over the years Carney has lived the kind of fearless double life that would make Spider-Man proud, supplementing his furniture business on 125th Street with a lucrative sideline in the form of underworld fencing. In his secretive, dogged style, he helps facilitate a process he describes as “churning”: the movement of stolen goods through New York. Churning boosts the economy and helps refresh the culture. It is the equivalent of the city’s endocrine system.
The Harlem Trilogy, like its protagonist, is a cool-headed trickster who is far more ambitious and far-reaching than its dimestore facade suggests. Carney’s story can be enjoyed as a set of shaggy-dog crime sprees range from high-risk robberies to mysterious bags of loot and frightening escapes from a rat-infested back alley. But it is also – perhaps primarily – the story of New York and its semi-autonomous sectors of black and white society across the decades. The first book in the series, Harlem Shuffle, takes place in the hotly contested Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s. The second, Crook Manifesto of 2023, played out during the “Fear City” era of the ’70s, when the infrastructure collapsed, the murder rate soared and Carney’s store doubled as a blaxploitation film set.
Now comes Cool Machine, the gorgeous final chapter, taking us into the dirty, regenerative 1980s. That means hip-hop on the stereo, graffiti on subway cars, and a growing gap between rich and poor. That means, in this case, a plot that plays out like pop-art Marxist noir, loaded with cultural references and tinged with class and racial tension.
Discovering a secret passageway into the five-star Waldorf Astoria, Carney encounters a Morlock-style community in the train shed beneath Manhattan, an underground tent city ruled by the self-proclaimed “Mayor Crouch”. Carney realizes that the homeless people in the tunnels are casualties of the prosperity above. “The richer those at the top became, the more miserable and numerous those at the bottom became. And the more deprived and deprived they became, the higher you had to build to get away from them.”
The carny is also a creature of the underworld, but he is also a middleman or bridge, directing traffic up and down to the point where the color line becomes porous. Spanning three interconnected stories from 1981 to 1986, Cool Machine exposes the seeds of 21st-century cultural appropriation in the trade of African artifacts and sports memorabilia. Black and white gangsters are feuding over the ownership of Jesse Owens’ Olympic medal. An Anguille mask from Gabon electrifies the grimy East Village art scene. A decade earlier, Carney’s director friend Zippo was in town shooting blaxploitation pictures. Now he’s hanging out with the arthouse crowd, working on a re-dubbed version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic that substitutes the N-word for every mention of birds. Zippo says that Hitchcock’s original film was always meant to be an allegory for racial segregation. So he’s just taking the subtext and making it the text.
Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a lighthearted entertainment, a departure from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced firsthand, which only adds to the air of vivid, unfettered entertainment. Whitehead maps roads, labels sites and provides useful background information from time to time. He captures a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminating, gorgeous, even borderline family-friendly.
It’s that churning, paradoxically, that keeps the story honest. It adds grit and grandeur to the sweetness of nostalgia. Carney’s decision is that this churn applies to more than just the flow of stolen goods. It is the great whip and royale of the city itself; Continuous waves of immigrants are moving into different neighborhoods. “Enclaves and ghettos rose and fell and were reborn. That too was the churning – the underlying chord of death and rebirth in the blocks and avenues. When you’re not looking you find that the city has unveiled another version.” Carney is now 50 and has one eye on the vent. He’s working hard to maintain his position, fighting the currents of a city that is as enduring and primal as the Mississippi River. New York, he realizes that he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. It’s all watching and indifferent and just wanders around.
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