A long talk with colsonwhitehead, whose heist novel, Harlem Shuffle, is about life in the gray area between legitimate business and hustle
Photo: Bryan Anselm/Redux Before Colson Whitehead wrote his first novel — 1999’s The Intuitionist, a mystery following a Black elevator inspector — he was a music and television critic at The Village Voice.
It feels fortuitous for this conversation to be happening during a 90-degree week in New York City. Most of Harlem Shuffle is set between July and August. Why was it important to set this story in summer? When I was a kid, there was a laundromat in my neighborhood that had a secret back room that functioned as a gambling spot. I get it.
What creates the spark for a period piece for you? Are you just always spelunking through history and taking notes? For locations, I did a lot of location scouting. I was just walking around Harlem, aimlessly, up and down, crisscrossing. I hadn’t really hung out there in years, so it was a revelation to see how much had changed and all the gentrification. I was walking around, taking notes, thinking, Oh, maybe that’s Carney’s office. Maybe that’s where Carney grows up.
Knowing you were born in New York in the late ’60s, I couldn’t help but feel like you were writing a prelude to the city as you knew it. I’m just old enough to have faint memories of what New York looked like in the ’80s, uptown, in the Heights, and the Bronx. To me, Shuffle felt like the story of the birth of that decay, that city that I knew at the beginning of my life. Am I projecting?
I was trying to capture the dynamism of the city. Harlem — before the Great Migration, before the influx of Caribbean immigrants in the ’20s — is a neighborhood of German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish people from all over the Earth. They came to America with nothing, and they entered the middle class and moved away, and then the next group came in. Maybe that’s Black Americans from the South, maybe it’s Black folks from Barbados and the West Indies, like my mom, like my grandmother was.
If you just heard of me five years ago, sure. I’ve been writing novels for 20 years. Some people know me from Sag Harbor, which is a realistic coming-of-age story, sort of humorous, a very different tone. Some people know me as the guy who wrote a zombie book. Some people will come to this book not having read my other books, and this is their first exposure to what I do. Because I switch genres a lot, I assume I’m losing people and gaining new readers, if I’m lucky, from book to book.
It’s super-rare for a white cop to be found guilty of killing an unarmed Black person. Is that the start of a new phase in police brutality and reform? I have no idea. I do know that under the Obama administration, there were some reforms put in about how they investigated police shootings and bad precincts, and they were thrown out the window when Trump came along. All these advances we make are really precarious, because bad actors or a bad administration can undo all this stuff we fight for.
I just write the books I need to write. But I think it’s interesting that there is that backlash or reluctance to read or view content, films, or books about slavery. If you actually look at the percentages of films that are about slavery, it’s, like, 5 percent. There’s one or two a year, and everything else is documentaries and romantic comedies and action movies. But those slavery movies loom so large in the imagination. So when people say there are so many, there are actually not.
The Sopranos and The Wire and Breaking Bad are in there just because we have a protagonist who gets a lot of screen time, and they’re often quite evil and doing terrible things, so how do we excuse the actions of a sociopath? Carney is not that bad. But in The Sopranos, we’re meant to see the human part of Tony, so we stay with him and start to excuse the terrible things he does. That’s true when you have a protagonist who’s a serial killer, like in fucking Dexter, or a mobster.
We’ve been talking about heists and jewels. I have to ask about Beyoncé. She and Jay-Z did an ad where she’s wearing the Tiffany yellow diamond, with all its origins, and he’s displaying a never-before-seen Basquiat. There’s been discourse about historically charged pieces as displays of wealth and some criticism of modern Black capitalism. When you’re good at something, there’s an expectation for your ideas and actions outside work to be just as good.
Yeah, and I think I took that on in different books — in Underground Railroad and John Henry Days early on, and The Nickel Boys.
But New York always bounces back. If you look at the ’70s — if you read a book like Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, by Will Hermes — that’s the birth of punk, disco, hip-hop, New York salsa. Out of this ruined city came this incredible cultural laboratory. And ’72 to ’76 is just a great moment where artists are doing a lot of work finding new forms. In the city, the buildings fall, whether they’re burnt down for insurance money or destroyed by bombs, and we rebuild.
With John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt and Zone One, I was dealing with contemporary society. John Henry Days chronicles early internet culture and the rise of the word “content.” As someone who was raised by pop culture, becoming a TV critic was an incredible job. At that point, in the early ’90s, it was basically degrading to be a TV critic and … everybody was sort of embarrassed for you, that you were writing about TV.Oh, really? I think people take criticism so much more seriously.
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