In the summer of 1977 a bolt of lightning struck a substation on the Hudson River, knocking out power across New York City. Two nights of darkness sparked a wave of looting as Harlem and Bronx teenagers swiped high-end items from the downtown stores. They took speaker systems and turntables to experiment with at home. They taught themselves how to scratch and mix, and sang self-styled scat lyrics into stolen microphones. Hip-hop, according to urban legend, was the child of a lightning strike and a robbing spree.
It’s art from crime, thinks Ray Carney, the hardscrabble hero of Colson Whitehead’s rollicking Cool Machine, the final part of his Harlem Trilogy. Or possibly vice versa, given that the man dislikes rap music and nurses a sneaking affection for old-school smash-and-grab. For years Carney has led the sort of intrepid double life that would make Spider-Man proud, supplementing his furniture business on 125th Street with a lucrative sideline as an underworld fence. In his stealthy, dogged fashion, he helps facilitate a process he describes as “the churn”: the movement of stolen goods through New York. The churn fuels the economy and helps refresh the culture. It’s the city’s equivalent of an endocrine system.
The Harlem Trilogy, like its hero, is a cool-headed trickster, more ambitious and far-reaching than its dimestore facade would suggest. Carney’s tale can be relished as a set of shaggy-dog crime capers that bound from the high-stakes heist to the mysterious bag of loot to the fraught getaway through the rat-infested back alley. But it is also – perhaps principally – a story of New York through the decades, and its semi-autonomous circles of black and white society. Harlem Shuffle, the first book in the series, hotwired the action to the 60s civil rights movement. The second, 2023’s Crook Manifesto, played out during the 70s “Fear City” era, when the infrastructure collapsed, the murder rate spiked and Carney’s store doubled as a blaxploitation film set.
Now along comes Cool Machine, the grandstanding final chapter, which pitches us into the dirty, regenerative 1980s. That means hip-hop on the stereo, graffiti on the subway cars and a widening gulf between rich and poor. It means, in this case, a plot that plays like pop-art Marxist noir, jam-packed with cultural references and thrumming with class and racial tensions.
Searching for a secret route into the five-star Waldorf Astoria, Carney encounters a Morlock-style community in the train sheds beneath Manhattan, a subterranean tent city governed by the self-styled “Mayor Crotch”. The homeless people in the tunnels, Carney realises, are casualties of the prosperity above. “The richer those up top got, the more miserable and numerous those below became. And the more cast-offs and have-nots, the higher you have to build to get away from them.”
Carney is a creature of the underworld too, but he’s also a middleman or a bridge, directing the traffic up and down to the point where the colour line becomes porous. Skipping through three interlinked tales from 1981 to 1986, Cool Machine uncovers the seeds of 21st-century cultural appropriation in the trade of African artefacts and sports memorabilia. White and black crooks squabble over the ownership of a Jesse Owens Olympic medal. A Ngil mask from Gabon electrifies the grungy East Village arts scene. A decade ago, Carney’s director friend Zippo was shooting blaxploitation pictures uptown. Now he’s hanging with the arthouse crowd, working on a redubbed version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic in which the N-word is substituted for every mention of birds. Hitchcock’s original film was always a parable for racial desegregation, Zippo insists. So he’s simply taking the subtext and making it text.
Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break 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 first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.
It’s the churn, paradoxically, that keeps the tale honest. It adds grit and grandeur to the sugar hit of nostalgia. The churn, Carney decides, applies to more than the flow of stolen goods. It is the great whip and roil of the city itself; the successive waves of immigrants washing through the individual neighbourhoods. “The enclaves and ghettoes rose and fell and were reborn. That was the churn, too – the underlying melody of death and rebirth in blocks and avenues. You wake up to discover the city has unveiled another version when you weren’t looking.” Carney is now in his 50s and has one eye on the exit door. He’s toiling to maintain his position, fighting the currents of a city that is as ageless and elemental as the Mississippi River. New York, he comes to realise, doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. It’s all-seeing and indifferent and just keeps rolling along.
