Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The magnitude of this reversal of fate is not lost on Whitehead.
The New York native andtwo-time Pulitzer winneris a history buff and pop-culture obsessive.
The inspiration comes by hook or by crook, from local news reports, essays, and Pinterest pages.
He spent much of his childhood living walking distance from Carneys dream home on Riverside Drive.
He insists that hes no specialist, no polished political thinker.
After a while, you find it hard to believe.
It feels fortuitous for this conversation to be happening during a 90-degree week in New York City.
Most ofHarlem Shuffleis set between July and August.
I picked the 64 riots thinking that my robbers could use that disturbance to hide what they were doing.
That happened in July of 64.
It all sort of flowed from there.
What made Ray the vessel for this narrative?I was doing some research about fences.
The original inspiration was low-fidelity heist movies.
The fence is always like, Oh, Ill give you ten cents on the dollar.
And it always seems so appalling.
So I decided to make the fence a hero.
A lot of fences, I found out in my research, would have front organizations.
Id go in, and theyd always sell S.O.S steel-wool pads, Corona, and Twinkies.
And theyd glare at me when I would buy beer.
And my friends were like, Thats a weed spot.
And I was like, I dont know.
Im always oblivious to fronts in the city.
Hes not a dreamer.
Hes a pragmatist and delegator.
Theres his wifes parents generation, bankers and lawyers and accountants.
Theyve entered into the upper-middle class as much as they can in the 60s.
Class mobility, and a lack of class mobility, is part of it.
I moved around a lot growing up in the city.
Theres always a better apartment waiting for you.
Its a New York novel, and people here invest so much of their psychology in real estate.
I wanted that to be a feature of the book.
What creates the spark for a period piece for you?
Are you just always spelunking through history and taking notes?I am always making notes.
Ill read an article and think,Oh, thats interesting.Or Ill see something on TV.
I thought,Oh, thats a weird job.
Theres a section inHarlem Shuffleaboutdorveille,segmented sleep.
For locations, I did a lot of location scouting.
I was just walking around Harlem, aimlessly, up and down, crisscrossing.
I was walking around, taking notes, thinking,Oh, maybe thats Carneys office.
If there are projects, when did projects go in?
Before or after this section?
That changes so much of the geography of Harlem.
I noticed!Shuffletaught me some history.
Id only ever knownthe Hotel Theresaas the White Castle on 125th Street, for instance.
Something I love about the novel is the trickle of New York lore.
I was itching to get back to writing about the city.
I wanted to make a real, authentic period piece, as much as I could pull off.
Its been fun to do this research and run it by my mother.
She was like, Oh yeah, I used to go there all the time.
I wouldve guessed that the 64 riot section ofHarlem Shufflewas a reaction to the unrest of last summer.
To hear the book was finished in May 2020 feels almost clairvoyant.
You telegraphed the story of June.Its never clairvoyance when you talk about police brutality.
Unfortunately, youre never predicting the future when it comes to police brutality.
Youre just waiting for the next high-profile incident.
Am I projecting?No.
I was born in 69, and we lived on 139th and Riverside until I was in kindergarten.
Some of my early memories are of the gritty, tense early 70s.
Subways are a mess, and crimes at an all-time high.
Ive actually started writing another book about Carney in the 70s.
I read through your nonfiction bookThe Colossus of New Yorkthis week.
Change is coming, and Carney clearly hates it, for good reason.
Drug dens are ruining everything and will continue to in the next decade.
But he also hates the next generation in the way everyone always hates the next generation.
I was trying to capture the dynamism of the city.
She came through Ellis Island in the 20s from Barbados.
I definitely wanted to capture that.
Then, of course, people rise up and down the economic ladder.
Carney rises, and the people in Dumas Club have entered into the upper-middle class.
Its precarious because thats the nature of Black success.
I came back toColossusin part because the narrative voice inShuffleis really funny.
What created that contrast?You pick the right tool for the job.
So how can I best serve this story?
Is it compact senses?
Before I start, I think of all that.
I write about the city a lot.
I write about American history a lot.
But humor is an important part of my projects.
Can I tell some jokes?
Definitely, withUnderground,I couldnt tell as many jokes.Nickel Boys, not so many.
Having a story that allows me to let that part of my personality out is important to me.
Not in every book, but over time.
Ive been writing novels for 20 years.
Some people know me as the guy who wrote a zombie book.
I dont think so much about other peoples reactions.
Theres not much I can do about where you started reading my work, you know?
He didnt hang on crazily, like some of these people.
Definitely inShuffle, theres small-time crime, like the people who rob the Hotel Theresa.
Then theres the people on Park Avenue that we end up with.
Thats all Im going to say.
Theres a sentence in the 1964 part ofHarlem Shufflethat says, Harlem had rioted for what?
Is that the start of a new phase in police brutality and reform?
I have no idea.
Fifty years later, someone can step in and gut those protections.
Theres 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.
Always, I just think if you do it well, people will come.
I kept putting it off.
At a certain point, 14 years later, I was like, I keep putting it off.
So Im writing these books because I think theyll be fun, and I think the investigation is worthwhile.
Is jumping around genres something you do to challenge yourself?I think partially.
Then I dont get bored.
Also, I like these different stories.
I like fantastic novels that deal with history, likeOne Hundred Years of Solitude.
How can I investigate that for my own purposes?
I like heist movies.
I like zombie stories.
I like detective novels.
And theres no rule what I have to do.
We are a year apart.
Were basically twins, and we have very different personalities, so that definitely got intoThe Nickel Boys.
Then Elizabeth, his wife, is a strong character.
This made it ring true as a kind of mob story to me.
Rays putting a family together, in a way.
Carney is not that bad.
Thats true when you have a protagonist whos a serial killer, like in fuckingDexter, or a mobster.
Theyre doing terrible things, but you still root for them.
InOceans 11, they can afford a million-dollar electromagnetic-pulse machine to knock out all the security in Las Vegas.
My guys dont do that.
So I wanted a low-technology, low-fidelity heist background.
For books, Richard Stark has this series about a sociopathic safe cracker named Parker.
Chester Himes, the great Harlem crime writer, definitely provided some inspiration.
Patricia Highsmith with her Ripley character.
Ripley is a murderer and in constant denial about his homicidal impulses and his queerness.
That divided self is hopefully in Carney as well.
It feels like youre sympathizing with Ray while dissecting the validity of his politics.
Another time, you have a guy talking about getting in the room.
I started to wonder whether there was tacit critique of Black capitalism happening.Its more about realism.
Freddie, for example, joins the anti-police protests in 64 mostly so he can talk to girls.
Theyre older, and they have different orientations to all these changes happening than 20-somethings and teenagers.
So Im trying to have them act appropriately, not be paragons of political virtue.
Some people are not political, and criminals are not the most activist types that youll find.
Weve been talking about heists and jewels.
I have to ask about Beyonce.
Theres beendiscourseabout historically charged pieces as displays of wealth and some criticism of modern Black capitalism.
Does that stress you?I just do my work, and I try not to make it suck.
If I have something to say about society, about capitalism or institutional racism, its in my books.
I feel no urge to write an op-ed for theTimes.
That time is better put to working on another book.
Im just a fucking writer.
In Europe, there are so few Black writers being published.
When I go there, Im the Black explainer.
Its like, Ask a Black guy a random question.
But Im not half as knowledgeable as I should be to be pontificating everywhere.
Thats … extreme modesty.
Youve got Magic Johnson Theater, Chuck E. Cheese.
I have nothing against those things, but the landscape changed.
The south side of 125th Street is incredibly different than it was 40 years ago.
So that documentary urge was fun for me.
Theres a scene inShufflewhere Carney is staring into a gaping hole in the ground in a Manhattan construction site.
Such things have specific significance to New York now.
But that devastation to the city, and the resilience afterward, is in the book.
Also, the 70s.
Are we going to go back to the terrible period of the 70s?
But New York always bounces back.
Out of this ruined city came this incredible cultural laboratory.
It might not be as pretty as the previous building, but we rebuild.
I think thats New York, that resiliency.
So there are different ways of doing that.
In terms of, say,Underground Railroad, it takes incredible courage to run north, like Cora.
It also took courage to stay on the plantation and take care of your kids.
There are many different forms of heroism.
But its not a mission.
I think I had an idea beforeUnderground Railroadthat was very contemporary.
It was about newspapers in a new media age.
I was plotting it out.
It was 2012, 2013.
And I was just like, Im too old.
But theres certain fire that somebody of a younger generation can bring to a story.
I dont want there to be anything I feel I shouldnt write about.
I always wanted to write fiction.
I always admired long-form nonfiction by people like Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer.
I had older sisters and parents who brought those books into our house.
I was a teenager readingThe Executioners Songor Joan Didion.
As someone who was raised by pop culture, becoming a TV critic was an incredible job.
Were still getting some of this energy now.Oh, really?
I think people take criticism so much more seriously.
Jenkinss adaptation ofThe Underground Railroadpremiered in May.
I mean, Im in the middle of a book right now.
I dont want to stop to work on a TV show about something I wrote.
I can only write Cora so many times in a lifetime before I get sick of it.
Heres the solution to, say, Cora being very static in the attic in North Carolina.
What if I had this other this person in there to join her?
Whatever I contributed, Im happy for.
Growing up, I saw so many bad adaptations.
I hope it goes well, and hopefully the team thats taking it on is capable.
But in the end, the book is the book, and the show is the show.
How does it feel to see your characters come to life?I see them more as personalities.
I never really picture their faces.
So, the first day Im on set, Im seeing Ridgeway.
They all look perfect.
I felt like all of them were immediately who I described in the book, so that was magical.
I respect the care and the sheer industry it takes to make a miniseries.
I wrote the words five years ago: Shes in the tunnel.
They put an incredible crew together and they pulled it off.
Theres the wheel man.
If they get this score, they can change everything.
But at the same time that theyre gifted, theyre also incredibly flawed.
So you know somebody will get arrested for some minor thing, and theyll rat to the cops.
The viewer or reader knows that its going to go to hell.
Its a setup, but the members of the gang dont know.
Usually, the heist goes terribly wrong.
It has to, or itd be a newspaper clipping instead of a novel.
I want aHarlem Shuffleseries so bad.Perhaps one day.
Theres been some people approaching, interested.
But Im still writing it.
I dont want to answer anybodys questions about it.
I want to write it and have fun with it and enjoy being in Carneys world.
So if, when Im done, someones still interested, thats great.
And I dont want people saying, Where do you see Carney in 30 years?
Its none of your business, you know?
I wouldnt have guessed.Theyre a California neo-garage band.
They put out a record every six months.
Id just have three hours of Thee Oh Sees I listened to.
