The
New York Times
Strivers Row, by Kevin Baker
Review by PETE HAMILL
Published: February 26, 2006
HISTORICAL novels are primarily works of the imagination,
not of history or its imperfect relative, journalism. History
can inspire the workings of the imagination and journalism provide
tools to help the novelist see the imagined past through its surviving
remnants. But imagination is the core of the book.
In this long, layered novel — the final
volume of a New York trilogy called "City of Fire" —
Kevin Baker plunges audaciously into the world of Harlem in the
early 1940's to imagine the lives of two African-American men.
He has absorbed the histories, biographies and previous fictions.
He has walked the actual streets where his drama plays out and
has imagined the rest. One of his main characters was known in
the "real" world of 1943 as Malcolm Little, a rootless
18-year-old who would later become famous as Malcolm X. The other
is the invention of Baker: a young, bourgeois, light-skinned Harlem
clergyman named Jonah Dove. Malcolm is poor. Jonah is comfortably
middle-class. In different ways, each is tormented by the world.
Over the course of the novel, the two men brush
against each other, always strangers separated by the peculiar
institution of class. Their decisive encounter takes place at
the beginning of the novel, when Jonah and his darker-skinned
wife are traveling south by rail to New York from an upper-class
black enclave on Martha's Vineyard. Malcolm is selling sandwiches
on the train, cynically "Tomming it up" for tips. Some
drunken white soldiers start taunting Jonah, who maintains an
embarrassed, tense, outwardly stoic calm. The soldiers go too
far, and young Malcolm slams them around with the heavy sandwich
box. In essence, he rescues the black couple, and when the train
eases into a station he leaves it and plunges into the shallow
waters of a place called Buzzards Bay. That act haunts Jonah,
and near the end of the novel he meets Malcolm in the middle of
the Harlem riot of 1943 and asks him why he dived into the water
in view of all the passengers.
" 'I just wanted their attention!' he called
over. 'Ain't you ever felt like that? I just wanted to make sure
they all saw me.' "
That is, another invisible black man makes himself
briefly visible.
After that first encounter on the train, Malcolm
and the couple go separately to Harlem, Malcolm to a seedy boardinghouse,
the Doves to a lovely town house in what poorer Harlemites called
Strivers Row. These two tree-lined blocks of houses on 138th and
139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues were designed
by Stanford White and other architects for white owners who never
came, or who fled when blacks started moving into Harlem at the
end of World War I.
Malcolm, shaped by an impoverished, erratic childhood
in Lansing, Mich., is exuberant about his arrival, at last, in
the capital of black America. Harlem is part of Jonah's birthright,
but he is deeply troubled by a crisis of faith, religious and
social. That crisis is italicized by the humiliations of the train
ride, which underline the cruel absurdities of race and class.
There is much guilt in Jonah's character, too. He has risen to
leadership of the Church of the New Jerusalem through the dynastic
power of his father, who founded it. He and his childless wife
have survived the terrors of the Depression on the contributions
of the black working poor, whose labors have financed the house
on Strivers Row. Jonah's father lives on in a room at the church,
aged and silent. He no longer believes in God, and his son has
more questions than answers about his own faith. At the same time,
Jonah imagines leaving his wife and vanishing into the larger
white world, where he can "pass."
"He knew then, for the first time, that he
truly would go," Baker's brooding Jonah reflects at one point.
"Pass once and for all into that monstrous white world —
not for fame or money or some sense of freedom like his sister
sought, but just so he wouldn't have to watch from close up anymore."
Jonah's sister, Sophia, lives as a white woman
in Greenwich Village and has taken the name Miranda. She is a
singer, a white-bread version of Billie Holiday, but in Harlem
she poses as a white woman who sleeps around with black men, one
of whom is Malcolm. Apparently, none of Jonah's parishioners ever
see her leaving the clubs or showing up at rent parties. And we
never learn why she didn't just stay home.
The education of Malcolm Little is a more coherent
tale, following the narrative line of "The Autobiography
of Malcolm X" (written with Alex Haley) and the biographies
cited in the acknowledgments by Baker. What is not in the existing
texts, Baker invents, his right as a novelist. Malcolm finds work
as a waiter in Small's Paradise (densely and vividly evoked),
loses that job out of naïveté (giving a lonesome young
soldier the address of a prostitute, then realizing the soldier
was probably a cop), and soon moves on to running numbers, peddling
and using drugs, and working for pimps. Along the way, young Malcolm
becomes Detroit Red, one of a variety of assumed street identities,
and adopts the defiant uniform of the zoot suit.
His formal education ended after the eighth grade,
and the basic texts of his informal self-education are movies,
comic books, dream books (those marvelous guides to playing the
numbers), stray tracts on black nationalism. Inevitably, he's
attracted to the comic-book theology of the Lost-Found Nation
of Islam, as conceived by a mysterious character named Wallace
Fard (who might have been white) and a messianic hustler named
Elijah Muhammad (Malcolm's actual conversion to this American
version of Islam didn't take place until 1949, while Baker's novel
ends in 1943). Baker's Malcolm appears to be totally devoid of
a sense of irony, or he would laugh out loud at their creed, with
its mad scientists and immense spaceships. Instead, near the end
of the novel, Baker has Malcolm reading a book about Elijah Muhammad,
and imagining fully developed scenes as if they were fact. One
imagined meeting of Fard and Elijah at which a Japanese secret
agent appears is pure comic-book melodrama, the preposterous machinations
of a nefarious secret society. But Baker's Malcolm doesn't see
it that way. This repeated device — Baker's fictional Malcolm
imagining Fard and Muhammad in detailed scenes from an imaginary
book — hurts the novel. Most of all, it drastically undermines
the reader's suspension of disbelief, in a novel whose driving
current is the need for belief.
In contrast, the Harlem shared by Malcolm Little
and Jonah Dove is portrayed with great care, built upon many exact
and concrete details, and is one of the strengths of the novel.
Baker makes us see the soldiers and sailors (black and white)
roaming the evening streets in search of women, whiskey and trouble,
and usually finding them. He captures the seething anger of ordinary
citizens as reports come in by mail or through the black press
about the racist abuse of segregated black soldiers in the American
South (and black defense workers elsewhere). Much street talk
has a singular point: why should any black American serve a country
that won't accept his full citizenship?
As Malcolm wanders through the nights, and Jonah
questions himself, his marriage and the cruelties of the Old Testament
God, tension grows in the doorways and on the stoops and rooftops
of Harlem. In a way, these passages are fictional extensions of
a 1955 account by James Baldwin in "Notes of a Native Son":
"I had never before known it to be so violently still. .
. . I had never before been so aware of policemen, on foot, on
horseback, on corners, everywhere, always two by two. Nor had
I ever been so aware of small knots of people."
Everything on the street builds toward an explosion.
The Detroit riot in late June happens offstage in Baker's novel,
but feeds the Harlem tension (curiously, Baker doesn't mention
the racist "zoot suit riots" in Los Angeles a few weeks
before the Detroit events). Neither Jonah Dove nor Malcolm Little
is in danger of being sent off to the war (Malcolm fakes psychological
problems and is classified 4-F). For them, the most dangerous
places of all are in America. Harlem erupts into riot on Sunday
evening, Aug. 1.
Baker wisely chooses to describe the riot in an
understated way, as if deferring to Ralph Ellison, who covered
it for The New York Post and made it a culminating, phantasmagoric
movement in his classic 1952 novel, "Invisible Man."
But one result of this decision is that neither of the principals
is much affected by the bloody events in the real world. Jonah
has spent a long solitary day in a Midtown hotel room, after leaving
his wife without a word of explanation, prepared to set off at
last into his new life of passing. He is then consumed by longing
and guilt and hurries home to Strivers Row, just in time for the
riot. He works hard at caring for his flock, and for the casualties,
but he is not much changed.
Malcolm, as he does so often in the novel, simply
runs. Away from danger, away from risk, away from the phantoms
of his deepening paranoia. It's as if the drugs had eaten his
will. Those who want to believe that Malcolm Little was always
a fearless black man will be enraged by that part of the portrayal.
Baker, however, is not interested in hagiography. On one important
level, he merely wants to tell a story.
That story has many moments of power and insight,
most of them involving the anguish and ambiguity of class, as
exemplified by the visions of Jonah Dove. In addition, there is
much buried treasure. Baker is wonderful on the numerology of
dream books, the painful rituals of "processing" hair.
A number of real people make cameo appearances: Fiorello La Guardia
(on the night of the riot); Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (another apostate
clergyman, but one possessed of a roguish charm); even the hermitlike
Collyer brothers, who in the novel die in 1943, when they actually
died in baroque squalor in 1947 (as noted by Baker in his afterword).
There are a few too many Dickensian coincidences for my taste,
but I kept turning the pages, wanting to know what would happen
next. That is, I surrendered to the craft of the novelist.
In the end, Baker has written a brave, honorable
work, taking us into a vanished world that should be better known.
More important, he imagines his human subjects with a sense of
pity and compassion and embrace, thus making them visible in ways
that are fresh and new.
Pete
Hamill, the author of nine novels, including the best sellers
"Snow in August" and "Forever," is a distinguished
writer in residence at New York University. His most recent book
is "Downtown: My Manhattan."
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2006 The New York Times Company
