During the summer of 1943, Harlem was a powder keg. The war effort fueled jobs and opportunity for white Americans but not, it seems, for its black citizens. People of all classes, congregating on Harlem’s streets, talked of race riots, lynching and abuse of black servicemen. Kevin Baker captures both mood and history in the final volume (“Dreamland,” “Paradise Alley”) of his City of Fire trilogy, “Strivers Row.”
This sprawling, dense novel springs from the intersection of two disparate paths, that of Malcolm Little and Jonah Dove. Little is a street hustler, and the man who eventually will be known as Malcolm X. Dove is a minister, head of Harlem’s Church of the New Jerusalem. The two first meet on a train, where Jonah and his dark-skinned wife are being taunted by white soldiers. Malcolm, who walks into the train compartment to sell sandwiches, makes the confrontation his own. He is able to save Jonah from the physical scars of a beating, but not from the psychic wounds, inflicted first by the soldiers and then by being rescued by one of his own.
The two black men are joined by nothing but race. Jonah, raised in Harlem and college educated, lives in a home on Strivers Row, a collection of 1890s brownstones where people of ambition live. From his father he’s inherited his position at the church. From his grandmother he has inherited a complexion so pale that he can pass as white.
Malcolm grew up in Michigan and has come to Harlem via Boston. His father, an itinerant preacher of sorts, may have been murdered by white supremacists. His mother is confined to a mental institution. And though he too has white blood, courtesy of a grandfather, there is no mistaking his race.
“Strivers Row” is redolent with the energy and the conflict of the time. Jonah sees – all too clearly – the racism that holds his people down. The lessons of the Jewish ghetto, and how this type of physical grouping is facilitating what will become known as the Holocaust, are clear. He struggles with a choice: He can either do what his father raised him to do, use his pulpit and his role of cleric to continue to fight for equal rights, or he can take advantage of his complexion and escape into the seemingly safer white world.
Choices are not something that Malcolm sees clearly. With his zoot suits and conked hair, he is a street operator looking for the main chance. He operates in a twilight world of drugs, gambling and prostitution that lead him, as Baker tells the story, to the first stirrings of the Black Muslim religion he will eventually espouse.
In a strange and accidental way, Malcolm also turns out to be Jonah’s conscience. Their paths cross at crucial times. Malcolm is first Jonah’s shame and eventually his conscience.
It is a pretty gutsy move for a white guy to write such a black book. The biggest risk lies in the portrayal of Malcolm X and Baker acknowledges that the character is closely modeled on sources that include “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” written with Alex Haley; “Malcolm, the Life of a Man Who Changed Black America,” by Bruce Perry; and “The Death and Life of Malcolm X,” by Peter Goldman.
The greatest surprise lies in the portrayal of Harlem’s anti-war sentiment. We are used to thinking of World War II as the great war, as a just war, as a war fought by heroes. Baker does nothing to diminish that perspective. Nonetheless, it is shocking, in the light of the current time, to read of abusive treatment of black troops during the Second World War. And this realization of this truth makes Harlem’s tinderbox reality in “Strivers Row” strikingly clear.
Baker has wrapped up his New York trilogy with power and grace. “Strivers Row” is a masterful blend of fact and fiction. Those who have read his preceding work, “Paradise Alley,” will recognize Jonah as the grandchild of Billy and Ruth Dove. And Malcolm X isn’t the only face of the civil rights movement to play a role in the novel. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., appears as a secondary character.
It’s this blend, using the fiction to highlight and underscore the fact, that makes the “Strivers Row” an addictive and enlightening read.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
Strivers Row
By Kevin Baker
HarperCollins, 560 pages, $26.95
