In Harlem a few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble

Gordon Parks - Untitled (Harlem, New York), 1967 ©The Gordon Parks Foundation

The way he saw it, living taught you that you didn’t have to live the way you’d been taught to live. You came from one place but more important was where you decided to go.
(p. 17*)

Strivers’ Row, where Alma and Leland Jones had raised her, was one of the most beautiful stretches in Harlem, but it was a little island—all it took was a stroll around the corner to remind its residents that they were among, not above.
(p. 25*)

Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition.
(p. 36*)

A siren approached, crawling east down 125th Street. No one moved until they were sure it was a fire engine and not a cruiser. They were hard men, and then some breeze came along and they got scared their little match might blow out.
(p. 61*)

Hank Diggs, the president of the Diggs Pomade Company and originator of the slogan “Dig This Shine!,” took the podium. “With all the brain power we got in this room,” he said, “we could light up Times Square!” He spoke in a slow, rumbling voice that evoked his own low wattage and undercut his point. His hair looked great, though.
(p. 103*)

Step back and the world is a classroom if need be.
(p. 104*)

No New Frontier stretched before him, endless and bountiful—that was for white folks—but this new land was a few blocks at least and in Harlem a few blocks was everything. A few blocks was the difference between strivers and crooks, between opportunity and the hard scrabble.
(p. 111*)

Freddie was the only Negro in attendance, and after some conversation (“What’s it like, growing up colored?” “My daddy worked on the Scottsboro Boys case”), he got hip that he was there to perform, put on a show of some authentic uptown magic. What was a night in New York City without a trip to the theater?
(p. 121*)

Part of moving up in the world is realizing how much shit you used to eat.
(p. 133*)

Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee.
(p. 173*)

The Carney clan’s worship of grudges. If you believed in the holy circulation of envelopes, everything that went down happened because a man took an envelope and didn’t do his job. An envelope is an envelope. Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.
(p. 178*)

Until they moved, the Carneys had no inkling of how shallow the elevated train had kept their sleep. As with many things in the city—traffic noise below, quarrelsome neighbors above, a dark walk from the corner to your front door—its effect was unmeasurable until it was gone.
(p. 189*)

When they smashed his front window on Saturday night, Mr. Diaz replaced it the next day. He replaced it when they smashed it the next night. Never mind that the store had been cleaned out and there was nothing to steal but the empty, busted cash register. They broke the window again. He replaced it. They smashed it four times and four times he replaced it. Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?
(p. 201*)

All his life he’d heard about the Manhattan House of Detention from guys dumb enough to get caught. Freddie never understood fools who bragged about doing time—why advertise your stupidity?
(p. 235*)

On the wall at Elizabeth’s office they had a map of the United States and the Caribbean with pins and red marker to indicate the cities and towns and routes that Black Star promoted. Stay on the path and you’ll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn’t help one another we’d be lost out there.
(p. 257*)

*as noticed on my reader

Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021)