Betrayal, Vengeance, and Integrity Theme Analysis

He didn’t know where the rent was going to come from, but it was still early in the month. You never know. The TVs were smart and they were a nice couple and it was good to do for them what no one did for him when he was young: give a hand. “I may be broke, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself, as he often did at times like this. When he felt this way. Weary and a little desperate, but also high-hearted.

Race-conscious and proud, up to a point—light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white. Carney spooned Gerber baby food into May’s mouth, saw his hand against her cheek. She was dark, like him. He wondered if Alma still recoiled when she saw her granddaughter’s skin, felt dismayed that she hadn’t turned out light like Elizabeth. He saw her flinch in the hospital room after the delivery. All that hard work and then look at what her daughter marries. Did she stare at her daughter’s belly and wonder whose blood would win out this time?

About a month later Carney received a package. He got an odd feeling and closed his office door and drew the blinds to the showroom. Inside the box, wrapped in newspaper like a fish, was Miss Lucinda Cole’s necklace. The ruby glared at him, a mean lizard eye. Pepper’s handwriting was childish. The note said, “You can split this with your cousin.” He didn’t. He sat on it for a year to let the heat die down. Buxbaum paid him and Carney put the money away for the apartment. “I may be broke sometimes, but I ain’t crooked,” he said to himself. Although, he had to admit, perhaps he was.

Five hundred dollars. Crooked world, straight world, same rules—everybody had a hand out for the envelope. A five-hundred-dollar investment in the future of Carney’s Furniture if business kept rolling in like it was. A second store, a third? The members of the Dumas Club circulated around him in the room: whiskey in hand, elbows in ribs. They were a collection of chumps, but he'd need these Dumas chumps for permits, loans, to keep the city off his back.

[…]

It was a betrayal of certain principles, sure, a philosophy about achieving success despite—and to spite—men like these. Condescending Leland types, Alexander Oakes and his lapdog buddies. But these were new times. The city is ever-changing, everything and everyone must keep up or fall behind. The Dumas Club had to adapt, and so did Carney.

Here was every street corner in this city, populated by noisy, furious characters who were all salesmen, delivering dead pitches for bum products to customers who didn’t have a fucking nickel anyway. He moved one foot then the other.

Sucker. The mistake was to believe he’d become someone else. That the circumstances that shaped him had been otherwise, or that to outrun those circumstances was as easy as moving to a better building or learning to speak right. Hard stop on the t. He knew where he stood now, had always known, even if he’d gotten confused; there was the matter of redress.

“You’re reading too many papers,” Freddie said. “Does he try to make a buck? He doesn’t try to hide anything. Put on a costume, like you. Suit and tie every day, pretty wife and kids, trying to hide shit. He’s out there trying to run a hustle the same as you.”

Learned gentlemen aside, Carney knew crime’s hours when he saw them—dorvay was crooked heaven, when the straight world slept and the bent got to work. An arena for thieving and scores, break-ins and hijacks, when the con man polishes the bait and the embezzler cooks the books. In-between things: night and day, rest and duty, the no-good and the up-and-up. Pick up a crowbar, you know the in-between is where all the shit goes down. He upheld the misspelling in his thoughts, in keeping with his loyalty to his mistakes.

“It’s like this,” Munson said. “There is a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keeps the city running. Mr. Jones, he operates a business, he has to spread the love, give an envelope to this person, another person, somebody at the precinct, another place, so everybody gets a taste. Everybody’s kicking back or kicking up. Unless you’re on top. Low men like us, we don’t have to worry about that. Then there’s Mr. Smith, who also runs a business, and he’s doing the same thing if he is a wise and learned soul and wants to stick around. Spreading the love. The movement of the envelopes. Who is to say which man is more important, Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith? To whom do we give our allegiance? Do we judge a man by the weight of the envelope—or whom he gives it to?”

Following his targets back-to-back, the banker and the peddler, Pepper had to say they were in the same business. There were obvious junkies in Harlem, swaying, grooving to some inner refrain, and then there were citizens you’d never know were on junk. Normal people with straight jobs who strolled up to Dixon’s men, copped, then split to their warrens. Then there was Duke. Every day Duke hustled, doing his own handoffs in restaurants and club rooms, pushing that inside dope: influence, information, power. You couldn’t tell who was using what these days, their drug of choice, but half the city was on something if you had your eyes open.

In the coming days, he tried to determine when the Duke job actually got underway. Did it begin with the arrest of the drug dealer, that endgame maneuver? With the return of dorvay, and Carney’s nocturnal scheming all those summer nights, or the day the banker committed an offense that called for payback? Or had it been summoned from their natures, deep in their makeup? Duke’s corruption. 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.

Miss Laura’s skin glowed. Now, she was what revenge looked like: fierce and full of purpose, alien to mercy. Humiliation: that’s the word Elizabeth had used to describe Carney’s Dumas rejection. Duke could do what he wanted because he held the money. Foreclose on your property, sit on your business loan, take your envelope and tell you to go fuck yourself.

Pop. That’s how the whole damn country worked, but they had to change the pitch for the Harlem market, and that’s how Duke came to be. The little man was the white system hidden behind a black mask. Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.

He finally went down near dawn and when he woke he was back on schedule, in sync once more with the straight world. Cast out from the forgotten land of dorvay, as if he’d never been there. What had they meant, those dark hours? Maybe it was a way to keep the two sides of him separate, the midnight him and the daytime him, and he didn’t need it anymore. If he ever had. Maybe he’d invented a separation where none existed, when it was all him and always had been.

“You’re against the protests now?” Elizabeth said. “After all those benefits for the Freedom Riders?”

“It’s not the students I mind,” Leland said, “so much as the shiftless element that attached themselves. […] They looted everything one day, picked it clean like vultures, and torched it the next. Why would you do that to your own neighborhood store?”

“Why’d that policeman kill a fifteen-year-old boy in cold blood?” Elizabeth said.

“They said he had a knife,” Alma said.

“They said they find a knife the next day and you believe him.”

“Cops,” Carney said.

Later, Pepper explained it was the principle of the thing: Let white people think they can fuck all over you and they'll keep doing it.

That was two months after the night on Park Avenue. […] Carney said, “You said with the riots, what was the point? Everything keeps on the way it is, so all the protests were for nothing.”

Pepper said, “I am right in that. Grand jury had nothing to say about that cop, did it? He’s still on the job, right? But as it pertains to me shooting those dudes…maybe you start small and work your way up.”

It was unreal to have your city turned inside and out. He felt unreal those days of the riots when his streets were made strange by violence. Despite what America saw on the news, only a fraction of the community had picked up bricks and bats and kerosene. The devastation had been nothing compared to what lay before him now, but if you bottled the rage and hope and fury of all the people in Harlem and made it into a bomb, the results would look something like this.