Harlem shuffle

Strivers Row

A Novel

Kevin Baker

HarperCollins: 550 pp., $26.95

*

THE historical novel, thought Henry James, was by nature a second-rate subspecies, fulfilling the requirements neither of fiction nor history. On the whole, James was right (and his contempt for the possibilities of the genre might account for why he never attempted any). Modern American historical fiction generally falls into one of two categories -- melodramatic potboiler or lead-footed social tract. Kevin Baker, the best of the writers currently practicing the genre, sees the possibilities for something more.

Baker’s history isn’t a recitation of facts, and his novels aren’t populated by puppets who jump at the pull of ideological strings. His books are filled with the sights, sounds and smells of worlds that historians aren’t likely to capture on paper and that many novelists don’t know exist. “Strivers Row” is the final entry in what the author calls his “City of Fire” trilogy, and although it works splendidly on its own, it will no doubt send new readers scurrying for the first two in the series -- “Dreamland,” which takes place around the turn of the last century with old Coney Island as its backdrop, and “Paradise Alley,” which is set during the Civil War draft riots and is the story of the gangs of New York that Martin Scorsese should have filmed.

“Strivers Row” isn’t the most ambitious of the three in terms of historical scope, but it certainly is the most daring: an attempt to reconstruct the world that produced Malcolm Little, as he was known when he left Michigan for Harlem during World War II, and who would change America as Malcolm X. I say “daring” for a number of reasons, beginning with the obvious: a white author writing about the most intriguing and enigmatic of black activist leaders. It’s daring from another perspective as well: namely, the melding of fact and fiction in its lead characters. “Strivers Row” is the parallel story of two men: Malcolm Little, real, and Jonah Dove, fictional. For something like this to work, the fictional character must be as provocative as the historical figure, and Baker pulls it off.

Jonah, whom the author says in his endnotes is “an amalgam of Harlem ministers past and present,” has a pedigree that can be traced back to “Paradise Alley.” A child who has inherited more all-American misery would be difficult to imagine. His grandfather, Billy Dove, was an escaped slave who enlisted in the Union Army after surviving the draft riots, and his grandmother, Ruth, barely survived the horrors of the Irish potato famine only to die in the riots saving her son, Milton, Jonah’s father. The Rev. Milton Dove, along with real-life figures Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Hutchens C. Bishop, are “ ‘The Three Kings,’ the ministers who had first made the great exodus uptown. Moving their churches up to Harlem lock, stock, and congregation when it was still a place where goats and pigs wandered through the streets.”

In 1943, Jonah, the reluctant inheritor of his father’s church, is at a crossroads, living uneasily in upper-middle-class comfort in a Florentine-style brownstone. His street, Strivers Row, the most elegant in Harlem, was built to attract wealthy whites who never came; the name now reflects the aspirations of the black bourgeoisie. Jonah, who because of his mixed ancestry can pass for white, is losing both his faith and his reasons to go on living in a black society.

At a critical juncture in his life, he crosses destinies with Malcolm, a petty criminal and hustler who is also of mixed racial origin. From there, the paths the two very different men take toward self-realization read like a secret history of the militant black consciousness in the 1950s. One of them struggles with the contradictions of a Christian world that teaches brotherhood while fostering racism; the other is drawn to a creed that demands justice in this world.

Does a white writer have a right to go there? Only a reader who has absorbed Malcolm X’s autobiography as thoroughly as Baker can decide for himself. (Baker has also relied on such comprehensive sources as Peter Goldman’s “The Death and Life of Malcolm X.”) Refreshingly, though, Baker isn’t interested in the sociopolitical significance of Malcolm X or the Black Muslims but in Malcolm’s personal triumph over racism and his proclivity for debauchery. As civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin phrased it, Malcolm X’s significance was not to Southern blacks who won concrete victories due to the efforts of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People but to Northern ghettoized blacks for whom the civil-rights struggle produced no obtainable, immediate results. “King,” said Rustin, “had to win victories in the real world. Malcolm’s were the kind you can create yourself.”

“Strivers Row” brings the streets of Malcolm’s Harlem to life with an almost hallucinatory intensity: the Apollo Theater, the Renaissance Ballroom, the formidable stone and brick churches with their awe-inspiring stained-glass windows, the “chicken restaurants and hamburger joints, and closed-up basement dance halls, and heat-dazed winos lying in the doorways ... the squatting curb vendors selling used books, and carved African animals, and jewelry that shone a little too brightly ... men selling halves of oranges, and alligator pears, and rings of coconut slices floating in dishes of water and their own fragrance.” And the music: Lionel Hampton’s band playing “as if there were something they were dying to catch up to before it got away. The frenzy of the crowd and the band playing off each other, surging back and forth across the dance floor, as if daring each other to the edge.”

How long, the newly arrived Malcolm asks himself rhetorically, “does it take to get used to one’s ghetto? To cling to it?” Strivers Row asks the more important question of how long it takes to leave it.

The title of Baker’s trilogy, “City of Fire,” isn’t hyperbole: From the New York draft riots of 1863 to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 to the Harlem riots of 1943, Baker has always found an actual conflagration to serve as a climax to his stories. The blazes light the path back to times and places that a complacent America would rather forget. They also light a path to the future of the American historical novel.