Crook Manifesto

In literature, an aside is a speech or short explanation delivered by a character directly to the audience rather than to other figures within the narrative. Although action-packed, the novel builds much of its important thematic structure through calmer moments like characters’ inner monologues. Whitehead does this partly to fill in pieces of the narrative that speak back to Harlem Shuffle, the first novel in this series. Although Crook Manifesto can be read as a standalone text, many of its characters appeared in the first book, and both Ray’s legal and illegal business operations are continuations from that text. However, the asides serve another function as well. They provide significant social, political, and cultural context. They add rich detail to the story about Black culture, life in Harlem during the 20th century, and each of the characters’ personal histories.

A key example of this device at work is the backstory Whitehead provides about New Country Kitchen and Lady Betsy’s restaurant. Although that scene overtly focuses on Zippo’s meeting with Pepper, a significant portion of the text is given to Pepper as he muses about the history of the two restaurants. The women behind each restaurant moved north during the early 20th century. They were part of an important cultural movement called the Great Migration, the largest migration in US history, during which more than six million Black Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North. With them they brought music, recipes, and other cultural traditions that wove their way into living patterns in their new homes. That Whitehead includes so much detail about these two restaurateurs is an important moment of engagement with the broader history of African Americans in the United States, and in Harlem in particular. By inserting many of these details into inner monologues told aside from the story, Whitehead removes his readers from the action, for just a moment, to help them better understand the narrative landscape.