Ray has to use everything he knows about being “crooked” to save himself and his cousin. Just when Ray thinks he has his life in order, Freddie, who has kept a low profile in Ray’s life since the Hotel Theresa heist, is back and this time he gets Ray into trouble with the white patricians of New York. But with his first taste of success, Ray now wants to be one of the Strivers’ Row elite and a member of the Dumas Club. He understands that the Strivers’ Row group is every bit as crooked as the hustlers of Harlem, only they know the legal loopholes that make crookedness safe and lucrative. Ray has always had disdain for his snobby in-laws, who are among the wealthy Black professionals of Harlem’s Strivers’ Row. On the outside, he is thriving for the first time, but a new ambition has been lit within him. While Ray is able to get himself out of the mess Freddie pulled him into and even profits from it, the events change him. When one of the conspirators is found dead, Ray gets a crash course in crime, including how to dispose of a body. Ray has no idea he has been named as the man who will help them sell the stolen goods until after the theft when he ends up in a post-heist huddle with a group of hardened criminals. It is Freddie who gets Ray involved with the heist at the Hotel Theresa, known as the Waldorf of Harlem. “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” is Freddie’s regular response after getting himself and Ray into trouble in childhood and beyond. Just as Ray attempted to be the opposite of his father, Freddie saw his mother work hard without benefitting from it and turned to crime without a knack for it. Freddie, who was raised by an honest and hardworking mother, has little use for honest work or the appearance of honest work. The two men were raised almost like brothers, given the early death of Ray’s mother and then the occasional absence and eventual death of Ray’s father. Yes, he sells some merchandise with questionable origins, and sure, the funds he used to open his shop were a posthumous gift of sorts from his father, but he’s doing his best to become a self-made man in Harlem.įreddie is Ray’s cousin. His father was one of the most notorious criminals in Harlem, but Ray sought to distance himself from that life, and he put himself through college and opened his own furniture store. Ray is a young husband, father, and businessman in Harlem.

This is how Colson Whitehead introduces us to his protagonist, Ray Carney. “Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.

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