Word: blueboy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Seizing on these seemingly immutable truths, two itinerant Negro waiters named Dave Greene and Blueboy Harris make themselves rich by setting up a thriving numbers bank in the city's ghetto. Like so many other aspects of the black world, the numbers operation is an inverted form of a white institution, the solid local business community. It, too, boosts the economy and shapes the ghetto's social and political structure. For the author, a former waiter, it further serves as an arena for playing off characters who embody multiple visions of the Negro destiny...
...plot springs from his search for moral equilibrium. Each of the characters closest to him seems to have found a partial solution. His partner, Blueboy, a shrewd, gamy con man, will play whatever role the whites expect of him with a comic and cynical flourish. His mistress, Kelly Sims, a college-educated chemist, bravely but quixotically banks her hopes for Negro progress on intellect. His eventual wife, Lila, a wise but unlettered country girl, has the "black granite" endurance that was once popularly thought to be the essential quality of the Negro race...
Ultimately, the sense of pain and loss conveyed by the book is profound. All Pharr's characters are destroyed in one way or another, even Blueboy. "We made a terrible mistake," he says on his deathbed. "We forgot that white folks is still here. We forgot we was operating in America." Less totally true than it once was, perhaps, the author's inescapable moral still seems timely enough: crime may sometimes pay, but being black never does...