Pay me what you owe me
Brooklyn, Biggie Smalls and Hari Kunzru’s White Tears.
Biggie Smalls mural on Fulton St. in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Image via author.
Somewhere in Bed Stuy, an old homeless man shuffling up to me, asking for money… Then he began to shout at me… Pay me what you owe me motherfucker!
Well, the most important thing is, I want you guys to have a real precise perception of what I do, and how I make my money, and how I affect people’s lives, and how I represent people. Because it’s really important.
Gimme the loot! Gimme the loot!
White Tears, the fifth and latest novel from Hari Kunzru, melds social satire, cultural archeology and the supernatural in an unexpected and clarifying way. It begins by unraveling the tangled friendship between pre-millennial Brooklyn musicians Carter and Seth, then—whirling through the Manhattan fifties, with record collectors Chester Bly and JumpJim—buries itself in the Mississippi twenties. The stakes rise as Seth, the narrator, shifts his attention from Carter to Charlie Shaw, a brilliant, forgotten bluesman.
Most reviews focus on the excavatory work of the novel. “Masterly… writing about early American blues,” writes novelist Rachel Kushner. Slate: “…into the shadowy heart of the matter, to the poisoned center of America’s past.” The Los Angeles Review of Books notes the focus on the “prewar African-American artist” and the similarity between famed collector Jim McKune and the character of Chester Bly.
Yet, even as the story sinks deeper into the old South, it evokes, with greater intensity, contemporary Brooklyn. Bly conjures Frank “VoodooFunk” Gossner, who spent a decade acquiring rare West African vinyl for re-issue on boutique Brooklyn labels. And Carter’s family—the Wallaces, rich from Southern prison labor—resemble the real-life Bronfmans, bootleggers who became conservative liquor magnates, and whose youngest members, Benjamin and Hannah, have embedded themselves in Brooklyn subculture.
Carter’s career trajectory and general worldview, though, hew closest to Diplo, the producer-celebrity who began in Philadelphia and Williamsburg loft parties. More subtly, Brooklyn-born rapper The Notorious B.I.G. (or Biggie Smalls), murdered at 24, hovers over the pages, especially over the character of Charlie Shaw.
In the familiar yet alternate world of White Tears, white privilege is unstable, and racial profiteers must account for their misdeeds. The ghost of Shaw seeks justice, and Carter’s family will pay. This fictional present, when juxtaposed against our own, throws new light on the tangle of American economies—music, real-estate, prisons—that continue to make meaning, and money, on black erasure.
