Intrigue Among Black Elite Power Brokers
By SCOTT SIMON
By Scott Simon
Washington Post News Service
A CABAL of powerful men meets in an East Coast mansion, between the first chill of the Cold War and the dawn of the civil rights era. Claret and cigars are served. The men hatch a secret plan. Mighty forces are set in motion. People’s lives get moved around like chess pieces. Murders are committed. History is upended. Their plans bear fruit, the country reels.
Wait – did you assume that all these ruthless plotters were white?
In “Palace Council,” Stephen L. Carter revisits family lines that run through his hugely successful “New England White” and “The Emperor of Ocean Park” in a page-turner that twists through the 20 years from Brown v. Board of Education to the departure of U.S. helicopters from Saigon. The story winds through Harlem, Park Avenue, Los Alamos, Georgetown and Saigon with the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, Langston Hughes, John F. Kennedy and Rudolph Abel .
At the center of the story is Eddie Wesley, child of a well- known Boston pastor. He graduates from Amherst and sets out for Harlem, searching for the street savvy to become the Richard Wright kind of writer he admires. Eddie quickly becomes the intimate of some of Harlem’s highborn African American families .
He writes a novel about a young man who is refused entree to Harlem’s elite drawing rooms and undertakes a war of revenge against those who barred the door. White critics praise the book as satire, but he knows it’s not: “The critics did not believe, even after reading the novel, that a wealthy black society actually existed in the secret uptown shadows of their own. This was the liberal era in our politics, and the Negro was understood by all to be poor, oppressed, and in special need of white solicitude.”
Much of the narrative is driven by Eddie’s search for his sister, Junie. She’s pregnant and has run off with a radical group called Jewel Agony. In the meantime, Eddie becomes a speechwriter in the Kennedy White House, then a journalist, and finds his Harlem friends rising to strategic positions in the government and the CIA. As he searches for Junie, he wonders about Jewel Agony and who plots it – the government, radicals or the shadowy Palace Council?
Although the story is propelled by loves, longings, intrigues and the murders of many of Eddie’s friends and rivals with connections in high places, what draws a reader along is Carter’s sharp commentary. When Eddie decides to write an article about the romantic popularity of Che Guevara among leftist intellectuals, he wonders “if they really would like to live in the sort of state that successful revolutionaries tended to produce.” And it’s practically sidesplitting when Carter – a Yale Law professor who is one of America’s most celebrated academics – dispatches a dinner guest with the aside “Like many intellectuals, he hated conversations in which he could not shine.”
Carter’s vignettes of historic figures display both scholarship and imagination. But his portrait of Richard Nixon is pitch-perfect and sympathetic enough to remind us that, in 1960, Nixon was a more outspoken supporter of civil rights than Jack Kennedy (who was as reluctant to irritate the Southern segregationist powers of the Democratic Party as he had been to censure Joe McCarthy).
Eddie Wesley is original and engaging, a writer who resists being cast as an official ethnic spokesman or predictable polemicist. He cracks the mystery of the Palace Council by knowing more about John Milton than about Frantz Fanon – a last twist in a mystery that will give a jolt to your conscience.
Scott Simon is host of NPR’s Weekend Edition and the author of the novel “Windy City.”
“PALACE COUNCIL”
Stephen L. Carter
Knopf. 514 pp. $26.95.
Originally published by BY SCOTT SIMON.
(c) 2008 Virginian – Pilot. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.