Books: Topical but Funny

THE SIEGE OF HARLEM by Warren Miller. 166 pages. McGraw-Hill. $3.95.

Harlem has seceded and declared itself a nation. Barricades made of abandoned autos, Fifth Avenue buses and Con Edison signs (“Dig We Must”) have been erected on its borders. Frontier guards have been posted on the subway lines and the New York Central and New Haven railroads, and tolls are collected as the trains pass through Harlem. The “numbers” have been nationalized. Harlem’s Congressman Lance Huggins, the first Prime Minister, announces a policy of no-surrender: “We have surrendered absolutely to our fate which is freedom. We had this secret space in us and now we have located it geographically and made it public for all the world to see.”

Too topical to be funny? In spite of the current Harlem rioting, Warren Miller, one of the best satirists (Looking for the General) writing in the U.S., has brought the joke off. In this novel about Harlem’s first year as a nation, Miller mocks blacks, whites, and the whole racial fuss; yet beneath the hilarity is a clear warning: “Laugh at your peril. It could happen.” Writing such a seriocomic novel is a feat of literary acrobatics, but Miller does not lose his balance.

The story is narrated, Uncle Remus style, 75 years” later when Harlem is an old and established nation like Nigeria and Ghana. The narrator was a Harlem militiaman in the days of derring-do, but now he is full of “Well, honey’s” and “byembys.” The children at his knee are snotty little know-it-alls with African nationalist names: Jomo, Sekou, Mboya. But “Grandpa” fascinates them with stories of how Harlemites resisted all threats and blandishments, how they were impervious even to Radio Free Harlem, over which “Washington, D.C., Rose” seductively urged them to return to the comforts, clean suits and warm apartments of the Privileged People. Harlem’s early heroes were the sit-in veterans like Foreign Minister Art Rustram, “who could sit-in, standin, lay-down, and stall-in with the best of them. When it came to a non-violent charge into some governor’s office, he led the way. He once out-pacified a Long Island high school principal, single-handed.”

Miller, a white man who lived in Harlem for five years, has mastered the vernacular, which in its own way is as eccentric as Uncle Remus’. He has also distinguished the different Harlem personality types—his way of saying that Negroes are people, too. And he has managed to show that even the nation’s No. 1 problem is good for an occasional laugh.