Taken for Granite

THE BOOK OF NUMBERS by Robert Deane Pharr. 374 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

"The day a Negro successfully robs a bank instead of a chicken coop we can honestly claim to be emancipated." The speaker is a character in this flawed but forceful first novel. The scene is a Southern city in the 1930s. For the Negroes who dwell there in remorseless squalor, a measure of freedom and manhood can be earned only by breaking the white man's law. For a bright, ambitious Negro, the best way to prosperity is not through business or the professions but in the illicit sporting life: gambling and the rackets.

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.

Moral Search. Dave, the numbers king, is a forebear of today's black radicals, a sort of "new Negro" whose drive for power and respectability is born of pride, anger and an awareness of his heritage. At best, his racket can bring him power only at the cost of respectability, and even that power is sharply circumscribed.

The 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.

Robert Pharr's prose often clumps along awkwardly, and his construction sometimes creaks. His art is at its apparently artless best when he simply shows the reader the teeming, sensual, violent ghetto, letting the vernacular of the streets crackle through his pages.

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.

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