Edward Trotter Wesley Junior breezed into Harlem in May of 1954, just days after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, a landmark decision that Eddie was certain must conceal some sort of dirty trick. He possessed a degree from Amherst, a couple of undistinguished years of graduate work at Brown, a handful of social connections through his mother, and a coveted job on the Amsterdam News, although he quit in disgust three months after starting. He had not realized, he explained in a letter to his beloved sister Junie, how very small and unimportant the position was. Junie, in a mischievous mood, forwarded his letter to their awesomely disapproving father, a Boston pastor and essayist.Wesley Senior thought Eddie lazy. But Eddie, to his own way of thinking, was simply focused. He did not want to write about car wrecks and speeches by the great leaders of the rising movement for Negro rights. He wanted to write short stories and novels and decided, in the manner of many an author before him, that earning a living would disturb his muse. So, for a time, he mooched.

His mother sent money, cars were washed, meals were served, papers were sold. Around the corner from his apartment on 123rd Street was a Jewish grocery – that was what they were called, Jewish groceries, a reference to ownership, not cuisine – and Eddie for a time earned a second income working nights behind the cash register, reading and writing there on the counter because custom was thin. But a better offer came his way. In those days the seedier side of Harlem was largely run by a worthy named Scarlett, who had risen to power after the legendary Bumpy Johnson, king of the Negro rackets, was sentenced to prison for the third time.At twenty-seven, a joyless term of military service behind him, Eddie Wesley was not known to be a scrapper. Still, he had a friend who had a friend, and before he knew it he was doing occasional odd jobs for bluff, secretive, boisterous men who were, or were not, connected to Scarlett. It was a living, Eddie told himself, but not his parents; it was only until he was discovered as a writer; besides, it would provide meat for the tales he would one day spin.

“Where do you go all these nights?” asked Aurelia, his unattainably highborn girlfriend, whom he often wooed by reciting Andreas Cappelanus on the art of courtly love: medieval literature having been among his best courses at Amherst. They were canoodling, as it was called, in a shadowed booth at Scarlett’s club, not the sort of place where Eddie’s friends ever went, or, more important, Aurie’s. “You’re so secretive” – as though she herself was not.

“If I told you, you’d never believe it.”

Aurelia was much quicker than Eddie, and always had been: “Then it can’t possibly be another woman.”

“You’re one to talk,” he said.

“I know.” Sipping her pink gin fizz with Kirschwasser, the drink for which she was known throughout Harlem. She was a columnist for the Seventh Avenue Sentinel, the second-largest Negro paper in town, and wrote about everyone’s scandalous peccadilloes but her own. “I am one to talk,” she said, and leaped to her feet, tugging at his arm. “Dance with me. Come on.”

“We shall be conspicuous,” said Eddie, in the peculiar elocution he had developed at Amherst. His friends mocked him, but women adored it.

“We shall not,” she teased, echoing his cadences, and perhaps she was even right, because Scarlett’s was also the sort of place that always remembered to forget you were ever there. But before they could have their dance, one of the boisterous men tugged Eddie aside for a whispered conversation. Eddie, excited, told Aurelia they would have to make it an early night, conveying through his body English what he dared not speak aloud.

Later that night, as Eddie left the train station in Newark, a couple of thugs tripped him, kicked him, snatched the parcel in its neat brown paper, ran. They had marked him down weeks ago and bided their time until he got careless. He was told by one of Scarlett’s people that the boys had admitted the crime. Not to the police. To Scarlett, who was said to have a way of loosening tongues. Eddie believed it.

After that Eddie went back to washing cars and sweeping floors. He earned little money, and saved none, for what he did not spend on Aurelia he shared with friends and neighbors. He developed a reputation as a soft touch. You had but to ask, and he would turn over his last dollar. This was not generosity in the usual sense, but neither was it calculated. He simply lived so thoroughly in the moment that it would never occur to him to hold on to a quarter because he might need it tomorrow. The most intensely political of his buddies, Gary Fatek, playing on Lenin, liked to say that when the revolution arrived Eddie would give the hangman cash to buy the rope; but Gary was white, and rich, and hung out in Harlem to prove his bona fides. Aurie found Eddie’s lightness with money endearing, even though it called into question – she said – his ability to support a family.

“In the fullness of time, I shall be successful.”

“In the fullness of time, I shall be married. So watch out.”

As it happened, Aurie made this comment, to embarrassed laughter all around, at a small dinner party hosted by a young couple named Claire and Oliver Garland at their apartment on West Ninety-third Street. The occasion celebrated Eddie’s transition to published writer. One of his stories had at last been accepted by a serious literary magazine. Ralph Ellison sent a note. Langston Hughes proposed a toast to Eddie’s grand future. Eddie had never met the famous writer, and was nervous. But Hughes, the greatest literary light in Harlem, put the young man at his ease. Hughes was broad and smiling, a spellbinder of the old school. Over brandy and cigars, he shared tales of a recent sojourn abroad. Eddie was enthralled. Langston Hughes lived the life Eddie coveted for himself. Running hotels with Aurelia’s uncle could not possibly compare. Oliver Garland, the only Negro lawyer on Wall Street, seemed to have been everywhere, too: he and his cousin Kevin and Langston Hughes compared notes on restaurants in Florence. Eddie, child of a preacher and a nurse, knew little of Negroes like this.

Eddie did not consider his short story revolutionary. He did not consider it anything, except finished. Entitled “Evening Prayer,” the tale had been published in The Saturday Evening Post. It was expected to win prizes. The story recounted a single day of segregation, viewed through the eyes of a small boy watching the daylong humiliation of his proud father, a stern deacon of the church who worked as a hotel doorman. At the end, the boy got down on his knees, folded his hands, and vowed that, whatever he turned out to be when he grew up, he would never be a Negro. Eddie’s mother wrote to say she cried for an hour when she read it. Aurelia had praised the story in the Sentinel, referring to its author as “Harlem’s most eligible bachelor”: her way of teasing from afar. Eddie’s literary agent was negotiating a deal for his first novel. This was the story in which Eddie invented the term “darker nation” to describe Negro America – capturing, he thought, a sense of solidarity and distinctiveness. And although later the term “black” would come into wider usage, for a time “darker nation” was on upper-crust Harlem’s lips.

Eddie, however, even if on their lips, had just barely scratched his way onto their lists. In those days, everything in Harlem was divided into tiers. Prestige mattered, and multiple layers separated the top from the middle, to say nothing of the bottom.Once his short story began to open doors, Eddie could not bear the thought of not walking through them. Given the chance, thanks to his erudition, he glittered. He traveled upward. He could quote Shakespeare and Dante by the yard, but also Douglass and Du Bois. He could tease. He could charm. He could flatter. On a frigid evening in February of 1955, he attended a grand party at a palatial townhouse on Jumel Terrace, a fancy little cobblestone enclave near Saint Nicholas Avenue between 160th and 162nd streets. The party had been called to announce a royal engagement....Everyone was buoyant but Eddie, who usually limited himself to a single glass but tonight drank quite a bit more. Eddie attended out of duty, and wished he had not.

He was in love with the bride-to-be.

Eddie watched the happy couple, listened as glasses were raised to Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland. His usual geniality faded. He began to seethe. People were surprised. Eddie Wesley was always so placid, and so much fun. Tonight he argued belligerently with other guests. Finally, a young man with whose family Eddie’s had summered on Martha’s Vineyard in the old days was delegated to pull him aside and calm him. Eddie broke free. Harry Belafonte tried. Eddie broke free. Langston Hughes tried. Eddie broke free. A grim phalanx of Harlem men then offered courteously to put the fool out on the street, but the bride-to-be intervened. In full view of everyone, she grabbed Eddie by the arm and dragged him into the kitchen. He did not break free. People whispered excitedly. The kitchen was busy with hired help, everyone in smart, sparkling uniforms, eyes on the princess as they pretended to look the other way.

Aurelia was furious.

“This is just the way it is. This isn’t your world, so I can’t expect you to understand. But I have responsibilities to my family.”

“And to yourself ?” Eddie demanded. “Have you no responsibility to yourself?”

Aurelia was unfazed. She remained schoolmarm-stern. “How can we preserve what matters if we all keep on putting ourselves first?”

“I don’t put myself first. I put you first.”

“You put your writing first.”

“I love you,” he said, the words like ash in his mouth. “I’ll always love you.”

For a moment Aurelia softened. She touched his cheek. “Maybe if you’d taken that job with my uncle.” Then, as if by force of will, the schoolmarm was back. “Some things we can’t do anything about. That’s the way life is.” To this credo, Eddie had no answer. “Now, behave yourself,” she added.

Aurelia rejoined her admirers, and her glaringly unamused fiancé. Eddie decided the time had come to depart. A friend or two offered to accompany him, but Eddie shook his head. In consequence, he was alone when, thirty minutes later, he found the body.

Some 150 pages later, we find Eddie working on Senator Kennedy’s campaign after the unexplained disappearance of his sister Junie.

Gary took him sailing on Long Island Sound. Apart from wading in the surf on Martha’s Vineyard, Eddie had no real experience of the water. He had never sailed. He dressed in a blazer, expecting a party on a rich man’s yacht. Instead, they went out in Gary’s sloop. Eddie could not tell a jib from a broad reach. All he knew of sailing was what he had read in Jack London’s essay about how the real sailor gets the salt in his bones and it never gets out again. That did not sound to Eddie like fun. But here he was riding low in the water, crashing over waves, and scampering around the deck following orders, ducking constantly as the boom swept past, and, once, not ducking fast enough.

“Your man doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance,” shouted Gary, who considered himself an oracle on politics because his great-great-uncle had been a mediocre president. “Nixon would mop the floor with him. But it won’t get that far, and we both know it. Your man won’t get the nomination. It’ll be Johnson or Humphrey, maybe even Stevenson. This is a vanity campaign, Eddie. This is trying to win with Daddy’s money. You know that joke your man likes to tell? The fake telegram from his father? ‘Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary, I’m damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide’? It’s true, Eddie. Without the money, your man is nothing.”

Eddie ducked again. Actually, he had helped write the joke, which played wonderfully well on the stump, but he had already learned that part of the role of political speechwriter was never admitting to having authored a single word that emerged from the candidate’s mouth.

“He has a good chance,” said Eddie, who had looked at the numbers just days ago. The spray caught him face-on, and for a moment he spluttered while Gary laughed. “Among Democrats, he’s tied nationwide with Stevenson–”

“Right. Your man is spending money hand over fist, and the best he can manage is a tie with a fellow who isn’t even in the race. If you’re looking for a job in Washington, Eddie, this isn’t the way to get it. It’s quicker to ask Aunt Erebeth. She adores you. I don’t know why.”

Eddie was still coughing. As a child, he had nearly drowned on Martha’s Vineyard, and had never entirely conquered his fear. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Well, whatever it’s about, it’s a mistake. You’re wasting your time.” But it was not a mistake. Eddie liked Jack Kennedy, and despised Dick Nixon. Like most of the campaign’s early supporters, he was enthusiastic about the changes a Kennedy candidacy would work. Yet that enthusiasm was not his principal reason for signing on. He was here because of Junie.

Excerpted from Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter. Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen L. Carter. Published July 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf. Author readings and booksignings: July 30 at 7:30 p.m., Union Chapel, 55 Narragansett Avenue, Oak Bluffs (sponsored by Bunch of Grapes Bookstore); August 2 at 7 p.m., Cousen Rose Gallery, 71 Upper Circuit Avenue, Oak Bluffs.