Review time! with ‘Queenie: Godmother of Harlem’

“I’m number one, second to no one; no sweat I’m clean, nothin’ can touch me”

Queenie, which is written by Aurélie Levy and drawn by Elizabeth Colomba, comes to us from Abrams ComicArts‘ Megascope imprint. Let’s take a look!

Stephanie St. Clair was a Harlem mobster who resisted the intrusions of the more “traditional” Mafia into that neighborhood once they figured out there was money to be made. Levy and Colomba tell the story, but it’s a bit incomplete, which makes it a bit less than it might have been. On the surface, this is a typical gangster epic, as Queenie fights to keep her piece of the pie against more rapacious criminals than herself. The book begins in 1933, when Queenie is released from prison and Prohibition is ending, which means mobsters such as Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano have to find other sources of income, and Harlem offers them a place to expand. Queenie spends the book trying to figure out a way to hold them off, and the plotting of this part is very well done, as she considers all the angles, calculates ways to get out of the business, and tries to thwart her enemies. Schultz’s assassination in 1935 didn’t change the way things were going, and Queenie managed to get out of the business and eventually retire. The book does a nice job showing how she was able to extricate herself from the life (even if some of it’s fictional, the broad strokes are true). St. Clair is notable because she was very much involved in the community, fighting against police corruption and helping Harlemites register to vote and know their rights, and that’s why she’s a good subject of a biography. While a lot of this is a standard gangster story, Queenie’s efforts in the community add a nice layer of social awareness to the story, humanize her a bit, and bring Harlem to life. I’m always wary of stories that show gangsters as “good Samaritans,” and Queenie does, after all, have people killed in this book, but it’s never a bad thing to remember that these people are just people, and a villain to some might be a hero to others. In this book, Queenie obviously does what she can for her community, but it’s a nice subtext that what she does for her community is on her terms.

The book often flashes back to her childhood on Martinique (there’s a nice reference to the eruption of Mount Pelée in the book) and how she got out of there and eventually began her career. The narrative veers toward cliché here, but that’s because, unfortunately, rape of women and harassment by the Klan were so common that it becomes cliché, and St. Clair experienced both. The flashbacks are interesting, but where the book feels incomplete is in her rise to the top of the Harlem underworld. She works for a Jewish accountant and becomes skilled with numbers, and eventually she’s running numbers in Harlem, but when the book begins, she’s already at the top, and the book skips her rise. I get that the book is more about how she came to realize it was time to leave the business, but as a black woman in the 1920s, her rise feels like something that would be as dramatic, as in the 1930s, everyone just accepts that she’s a woman and she’s in charge. I can’t believe it was that easy to rise, but the book skips it. It feels like a missed opportunity.

Colomba’s art is beautiful, as she does a superb job creating a rich world for Queenie and the others to live in. Harlem is a vibrant, bustling place, and Colomba does a good job making it a real neighborhood, full of good places and some not-so-good places, but still, a place where people live and work, so it demystifies the gangster vibe a bit. Queenie is just a woman living in a place where she feels comfortable, and the art does a good job grounding her in that. Colomba’s details are impressive – she dresses Queenie well, befitting a woman at the height of her power, and she makes sure that the many, many characters in the book are interesting and unique in their own right. In the flashback sequences, she uses a bit of a rougher, heavier line and shades the drawings more than in the “present,” in which she uses stark black and white. Her precise line and use of blacks bring the world into stark relief, and her occasional use of negative space is very well done, as are the few times she decides to drop holding lines. There’s a wonderful sense of style to the art, and it makes St. Clair’s world shine with possibility, even as we realize that this golden age is coming to an end.

I like Queenie, as it’s a good story about a person about whom many people are unaware, and while, as I noted above, I’m always a bit annoyed about the glamorization of gangsters (as much as I like The Godfather, it seems to have started this trend that shows no signs of ever stopping), it’s still an interesting look at a person who actually had a sense of community, even if it didn’t stop her from enriching herself. I do wish we had seen a bit more about her rise, but even so, this is a fascinating quasi-biography, an exciting thriller at times, and a peek into the way America worked in the 1930s, which is depressingly similar to today. Sigh.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆