Name: Alphonse “Boo Banjo” Harlow.
Other Aliases: Country, Brother Al, Country Al.
Appearance:
Age: 51.
Occupation/ Cover: Alphonse follows in the footsteps of the Freedom’s Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, and many others as head of O’Connor County’s resident Black newspaper: the Crucible.
Racket: Boo Banjo and his salacious band have, through connections with black mobsters on the east coast--namely Harlem and Philadelphia--used laundered money to unite the city’s black poor working class populace under a single united front. While it has been near impossible to forge an official union, Banjo has amassed considerable power through this vast and still growing labor class communion. What little production takes place in the county can be halted with one word from the Dixie Mob’s resident country bumpkin.
He sends a little money back East and funnels the rest through gambling and numbers to sustain and employ the many black workers who rely on him.
Public Goals: Where Black Jack Rawlins seeks to integrate O’Connor County, Alphonse is a segregationist. He mimics Malcolm: the black dollar is power and Harlow believes that dollar and the power that comes with it must remain in their respective communities. He is remiss to dabble in anything that brings too much attention: drugs, moonshine, wet work.
Private Goals: His public goals and his private goals intermix. He wants black independence: black business, black universities, black public schools, higher wages for his people, better working conditions. Despite his public abhorrence of drugs and other violent aspects of the business, he is just as ruthless as the next gangster and has aligned himself with some of the biggest black drug dealers in the nation in service of his aims.
Supporting CastMinnie Harlow, 47: His “high yella” baby. Girlfriend, wife, mother to his two younger children. The one woman he’s loved since he was fifteen. His confidant, his everything. She is shrewd, speaks her mind when and wherever she wishes. Very close with many of the women throughout O’Connor county, especially those in Buck Nelly.
Walter “Shoeshine” Simmons, 43: Alphonse’s oldest friend and the closest thing he has to a right-hand man. Country Al might be the boss, but Simmons is the brains. A smooth talker, a sly diplomat, a former jazz musician from the Bronzeville area of Chicago who fell on hard times.
Terrence “Blood” Brown (age 39) and the Dogs of Redline County: Though Alphonse’s operation isn’t one that worries much about territory, he knows that he needs someone to protect what he’s built. Someone bold enough to tell the white folks hell no, and braver still to tell them to go back to wherever they came from. Blood is a former heavyweight boxer whose greatest achievement was being knocked out by George Foreman in 1967. Volatile, and his loyalty questionable, Harlow and Simmons work overtime to keep Brown’s leash tight and short.
Mama Fats, 64: A husky WWII era jazz debutante who fell out of favor, like so many others, with the rise of Doo Wop and Motown in the fifties and sixties. Boo, a long time fan of hers, supported her when she was penniless and she now heads Harlow’s gambling operation in return.
Personal History
Some aspire to be war heroes, doctors, lawyers, politicians. Alphonse Harlow believed the way out was through money, through education. He spent the first ten years of his life on the east coast where his mother and father eked livings for themselves. Illiterate and otherwise barred from meaningful institutional work because of discriminatory housing practices, his father found work in sanitation and his mother became a maid for several affluent white families in Harlem. After a fight with a white boy that saw Alphonse break the boy’s nose, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in Mississippi some time in 1931.
The Jim Crow south made many bitter, angry, or subservient to the quo. Alphonse’s arrogance made him reject his station. Saddled with aging grandparents who, though they tried, were ineffectual with the rod in their advanced age, Alphonse left home and roamed the streets. Always possessing a penchant for numbers, Alphonse landed a job as a runner for a group of black gangsters connected to Madame St. Clair and Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson up north in his hometown.
He learns the intricacies of number running and soon makes enough money to fulfill a dream of his: to learn to read. He teaches himself basic words and sounds first. With time and a steady rise through the numbers and later policy rackets, Alphonse completed his first book by age 28: W.E.B. DuBois’
The Souls of Black Folk. This seminal work changed Alphonse’s perspective: Jim Crow be damned, there was a way to feed all these starving, poor black mouths. And it would take a certain kind of man to do it; the kind of man Alphonse had known for much of his life: the hoodlum.
By 1956, Alphonse had taken over the remnants of the fledgling black organized crime syndicates on the south side of O’Connor County. By 1967 he had consolidated his power and used the knowledge he’d gained from DuBois’ teachings to organize much--though not all--of the county’s black workforce under his control. He attempts to make contact with Black Jack Rawlins and establish an alliance sometime later.
In 1969 he used the money from his gambling operations to put into press the Crucible, newspaper which elevates black socialist voices and thinkers from around the nation. In 1971 he established contacts out east through an old mentor from his number running days and became tied in with the Philadelphia Black Mafia and one Leroy “Nicky” Barnes in Harlem.
