LaShawn Harris's fascinating book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy, provides a fresh perspective on black women's experiences in New York City's notorious underworld economy as both “wage earners and entrepreneurs” during the first half of the twentieth century (1). Through extensive archival research, Harris has reconstructed the experiences of poor and working-class black women through personal letters, detailed reports from police and reform groups, and accounts from the black press. By historicizing black women's experiences as “career criminals and confidence artists, pornography workers, sex entrepreneurs, and narcotics dealers,” Harris expands our understanding of the history of black women's labor, “vice” and crime, and internal migration and immigration (6). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners situates “black women's less familiar modes of labor” within the larger context of the Great Migration, Harlem Renaissance, and Great Depression, and ultimately highlights black women's resilience and ingenuity in the face of race, class, and gender discrimination.

Many black women who migrated to New York City in the first two decades of the twentieth century struggled to find legitimate employment, and were often forced to accept jobs as housekeepers or domestics in brothels and houses of assignation. Harris offers the all-too-typical example of Blanche Haines, a trained nurse from Florida who was unable to find a permanent, professional position in New York City; therefore, she took a position as a domestic servant in a brothel before eventually transitioning to sex work, which was more lucrative. Haines was but “one of many academically trained women that toiled at gambling, drug, and brothel dens, especially as household workers” when locked out of the legitimate economy (28). The “informal labor sector” offered black women “employment and economic opportunities that complemented [their] desire to secure occupational mobility” and a modicum of freedom (2). Harris cites the example of a black woman arrested for sex work, who reported that she chose the profession out of desire for economic self-sufficiency; another “chose selling her body on the streets over welfare,” which would have brought agents of the state directly into her home and personal life (42). From fencing stolen goods to hawking Southern foodstuffs to reading fortunes, black women in the shadow economy discovered “a path toward living in a world in which they chose their own labor and social amusements” (3).

Poor and working-class black women's “criminal activities” as sex workers, supernatural healers, or numbers runners put them “at odds” with the white power structure and the “prevailing black bourgeois perspectives on female labor and … proper decorum” (24). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners, then is in direct conversation with the history and historiography of racial uplift ideology. Harris acknowledges that her subjects did not have the luxury of living their lives according to the (flawed) logic of uplift; rather, she argues that some black women reinterpreted “uplift” and “respectability” as a “practical strategy that stressed individual empowerment, self-sufficiency, and fiscal stability” (24). Others, like Mary Holmes, a “self-professed spiritual advisor” who was arrested for running a gambling game, told police officers that she “collected numbers not to accumulate individual wealth but rather ‘for the upkeep of the church’ and to aid her impoverished community” (33). Harris resists romanticizing the underground economy, and underscores the dangers black women faced—ranging from “public and family shame, arrest and imprisonment, verbal and sexual exploitation,” to death (25).

Harris's discussion of male and female supernatural entrepreneurs is fascinating. Purveyors of psychic skills and products saw “the possibility of alleviating financial hardship and reaping economic benefits” by opening a spiritual business, “exploiting and capitalizing on the African Diaspora's diverse religious and cultural practices” in the process (103). Not all of Harlem's supernatural entrepreneurs practiced Christianity; others embraced rituals and beliefs of Eastern religious traditions. For instance, Madame Fu Futtam, “the ‘Negro-Chinese seer,’” was a Jamaican immigrant who, along with her husband Sufi Abdul Hamid, founded a Buddhist temple in Harlem in 1938—the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility (98). Futtam and Hamid were among a “small community of black men and women who assumed different racial ethnicities as a creative response to race discrimination and Jim Crow segregation” (100). In addition, embracing non-Western spiritual traditions allowed supernatural practitioners to gain credibility and claim authenticity. For black women in particular, Harris argues that “by situating themselves as powerful and all-knowing; as authorities on the past, present, and future; and as individuals who possessed the ability to control others’ destinies,” they defied stereotypes and staked a claim to power (97).

Harris's analysis of the interactions between black migrants and black immigrants, along with her discussions of ethnicity, nationality, and citizenship, addresses Joe William Trotter's call to bring together the histories of the Great Migration from the American South and from Europe.Footnote ¹ Harris's explication of the notions of power and authority in her analysis of supernatural entrepreneurs, and the products and services they offered to the black diasporic community, is reminiscent of Robert Orsi's Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes.Footnote ² In conclusion, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners is an impressive and significant contribution, not just to the historiography, but also to the larger conversation of the over-policing of black Americans’ labor and leisure.