Invisible
by Stephen L. Carter
Author and Yale law professor Stephen Carter wrote this biography of his paternal grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, in part because of his annoyance at ugly responses to HBO's Boardwalk Empire's depiction of a black woman prosecutor in 1930s New York City. Some viewers mocked the idea of a black woman prosecutor, viewing it as hyperbolic political correctness. Untrue. Eunice Carter really was a prosecutor who worked for Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey during his 1930s racketbuster days. She was the only member of Dewey's team who wasn't a white man. Eunice Carter, initially shunted away to taking complaints about streetwalkers and brothels, was the first to realize that the Mob, directed by the most powerful boss, Lucky Luciano, had started organizing the prostitution business. Eunice Carter conceived the legal strategy that saw Luciano convicted and sentenced to a thirty to fifty year prison sentence.

Though the Mob hook gives this book its subtitle, Stephen Carter said he had long wanted to write this biography. Eunice's story influenced his previous fiction. This is not, repeat NOT a story, about the Mob. It IS a story about Eunice Carter. If you're looking for a book on organized crime, look elsewhere. I can't emphasize that enough.

Eunice's younger brother, Alphaeus , became a Communist, something which almost certainly damaged Eunice's career in the prosecutor's office and beyond. Eunice certainly believed it did. When Alphaeus (along with the novelist Dashiell Hammett) was imprisoned for refusing to name names, his sister disowned him.

Eunice was interested in or least tolerated the various Black Harlem society galas and intrigues and rivalries. She was temperamentally conservative. She almost certainly stayed in an unhappy marriage because of societal expectations. Alphaeus on the other hand didn't give a good god**** about what anyone else thought, something which endeared him to his friends W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robseon, even as it strained relationships with his family. If the book has a weakness it is the author's tendency to conclude what his grandmother thought about this or that life event. I thought Carter too often wrote definitively of something about which, absent family stories or diaries, we don't know what his grandmother thought.