Home To Harlem Read online

  HOME TO HARLEM

  Other titles in

  The Northeastern Library of Black Literature

  edited by Richard Yarborough

  LLOYD L. BROWN / Iron City

  STERLING A. BROWN / A Son’s Return: Selected Essays

  WILLIAM DEMBY / The Catacombs

  JESSIE REDMON FAUSET / The Chinaberry Tree and There Is Confusion

  ANDREA LEE / Sarah Phillips

  CLARENCE MAJOR / All-Night Visitors

  JULIAN MAYFIELD / The Hit and The Long Night

  J. SAUNDERS REDDING / Stranger and Alone

  GEORGE S. SCHUYLER / Black Empire; Black No More; and Ethiopian Stories

  ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY / Loving Her

  WALLACE THURMAN / Infants of the Spring

  JOHN A. WILLIAMS / Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light

  RICHARD WRIGHT / Lawd Today! and The Long Dream

  Home to Harlem

  by CLAUDE MCKAY

  Foreword by

  WAYNE F. COOPER

  NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Boston

  Published by University Press of England

  Hanover and London

  NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Published by University Press of New England,

  One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766

  www.upne.com

  © 1928 by Harper & Brothers

  © 1987 by Hope McKay Virtue

  First published in 1928 by Harper & Brothers

  First Northeastern University Press edition 1987

  ISBN–13: 978–1–55553–024–2

  ISBN–10: 1–55553–024–9

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-55553-779-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McKay, Claude, 1890–1948

  Home to Harlem.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York: Harper, 1928.

  With new foreword.

  I. Title.

  PS3525.A24785H6 1987 813′.52 87–15357

  ISBN 1–55553–023–0 (alk. paper)

  ISBN 1–55553–024–9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-55553-779-1 (e-book)

  TO MY FRIEND

  LOUISE BRYANT

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  FIRST PART

  I

  GOING BACK HOME

  II

  ARRIVAL

  III

  ZEDDY

  IV

  CONGO ROSE

  V

  ON THE JOB AGAIN

  VI

  MYRTLE AVENUE

  VII

  ZEDDY’S RISE AND FALL

  VIII

  THE RAID OF THE BALTIMORE

  IX

  JAKE MAKES A MOVE

  SECOND PART

  X

  THE RAILROAD

  XI

  SNOWSTORM IN PITTSBURGH

  XII

  THE TREEING OF THE CHEF

  XIII

  ONE NIGHT IN PHILLY

  XIV

  INTERLUDE

  XV

  RELAPSE

  XVI

  A PRACTICAL PRANK

  XVII

  HE ALSO LOVED

  XVIII

  A FAREWELL FEED

  THIRD PART

  XIX

  SPRING IN HARLEM

  XX

  FELICE

  XXI

  THE GIFT THAT BILLY GAVE

  FOREWORD TO THE 1987 EDITION

  OF all the major Afro-American writers who emerged in the 1920s, Claude McKay remains the most controversial and least understood. Those among the general public who recognize his name at all will recall him as the author of “If We Must Die,” a defiant sonnet of black resistance before mob violence. A few may also remember him as the author of Home to Harlem, the first and best-known work of his four volumes of fiction published between 1928 and 1933. It has often been called the first Afro-American “best seller,” because of the brief vogue it enjoyed in New York City before the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression sent black writers and their literature into deep eclipse. Not until the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940 did another Afro-American novel enjoy such popular success.

  Before writing Home to Harlem, McKay had already established himself as a poet. Born in the mountains of central Jamaica in 1890 of black peasant parents, McKay published two volumes of Jamaican dialect poetry, Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), before he left for the United States in 1912. Once in the United States, McKay abandoned dialect verse and, instead, began to write sonnets. He also continued to move politically to the left. Just after World War I, McKay emerged in New York City as a militant Communist poet. He joined Max and Crystal Eastman on the revolutionary arts journal the Liberator (the successor to the more famous Masses). In the poetry he wrote for the Liberator between 1919 and 1922, he expressed the alienation, anger, and rebellion Afro-Americans experienced in the face of racial prejudice. During these years, McKay also wrote love sonnets and lyrics evocative of a lost pastoral childhood in Jamaica.

  In 1920, he spent a year in England working as a journalist on Sylvia Pankhurst’s weekly, Worker’s Dreadnought. While there, he also published a slim volume of his new verse, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). Returning to New York City in 1921, he became a co-editor of the Liberator. In 1922, he published Harlem Shadows, which included the best of his militant sonnets since 1912.

  While on the Liberator, McKay had attacked the extreme conservatism of most black critics who often viewed black art simply as an extension of racial uplift efforts. As a result, McKay believed, they tended to stifle the kind of free expression in literature and drama that was already making popular Afro-American music a vital and universally appreciated medium. Against such freer forms of Afro-American popular expression, black critics held up as models those black artists who achieved excellence in the classic forms of Western music, art, and literature. As McKay wrote in his review for the Liberator of the Afro-American musical Shuffle Along:

  The Negro critics can scarcely perceive and recognize true values through the screen of sneering bigotry put between them and life by the dominant race. . . . Negro art, these critics declare, must be dignified and respectable like the Anglo-Saxon’s before it can be good. The Negro must get the warmth, color and laughter out of his blood, else the white man will sneer at him and treat him with contumely. Happily the Negro retains his joy of living in the teeth of such criticism; and in Harlem, along Fifth and Lenox avenues, in Marcus Garvey’s Hall with its extravagant paraphernalia, in his churches and cabarets, he expresses himself with a zest that is yet to be depicted by a true artist.1

  In New York and in London, McKay became aware of the growing appreciation of African art, Afro-American jazz, and other forms of Afro-American music among white critics and white artists. In The Negroes in America, he declared that “our age is the age of Negro art. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is ‘Return to the Primitive.’ The Futurists and Impressionists are agreed in turning everything upside-down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive Negro” (p. 63). In the same work, McKay also expressed an appreciation of the growing importance in America and elsewh
ere of ethnic literatures that concentrated on the specific characteristics and experiences of particular minorities; he cited as his chief example the growth of Jewish-American literature.

  Finally, McKay was strongly influenced by contemporary novelists Sherwood Anderson and D. H. Lawrence. He considered Lawrence, in particular, a spiritual brother, though they never met. With writers like Anderson and Lawrence, he shared a deep faith in the primitive life forces in human nature, as opposed to the artificial constraints imposed upon humanity by modern industrial society. In particular, McKay believed that Afro-Americans, especially the rural Afro-Americans of Jamaica and the American South, were closer to the earth and more natural in their responses to life than the white urban population of over-industrialized Europe and America.

  In his American verses (and earlier, in his Jamaican dialect poetry), McKay expressed with great clarity and vigor his race’s deepest emotions as an alienated, besieged, and tormented minority within Western civilization. At the same time, he also proclaimed himself a universalist, a Communist internationalist, and a free spirit. In 1922, he traveled to the Soviet Union. While there, he wrote an account of American race relations and outlined a program for Afro-American assimilation into the American Communist movement. His account was published in Moscow as The Negroes in America (1923, 1979). In Russia, too, he published his first volume of fiction, a slim pamphlet of short stories entitled Trial by Lynching (1925, 1977). These stories were hurriedly written and much more overtly propagandistic than his later fiction.

  After deciding in Russia that he must not subordinate his freedom as a literary artist to the emerging Soviet-dominated, Communist International political orthodoxy, McKay arrived in France in 1923 determined to earn his way as a novelist. To H. L. Mencken, he wrote that he planned “to do a series of prose sketches of my contacts in America, using the most significant things, yet, leaving no subject, however degraded, untouched. Much of the period 1914–1919 was spent in the so-called semi-underworld and should make interesting reading from the point of view I shall write from. I have the whole thing planned in my head and I see the scenes in a finer perspective from here.”2

  For the next five years, McKay struggled to master prose fiction. With the friendly support, advice, and encouragement of Louise Bryant Bullitt and Sinclair Lewis, he managed to complete one novel, “Color Scheme,” by the fall of 1925. To a friend in the United States, he wrote that the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People might find “Color Scheme” shocking, even immoral. He described it as a satire in “black and white” that ignored the genteel traditions that had previously constrained earlier black novelists. “I make my Negro characters yarn and backbite and fuck like people the world over,” he exclaimed.3

  American publishers found “Color Scheme” uneven in quality and much too explicit in its sexual frankness and language to be published. In anger and despair, McKay burned the novel and wrote a series of short stories, which Louise Bryant Bullitt submitted to Harper and Brothers in the fall of 1926. She also urged McKay to allow an American literary agent in Paris, William Aspenwall Bradley, to represent him. Bradley secured for McKay a long-term contract with Harper, which urged him to expand one of his short stories, “Home to Harlem” into a novel. McKay eagerly complied and Home to Harlem appeared in 1928 at the height of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance period.

  While McKay remained abroad, a younger generation of black writers had begun to break the restraints of the genteel protest tradition prescribed by an older Afro-American leadership. Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen had begun to expand the boundaries of Afro-American literature in the face of conservative Afro-American criticism. At the same time, a Negro vogue among New York critics had begun to make Harlem cabarets and night spots and Afro-American music and literature increasingly attractive to the literate white public, especially in New York City.

  By its vividness and by its explicit depiction of the seamier sides of Harlem’s growing population of working-class blacks, Home to Harlem sparked even more critical commentary. It quickly reaped both exaggerated praise and condemnation. Conservative black critics condemned it as a strictly commercial work that pandered to the worst stereotypes of Afro-Americans held by white America, while some white reviewers praised it uncritically as “the real thing in rightness . . . the lowdown on Harlem, the dope from the inside.”4 Black critics such as W. E. B. DuBois in Crisis and Dewey Jones in the Chicago Defender protested such uncritical acceptance. After reading Home to Harlem, DuBois remarked that he had felt unclean and in need of a bath. Jones bemoaned the fact that “white people think we are buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway. Why should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That’s what Claude McKay has done.”5

  To the youthful Langston Hughes, who had already begun to battle for greater Afro-American literary freedom in America, Home to Harlem was a welcome addition and McKay a welcome ally in the fight. To McKay, he declared that “undoubtedly it is the finest thing ‘we’ve’ done yet. . . . Your novel ought to give a second youth to the Negro Vogue.”6 After five years of struggle, Home to Harlem’s popular success gave McKay great satisfaction. In April, 1928, McKay noted to William Aspenwall Bradley with satisfaction that “I see Home to Harlem like an impudent dog has [moved] right in among the best-sellers in New York.”7 To others, McKay wrote that he understood but did not agree with his black critics’ objections to his frank exploitation of “low-class Negro life. We must,” he concluded in one letter, “leave the appreciation of what we are doing to the emancipated Negro intelligentsia of the future, while we are sardonically aware now that only the intelligentsia of the superior race is developed enough to afford artistic truth.”8 To the black journalist J. A. Rogers, he further remarked that “it will take the Negro in America another thirty or forty years to see Home to Harlem in its true light—to appreciate it in the spirit in which I wrote it.”9

  Today, as never before, Home to Harlem deserves a fresh reading. The issues it examined and the portrait it drew of Harlem in the 1920s foreshadowed both the vast problems and the vast potentials locked within that portion of the Afro-American population that has remained restricted, impoverished, congested, and only marginally employed by American corporate society.

  In writing Home to Harlem, McKay consciously attempted to portray what he described as “the semi-underworld” of single, black, working-class men in the industrial Northeast in the years just after World War I. They were all migrants from the American South or the West Indies, with whom he worked and fraternized in New York City between 1914 and 1919. McKay describes their work, their play, and their relationships with women, each other, and their community.

  Within the larger Harlem community, as within American society, McKay’s characters in Home to Harlem occupied a marginal position. They were largely uneducated. They lived in boarding houses and in what today might be called “single-room occupancy” hotels. Their love affairs tended to be brief and fraught with ambivalence; they often ended abruptly, sometimes violently. The women with whom they became involved had their own incomes as cooks, domestics, entertainers, waitresses, or clerks; some worked as part time prostitutes. Between the men and women in Home to Harlem, there existed both passionate tenderness and competitiveness, a mutually jealous independence of spirit that often resulted in antagonism and separation.

  Their places of entertainment were cabarets, night clubs, saloons, pool halls, gambling dens, buffet flats, and houses of prostitution. They imbibed alcohol freely; some sniffed cocaine or smoked opium. They lived with a potential for violence emanating from white society and from their own desperate desire for a freer life. Self-hatred, color-complexes, sexual struggle, corruption, drug addiction, ghetto congestion, and class divisions within Afro-America can be found in Home to Harlem. McKay was aware of these problems, and he neither ignored nor apologized for them as simply the consequences of the white injustices commi
tted against Afro-America.

  In Home to Harlem, as in all his fiction, McKay chose to demonstrate that despite all the horrors visited upon Afro-Americans by white oppression, there existed among even the least privileged Afro-Americans a healthy determination to live and to enjoy the fruits of life. It is this passionate embrace of life that sometimes justified in their minds the negative aspects of their existence. When the novel’s hero, Jake Brown, tells his fellow black longshoremen that it is wrong to cross picket lines and work as “scabs,” one black man angrily retorts that black workers were often shut out of union jobs and asserts that Jake was “talking death, tha’s what you sure is. One thing I know is niggers am made foh life. And I want to live, boh, and feel plenty o’ the juice o’ life in mah blood. I wanta live and I wanta love. And niggers am got to work hard foh that. Buddy, I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell it to the wo’l’—all the crackers, and all them poah white trash, all the nigger-hitting and nigger-breaking white folks—I loves life and I got to live and I’ll scab through hell to live.”

  Jake listens but demurs; he is Claude McKay’s symbol of primitive Afro-American decency and vitality. It is Jake’s picaresque journey through “the semi-underworld” of black working-class America that we follow in Home to Harlem. After he joins the Pennsylvania Railroad as a third cook in their dining-car service, he meets the waiter, Ray, a displaced Haitian intellectual. A friendship develops that allows McKay to complement and contrast their respective strengths and weaknesses against a background of rough-and-tumble work and night life.

  It is a life that is entirely black, and despite its severe limitations (which both Jake and Ray recognize), it achieves certain positive expressions that emerge most clearly in the music, dance, and laughter of black men and women together at night. They are lost in enjoyment of themselves, revealing their own hard-won creativity, color, and joy in life: “Black lovers of life caught up in their own free native rhythm, threaded to a remote scarce-remembered past, celebrating the midnight hours in themselves, for themselves, of themselves, in a house in Fifteenth Street, Philadelphia. . . .” Against such lyrical aspects of Afro-American life as McKay himself had, in fact, experienced as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War I, there is also in Home to Harlem a less optimistic recognition that Afro-American life in Harlem and in other developing Northeast ghettoes was too confined and congested. Frustration and self-hatred often resulted from such conditions, and self-inflicted violence was a constant threat to everyone in the community. In Home to Harlem, McKay celebrated the potential of the Afro-American community but remained aware of the pressures within it that threatened its future.