Home To Harlem Read online

  With Home to Harlem, McKay began a fictional search for value, meaning, and self-direction in modern Afro-American existence that would preoccupy him in future works.10 Despite all the brave assertions of Afro-American vitality and joy in the novel, it was a troubled book by an author whose own tensions and doubts were never far from the surface. Nevertheless, McKay’s portraits of Jake and Ray were positive ones. Threads of affirmation and hope pervade their story that, with few exceptions, have remained constant in black fiction, despite the enormity of the problems that still beset America’s black inner cities today. McKay believed that the black folk wisdom brought to the nation’s cities in the Great Migration northward that began in his day was exemplified in men like Jake in Home to Harlem. These men possessed both a hard realism and a generosity of spirit upon which the black community had to build if it were ever to take control of its own destiny and cease to be the victim of heedless American capitalism that viewed Afro-Americans as inert pawns upon a chessboard of profit and loss.

  July 1987 W.F.C.

  1. Claude McKay, review of Shuffle Along, Liberator, Vol. 4 (December, 1921): 24–26.

  2. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, A Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987): 212.

  3. Ibid., 217–218.

  4. Ibid, 245.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid, 243.

  7. Ibid, 237.

  8. Ibid, 247.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Banjo (1929), Gingertown (1932), Banana Bottom (1933), A Long Way From Home (1937), and Harlem, Negro Metropolis (1940).

  FIRST PART

  GOING BACK HOME

  I

  ALL that Jake knew about the freighter on which he stoked was that it stank between sea and sky. He was working with a dirty Arab crew. The captain signed him on at Cardiff because one of the Arabs had quit the ship. Jake was used to all sorts of rough jobs, but he had never before worked in such a filthy dinghy.

  The white sailors who washed the ship would not wash the stokers’ water-closet, because they despised the Arabs. And the Arabs themselves made no effort to keep the place clean, although it adjoined their sleeping berth.

  The cooks hated the Arabs because they did not eat pork. Whenever there was pork for dinner, something else had to be prepared for the Arabs. The cooks put the stokers’ meat, cut in unappetizing chunks, in a broad pan, and the two kinds of vegetables in two other pans. The stoker who carried the food back to the bunks always put one pan inside of the other, and sometimes the bottoms were dirty and bits of potato peelings or egg shells were mixed in with the meat and the vegetables.

  The Arabs took up a chunk of meat with their coal-powdered fingers, bit or tore off a piece, and tossed the chunk back into the pan. It was strange to Jake that these Arabs washed themselves after eating and not before. They ate with their clothes stiff-starched to their bodies with coal and sweat. And when they were finished, they stripped and washed and went to sleep in the stinking-dirty bunks. Jake was used to the lowest and hardest sort of life, but even his leather-lined stomach could not endure the Arabs’ way of eating. Jake also began to despise the Arabs. He complained to the cooks about the food. He gave the chef a ten-shilling note, and the chef gave him his eats separately.

  One of the sailors flattered Jake. “You’re the same like us chaps. You ain’t like them dirty jabbering coolies.”

  But Jake smiled and shook his head in a non-committal way. He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not as a stoker. He didn’t care about the dirty old boat, anyhow. It was taking him back home—that was all he cared about. He made his shift all right, stoking four hours and resting eight. He didn’t sleep well. The stokers’ bunks were lousy, and fetid with the mingled smell of stale food and water-closet. Jake had attempted to keep the place clean, but to do that was impossible. Apparently the Arabs thought that a sleeping quarters could also serve as a garbage can.

  “Nip me all you wanta, Mister Louse,” said Jake. “Roll on, Mister Ship, and stinks all the way as you rolls. Jest take me ’long to Harlem is all I pray. I’m crazy to see again the brown-skin chippies ’long Lenox Avenue. Oh boy!”

  Jake was tall, brawny, and black. When America declared war upon Germany in 1917 he was a longshoreman. He was working on a Brooklyn pier, with a score of men under him. He was a little boss and a very good friend of his big boss, who was Irish. Jake thought he would like to have a crack at the Germans. . . . And he enlisted.

  In the winter he sailed for Brest with a happy chocolate company. Jake had his own daydreams of going over the top. But his company was held at Brest. Jake toted lumber—boards, planks, posts, rafters—for the hundreds of huts that were built around the walls of Brest and along the coast between Brest and Saint-Pierre, to house the United States soldiers.

  Jake was disappointed. He had enlisted to fight. For what else had he been sticking a bayonet into the guts of a stuffed man and aiming bullets straight into a bull’s-eye? Toting planks and getting into rows with his white comrades at the Bal Musette were not adventure.

  Jake obtained leave. He put on civilian clothes and lit out for Havre. He liquored himself up and hung round a low-down café in Havre for a week.

  One day an English sailor from a Channel sloop made up to Jake. “Darky,” he said, “you ’arvin’ a good time ’round ’ere.”

  Jake thought how strange it was to hear the Englishman say “darky” without being offended. Back home he would have been spoiling for a fight. There he would rather hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt. He preferred white folks’ hatred to their friendly contempt. To feel their hatred made him strong and aggressive, while their friendly contempt made him ridiculously angry, even against his own will.

  “Sure Ise having a good time, all right,” said Jake. He was making a cigarette and growling cusses at French tobacco. “But Ise got to get a move on ’fore very long.”

  “Where to?” his new companion asked.

  “Any place, Buddy. I’m always ready for something new,” announced Jake.

  “Been in Havre a long time?”

  “Week or two,” said Jake. “I tooks care of some mules over heah. Twenty, God damn them, days across the pond. And then the boat plows round and run off and leaves me behind. Kain you beat that, Buddy?”

  “It wasn’t the best o’ luck,” replied the other. “Ever been to London?”

  “Nope, Buddy,” said Jake. “France is the only country I’ve struck yet this side the water.”

  The Englishman told Jake that there was a sailor wanted on his tug.

  “We never ’ave a full crew—since the war,” he said.

  Jake crossed over to London. He found plenty of work there as a docker. He liked the West India Docks. He liked Limehouse. In the pubs men gave him their friendly paws and called him “darky.” He liked how they called him “darky.” He made friends. He found a woman. He was happy in the East End.

  The Armistice found him there. On New-Year’s Eve, 1919, Jake went to a monster dance with his woman, and his docker friends and their women, in the Mile End Road.

  The Armistice had brought many more black men to the East End of London. Hundreds of them. Some of them found work. Some did not. Many were getting a little pension from the government. The price of sex went up in the East End, and the dignity of it also. And that summer Jake saw a big battle staged between the colored and white men of London’s East End. Fisticuffs, razor and knife and gun play. For three days his woman would not let him out-of-doors. And when it was all over he was seized with the awful fever of lonesomeness. He felt all alone in the world. He wanted to run away from the kind-heartedness of his lady of the East End.

  “Why did I ever enlist and come over here?” he asked himself. “Why did I want to mix mahself up in a whi
te folks’ war? It ain’t ever was any of black folks’ affair. Niggers am evah always such fools, anyhow. Always thinking they’ve got something to do with white folks’ business.”

  Jake’s woman could do nothing to please him now. She tried hard to get down into his thoughts and share them with him. But for Jake this woman was now only a creature of another race—of another world. He brooded day and night.

  It was two years since he had left Harlem. Fifth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, with their chocolate-brown and walnut-brown girls, were calling him.

  “Oh, them legs!” Jake thought. “Them tantalizing brown legs! . . . Barron’s Cabaret! . . . Leroy’s Cabaret! . . . Oh, boy!”

  Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love.

  “Harlem for mine!” cried Jake. “I was crazy thinkin’ I was happy over heah. I wasn’t mahself. I was like a man charged up with dope every day. That’s what it was. Oh, boy! Harlem for mine!

  “Take me home to Harlem, Mister Ship! Take me home to the brown gals waiting for the brown boys that done show their mettle over there. Take me home, Mister Ship. Put your beak right into that water and jest move along.” . . .

  ARRIVAL

  II

  JAKE was paid off. He changed a pound note he had brought with him. He had fifty-nine dollars. From South Ferry he took an express subway train for Harlem.

  Jake drank three Martini cocktails with cherries in them. The price, he noticed, had gone up from ten to twenty-five cents. He went to Bank’s and had a Maryland fried-chicken feed—a big one with candied sweet potatoes.

  He left his suitcase behind the counter of a saloon on Lenox Avenue. He went for a promenade on Seventh Avenue between One Hundred and Thirty-fifth and One Hundred and Fortieth Streets. He thrilled to Harlem. His blood was hot. His eyes were alert as he sniffed the street like a hound. Seventh Avenue was nice, a little too nice that night.

  Jake turned off on Lenox Avenue. He stopped before an ice-cream parlor to admire girls sipping ice-cream soda through straws. He went into a cabaret. . . .

  A little brown girl aimed the arrow of her eye at him as he entered. Jake was wearing a steel-gray English suit. It fitted him loosely and well, perfectly suited his presence. She knew at once that Jake must have just landed. She rested her chin on the back of her hands and smiled at him. There was something in his attitude, in his hungry wolf’s eyes, that went warmly to her. She was brown, but she had tinted her leaf-like face to a ravishing chestnut. She had on an orange scarf over a green frock, which was way above her knees, giving an adequate view of legs lovely in fine champagne-colored stockings. . . .

  Her shaft hit home. . . . Jake crossed over to her table. He ordered Scotch and soda.

  “Scotch is better with soda or even water,” he said. “English folks don’t take whisky straight, as we do.”

  But she preferred ginger ale in place of soda. The cabaret singer, seeing that they were making up to each other, came expressly over to their table and sang. Jake gave the singer fifty cents. . . .

  Her left hand was on the table. Jake covered it with his right.

  “Is it clear sailing between us, sweetie?” he asked.

  “Sure thing. . . . You just landed from over there?”

  “Just today!”

  “But there wasn’t no boat in with soldiers today, daddy.”

  “I made it in a special one.”

  “Why, you lucky baby! . . . I’d like to go to another place, though. What about you?”

  “Anything you say, I’m game,” responded Jake.

  They walked along Lenox Avenue. He held her arm. His flesh tingled. He felt as if his whole body was a flaming wave. She was intoxicated, blinded under the over-whelming force.

  But nevertheless she did not forget her business.

  “How much is it going to be, daddy?” she demanded.

  “How much? How much? Five?”

  “Aw no, daddy. . . .”

  “Ten?”

  She shook her head.

  “Twenty, sweetie!” he said, gallantly.

  “Daddy,” she answered, “I wants fifty.”

  “Good,” he agreed. He was satisfied. She was responsive. She was beautiful. He loved the curious color on her cheek.

  They went to a buffet flat on One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street. The proprietress opened the door without removing the chain and peeked out. She was a matronly mulatto woman. She recognized the girl, who had put herself in front of Jake, and she slid back the chain and said, “Come right in.”

  The windows were heavily and carefully shaded. There was beer and wine, and there was plenty of hard liquor. Black and brown men sat at two tables in one room, playing poker. In the other room a phonograph was grinding out a “blues,” and some couples were dancing, thick as maggots in a vat of sweet liquor, and as wriggling.

  Jake danced with the girl. They shuffled warmly, gloriously about the room. He encircled her waist with both hands, and she put both of hers up to his shoulders and laid her head against his breast. And they shuffled around.

  “Harlem! Harlem!” thought Jake. “Where else could I have all this life but Harlem? Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem! Sweet Harlem! Harlem, I’ve got you’ number down. Lenox Avenue, you’re a bear, I know it. And, baby honey, sure enough youse a pippin for your pappy. Oh, boy!” . . .

  After Jake had paid for his drinks, that fifty-dollar note was all he had left in the world. He gave it to the girl. . . .

  “Is we going now, honey?” he asked her.

  “Sure, daddy. Let’s beat it.” . . .

  Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere, . . . singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem. . . . Burning now in Jake’s sweet blood. . . .

  He woke up in the morning in a state of perfect peace. She brought him hot coffee and cream and doughnuts. He yawned. He sighed. He was satisfied. He breakfasted. He washed. He dressed. The sun was shining. He sniffed the fine dry air. Happy, familiar Harlem.

  “I ain’t got a cent to my name,” mused Jake, “but ahm as happy as a prince, all the same. Yes, I is.”

  He loitered down Lenox Avenue. He shoved his hand in his pocket—pulled out the fifty-dollar note. A piece of paper was pinned to it on which was scrawled in pencil:

  “Just a little gift from a baby girl to a honey boy!”

  ZEDDY

  III

  “GREAT balls of fire! Looka here! See mah luck!” Jake stopped in his tracks . . . went on . . . stopped again . . . retraced his steps . . . checked himself. “Guess I won’t go back right now. Never let a woman think you’re too crazy about her. But she’s a particularly sweet piece a business. . . . Me and her again tonight. . . . Handful o’ luck shot straight outa heaven. Oh, boy! Harlem is mine!”

  Jake went rolling along Fifth Avenue. He crossed over to Lenox Avenue and went into Uncle Doc’s saloon, where he had left his bag. Called for a glass of Scotch. “Gimme the siphon, Doc. I’m off the straight stuff.”

  “Iszh you? Counta what?”

  “Hits the belly better this way. I l’arned it over the other side.”

  A slap on the shoulder brought him sharply round. “Zeddy Plummer! What grave is you arisen from?” he cried.

  “Buddy, you looks so good to me, I could kish you,” Zeddy said.

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. . . . French style.”

  “One on one cheek and one on the other.”

  “Savee-vous?”

  “Parlee-vous?”

  Uncle Doc set another glass on the counter and poured out pure Bourbon. Zeddy reached a little above Jake’s shoulders. He was stocky, thick-shoulder
ed, flat-footed, and walked like a bear. Some more customers came in and the buddies eased round to the short side of the bar.

  “What part of the earth done belch you out?” demanded Zeddy. “Nevah heared no God’s tidings a you sence we missed you from Brest.”

  “And how about you?” Jake countered. “Didn’t them Germans git you scrambling over the top?”

  “Nevah see’d them, buddy. None a them showed the goose-step around Brest. Have a shot on me. . . . Well, dawg bite me, but—say, Jake, we’ve got some more stuff to booze over.”

  Zeddy slapped Jake on his breast and looked him over again. “Tha’s some stuff you’re strutting in, boh. ’Tain’t ’Merican and it ain’t French.” . . .

  “English.” Jake showed his clean white teeth.

  “Mah granny an’ me! You been in that theah white folks’ country, too?”

  “And don’t I look as if Ise been? Where else could a fellow git such good and cheap man clothes to cover his skin?”