In 1921, Claude McKay wrote an article on the Irish revolution in which he declared that neither the British government nor the British Left really understood the Irish. But, he said, he thought he did. “My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them,” he explained. “And then I was born and reared a peasant; the peasant’s passion for the soil possesses me, and it is one of the strongest passions in the Irish revolution.” The remark provided insight into both the Sinn Fein movement for Irish independence and McKay’s own background and character. It also illustrated McKay’s limitations as a communist theoretician. “For my part,” he remarked, “I love to think of communism liberating millions of city folk to go back to the land.”1 Although this statement may have betrayed an incurable romanticism, McKay’s roots did, indeed, run deep in Jamaica’s black peasantry. Its history, in fact, largely defined the place of Claude McKay’s immediate family in nineteenth-century Jamaica. Theirs was the story of transplanted Africans forced to cultivate an alien soil. They survived to claim it as their own. Their history became Claude McKay’s most basic legacy. The McKay family had its origin in almost the exact geographical center of Jamaica, in upper Clarendon Parish. The mountains that dominated the environment would later be celebrated by Claude McKay in his earliest poetry. It was a pleasant land, whose seasons varied between the drier spring and summer months and the wet period, which began in October and lasted through March. The environment of Claude’s boyhood—its mountain streams, its lush richness of soil and vegetation, its bright sunshine and variegated natural colors, the very sounds of tropical country life—would always remain vivid in his memory. At the end of his life, he fondly recalled the great fertility of the land of his birth: “There grow in abundance, as if spilled straight out of the Hand of God—bananas, oranges, coco, coffee, pimento, breadfruit, ackee, mangoes, sugar cane and all the lesser varieties of edibles such as various kinds of beans and peas, okra, cashews, cabbages, sweet potatoes, cassava and arrow-root.”2
Claude McKay’s parents had emerged from the black peasantry of upper Clarendon. By his birth in 1890, the free peasantry formed the majority there. Although this black peasantry was of relatively recent origin, its roots reached far back into slavery. Long before legal emancipation, Jamaica’s slave population had been striving toward independence. In the nearly inaccessible interior, several maroon communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had won their freedom and a degree of autonomy within the colonial structure. On the plantations, slave revolts had been frequent, but the desire for freedom also expressed itself in other ways. Over the years, slaves had gained certain customary rights and privileges into which they poured their energy and ingenuity. By the 1830s, for example, from their own traditional provision grounds (garden plots), Jamaican slaves had devised an islandwide system of Sunday produce markets upon which the colony had come to depend for much of its food. From this system of provision grounds and slave markets, the freed slaves moved naturally toward acquiring land and expanding their economic opportunities.
With the end of slavery in the 1830s, many former slaves left the sugar plantations on the coastal plains and in the valleys and occupied the largely uncultivated mountainous interior. Some obtained clear tide to their land; most simply claimed ownership by right of possession and cultivation. As a result, during the first three decades after emancipation, a significant proportion of Jamaica’s African population transformed itself into a free black peasantry.3 The road to independence proved a hard one. For decades, the blacks’ interests remained subordinated to those more favorably placed in the island’s complex social hierarchy. Between the blacks at the bottom and the traditional white-planter class at the top (who dominated the island’s oppressive legislative assembly), there existed a small mulatto elite, the mixed-blood class also known as colored, whose interests as property owners did not always coincide with those of their darker kinsmen. In addition, after emancipation Chinese and East Indians were imported as contract laborers to replace those blacks who had left the sugar fields. They, too, soon deserted the plantations. Many left Jamaica, but those who remained soon competed with the tiny Jewish and Lebanese commercial communities in Jamaica. Their collective small-scale retail trade squeezed every available penny of profit from the struggling black peasantry.4
By the mid-1860s, chronic economic depression, drought, crop failures, famine, long-standing discriminatory legislation, and an antiquated judicial system combined to bring peasant discontent to a boil. At Morant Bay on October 11, 1865, black peasants attacked the parish courthouse and killed eighteen officials, planters, and their subordinates. British troops dispatched to the scene by the royal governor, Edward Eyre, speedily and brutally suppressed this rebellion. At the governor’s behest, among those summarily executed was a mulatto politician from Kingston, George William Gordon, whose chief offense was his outspoken airings of small peasant grievances in the Jamaican assembly and his attacks on Governor Eyre’s leadership.
The Morant Bay Rebellion and its outcome—largely random execution of black males in the vicinity, together with Gordon’s martyrdom—led in Britain to a temporary revival of old abolitionist concern for the welfare of blacks in the British colony. A royal inquiry resulted in the removal of Governor Eyre and, most important, the abolition of the discredited, bankrupt Jamaican assembly. It was replaced by direct crown-colony rule in 1866. In the last third of the nineteenth century, crown-colony government at last brought order, some social reform, and a measure of stability, if not prosperity, to the colony’s economy.5
During Claude McKay’s boyhood in the 1890s, the acute troubles of slavery and the postemancipation period had been left behind, but certain legacies of those years remained vividly alive within the McKay family. Claude’s parents had both grown up in the postemancipation period. Although the details of their early lives remain sketchy and often uncertain, some important facts are clear. Both families had experienced slavery, and both retained a clear memory of its harshness.
On Claude’s mother’s side, tradition told of an origin in Madagascar (a few slaves did in fact enter Jamaica from East Africa). That same tradition also told of a family bond so strong that, when faced with the slave auction block, they had agreed upon death before disunity. “And this fact solemnly announced in the market by the oldest white-haired Negro among them, had such an effect upon prospective buyers that it was impossible to sell them as individuals, and so they were all taken away together to those hills at Clarendon which their descendants still cultivate.”6 In Claude’s boyhood, a mulatto planter clan, the Woolseys, which had perhaps owned his mother’s family, still lived nearby in their decaying plantation home. Although greatly reduced in circumstances, if not in numbers, they still clung precariously to a slightly higher status than their peasant neighbors. The oldest among them often recalled the troubles she had had in disciplining her slaves.
Claude believed his father to be of Ashanti origin. He remembered that his father knew certain Ashanti customs and remembered stories of Africa, which he related to his children. Whenever his sons’ behavior or cocky self-assurance angered him, he would remind them that their grandfather had been a slave and “knew how cruel the white man could be. You boys don’t know anything.”7
Although such memories remained alive within them, McKay’s parents had also been molded by missionary influences and by the deep attachments of a newly independent peasantry to the soil. From their youth, both had made profound and permanent commitments to Christianity and to the cultivation and improvement of their own land. Upon these bedrocks they based their marriage and their lives.8
Claude’s father, Thomas Francis McKay, was born around 1840 in the vicinity of Staceyville, a little community near the great Bull Mountain in upper Clarendon.9 Little is known about Thomas’ parents. At some point in his youth, Thomas Francis came under the decisive influence of a British missionary, who converted him to Christianity, instructed him in the fundamentals of reading and writing, and helped mold in him a rigidly fundamentalist, Old Testament cast of mind that absolutely forbade smoking, drinking, dancing, swearing, extramarital sex, or dishonesty in any form. Thomas Francis quite early chose a straight and narrow path and never deviated from it.10
Few of his neighbors, perhaps even few of his fellow churchmen, adopted so wholeheartedly the puritanical Christianity of nonconformist England. One of the constant complaints of missionaries throughout the nineteenth century was the ease with which professing Christians in the hill country of Jamaica both joined the church and broke its moral codes. More than a few (some said a majority) continued also to believe in Obeah, the evil magic of African origin, and consulted Obeahmen on the sly. The random beliefs and practices as well as the spirit, of African religions suffused black Jamaica. Many broke away from orthodox Protestant churches. They were constantly forming and re-forming native church sects whose unlettered pastors, the missionaries knew, allowed free vent to practices and doctrines of non-Christian origin.11 Most black peasants had eagerly accepted the flexible spirit of Christianity but had left its rigid doctrinal orthodoxy to the anxious guardianship of the European missionaries. Thomas Francis McKay, however, grasped both spirit and doctrine in a tight embrace. Even more surprising, he actually practiced what he preached. In a region of syncretistic Afro-Christian religious beliefs, he stood as a clear exception to the rule.12
In My Green Hills of Jamaica, a late memoir of his boyhood, Claude stated that the missionary who had converted his father had been a Scotch Presbyterian. But others dispute this, maintaining that Thomas had from the first been a Baptist. This seems more likely. Upper Clarendon apparently had no Presbyterian mission churches in the mid-nineteenth century but did have numerous Congregationalist and Baptist missions, and there was a Baptist church at Staceyville during the elder McKay’s youth. Without question, Thomas McKay did spend his adult years as a senior deacon in the Baptist church.13
The Baptists had by far the greatest respect and the largest following among the black peasantry. The first Baptist missionaries to Jamaica had been black men, former slave preachers from the United States. In the years after the American Revolution, they had filtered one by one into the island and had immediately won converts. Two of these men, George Lisle and Moses Baker, proved particularly successful. Eventually, Baker felt the need for help. He appealed to the Baptist Missionary Society in London, which sent its first missionaries to Jamaica in 1814. More soon followed.
In the tradition of Baptist ministers, more than one of these early missionaries identified completely with their congregations. They became so absorbed in defending the interests of their black followers that they were eventually accused of fomenting discontent and at least one major slave revolt. After emancipation, Baptist missionaries, along with other Protestant denominations, accompanied the freedmen into the interior, where they laid out villages, built churches, established schools, and educated future leaders like Thomas Francis McKay.14
Although the white missionaries of Jamaica fostered a mid-Victorian morality that few Jamaicans ever accepted as completely as Thomas McKay, the effects of their labors were not negligible. One black Jamaican clergyman later wrote that the early Baptist pioneers like George Lisle and Moses Baker had been “pathfinders,” men who had made an important contribution “in the making of a people.” Because of their efforts, he concluded, “we who were no people, are now a people.”15 Thomas McKay would have undoubtedly concurred with such sentiments.
At the end of the 1860s, though serious and upright, Thomas was as yet unsettled. As a young man, he had farmed and worked as a laborer on local road maintenance crews. As he approached his thirtieth year, he was still unmarried. Around 1869, he found himself in the small community of Sunny Ville, about twelve miles from Stacey-ville. He had been lured there to court a local girl who a friend thought would make Thomas a good wife. The friend’s matchmaking proved errant but not futile. In the way of love, the unexpected happened. Attending church in Sunny Ville, he chanced upon another who interested him more: Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, the lithe young daughter of a local farmer. Not more than fifteen or sixteen at the time, Hannah had a bright smile and a gentle, gracious manner, which no doubt helped the intense stranger feel at ease in her presence. Equally important, she had a good Christian upbringing and she excelled in her letters. Thomas was stirred. He became a regular Sunday visitor.16
In her turn, perhaps, Hannah was pleased to be courted by such a mature and serious man, so unlike the local gay blades. Her father also liked him; he even gave Thomas a bit of land down the hill from his own home. Events moved swiftly. Thomas and Hannah Ann married in 1870, and they began their life together in a three-room thatched cottage Thomas constructed on his new land.17
Thomas Francis quickly proved himself an able, productive farmer. In addition to his own piece, he soon began to cultivate all the land owned by his father-in-law, who could no longer work because of infirmities. Through diligent labor and alert management, Thomas Francis eventually expanded his properties far beyond those of the average small landholder. Claude recorded years later that “in a short while he had acquired a dray with mules by which he would take his produce and his neighbors’ to the far off markets, [and] by the time I left for America in 1912,. . . my father had acquired at least one hundred fertile acres.”18
For years both Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann worked “grimly hard” to achieve prosperity. Thomas labored incessantly in the fields with hoe, cutlass, and pickax. His wife did the household chores, cultivated the gardens adjacent to their home, managed the small stock—chickens and goats and perhaps a pig or two—and all the while cared for an ever-expanding family.
During the first two years of marriage they had no offspring. Then between 1872 and 1890, Hannah Ann gave birth to eleven children, eight of whom (seven boys and one girl) lived to maturity. Uriah Theodore, their oldest son, was born March 23, 1872. There followed Matthew, Rachel (the only girl), Thomas Edison, Nathaniel, Reginald, and Hubert. Finally, on September 15, 1890, their last child was born. He was named Festus Claudius, after a Roman governor and an emperor mentioned in the New Testament Book of Acts. As Claude McKay, poet and novelist, he would celebrate the hills of Clarendon and the black peasantry of Jamaica.19
McKay’s family was not unique in its relative prosperity, its strictly Christian profession, its literacy, and its upwardly mobile thrust, but such families were in the minority. They were to be found sprinkled among the great majority of poorer small landholders, whose limited acreage, meager education, common-law marriages, and Afro-European religious beliefs consigned them to an existence outside and clearly subordinate to the dominant, English-oriented island culture, whose ruling elite controlled Jamaica’s politics, economy, and education system. By virtue of their superior economic position and Christian education, the dark-skinned McKays could claim a social position in Jamaican society akin to that of the traditional mulatto elite. They certainly distinguished themselves from their poorer neighbors and felt equal in every way to the colored elite, whose pretensions of superiority they scorned. As aspiring members of the middle class, the McKays were sensitive to any class discriminations based on skin color and were particularly critical of any such distinctions in Jamaican society. Claude would grow up suspicious and resentful of light mulattoes.20
While the McKays sought to compete socially and economically within the dominant culture, they nevertheless remained, by virtue of their origins, color, and location, firmly tied to the black peasantry. Nestled in the mountainous center of the island, Sunny Ville was a black community of small farmers remote from the larger towns and more than fifty miles from Kingston, the capital and commercial center. About twelve miles below Sunny Ville, down a steep, winding road, lay Chapelton, the principal town of upper Clarendon. Still farther south, twenty-two miles away, was the nearest rail center, the crossroads town of May Pen. Thirty-three miles from May Pen on the southeast coast lay Kingston.
In the small, largely self-contained world of Sunny Ville, the McKays early assumed the role of community leaders. Thomas Francis served as senior deacon in the Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which he helped to build and which overlooked his home from a summit about one-quarter mile away. Over the years, he befriended a succession of British missionaries who pastored the church. He became fast friends with the first English missionary there, William F. Hathaway, who arrived in 1875. Together they made the Mt. Zion Church and mission school the center of community life. It was Hathaway, too, who tutored Thomas’ eldest son, U’Theo, and helped prepare him for Mico Teacher’s College in Kingston, which he entered in 1891.21
Claude’s father was one of the few black peasant cultivators of his day who acquired enough property to qualify to vote in the island’s limited electoral system. It was a responsibility he assumed with his usual probity. As Claude remembered him, “he was something of a village leader, as they have in Africa.” As “a patriarch of the mountain country,” the elder McKay often judged the petty disputes brought to him by his neighbors, who preferred such informal proceedings to the more distant and expensive processes of the colonial legal system.22 By such informal but well-established customs, the black peasantry of the area maintained a community existence. Their agricultural practices also ensured a common outlook and a degree of unity. From the earliest days, they devised a system of mutual aid and regularly borrowed one another’s labor to clear land or harvest crops.23
During Claude McKay’s formative years, his family maintained a strong tie to Sunny Ville’s black peasantry. But they also differed from the average in important respects. Thomas and Hannah Ann had been legally married in a Christian ceremony. This alone set them apart from many who simply existed in common-law unions or who had a series of partners before settling down with one. The elder McKays spurned the relaxed morality of the typical Jamaican peasant. They had totally rejected any belief in Obeah. In a society where the woman often managed her household alone, Thomas McKay ruled like a mid-Victorian patriarch, more intense, more single-minded, and more socially ambitious than most of his neighbors. Nor did he neglect to educate his children for leadership. By Claude’s birth, the oldest son, U’Theo, was ready for college. By virtue of his relatively large landholdings, the elder McKay had clearly elevated himself above the subsistence farming practiced by his poorer neighbors. Unlike them, he could be classified as a small-scale commercial farmer who produced such staples as coffee, bananas, and sugar both for local markets and for external trade.
Claude McKay was thus born into an atypical, well-established black farm family. In a society where general poverty and distinct cultural cleavages, as much as racial identity, stood between the ruling elite and the masses, the McKays were striving with some success for upward mobility. In this setting, Claude McKay, the youngest son and the future poet, grew and developed.
Claude McKay spent his first seven years with his parents at Sunny Ville. The youngest child in a large family, he never lacked security or attention. In fact, he may have been somewhat pampered, especially by his mother. He later maintained that as the baby of the family he became her favorite, and certainly he developed early a strong identity with her that persisted throughout his life.
He always remembered his mother as unfailingly warm and loving. Hannah Ann Elizabeth McKay was a good and generous soul. Though a leader in church affairs, she did not let her religious scruples stand between her and the direct appreciation of other people’s humanity, whatever their morals. For example, she always befriended the local girls who became pregnant out of wedlock. “From the time she was a young woman,” her neighbors called her “Mother Mac.” In the hill country around Sunny Ville, such a term was not used lightly. It betokened “real respect and endearment.” McKay probably had his mother in mind in the dialect poem “Ribber Come-Do’n,” when he wrote of the “kind district mother” who feeds a house full of neighboring children when she learns they have no food because their parents have been prevented from returning home. The eldest child in the poem refers to the “kind district mother” as “cousin Anna.”24
“My mother,” McKay maintained, “didn’t care very much about what people did and why and how they did it. She only wanted to help them if they were in trouble. . . . She loved all people. It was a rich, warm love.” In this regard she was quite the opposite of her husband. “All of us preferred my mother who was so much more elastic and understanding. She was a virtuous woman too. My father . . . was a Presbyterian Calvinist. A real black Scotchman. We boys wondered how his education could have made him that way. He was so entirely different from all our colored neighbors with their cockish-liquor drinking and rowdy singing. . . . So top-lofty, one might say. Yet everybody liked and respected him.” His mother provided an effective counterbalance to his father’s pious authoritarianism. Claude wrote that “she always took the children’s side in dealings with my father who was strict and stern.”25
McKay’s devotion to his mother was no doubt heightened by the fact that after his birth she became ill and suffered for the remainder of her life from heart disease. In My Green Hills of Jamaica, he began the chapter tided “The Death of My Mother” by trying to recall his earliest childhood memory, but he decided that he could not distinguish between the actual remembrance of an accident at age two and the later telling of it. Then, abruptly, he stated, “One thing I do remember sharply is that my mother was ill and it was generally said that she became ill right after I was born.”26 Such knowledge must have been a heavy burden for young Claude, too easily translated into a sense of personal responsibility. In McKay’s novel of Jamaican country life, Banana Bottom, the mother had died at the heroine’s birth, and “the village folk said that she had killed her mother. That was the way the black peasants referred to a child that survived when the mother had died giving birth to it.”27
Compared to the utter devotion with which he always referred to his mother, McKay’s attitude toward his father was ambivalent, to say the least. In his mature years, Claude remembered with pride that his father had had a wonderful store of African tales.28 He also acknowledged his father’s integrity, his strength, and his actual accomplishments as a dedicated, conscientious parent and community leader. On the other hand, he never identified with the harsh disciplinarian and dour Old Testament moralist who towered over his childhood. To his youngest son, Thomas McKay would always remain a remote, austere, and ultimately unsympathetic authority figure. He may have been respected, but he was never unreservedly loved.
Claude grew into a strong, energetic boy who greatly enjoyed the simple pleasures of childhood. In the surrounding community, he found plenty of playmates. Together they enjoyed the usual children’s games—chase, hide and seek, and “rounders, a mild form of American Softball.” On bright moonlit nights, he and the neighboring children delighted in making “moonshine babies” out of bits of broken crockery. One child would lie on his back with arms and legs outstretched while the others would outline his body with the pieces of glass. Then they would carefully lift their companion off the ground and stare in wonder at the shiny outline.29
Around his fourth year, Claude began to attend school at Mt. Zion, which crowned the hill above his home. The church was the largest building in the area, and its spacious sanctuary served as a school for the children from several adjacent communities. In My Green Hills of Jamaica, Claude recalled that its Sunday benches served as dividers to separate the various classes. Thus transformed, Mt. Zion had its own magic. “I remember,” McKay wrote, “sitting there rapt with attention. . . . It was from this little school room in which I first learned about the history and geography of Jamaica that my interest in the history and geography of the world started.”30 Claude also enjoyed the special programs on holidays and at the close of term. In an isolated rural village like Sunny Ville, they provided one regular form of community entertainment.
In retrospect, however, Claude delighted most in the natural, spontaneous play of childhood. His earliest years became in his memory a kind of Eden, gone forever yet always accessible in imagination. To the mature poet, these became the years of peace, of balance, of freedom from conscious tension, a time when the imagination itself awoke to the world about it and he discovered the “wonder” that “clings” to life’s commonplaces.31 McKay’s first seven years at Sunny Ville were not entirely free of the usual crises of childhood, but they were not unhappy. They were most poignantly remembered, perhaps, because they ended so abruptly.
Around 1897, Claude’s eldest brother, Uriah Theodore (known as U’Theo), made one of his infrequent visits home. Only a year or two before, he had graduated from Mico Teacher’s College in Kingston and had found a good position as a schoolteacher in a little town near Montego Bay. While he was home his parents decided that his youngest brother’s education should be entrusted to him. So Claude bid farewell to Sunny Ville and returned with U’Theo. From the available evidence, it is not clear at exactly what age McKay left Sunny Ville and began to live with U’Theo. In Pearson’s magazine in 1918 he stated he went to live with his brother at the age of nine. In 1923, the translator of his Soviet book wrote that “as an eight-year-old [McKay] was sent to school in a small town, where his brother was a teacher. Four years later he returned to his native village.” Finally, in My Green Hills, McKay leaves the impression that he was six when he left Sunny Ville and that he stayed with U’Theo for seven years, “more or less.” In A Long Way from Home, he stated that the time he spent with U’Theo was “spanned by the years between the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria [in 1897] and her death [in 1901].” From these varying accounts, it seems safe to conclude that McKay left home around 1897 or shortly thereafter and remained away from the Sunny Ville area for at least four years.32
His parents’ confidence in U’Theo as an educator and surrogate parent was not misplaced. He had received his grammar school education under the tutelage of William Hathaway and other churchmen in Clarendon Parish. And in his four years at Mico, U’Theo received a broad academic education in the natural sciences, mathematics, music, and the humanities, including a grounding in Latin and French. For the time and place, it was the best education available.33
U’Theo took full advantage of his opportunity. In late-nineteenth-century Jamaica, teaching or the ministry often proved only the first steps upward for young black men who desired to raise themselves out of the peasantry. In rural Jamaica, the village schoolteacher and the local preacher enjoyed a status and authority far above their roles as mere educators or ministers. They were often the individuals around whom the common social life of their communities revolved, and their influence frequently extended into economic and political spheres.34
Unlike the United States in this same period, Jamaica had no formal, racially based restrictions or rigid, castelike barriers between the black masses and the white and colored elite. An exceptionally able and well-placed black such as U’Theo could reasonably expect to rise in the island’s social structure. A tall, broad-shouldered, well-built young man with a keen mind, irrepressible self-assurance, and abundant energy, U’Theo in the late 1890s stood on the threshold of a long and brilliant local career. He would eventually emerge as a highly successful planter, politician, and civic leader well known throughout Jamaica.35
After his mother and father, U’Theo easily ranked as the dominant adult in Claude McKay’s childhood. In My Green Hills of Jamaica, McKay maintained that during those years with U’Theo, he never visited his parents or heard from them except for brief messages in their letters to U’Theo. Whether this was true or not, U’Theo during this time did exert a primary influence on Claude’s life. Many of his basic ideas and intellectual attitudes, if not his purely emotional responses to the world, certainly developed under U’Theo’s guidance.36
For Claude, the move from Sunny Ville to the outskirts of Montego Bay, already a fashionable resort area, meant a dramatic change. From barefoot country child, he suddenly became the schoolteacher’s little brother, very conscious of his higher station in life. Now, he wore shoes to school and lived in a very neat little cottage with U’Theo and his new wife. Fortunately for Claude, the new sister-in-law was, like his mother, a warm and attentive woman, and he soon grew fond of her. Besides, she had wondrous things in her home, such as a highly polished whatnot table in the parlor on which sat intriguing glass and porcelain figurines. With such novel furnishings, and with the attention he received from U’Theo and his wife, Claude had no trouble accepting his new surroundings.37
U’Theo did occasionally whip his little brother. Once, for instance, he discovered some startlingly mature love notes that had passed between young Claude and his classmate, Agnes. U’Theo did not know that an older boy had written them for Claude. From the evidence, it appears that U’Theo’s use of corporal punishment was neither exceptionally harsh nor frequent. “Beatings,” as they were called in Jamaica, and, more commonly, the threat of beatings, formed a normal part of the Jamaican child’s upbringing, a standard punishment in and out of school. But Claude never accepted such punishment without deep resentment and loud protests. And as he remarked in reference to the whipping he and Agnes received because of their little affair, “the beating did not change us.”38
Although certainly a formidable figure, U’Theo apparently was not the forbidding presence Claude had discovered in their father. The youngster had little trouble relating to U’Theo. As the baby of the family, he may have already developed in Sunny Ville certain lasting habits of dependence. If anything, his move to the Montego Bay area only increased his appetite for security and attention. “There was one thing that gave me a great deal of physical and mental joy,” he later wrote. “That was the fact that I was my brother’s brother and because of this received so many little privileges.” Even though under age, he was placed in “all the important school clubs” and was advanced to older classes. Everyone helped him. “They were all willing to do it,” he recalled. “Then I soon discovered that except for figuring I had a good brain. I was good in geography and history, reading and writing and the natural sciences.”39 This may have been the beginning of that peculiar combination of dependence on others and aggressive independence that would eventually cause him much anguish.
During these early years, there was no thought of such eventualities. Claude was growing in body and mind. Under U’Theo’s charge, his education went considerably beyond the normal elementary courses. A precocious child, Claude easily mastered his classroom assignments. Before long, he began to tackle the weightier volumes in his brother’s small library. U’Theo was both surprised and pleased, and he imposed no restrictions on his brother’s learning. When his wife once discovered the youngster wading through a decidedly antireligious work, she protested to her husband, who replied firmly, “Let the child read what he wants.”40
During his years with U’Theo, Claude awoke to the unlimited pleasures of literature and undoubtedly enjoyed many happy days with books. Reading even began to supplant play as a major activity. In fact, reading became a form of play. During this period, McKay discovered in literature broad new worlds of romance and thought. “These were ... the indelible years of my first reading of anything . . . thrilling just for the thrill.” He read Dickens “in small, sardine-packed words,” Scott’s Waverley novels, and a host of lesser Victorians. He also read Shakespeare from a set that the missionary William Hathaway had once given to U’Theo. All contributed to the awakening of a creative imagination.41
Of equal importance to the development of his youthful mind was the “free-thought” literature in his brother’s library. The great debate that raged between science and theology, Darwinist and Christian, in nineteenth-century England had not failed to reach the most insignificant British colonies. It was heard in the remote hill country of Jamaica, and it played an influential role in Claude McKay’s education. In U’Theo’s home, Claude read before his fourteenth birthday such evolutionist works as Thomas Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature and Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.42
U’Theo had probably become acquainted with Darwinist ideas as a student in Kingston. By the time he assumed responsibility for Claude, he had long since rejected his father’s belief in revealed religion and considered himself an agnostic. It was a bold stance, but U’Theo took care to see that his beliefs did not threaten his professional standing. He did not proselytize, nor did he reject the Christian church as a useful social institution. He could have hardly afforded the personal consequences of such a stand. After all, he taught in a mission school and regularly invited the minister into his home for dinner. His job depended upon the good will of the church, and U’Theo was a practical man. Besides, he loved the traditional church music. Throughout Claude’s boyhood U’Theo served enthusiastically as a highly successful and innovative choir leader. “It was said,” Claude recalled, “that my brother was the first person in the country to stage the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ of the great German musician Handel. As I remember, it was surely marvelous singing.”43
Despite his compromises with the social realities of his time and place, U’Theo valued intellectual independence, and he communicated his Victorian rationalism to his younger brother with the proviso that “an agnostic should so live his life that Christian people would have to respect him.”44 As a teacher, U’Theo accepted that peculiar Darwinian educational paradox that sought “to expel the preternatural element from Christianity, to destroy its dogmatic structure, yet to keep intact its moral and spiritual results.”45
Encouraged by U’Theo and by his own discovery of “the romance of science,” Claude soon decided that he, too, was a freethinker. He read “Matthew Arnold’s ‘Literature and Dogma,’ . . . Draper’s The Conflict Between Religion and Science,’ and a number of Herbert Spencer’s works.” U’Theo told Claude “about the lives of the great freethinkers of the times such as Thomas Huxley, Bradlaugh, the great parliamentarian, Mrs. Annie Besant and Mr. John M. Robertson also a parliamentarian.”46 Following U’Theo’s lead, Claude in a short while moved far from the religion of his father.
U’Theo probably never dreamed that he was supplying his sensitive and romantic younger brother with ideas that would later serve as springboards for more sweeping attacks on other bulwarks of Western civilization. As a social and political radical, McKay would go far beyond his older brother’s lack of belief in Christianity. In 1929, U’Theo wrote McKay, who was then in North Africa, and informed him that a local newspaper had stated he had been refused reentry into the United States because of his Bolshevik activities. Then he added, “I am quite certain, however, that you would do nothing to justify being debarred from the United States for it is not in our blood to be revolutionists.”47 After a hot reply from McKay, who apparently defined his position as something less than a murderous revolutionary, U’Theo wrote reassuringly, “I believe in independence, especially intellectual independence. . . . I still stand a free man where revealed religion is concerned. Try as I may, I cannot regard the teachings of priest and prophet as anything but superstition.”48
As a growing boy, Claude did not dwell continuously on matters of faith. He experienced many of the good times enjoyed by boys everywhere. U’Theo had horses, and Claude loved to ride. His sister-in-law, however, felt it was too “common” for him to ride wildly across the pastures bareback. For a time, she arranged for him to ride properly with the children of the “local gentry.”49 During these years, Claude also enjoyed swimming, ball games, school and church picnics, and other affairs.
While under U’Theo’s guidance, Claude also began to write poetry. According to his autobiography, his first effort was “a rhymed acrostic for [a] . . . school gala” written at the age of ten.50 After that beginning, versemaking apparently became a habitual diversion. His earliest influences were varied. They included the lyrics of the local folk and church music. “All were singularly punctuated by meter and rhyme,” Claude once explained, “and nearly all my own poetic thought has run naturally into these regular forms.”51 Although undoubtedly influenced by native verse and speech, McKay’s school English was British, and the major and minor English poets were early set before him as examples worthy of imitation. As a youngster, he was attracted away from dialect and toward conventional English expression, which he accepted as the “correct” way to speak and write. He would later observe that “the direction of our schooling was of course English, and it was so successful that we really believed we were little black Britons.”52 The personal ambivalence that resulted from such training would be apparent in McKay’s first volumes of dialect poetry.
By McKay’s fourteenth birthday in 1904, U’Theo had quit his position near Montego Bay and had returned to Clarendon Parish. After a few years of teaching, he had acquired enough money to lease Pal-myara, a large estate near Sunny Ville. He was beginning to move up in the world. U’Theo’s decision, however, displeased his wife. She preferred to remain in St. James Parish, where she had grown up and where most of her friends and relatives lived. And she knew that the hills of upper Clarendon possessed few of the amenities of Montego Bay. There, for example, she lived on the main rail line to Kingston. At Sunny Ville the nearest railroad station lay twenty-two miles away in May Pen.
Claude may have also had misgivings about the move. He certainly sympathized with his sister-in-law. During his years with U’Theo, he had grown into a bright, sensitive, high-spirited teenager; he enjoyed his books and his highly developed independence of mind. He also relished his position as the only child in the household. U’Theo and his wife had no children of their own. In all his writings about his years with U’Theo, Claude never mentioned any visits from any of his other brothers or his sister. He especially enjoyed being privy to all his brother’s plans and activities in the school and church. Each week U’Theo and his wife exchanged dinner visits with the minister and his wife. Claude particularly enjoyed these dinners, with their long, adult conversations and good desserts.53
On the whole, these had been happy, secure years. In 1918, Claude described them as “a great formative period in my life—a time of perfect freedom to play, read, and think as I liked.”54 Those days ended with U’Theo’s decision to return to his native parish. In the end, his wife packed her belongings and accompanied him. Claude returned with them. For a while, he continued to live in U’Theo’s new home. Around age fourteen, however, he returned to his parents’ home and once again became a part of the larger family at Sunny Ville.
He faced some difficulties in the transition: “I had become used to the life of a small town child. I loved the grey macadamized roads, the better houses and my chic schoolmates. . . . I found a new world on my return to Sunny Ville. I had scarcely known my father and mother when I left with my brother about seven years previous. Now I had to become acquainted with my own family.”55 That reacquaintance was not wholly pleasant. One of Claude’s major difficulties was his relationship with his father, who expected total obedience. In his turn, Claude no longer considered himself a child and resented his father’s strict, old-fashioned attitudes. Never one to suffer in silence, he displayed increasing impertinence. Claude had arrived at that difficult age when a healthy male adolescent’s natural aggressiveness often masks painful anxieties about his manhood. His father no doubt touched a raw nerve by viewing him as still a child, and he woefully underestimated the depth of Claude’s resentment and the explosive volubility of his emotions. A confrontation between the two was not long in coming.
After some unrecorded incident that offended the elder McKay, he threatened Claude with a sound thrashing. According to Claude, the following scene then occurred:
I was very impertinent and said to him . . . “you cannot whip me, sir. I am a man.” He promptly tied me to a post and dropped my pants. He went to get his strap. When I saw him coming I started to curse and used every swear word a small boy could think of. My father who was a deacon of the church was so shocked he said: “I can’t whip the boy. Why he’s gone crazy.” He left me tied there and went off to the fields. It was the last time he ever tied me up or laid a hand on me.56
One can only wonder if Thomas McKay ever recognized that Claude possessed in his own way that same fierce commitment to righteousness and justice that was such a prominent part of his own character. Although neither may have ever recognized it, their confrontation revealed their similarities as well as their differences. Theirs was in truth a difficult and painful relationship.57
Claude also found upon his return that his mother’s health had grown worse. For that reason, perhaps, he more than ever treasured their relationship. In her he saw what he perceived to be his own best qualities. She loved books, she reacted spontaneously and warmly to the simple pleasures of life, and she set no artificial barriers between herself and others. Upon her alone he centered his love.
From the evidence, Claude resented the intrusion of his other brothers into the solitary, imaginative world he had created and sustained for himself under U’Theo’s roof. At home in Sunny Ville, he had to fight hard to win a cot and a tiny space of his own in the room he shared with two older brothers.58 Despite the inevitable tensions of family life, Claude did find pleasures at Sunny Ville. U’Theo generated a whirlwind of excitement by energetically plunging into the management of his new estate. He rented much of it to the local peasants. For once, his father abandoned his scruples against such practices and rented ten acres himself, planting it all in sugarcane. Soon there was much work to be done in the fields, and all the McKays shared in it. Despite his newly acquired status as a planter, U’Theo still found it necessary to teach, and he soon located a school near his new property. Claude continued his education with U’Theo and finished his regular grammar school course as his brother’s junior teaching assistant. If not always happy and harmonious, the McKays were an intelligent, literate, and productive clan.59
In My Green Hills of Jamaica, Claude stressed that the country around Sunny Ville had its full share of bright and active individuals whose intelligence equaled, if it did not surpass, the supposedly more sophisticated urban dwellers of Europe and America. As much as possible, the McKays and their neighbors kept abreast of local and world affairs. If Claude’s recollections were accurate, their access to the larger world came from a surprisingly large and varied number of journals, books, and newspapers published in Kingston, Great Britain, and the United States.
His sister, Rachel, had long kept up with the latest fashions in Weldon’s and other women’s magazines. A few neighbors subscribed to the weekly Jamaica Times, and all who were literate and ambitious read that important journal. Its editor, Thomas H. MacDermot, understood and identified completely with the needs and aspirations of those blacks from the lower and middle classes who wished to get ahead in life. U’Theo counted MacDermot as a friend and served as his country correspondent in the upper Clarendon area. McKay’s long list of magazines and newspapers found in Clarendon (no doubt on an irregular and haphazard basis) included “The Spectator, The Nineteenth Century, Answers, The Windsor, the weekly edition of The Times (London), many English papers as well as The Outlook, The Argosy, the famous New York Herald, the Deadwood Dick detective stories and other magazines and newspapers which I don’t remember from America.”60
Claude also had access to much of the sentimental fiction characteristic of the late Victorian period. Some of it came from the mission school library, “to which,” McKay wrote, “every intelligent barefoot boy had access, and there were many of us.” The rest he no doubt found at home or in U’Theo’s library. Like the journals, the fiction available was a mixed lot: “They were all good and bad thrown together and we young people read indiscriminately. We had Marie Corelli, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Gaskell, Sheldon’s In His Steps, which was a very wonderful book for us kids who were being trained to be model colonial Christians. Most famous of all the books was Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynn. I remember that I read passages from it to my mother andcried in her lap and she cried too.”61 The impression of such literature on McKay’s mind would later be clearly reflected in his dialect verse, where in one poem he would write of his desire to visit England and “watch de fact’ry chimneys pourin’ smoke up to de sky . . . An’ see de matches-children, dat I hear ‘bout passin’ by.”62
During his teenage years at Sunny Ville, more tangible pleasures also presented themselves. Claude did not lag behind in the pursuit of the local girls. The daughters of the mulatto Lewars family in particular attracted Claude, who was fascinated by their “lovely soft skins.”63 His father naturally objected to his sons’ uninhibited interest in the opposite sex. He earnestly exclaimed that he had “never known another woman” besides their mother, “and God helping me, I never will.”64 He had not, he said, educated his sons to be ensnared by any of the ignorant village girls, no matter how pretty they were. At the close of his life, McKay noted in a typed manuscript fragment that none of Thomas McKay’s boys had been like their father: all would do the things that he would not, and in a handwritten insert he defiantly added, “without any regrets.” He carefully noted that only his sister “lived up” to her father’s ideals.65
If less respectful of Christian virtues than their parents, the younger McKays nevertheless exerted a positive influence within their community. As the eldest, U’Theo took an active and progressive lead in agricultural, educational, and musical affairs. After his arrival in the Sunny Ville area, he organized an exceptionally fine choir and decided to give in concert some of the great European choral pieces he had learned as a student at Mico. He drew upon the support of the local “gentry,” attracted a favorable press in Kingston, and wound up touring all of Clarendon and parts of adjacent parishes with his group. U’Theo then persuaded a choir from Kingston, which had successfully toured England, to give a weekend of concerts in the Clarendon hills. His name quickly became synonymous with good music.
As his brother’s confidant and a member of his choir, young Claude was at the center of events, and proud to be. The music uplifted him, and he eventually drew upon his experiences with his brother’s choir to create one of his best short stories, “The Agricultural Show,” which he wrote in the early 1930s.66 Claude greatly admired the ease with which his brother brought together all elements of the local society, and over the years, he invested his brother’s activities with great symbolic importance. They became a part of that pastoral childhood that existed in the Eden of his mind.
In actuality, Eden had its tensions. Around 1906, a fervent storm of revivalism, which had started in distant Wales, descended upon upper Clarendon. Throughout 1905 the Kingston Daily Gleaner tracked its course to Jamaica.67 In Claude’s village, it apparently arrived in the form of a small, fiery Welsh evangelist, who soon had the hill folks vibrant with the spirit of repentance. U’Theo and young Claude quickly became conspicuous by their resistance to the Holy Ghost. Some concluded that the Devil had guided U’Theo’s education and that he in turn had corrupted his youngest brother. “All the people were angry with my brother. They prayed for him in church. . . . But in their prayers there was a menacing tone as if they would like to lynch him.”68 Claude always fondly remembered that he had responded with a little revival of his own among his youthful companions; soon, he had organized “ten . . . boys in a free-thought band, and most of them were heathen from their own primitive thinking, without benefit of books.”69
U’Theo’s reputation suffered no lasting damage. The revival spirit soon passed. Claude mischievously recalled that it had left in its wake more than one pregnant village girl. Such had been its power, however, that several guilty paramours confessed their misdeeds and married.70
By 1906, Claude faced another transition. He had finished grammar school and had to decide upon a career. At sixteen, he had grown into a strikingly handsome, quick-witted youth of average height and slim, muscular physique. He possessed the exceptionally quick mind and the direct, highly intuitive capabilities of a poet. But these were gifts one spent spontaneously and freely in the hills of Clarendon— he could not earn a living as a poet. Claude thought a great deal about the choices open to him. At least two of his other brothers had followed U’Theo into the teaching profession. Thomas Edison was preparing for the ministry. Another, Reginald, seemed content simply to farm as his father had done before him. None of these choices appealed to young Claude. He would try something different.
In an age when Booker T. Washington had already established his reputation as a practical educator in the American South, it appeared logical to the young poet to learn a craft and become a skilled tradesman. The colonial government was encouraging vocational education, and learning the secrets of a skilled craft may have appealed to Claude’s sense of romance. In 1906, he took the junior teacher’s yearly test and the government’s “trade scholarship examination.” He passed both and elected to accept the trade scholarship, although he could not decide what trade actually interested him. He was fortunately spared the necessity of choice when the government informed him that he would first spend a year studying at a trade school in Kingston. The prospect of a year in Kingston delighted him.71
Claude learned in the summer or fall of 1906 that his term would begin in January, 1907. In the interim, he enjoyed himself. The people of upper Clarendon took pride in those among their children who won any sort of scholarship. At parties he received many small gifts and was elaborately toasted by his friends and neighbors. His mother and his sister, meanwhile, took care to buy him the proper clothes for a year in Kingston. Finally, sometime after Christmas, he journeyed one morning before daybreak to May Pen, where he caught an early train to the capital.
An older cousin in the postal service met Claude in Kingston, introduced him to his circle of friends, and found for him a good rooming house near the trade school. It was not Claude’s first visit to the city. As a small boy, he had accompanied his sister-in-law on a few shopping trips. Now he happily looked forward to remaining a whole year.
He had hardly settled in his new quarters, however, before disaster struck. School had not yet started, and Claude was lying in bed one afternoon reading a “wild west thriller” when his room suddenly buckled and crumpled, “as if some giant had crushed in the walls of the house.” He managed to dash uninjured into the street, where he experienced a chaos of trembling earth and collapsing buildings. People ran wildly about him; flames soon engulfed parts of the city. Some looting occurred, but the people quickly began the frantic and gruesome task of digging the injured and dead from underneath the rubble. It was the worst earthquake to hit the Kingston area since 1696, when the buccaneer town of Port Royal slid beneath the sea.72
Along with most of Kingston, the trade school lay in ruins. That evening, Claude joined a long line of refugees streaming out of the city, back to their native villages. In My Green Hills of Jamaica, he recalled that the night lay beautiful, clear, and peaceful upon the countryside. He also remembered that “there were others coming toward the city.”
It was around May Pen that I met my father. It was night and he had been calling out to the different drays to see if I was on any of them. Finally he spotted the one which carried me. I remember the drayman stopped and I got off. My father hugged and kissed me. It gave me the strangest feeling—my father’s beard against my face because I had never before been kissed by him. He was always a very stern man; but now he must have felt that I’d escaped from something terribly tragic as he held me in his arms.73
The moment might have led to reconciliation between father and son, but by now Claude’s estrangement from his father ran deep. At the end of his life, he recorded the exceptional event with feeling and understanding.
With the trade school destroyed, the government directed Claude to find a master craftsman willing to accept him as an apprentice. His relatives eventually found for him a tradesman in Brown’s Town, just north of Clarendon in neighboring St. Ann’s Parish. Claude was disappointed: the glamour of city life fascinated him, and he had also hoped to find in Kingston a trade that appealed to him. Now he found himself apprenticed to “Old Brenga, a light mulatto, kind of crabbed, yet kindly in a way. He was a jack-of-all-trades—a wheelwright, a carriage builder and an excellent cabinet maker.”74 Claude remained in his employ for about two years, from 1907 to 1909.
It was an odd but not wholly unsatisfactory arrangement. Claude’s disinclination to learn matched the craftsman’s reluctance to teach. “It was a fairly good arrangement because he was one of those men who wanted to guard his trade secrets and was not eager to teach me anything.”75 Claude happily learned nothing of consequence during his stay in Brown’s Town.
He did, however, have some good times. For one thing, he enjoyed his new environment. Unlike Clarendon, St. Ann had a dry climate and rocky soil. Pimento and coffee trees grew in abundance. Brown’s Town itself was one of the most attractive towns in the region. His employer often sent him around the countryside collecting debts. Claude particularly enjoyed visiting the larger estates and seeing the interiors of the old mansions. Sometimes he and his employer’s young son, who often accompanied him on these trips, “would leave the highway and go into the fields and sit under the pimento trees, just talking and reading poetry while the John-tu-whits feasted and twitted on the ripe blue pimento fruit.”76 It was not a demanding existence, and his sojourn in St. Ann nourished Claude’s development as a poet. For here, late in 1907 he met Walter Jekyll, an English gentleman resident in Jamaica, who over the next five years would give Claude the encouragement and direction he needed to emerge as a creative, productive, and recognized poet.
Despite the personal obscurity that he cultivated during his lifetime and that has since persisted, Walter Jekyll surely ranked among the more interesting Englishmen found in Queen Victoria’s far-flung possessions. Jekyll had come from an old, upper-class family. His father, Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll, a former captain in the Grenadier guards, originally came from Wargrave Hill, Berkshire. Walter, his youngest son, had been born at Bramley House in Surrey on November 27, 1849. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with honors in 1872, Jekyll excelled in music, literature, languages, and philosophy. After receiving an M.A. at Cambridge, he entered the Episcopal ministry, but in the great debate between religion and science he decided against the faith and renounced Christianity, probably around 1880. He next went to Italy and studied singing in Milan with the great master, Francesco Lamperti. Afterward, Jekyll returned to England and lived in various places, including London, Birmingham, Bournemouth, and Devonshire. He himself taught music; in Birmingham he gave penny singing lessons to the poor. In 1884 he published in London his own translation of Lamperti’s The Art of Singing According to Ancient Tradition and Personal Experiences, a book his brother reported still had a sale in 1929, the year of Jekyll’s death.77
While in Bournemouth in the early 1890s, Jekyll had become friendly with Robert Louis Stevenson, who at the time wrote a story that had been incubating in his mind for several years. Stevenson en-tided his new story ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Although Walter Jekyll may not have been in fact Stevenson’s fictional Dr. Jekyll, he almost certainly lent his name to that author’s famous character.78
Jekyll scorned notoriety (especially the sort that may have threatened to come his way as a result of Stevenson’s work). He loved simplicity and solitude and felt uncomfortable in the ordinary roles expected of English gentlemen. During these years, he and an intimate friend, Ernest Boyle, spent several summers trout fishing deep in the mountains of Norway. His brother, Herbert, who in no way shared Walter’s taste for the simple life in the open spaces, recounted that “the place they went to was very remote, and they had to walk the last fifty miles of the journey, taking with them a man and a cow. . . . The last thing they did on coming away was to make hay for next year’s beds.”79
Besides his distaste for the conventions of upper-class society, Jekyll sometimes suffered from asthma in the long, damp English winters, which he grew to dread increasingly with the passing years. Finally in 1895, after his mother’s death, he settled permanently in Jamaica, whose climate he had enjoyed on several previous visits. After Jekyll had settled comfortably at Mavis Bank in the Blue Mountains northeast of Kingston, he was joined by Ernest Boyle, who moved into a home of his own in the same locality.80
In Jamaica, Jekyll maintained his old interests and developed new ones. He took great pleasure in tropical horticulture and became a close friend of the director of the famous Hope Gardens outside Kingston. All the while, he maintained his interest in the new criticisms of Christianity and found time to write on the subject. In 1904 he contributed his own attack upon traditional Christianity in a book entitled The Bible Untrustworthy: A Critical Comparison of Contradictory Passages in the Bible.81
These subjects hardly exhausted Jekyll’s varied interests. As the independent scion of an old, aristocratic family, Jekyll looked askance at the rise of the middle class and bemoaned the deleterious effects of industrialism and urbanization in the modern world. He looked nostalgically upon the traditional peasantry as the source of every nation’s real strength, and he mourned the destructive disregard for traditional ways in modern England. For the same reasons, he was highly critical of American life, which seemed to him to be based entirely on the material values of the middle classes. Once in Jamaica, he became fascinated by the folk music of its black peasants and by their wonderful stories of Annancy, the trickster spiderman of West African origin. He began to collect systematically the native Jamaican songs and stories. When Claude first met him in Brown’s Town, the Folk-lore Society in England had just recently published his collection, Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes.82
The white man who had entered the shop of Claude’s employer sometime in 1907 appeared to be in his late fifties. He was short and wiry, and his casual dress suggested a man not at all concerned with fashion. On his weatherbeaten face he wore a small goatee, and his confident stride betrayed the directness and self-possession of one sure of his place and purpose. Despite the eccentricity of his appearance, Jekyll remained an English gentleman.83
He had come to “old Brenga’s” shop in Brown’s Town from the resort town of Moneague in the eastern part of St. Ann to get a carriage wheel repaired. Claude’s employer had heard that Jekyll was an author and sarcastically remarked that he had a poet in his employ and introduced the two. Unlike the wheelwright, Jekyll expressed genuine interest in McKay’s poetry and asked to see it. Claude demurred, claiming that he had left his best poems at home in Sunny Ville. He liked Jekyll, however, and promised to send his poems to him. Claude kept his word, and the two began a regular correspondence. Over the next two years, their relationship developed slowly. “His interest in me was general at first,” McKay recalled. “I was merely a literate phenomenon among the illiterate peasants whose songs and tales he was writing. Then in time there was a subtle change from a general to an individual interest and he became keen about my intellectual development and also in my verse as real poetry.”84
During 1908, Claude had a more pressing concern than his developing friendship with Jekyll. His mother’s health was steadily growing worse. By 1909, her heart disease had advanced beyond repair. She had begun to suffer from dropsy, a condition characterized by an abnormal retention of body fluids and progressive fatigue and weakness; she needed constant nursing. Claude felt impelled to return home. It meant giving up his apprenticeship, but that was easy: he had never developed any genuine interest in learning a trade. Once home, he encountered little criticism. “As I was the baby of the family and the favorite of my mother,” he later explained, “there was little objection from the rest of the family about my giving up a government trade which in Jamaica was an important thing.”85
The family had long since left the three-roomed thatched cottage where Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann had begun their married life. They now lived in a new, larger, more solidly built five-room house “with cedar floors and broadleaf shingles, mahogany chairs and a porch.” For Hannah Ann, the climb upward had taken a heavy toll. The accumulated burdens of farm work, domestic chores, and childrearing had placed greater demands on her constitution than it could bear. In the end, she found no comfort, even in “the great carved mahogany, four poster bed which had belonged to her father.” She asked to be placed on a mattress on the floor of her daughter Rachel’s room. The move brought scant relief. She fingered awhile; finally, on December 19, 1909, she quietly died.86
Her slow decline had been exceedingly painful for all the family. For Claude, her death held special significance. His devotion to her had been complete, even excessive. Upon her he had concentrated all his familial affections, and he had projected upon her all those sensitive, romantic qualities he himself possessed. Over the years, he memorialized his mother in several highly emotional poems in which he expressed with precision the totality of his identification with her.
In one early dialect poem, he portrayed his mother as a warmly human individual who at the end had been far more concerned with the living world around her than with thoughts of what might lie beyond the grave. At the same time he revealed his own alienation from his father.87 Much later, in a sonnet entitled “Heritage,” McKay almost certainly had his mother in mind when he wrote
I know the magic word, the peaceful thought,
The song that fills me in my lucid hours,
The spirit’s wine that fills my body through,
And makes me music-drunk, are yours, all yours.
I cannot praise, for you have passed from praise,
I have no tinted thought to paint you true;
But I can feel and I can write the word:
The best of me is but the least of you.88
When McKay decided to publish some of his first poetry in the United States under a pseudonym, he chose the name Eli Edwards, an abbreviated, masculinized version of his mother’s maiden name, Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards.89
In the first of a two-part sonnet sequence published in 1921, Claude stated explicitly the significance his mother’s death had for him within the family circle: “The only one I loved was gone.”90 In the second sonnet of this sequence, he fused his childhood, his mother, and Jamaica itself into a unity and re-created in miniature that imaginary refuge to which he again and again returned for solace.
The dawn departs, the morning is begun,
The Trades come whispering from off the seas,
The fields of corn are golden in the sun,
The dark-brown tassels fluttering in the breeze;
The bell is sounding and children pass,
Frog-leaping, skipping, shouting, laughing shrill,
Down the red-road, over the pasture grass,
Up to the schoolhouse crumbling on the hill.
The older folk are at their peaceful toil,
Some pulling up the weeds, some plucking corn,
And others breaking up the sun-baked soil.
Float, faintly-scented breeze, at early morn
Over the earth where mortals sow and reap—
Beneath its breast my mother lies asleep.91
After his mother’s death, Claude had little desire to remain at home. His thoughts turned persistently to Kingston and the possibility of living closer to his new-found mentor, Walter Jekyll. Sometime after their initial meeting in Brown’s Town, they had met again. The circumstances of that meeting were never recorded, but Claude had given Jekyll several poems. As he was reading them Jekyll suddenly began to laugh. Claude was stunned and angry. Jekyll hastened to explain that he had not been laughing at Claude’s serious poetry, all of which had been written in standard English, but at the single humorous piece, written in the local dialect. Jekyll said he found Claude’s poems in straight English too “repetitious. . . . ‘But this,’ said he, holding up the [dialect] poem, This is the real thing.’,, Jekyll went on to say that except for himself no one had ever put the Jamaican dialect into literary form. He urged Claude, “as a native boy,” to seize the opportunity. He assured him that his poems would sell.92
Claude hardly knew how to respond to such a suggestion. As he later explained, “I was not very enthusiastic about this statement, because to us who were getting an education in the English schools, the Jamaican dialect was considered a vulgar tongue. It was the language of the peasants. All cultivated people spoke English, straight English.” After much thought, Claude eventually followed Jekyll’s advice. After all, he did know “many pieces in the dialect which were based on our local songs of the draymen, the sugar mills, and the farm land.” Besides, poems in the dialect were “so much easier to write than poems in straight English.”93 McKay did not elaborate on why dialect poems proved easier for him to write. Louise Bennett, who has written only in the dialect, once stated that because the “Jamaican language” was her native tongue, it was naturally the medium in which she thought and wrote best as a poet.94 This might have also been true of McKay. Claude spoke the Jamaican dialect peculiar to the upper Clarendon area. In a recording made near the end of his life, he still retained, after an absence of more than thirty years, the “quaint” accent of a Jamaican hill countryman.95
After a brief visit with Jekyll in his home at Mavis Bank, Claude “one day . . . packed a few things in a battered old suitcase and went off to Kingston.” This was probably late in 1909 or early in 1910, a few months after his mother’s death. At the age of twenty, he still had “no special objective.” He even felt unsure about his relationship with Jekyll. “I didn’t want to tell Mr. Jekyll,” he recalled, “that I had run away from home to be near him.”96 He obviously felt the need for guidance. He had rejected the paths followed by U’Theo and his older brothers but had developed no alternative path of his own. Jekyll offered him the opportunity to nourish his talent as a poet. Without quite admitting it, even to himself, he hastened to place himself under the older man’s guidance. He wanted to proceed along the poet’s path, but thirsted for the reassurance and approval of an older, authoritative voice. It was a pattern McKay would repeat with other men in other places to the very end of his life.
Although Claude felt unsure about his long-range career choices, he never timidly retreated from new experiences. On the contrary, he welcomed them. And like most young men fresh from the country, he hungered for the fabled good times to be found in the city. In Kingston, he soon found new friends, “chiefly waiters in the big hotels and cabarets . . . who lived very fast lives.”97 The little money he had brought to Kingston did not last long, and he faced the necessity of earning a livelihood. For a while, he worked in a local “match factory,” but quickly grew bored by the long hours and the monotony of his tasks.98 He then impulsively chose a way out taken by many similarly placed young men both before and after him: he joined the constabulary. A disastrous love affair may also have been responsible: an early newspaper account reported that it was rumored that McKay joined the constabulary in the aftermath of a “pitiable love story.” McKay neither confirmed nor denied this, saying only, “I cannot touch the public with my heart. . . . It would be of no interest to them.”99
Patterned after the Irish constabulary, the Jamaican police had been created in 1867 as part of the administrative reforms established after the Morant Bay Rebellion. It served as an efficient island-wide police force and functioned as a quasi-military institution. Men enlisted for five years and received “military training and civil instruction in Spanish Town at the Old Military Barracks,” before going on regular duty. Like the British police, they carried only batons and handcuffs, but in emergencies they could be issued firearms.100
Claude joined in June, 1911.101 All the while he continued writing dialect poems and regularly visited Jekyll, who had by this time become deeply involved with Claude’s writing and his education. In addition to the encouragement and advice Jekyll gave him as a poet, he had also begun to tutor Claude in language, literature, philosophy, and history. With his wider knowledge and larger, more varied library, Jekyll advanced Claude’s education far beyond the point U’Theo had taken him. Jekyll “loved good books and their makers more than anything else,” and in Claude he found an apt and willing pupil.102 For Claude, their hours together proved wholly absorbing. In 1918, he wrote that Jekyll
opened up a new world to my view, introduced me to a greater, deeper literature—to Buddha, Schopenhauer and Goethe, Carlyle and Browning, Wilde, [Edward] Carpenter, Whitman, Hugo, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Shaw and the different writers of the rationalist press—more than I had time to read, but nearly all my spare time I spent listening to his reading choice bits from them, discussing the greatness of their minds, and telling of their lives, which I must confess I sometimes found even more interesting than their works.103
Some writers naturally proved of greater interest than others. As a naive child of British colonialism, Claude devoured with pleasure the works of the social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer. Early in their friendship, Jekyll had given McKay a membership in the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), an organization founded by the publisher Charles Albert Watts in 1899 to promote scientific rationalism. As a member, McKay received the RPA reprints.104 But Jekyll also introduced him to the works of Hume and Berkeley, as well as to the great German philosophers—Kant, Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Claude became well acquainted with Schopenhauer, whom Jekyll had only lately translated and published in a new book entitled The Wisdom of Schopenhauer as Revealed in Some of His Writings. Jekyll had also translated (but not published) selections from the great German romantics—Goethe, Schiller, and Heine. Their poetry enthralled McKay. “I loved German poetry,” he wrote in My Green Hills of Jamaica. “Mr. Jekyll always read the German deep and sonorous before he translated it into English for me.”105
In Jekyll’s home, Claude also deepened his knowledge of the great English and other European poets. “With this man’s excellent library at my disposal, I read poetry:Childe Harold, The Dunciad, Essay on Man, Paradise Lost, the Elizabethan lyrics, ... the lyrics of Shelley and Keats and ... of the late Victorian poets. . . . He translated and we read together pieces out of Dante [and] Leopard!”106
Jekyll knew six languages, and Claude asked that he teach him French, one of the languages U’Theo had studied at Mico. For the time, Jekyll’s language instruction was unorthodox. He insisted that Claude begin by repeating aloud the French as it was read to him. He had been taught in that manner and thought it the best way to learn a language; Claude could study the grammar later.107
As Jekyll’s protege, Claude also became acquainted with some of Jamaica’s social elite. Many were Jekyll’s near neighbors in the healthier mountain parishes above the hot, dry Liguanea plain where Kingston sat, perpetually sweltering in the heat. Much to his delight, Claude was present one day when the colony’s governor, Sidney Olivier, visited Jekyll’s modest two-bedroom cottage. Olivier enjoyed his visit so much, he asked if he might not stay the night. Much to Claude’s astonishment, Jekyll curtly refused the governor’s request. When Olivier pointed out that Claude was staying, Jekyll told him there was a difference; Claude was his “special friend.”
Jekyll was irate that Olivier had even made the request. He considered it a typical example of the bad manners displayed by England’s aggressive middle class. Taken aback by this unusual outburst of intolerance, Claude asked how Jekyll could stand him, the mere son of a black peasant. “’Oh,’ said he, ‘English gentlemen have always liked their peasants; it’s the ambitious middle class that we cannot tolerate.’” In retrospect, Claude confessed that he had perhaps been “a little snobbish myself because I admired Mr. Jekyll for pulling the governor down a step.”108
One can only guess at the exact nature of the relationship between Jekyll and McKay. Although it was never explicitly stated, the evidence suggests that Jekyll was homosexual. He never married; he had a long, intimate relationship with Ernest Boyle; and his own writing suggests a strong preference for the company of men and boys. In Jamaican Song and Story, he concluded his introductory discussion about the Jamaican dialect with these highly ambiguous remarks: “The men’s voices are of extraordinary beauty. To hear a group chatting is a pure pleasure to the ear, quite irrespective of the funny things they say; their remarks are accompanied by the prettiest little twirks and turns of intonation, sometimes on the words, sometimes mere vocal ejaculations between them. The women’s voices have the same fine quality when they speak low, but this they seldom do, and their usual vivacious chatter is anything but melodious.”109
The evidence about Claude’s sexual orientation is much more clear-cut. Although McKay had sexual relations with women, he also had many homosexual affairs, particularly in the United States and Europe. The evidence indicates his primary orientation was toward the homosexual on the spectrum of human sexual inclinations, not too surprising in view of the difficulties he had in relating to his father and the strong identification with his mother.110 A homoerotic component most likely underlay the relationship Claude developed with Jekyll. This did not necessarily mean they developed a physical relationship. Nothing in Claude’s writings ever hinted that their friendship took such a turn, but he did once indirectly suggest that Jekyll introduced him to the reality and to the moral legitimacy of homosexual love.
In 1918, Pearson’s magazine published an essay in which McKay discussed Jekyll’s great influence on his career. Among the famous authors he listed as having read and discussed with Jekyll, he significantly grouped together Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and Walt Whitman. Oscar Wilde’s tragic self-exposure and imprisonment occurred the same year Jekyll setded in Jamaica, and although there was no connection between the two events, Jekyll would have undoubtedly been familiar with the Wilde affair, the most infamous case of homosexual persecution in nineteenth-century England. Edward Carpenter was a British author whose studies and commentaries on human sexuality would be much discussed in the 1920s. In 1894 he had published a work entitled Homogenic Lave and Its Place in a Free Society, in which he defended homosexuality and “developed the thesis that the bisexually endowed were specially fitted for progressive leadership in a democratic society.” He elaborated upon these ideas two years later in his best-known work, Love’s Coming of Age. Carpenter was a great admirer of Whitman, whom he visited in America and whom he imitated in his own poetry. In 1906 he published an account of his encounter with Whitman, which he titled Days with Walt Whitman, a well-known source on the Good Grey Poet’s old age and reminiscences. If Jekyll introduced McKay to Carpenter’s work, they almost certainly discussed his defense of homosexuality and his opinions of Whitman, whose own homoerotic passages in Leaves of Grass were well known. For those in 1918 who were possessed by “the love that dared not speak its name,” the stringing together of the names Wilde, Carpenter, and Whitman would have left no doubt about McKay’s meaning. It was there, so to speak, written between the lines.111
Claude was not the only young man befriended by Jekyll during his long residence in Jamaica. In the 1920s he met a young musician named Johnny Lyons, tutored him in singing, and helped launch his career. Like McKay before him, Lyons left Jamaica. He moved to London, where he won some success on the musical stage before settling down to a prosperous career as an accountant. After Jekyll’s death in 1929, U’Theo disdainfully noted in a letter to Claude that Jekyll had left his library to an “ignorant” fellow in Hanover Parish.112 Perhaps the “ignorant” fellow was Johnny Lyons, or a similar young man Jekyll was attempting to assist.
Ronald Hyam has speculated on the sexual dynamics that underlay Great Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial exploits. According to Hyam, the wanderlust of Englishmen much more famous than Walter Jekyll could at least in part be explained by their homosexuality, which could not be freely expressed in Britain itself. Among them he included some of the principal architects of Victoria’s empire, explorers, generals, and administrators: Sir Richard Burton, Lord H. H. Kitchener, General Charles Gordon, Cecil Rhodes, and Sir Matthew Nathan, the governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong, and Natal. Not all these men were sexually active; some apparently buried their strong homoerotic impulses beneath an almost demonic concentration on their work.113
Walter Jekyll can hardly be ranked with these fervid colonizers. On the contrary, Claude remembered that he “hated” the British Empire but feared German imperial expansion even more. As a rule, Claude stressed Jekyll’s “gentleness and otherworldliness.”114 For a young man fresh from the country, Jekyll could not have been easy to understand. McKay remembered that “he was disillusioned with British liberalism, yet he did not believe in socialism or any of the radical parties of the day. He always said to me that the British upper class would know how to handle radicals and that Lloyd George who was the famous liberal radical then, would finish up as a lord. . . . He was . . . something of a Buddhist and did not think that the world could be reformed.”115
Jekyll, in his lonely self-exile, reflected one isolated response to the doubts, tensions, and stress that had been engendered in Victorian England by the commingling of disparate social and intellectual elements. The conflict between science and religion, the personal repressiveness of middle-class manners and conventions, the decline of the landed aristocracy, the stubborn persistence of romanticism, industrialism, the awakening of working-class consciousness, and the demands of empire—all weighed upon the minds of sensitive Victorians.116 Personal considerations had dictated that Jekyll seek a simpler, healthier, and less demanding existence in Jamaica, but he had brought his awareness of the complexities of modern life with him. In part romantic, in part a Spencerian rationalist, Jekyll had found in Jamaica a safe retreat from which to look upon the world with a measure of detachment.
Within Jamaica itself, he found satisfaction in its climate and great natural beauty, and also in its people, their language, customs, and songs. He also derived much satisfaction from the association of young men such as Claude McKay and Johnny Lyons, whose psychological uncertainties he perhaps understood and whose talents he could definitely help develop. It is probable that Jekyll’s admiration and love for such young men expressed itself wholly in his role as mentor and friend. During this period, homosexual “passion” often expressed itself in this manner.117 Whatever Jekyll’s behavior in this regard, the relationship that developed between him and McKay had been actively sought by both, and in it each strongly fulfilled personal needs. At no time did Claude ever deprecate Jekyll’s influence on his own life. In Banana Bottom, his novel of Jamaica at the turn of the century, McKay created Squire Gensir as Jekyll’s fictional prototype. He dedicated the novel to Jekyll and memorialized him in the following passage, in which the novel’s heroine, Bita Plant, looked back upon Gensir after his death and pondered the significance of his life:
This man was the first to enter into the simple life of the island Negroes and proclaim significance and beauty in their transplanted African folk tales and in the words and music of their native dialect.
Before him it had generally been said the Negroes were inartistic. But he had found artistry where others saw nothing, because he believed that wherever the imprints of nature and humanity were found, there also were the seeds of creative life, and that above the dreary levels of existence everywhere there were always the radiant, the mysterious, the wonderful, the strange great moments whose magic may be caught by any clairvoyant mind and turned into magical form for the joy of man.118
Jekyll’s insistence on the value and beauty of the Jamaican dialect and the folk traditions it embodied enabled Claude McKay to accept the dialect as a legitimate poetic medium; his acceptance of it enabled him to give voice to his own heritage and expose the problems he found within it and within himself. It was an unprecedented and difficult challenge. Because of his education, he had sentimentally regarded himself a part of the great British Empire. From his earliest years, he had accepted the English language and its literary traditions as his own. His use of the dialect might conceivably have turned into a mere academic exercise, an inconsequential diversion. But McKay always wrote directly from the deepest levels of his own personal feelings, and his experience in the constabulary propelled him into a direct confrontation with the limited alternatives and painful contradictions inherent for all blacks in the British Jamaican colonial situation.
McKay’s enlistment in the constabulary might have ended disastrously had it not been for Jekyll’s intercession. As an idealistic recruit fresh from the country, he was revolted by the constant brutality and duplicity, seemingly normal parts of the policeman’s lot. He disliked with equal intensity the unending discipline of a semimilitary life and the policeman’s preoccupation with “making cases.”119 Many who ran afoul of the law were simple peasants newly arrived from the country, and he often sympathized with their troubles.
He had not told his officers or fellow enlistees that he visited Jekyll or wrote poetry. After his initial training at the Old Military Barracks in Spanish Town, he had been assigned to regular clerical duty in the constabulary office there. Spanish Town was twelve miles west of Kingston and even farther from Jekyll’s home at Mavis Bank. As long as he remained in Spanish Town, his visits to Jekyll had to be confined to weekends. Much to his surprise and embarrassment, Jekyll one day appeared in Spanish Town and spoke directly to the head of the constabulary. Shortly afterward, Claude was transferred to the constabulary office in Half-Way Tree, just north of Kingston proper, much closer to Jekyll. Moreover, although he “was supposed to do duty there about once a month . . . sometimes for three months I didn’t go because the sergeant in the office was so indulgent.”120 No doubt, too, it helped to have friends in high places.
Before long, some of McKay’s verse, along with an account of Jekyll’s role in his discovery and development as a poet, appeared in Jamaica’s largest newspaper, the Kingston Daily Gleaner.121 Jekyll thought the article full of exaggeration about himself, but he correctly surmised it would help the sale of Claude’s first volume of dialect poetry, which the two were then putting together. About that time, Jekyll one day calmly announced that he was going to get Claude out of the constabulary. About two months later, Claude obtained his discharge; he had served less than a year of his five-year term. He would no longer have to place himself in opposition to those he regarded as his kin; an intolerable burden had been lifted from his shoulders. “So now I was happy as a golden finch. . . . I was writing my poetry. . . . I had the very best friend in the world. Oh, Jamaica was a happy place for me then. I thought I was walking always with flowers under my feet.”122 While Jekyll made arrangements for the publication of his poems, Claude returned to Sunny Ville, moved into a small thatched cottage near the family home, and farmed for several months.
In his twenty-first year, Claude McKay was on the verge of achieving considerable local success as a poet. He was a handsome, slim, dark brown young man of medium height. He had the ready smile and the rollicking laugh of a Jamaican countryman. Upon his broad, expressive face his “eyebrows arched high up and never came down, and his finely modeled features wore in consequence a fixed expression of ironical and rather mischievous scepticism.”123 He possessed a poet’s keen sensibility and knew well his environment and its people. He understood himself less well. As the youngest child of a large family, he secretly doubted his ability to make his way alone in the world and remained unsure about his future. (Jekyll had already reminded him that he could not expect to earn a living as a poet.)124 He still needed guidance but felt uncomfortable with his father. He greatly admired his older brother, U’Theo, but never wished to emulate him. He had not developed strong attachments to his other brothers, but did seem fond of his sister, Rachel. He had idolized his mother.
Now he once again found himself back home in Sunny Ville. He made clear his reasons for returning to Sunny Ville in the two volumes of Jamaican dialect poetry that finally appeared in 1912. Together they revealed the mind, moods, achievements, and limitations of the young poet, Claude McKay.