In 1912, Claude McKay produced two volumes of poetry. Songs of Jamaica appeared early in January, and Constab Ballads became available locally in late November. That year he also published a significant number of poems in the island’s two major newspapers, the Kingston Daily Gleaner and the weekly Jamaica Times.1
No black West Indian educated in the British imperial tradition had ever before attempted to use a local island dialect as his primary poetic medium. Ever since the eighteenth century, British West Indian poets, black and white, had with few exceptions striven to duplicate in language and form the traditions of English verse. They had also proclaimed in their poetry their loyalty as British imperial subjects. They had celebrated the great beauty of their New World homes, but in the tradition of British pastoral verse and the nature poetry of the romantic period.
From time to time a few blacks among them had expressed an awareness of their people’s grievances as the descendants of exploited and abused black African slaves. But their exploration of the dilemmas inherent in their marginal position as the stepchildren of British culture remained for the most part submerged beneath a derivative pastoral tradition and respect for British literary forms and themes.2
In McKay’s day, this imitative literary tradition still persisted in Jamaica. With the exception of Walter Jekyll, almost no one regarded the Jamaican dialect as a fit vehicle for serious literary expression. Even McKay had initially rejected it, and in Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, many of his poems still reflected his attachment to standard nineteenth-century British literary modes and themes. At the same time, however, McKay wrote from the perspective of a black Jamaican of rural, peasant origins. To a greater degree than prior West Indian poets, he clearly revealed in his dialect poetry the intellectual, social, and cultural contradictions that faced a perceptive black artist in British colonial Jamaica.
Written with a naive and disarming candor, these early poems can be read today as autobiography, as social documents of historical value, and as linguistic and artistic creations of pioneering importance in the development of modern West Indian literature. They are also of fundamental importance in understanding McKay’s later work. In the dialect poems he developed certain basic themes and stylistic tendencies that persisted in all his subsequent writings. In short, McKay’s dialect poetry provides insight into the mind and feelings of the young poet and into some of the hard realities of black life in Jamaica during the first two decades of the twentieth century.3
Songs of Jamaica contained fifty poems, Constab Ballads only twenty-eight. The first collection included many poems that dealt with various aspects of Jamaican country life as McKay had known it, and others that reflected McKay’s intellectual convictions and commitments. It also had its share of love poems. Although written in dialect about Jamaican country youth, the love songs told conventional stories of lovers and their tribulations and contained little that was original or exceptionally striking, either in content or style. As its tide implied, Constab Ballads consisted of poems that generally focus on McKay’s experiences and impressions as a policeman in urban Kingston and Spanish Town. There was, however, an overlapping of themes in the two works; Constab Ballads actually elaborated on topics first introduced in Songs of Jamaica.4
In both volumes, the style, content, length, and overall quality of the individual poems varied enormously. Some were very short, little more than sentimental jingles. Others possessed considerable artistic merit. A few were sustained efforts of over a hundred lines. The individual poems also varied greatly in language. Although most were written in Jamaican dialect, several of the poems contained only a limited number of dialect words and usages. A few were written entirely in standard English. Throughout both volumes, McKay wavered between the use of a pungent, wholly colloquial Jamaican dialect and a standard English patterned upon the stereotyped Victorian romanticism of his day. Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads were the uneven first products of McKay’s apprenticeship, and they frequently echoed the standardized, cliché-ridden themes of his West Indian literary predecessors and contemporaries.5
Although McKay’s uniqueness and importance lay in his intense celebration of his rural, specifically black, Jamaican origins, he also affirmed in his poetry his attachment to the lyrical traditions of England and to Western civilization itself. The direction of his schooling had ensured his identity with Western intellectual traditions. On the other hand, his experiences in urban Kingston’s constabulary had awakened in him an acute realization of the wide gap that separated most black Jamaicans from their British rulers. There consequently developed in McKay an intellectual and emotional tension that the dialect poems clearly reflected, not only by their curious and naive mixture of styles and themes, but also by the consistently autobiographical thread that ran through both volumes.
On one very basic level, he remained in the dialect poetry the idealistic, if disillusioned, pupil with a sentimental conception of English cultural and intellectual achievements. Nowhere was this provincial, long-distance infatuation more evident than in the poem “Old England,” where he confessed that for as long as he could remember he had longed “just to view de homeland England” and to see its famous sights. This relatively long poem of seven stanzas revealed not only McKay’s English orientation but also the anti-Christian bent it had taken, for in it he elaborated upon the crumbling structure of Christian faith and indicated his preference for the new scientific rationalism that seemed likely to replace it.6
“Old England” contained abundant examples of McKay’s dialect verse at its worst—painfully forced rhymes, worn poetic clichés (“to sail athwart the ocean an’ to hear de billows roar”), and an overriding sentimentality.7 Despite his nominal use of dialect, in “Old England” McKay did not advance far beyond the derivative traditions of earlier West Indian versifiers.
Other poems, particularly those that reflected his involvement with late Victorian intellectual issues, proved more successful. In one such poem, “Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture,” a Jamaican peasant ruminated on the implications for blacks of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which he had just heard expounded by a British lecturer. Cudjoe’s remarks provided some subtle amendments to the orthodox social Darwinist doctrines of the day, which invariably placed the black man last on the human evolutionary scale. Although he did not have the scientific knowledge to reject-outright the white man’s derogatory image of Africa, in general Cudjoe conceded little to the racism implicit in social Darwinist theory. In fact, he concluded that there was little difference between the two races in the evolutionary scheme.8
“Cudjoe Fresh from de Lecture” also revealed that neither McKay nor his peasant persona had any effective image of Africa to counter the one foisted on them by the white man. Because this image was one of naked barbarism, Africa tended to be rejected throughout McKay’s dialect poetry. In one poem, for example, he said instead that
Jamaica is de nigger’s place,
No mind whe’ some declare;
Aldough dem call we “no land race,”
I know we home is here.9
While Africa may have been only an uncomfortable place from which one long ago escaped, there could be no question about Jamaica. It was home, a place known, accepted, and loved. McKay knew from experience that Jamaica could provide blacks the subsistence needed for them to stand upon their own feet, and what he knew from direct experience he could write about with confidence and authority.
Both Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads included engaging dialect poems that portrayed black Jamaican peasant life in realistic detail. One such poem is “Quashie to Buccra,” in which the black peasant farmer complains to the white buyer that he offers little for his sweet potatoes because he has no notion about the labor involved in their production. Their cultivation, he maintains, “Is killin’ somet’ing for a naygur man.”10 The sun is hot “like when fire ketch a town,” but the farmer “caan’ lie down” until his work is finished. The potato plant will yield in great quantity only if it is given lavish care. The farmer notes that Buccra thinks his field pretty. He then reminds him that with all the attention it has gotten, it could not look otherwise. “Yet still de hardship always melt away / Wheneber it come roun’ to reapin’ day.”11 Although the price may not always be fair, an abundant crop brings its own satisfactions.
It must be noted that Quashie is very much his own man. Although many blacks still labored on sugar plantations and cattle pens in turn-of-the-century Jamaica, they made no appearance in McKay’s dialect poetry. When writing of country life, he invariably took the point of view of the small, independent farmer who produced for both the local and the export markets. Quashie’s potatoes were for the local market.
In McKay’s boyhood, bananas provided the small farmer’s chief revenue on the export market. In “King Banana,” he celebrated its central place in the black farmer’s life.12 The “king banana” was a Martinique variety, known as “mancha” in Jamaica. The poem begins by noting that “Green mancha mek fe naygur man” (that is, blacks liked to eat them green, roasted or baked) while “A buccra fancy when it ripe.”13 In succeeding stanzas, he describes the steps in its cultivation. The underbrush is burned to clear the land and to kill insect pests. The land is then prepared with rake and hoe. These traditional methods produce big strong bunches. After they are cut, the bunches are wrapped in dried banana leaves and are firmly packed in drays to prevent bruising on the way to market. At market, they can always be sold. A few farmers may spend the money thus earned on rum, but others on the return trip home “hab money in t’read bag well.” Whether the money is squandered or saved, the poem concludes, it nevertheless remains true that
Green mancha mek fe naygur man,
It mek fe him all way;
Our islan’ is banana lan’,
Banana car’ de sway.14
Despite their independence, most Jamaican peasants had to struggle just to make ends meet. The demands of large families, the vagaries of weather, and the fluctuations of market prices made life uncertain and often harsh for the average small farmer. Central to his prosperity were the intensely active local markets where he went year round to dispose of his surplus produce. In “Two-an’-Six,” McKay tells the story of Cous’ Sun’s trip to market in a rented dray packed with sugar he had refined at a hired mill. At the market, he finds that “sugar bears no price te-day.” He has to sell his load for a mere “two-an’-six a tin,” far below its normal price. He returns home ashamed and dispirited, with none of the usual treats for the children. His wife consoles him, and together they sit down to count up their profit and loss.
So day k’lated eberyt’ing;
An’ de profit it could bring,
A’ter all de business fix’,
Was a princely two-an’-six.15
“Two-an’-Six” contains its share of sentimentality, but it describes in realistic detail the bare margin upon which most Jamaican small farmers of McKay’s day existed.
Abject poverty was a reality, or at least a constant threat, to every Jamaican peasant. Those who owned sufficient land to gain a modest livelihood never knew when a disastrous drought, flood, hurricane, or other natural catastrophe might reduce them to misery. Resources and economic development were limited in Jamaica, and the hard-pressed peasant often resigned himself to an unending struggle for subsistence. In “Hard Times,” the peasant protagonist proclaims that
De peas won’t pop, de corn can’t grow,
Poor people face look sad;
Dat Gahd would cuss de lan’ I’d know
For black naygur too bad.16
Resignation did not appeal to all. Many Jamaicans migrated to Panama during this period. Others tried their luck elsewhere—on the plantations of nearby Cuba or more distant Costa Rica and Colombia. In all these places, they could earn more than on the local Jamaican plantations, where the presence of imported “coolie” laborers from India had helped drive wages below the subsistence level. A steady trickle of Jamaicans was also leaving for the United States during these years.17
Kingston offered a closer alternative, but few found anything better there than work as unskilled laborers, domestic servants, petty clerks, or small traders. Such jobs generally offered limited opportunities for advancement. Lack of hope sometimes turned women toward prostitution and men toward petty crime and dissipation. In McKay’s youth, most of the grave social problems that today beset the giant, sprawling, run-down metropolis of Kingston could already be seen as growing elements in the city’s daily life.18
As a constab, McKay saw the wide gulf that separated the comfortable social elite from the mass of country folk constantly coming and going in Kingston’s crowded streets. As a young recruit, he had also become aware that the constabulary itself was composed of many young men, not unlike himself, who had joined the police force at least in part to escape the isolation and economic limitations of country life. McKay incorporated these insights into some of his most starkly realistic and effective dialect verse. In “Flat-Foot Drill,” for example, the impatient drill instructor declares he is “boun’ fe swea’”
Dealin’ with you’ class all day,
Neber see such from a barn
“Right tu’n, you damn’ bungo brut’!
Do it so, you mountain man.”19
The idea that joining the constabulary was a way of escaping rural poverty received even more elaborate treatment in “A Midnight Woman to the Bobby.” One of McKay’s most accomplished dialect pieces, it is in the form of an irate monologue delivered by a street prostitute who has just been accosted by a young black policeman on his nightly beat in Spanish Town. The poem is remarkable for its vigorous, forthright use of authentic Jamaican language, as well as for its bitterly ironic commentary on the rural conditions that sometimes forced young men into the constabulary. The “midnight woman” clearly has no respect for a black man in what she perceives as a white man’s uniform, and throughout the poem she heaps scorn upon his African physiognomy, his rural origins, and the abject poverty from which he fled.
An’ when de pinch o’ time you feel
A ‘pur you a you’ chigger heel,
You lef’ you’ district, big an’ coarse,
An’ come join buccra Police Force.20
The black policemen of McKay’s day were, in fact, highly conscious of their ambiguous status as the enforcers of British colonial law.
In 1910, H. G. DeLisser, a white Jamaican author, described the way a black Jamaican policeman would typically intervene in a public argument that threatened to get out of hand. As spectators and participants all tried at once to give their versions of the altercation, the policeman would listen for a moment and then would “inform all and sundry with severity that ‘although I am a black man, I am not a fool’... He is conscious he is a black man: he tells you so. But he does that in order to let you know that you must not presume too much upon that fact.” DeLisser went on to comment on the black Jamaican’s “real attitude toward the government and the law.”
He regards them as something outside of and apart from himself. They are something imposed upon him which he is obliged to respect, but which he does not consider himself identified with, and which he is sometimes inclined to think of as oppressive. The laws are “backra laws.” . . . He doubts the absolute impartiality of the law. He is quite satisfied that the policeman will readily arrest him while leaving his master to go free, though their offense may be the same. Consequently he is no stalwart admirer of the laws or defender of the government; he accepts them as he does the other inevitables of life, . . . [but] he would like to see less of the policeman.21
McKay’s dialect poetry confirms DeLisser’s observations. In his poems of rural life, the white man appears as an intrusive, though not absolutely dominant, presence; he is an annoyance more than an outright oppressor.22 In his poems of black street life in Spanish Town and Kingston, the white presence, ironically acting indirectly through black policemen, becomes more constant and directly oppressive. In “The Apple-Woman’s Complaint,” for instance, a street peddler, informed that she must carry her tray of apples and not place it upon the sidewalk, receives this information as just another example of police harassment.
Black nigger wukin’ laka cow
An’ wipin’ sweat-drops from him brow,
Dough him is dyin’ sake o’ need,
P’lice an’ dem headman boun’ fe feed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ah son-son! dough you’re bastard, yah,
An’ dere’s no one you can call pa,
Jes’ try to ha’ you’ mudder’s min’
An’ Police Force you’ll neber jine.23
McKay’s best dialect poems by far are those that vividly portray the island’s poor and the difficulties under which they lived. There can be no doubt he sympathized and identified with them. Although his own family had achieved a measure of prosperity, he could not ignore the sea of human poverty around him. McKay’s stint with the constabulary had brought him face to face with the injustices of Jamaican social life and the daily tensions, frustrations, and pain they engendered. In a preface to Constab Ballads, he recorded his reactions in a remarkably candid self-analysis:
Let me confess it at once. I had not in me the stuff that goes to the making of a good constable; for I am so constituted that imagination outruns discretion, and it is my misfortune to have a most improper sympathy with wrongdoers. . . . Moreover, I am, by temperament, unadaptive; by which I mean that it is not in me to conform cheerfully to uncongenial usages. We blacks are all somewhat impatient with discipline, and to the natural impatience of my race there was added, in my case, a peculiar sensitiveness which made certain forms of discipline irksome, and a fierce hatred of injustice. Not that I ever openly rebelled; but the rebellion was in my heart, and it was fomented by the inevitable rubs of daily life—trifles to most of my comrades, but to me calamities and tragedies. To relieve my feelings, I wrote poems, and into them I poured my heart in its various moods.24
McKay’s duties as a constab led him to emphasize in his dialect poetry his fundamental identity as a black man and to reaffirm his peasant origins. In one poem, a bobby declines to arrest a servant girl simply because her employer, “the sneering lady,” is angry with her for some minor offense. In another poem, a constab is threatened with dismissal and the return to farm labor. He defiantly replies that such a prospect would be infinitely preferable to the life he had found in the constabulary.25 And, in yet another poem, McKay exclaimed that
Tis grievous to think dat, while toilin’ on here,
My people won’t love me again,
My people, my people, me owna black skin,—
De wretched fought gives me such pain.26
No island poet had ever spoken so directly or at such length of his basic identity as a black man, a peasant, and a Jamaican. As he was to do so often in his life, McKay addressed himself directly in this early poetry to the deeply personal problems of alienation and identity. By donning the uniform of a constab, he separated himself from his black kinsmen in a more obvious way than the separation he experienced as a developing poet and intellectual. The peasants’ lives were deeply rooted in self-sufficient rural folk patterns that enabled them to survive natural catastrophes, the fluctuations of market economics, and decades of governmental neglect. They experienced little benefit from British colonial government and often resented its interference in their lives. Government benefited “high people,” and policemen were their tools.27
To be in such direct conflict with his fellow blacks was intolerable to McKay, and in the dialect poetry he bewailed his enlistment and melodramatically pledged a return to the rural environment of his birth. “For ‘tis hatred without an’ tis hatred within, / An’ how can I live ‘doubten heart?”28
McKay’s best dialect poems are those in which he allowed black Jamaicans such as Quashie, Cudjoe, the “midnight woman,” and the “apple-woman” to speak for themselves. Their rapier wit, ironic awareness, and telling phrases conveyed the real vitality of the Jamaican dialect and the Jamaican common folk. In their monologues, McKay created believable characters and fine poetry. In addition to these dramatic monologues, McKay also used the dialect effectively in such poems as “King Banana” and “Two-an’-Six” to describe various aspects of Jamaican country life. In still other narrative poems, such as “Pay-Day,” “Knutsford Park Races,” and “Papine Corner,” he successfully depicted life in Kingston and its environs. In all these poems, McKay’s use of the dialect remained unequaled until Louise Bennett in the 1940s dedicated herself wholly to Jamaican dialect poetry and drama.29
Less successful, however, were those poems in which McKay attempted to come to terms with his own situation as a man and a poet. Here his use of the dialect faltered under the weight of his peculiar European intellectual inheritance; his personal role confusion as a black intellectual became evident, and he reacted with despair and disillusionment.
To some degree, too, the pessimism that pervaded both Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads was accentuated by McKay’s infatuation with the ideas contained in The Wisdom of Schopenhauer, which Walter Jekyll had edited for the Rationalist Press Association in 1911.30 Jekyll’s translation of selections from Schopenhauer’s writings offered McKay the idea that an impersonal, all-encompassing, and self-aggrandizing will pervaded the world and determined the human situation and human actions. According to Schopenhauer, a man became aware of the existence of will by recognizing its dominance within himself and by then observing its manifestations in nature. In the individual, thought itself served as an instrument of this blind will. Only through withdrawal from the actions of the world could man overcome the insatiable need of this omnivorous force for active dominance. Schopenhauer considered scientific thought ultimately subservient to the will, but he held a different view of art, through which he believed man could achieve knowledge of an archetypal reality that existed independently of the will.31
For a sensitive young man such as McKay, still very unsure of the direction his life should take, Schopenhauer’s bleak and gloomy view of the human situation held a definite romantic appeal. After all, much had happened in his own experience that seemed to confirm the philosopher’s ideas. His father’s unbending Christian morality, his mother’s agonizing death, the strife of constabulary life, the poverty around him, and even the logic of evolutionary theory—all seemed to confirm Schopenhauer’s dreary world view and justify McKay’s own melancholy.32
The only solution obvious to McKay was retreat from the world’s inevitable strife: he would return to the mountains. In the poem “To W.G.G.,” he appealed for a companion to accompany him.
Come to de hills; dey may be drear,
But we can shun de evil here.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
De helpless playt’ing of a Will,
We’ll spend our short days here; an’ still,
Though prisoners, feel somehow free
To live our lives o’ misery.33
Schopenhauer’s reverence for childhood also no doubt appealed to McKay. The old pessimist had written that “childhood was the time of innocence and happiness, the paradise of life, the lost Eden, on which we look longingly back through the whole remaining course of our life.”34 McKay could not have agreed more, and in his dialect poems the blessedness of childhood emerged as a fully developed theme. “Childhood pain could neber las’,”35 but he had wandered far from home and had turned his back on the satisfactions that flowed from the independent existence of the mountain peasantry.
Fool! I hated my precious birthright,
Scornin’ what made my father a man;
Now I grope in de pitchy dark night,
Hate de day when me poo’ life began.36
In one long poem, appropriately entitled “A Dream,” McKay painted an idyllic picture of a typical childhood day in rural Jamaica and bemoaned its irrecoverable loss. “Gone now those happy days when all was blest /. . . The pains, the real in life, I’ve now to bear.”37
Although there was much youthful self-indulgence and sentimental breast-beating in McKay’s development of these themes, his personal dilemma was real. While remaining fundamentally loyal to the black peasantry, he had embraced uncritically the language and themes of European romanticism, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and the scientific rationalism of late Victorian England. Within the context of their own cultures, the great romantics had attempted to transcend the mechanistic rationalism and the impersonal, laissezfaire materialism of the early industrial age. Their concerns were not without relevance to McKay and the Jamaica of his day, but in his dialect poetry he often failed to translate their preoccupations into terms truly applicable to his own situation as a deracinated black intellectual who wished to relate in a meaningful way to his people.
McKay did learn from his European predecessors certain techniques that he put to good use in his Jamaican dialect poetry. The dramatic monologues of the “midnight woman” and the “apple-woman,” for instance, almost certainly reflect Robert Browning’s influence. In My Green Hills, he wrote that in Jamaica “there were ‘Browning Clubs’ where the poetry of Robert Browning was studied but not understood. I had read my poems before many of these societies and the members used to say: ‘Well, he’s very nice and pretty you know, but he’s not a real poet as Browning and Byron and Tennyson are poets.’” Another obvious influence in McKay’s Constab Ballads was Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. At least one En glish review noted the “Kiplingesque” influence in Constab Ballads.38
In general, however, McKay’s dual heritage as a child of black Jamaica and imperial British culture required more than an unsophisticated incorporation of a clichéd English romanticism into Jamaican dialect. Nor would a simple retreat to the countryside of his youth resolve his problems, as he himself recognized.
Tis home again but not the home of yore;
Sadly the scene of bygone days I view,
And as I walk the olden paths once more,
My heart grows chilly as the morning dew.39
These lines are from “A Dream,” McKay’s paean to lost innocence. It was written entirely in standard English. Despite his facility with the dialect, at a most basic level he had also assimilated as his own the language of the dominant culture. He had not yet, however, learned to use its literary traditions to explore thoroughly the nature of his fundamental estrangement. The experience necessary for such an exploration would come later. Meanwhile, one can already see in the dialect poetry certain themes and stylistic responses that would persist in McKay’s later poetry, all of which would be written in standard English. The basic insistence upon the innocence of childhood and a nostalgia for the countryside of his youth would remain. The note of protest present in the dialect poetry would grow stronger, too, and would sound more insistently in his later work. Even in the dialect volumes, the deeply personal expressions of anger, alienation, and rebellion that would characterize his later poetry sometimes broke through. In “Strokes of the Tamarind Switch,” for example, McKay expressed his revulsion at the practice of flogging, which was still inflicted upon Jamaicans convicted of certain crimes.
The cutting tamarind switch
Had left its bloody mark,
And on his legs were streaks
That looked like boiling bark.40
Despite his genuine achievements in Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, these volumes too often betrayed McKay’s literary inexperience, emotional confusion, and intellectual immaturity. In “Bennie’s Departure,” a long description of his affection for and emotional dependence on a fellow recruit in the early days of their enlistment—a description, not incidentally, that bordered upon a passionate declaration of homosexual love—McKay observed that Bennie “was always quick and steady, / Not of wav’rin’ min’ like me.”41 McKay’s “wav’rin’ min’” can in part be attributed to his youthful inexperience and in part to the deep-seated psychological insecurity with which he viewed his future. But his uncertainty was made even more acute by his ambivalent suspension at this stage of his life between the peasant culture and the literate colonial society. All these factors contributed to the stylistic problems and contradictory emotional and intellectual stances in his dialect poetry.
Despite his emotional loyalty to the Jamaican peasantry, his commitment to the dialect was not total because he could not adequately express through his dialect persona all those aspects of his own intellectual and literary experiences that he had assimilated as an educated colonial. His education claimed a part of his being as surely as did his peasant heritage and could not be denied expression, as its awkward manifestation in the dialect attested. Although tied emotionally and racially to the uneducated peasantry, he no longer fully shared their necessarily restricted world view. On the other hand, while sharing the literate consciousness of the race from whom he had acquired his education, he could not identify with it at the deepest levels of his emotions.
Given this dual estrangement, the wonder is not that so much of McKay’s dialect poetry was bad but that he achieved in it as much as he did. In his later poetry and novels, he would handle the problems of alienation and identity with greater self-consciousness and with more sophistication.42
Late in 1911, while awaiting the publication of Songs of Jamaica, McKay returned to Sunny Ville and attempted to assume the role of peasant-poet he had projected for himself in the dialect poetry. He moved into a small thatched cottage on his father’s land and cultivated “peas and corn and yams.” They were, he explained, “mostly light crops which gave me quick returns.” But just as before, and to an even greater degree, he found he could not fit comfortably into the life around him. “The old embarrassment was always there. People knew that I was a poet, and that made me different, although I wanted so much to be like them. Even my closest friends at home were never the same. I tried to be as simple as simple, but they would never accept me with the old simplicity. Truly I must admit that I was much happier in Kingston where I went with the crowd and nobody knew me; or when I was up at Mr. Jekyll’s where it was not at all embarrassing to be known and accepted as a poet.”43 His stay in Sunny Ville proved a brief, unsatisfactory interlude and lasted only a few months. Far from finding contentment, McKay in 1912 began to move inexorably toward active involvement in island economic and social controversy. He also began to plan a career for himself that would involve further education outside Jamaica.
Although Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads clearly revealed McKay’s general concern for the extreme poverty and social disadvantages of the colony’s black peasantry, neither of these volumes contained his poetry of social commentary, which appeared in the local newspapers after he left the constabulary. Late in 1911 and periodically throughout 1912, the Daily Gleaner and the Jamaica Times published poems by McKay in which he dealt with historically specific occurrences and situations of concern to Jamaica’s government and population.
One of these poems, “Christmas in de Air,” appeared in the Jamaica Times on December 16, 1911. In the form of a monologue uttered by a penniless Jamaican farmer, it commented extensively upon the wretched economic conditions of poor Jamaicans and the indifference of the colonial government to their plight. Typically, the farmer has an ailing wife and several children. They are facing drought, general crop failure, a lack of cash, and actual hunger. The farmer looks at the possibility of wage labor but finds nothing adequate to support his family.
Wuk is shet do’n ‘pon de road,
An’ plantation pay no good.
Whole day ninepance for a man!
Wha’ dah come to dis ya Ian?
Meanwhile, he observes, the government does nothing about the high price of food. And furthermore, “Not a single wud is said / ‘Bouten taxes to be paid.” They have to be paid every year, even “though dere’s hunger in the air.” The government, the merchants, and the large planters are not hurt. Their profits must come before the desperate needs of the island’s poor.
While we’re sufferin’ in pain
Dem can talk ‘bout surplus gain;
O me God! de sad do’n-care,
An’ dere’s Hard Times in de air.44
The references to “surplus gain” and to Hard Times, Charles Dickens’ novel of capitalist greed, are clear proof of McKay’s early conviction that Jamaica’s poverty had to be understood within the context of an economic system whose profitability for merchants and plantation owners was ultimately derived by denying the laboring masses any chance for a decent living.
McKay’s Christmas complaint reflected actual economic hardships. Throughout 1911 and 1912, the Jamaica Times reported upon rural conditions and periodically ran a page-one letters-to-the-editor section entitled “The People’s Parliament,” in which the causes of Jamaica’s poverty were frequently debated by its readers. The staid Daily Gleaner also reported extensively upon adverse economic conditions throughout the island, but to a much greater degree, the Times reflected the frustrations and aspirations of Jamaica’s struggling black majority.45
In March and April of 1911, for example, the Times reported upon the depressed economic condition of upper Clarendon and described the hopes of the people there that an extension of the railroad from May Pen to Chapelton would bring prosperity to the region. As work proceeded on the railway, the Times and the Gleaner duly noted the laborers’ complaints of extremely low wages and contractors’ deceptions about wage agreements.46 One of the most interesting protests came from Claude’s brother, U’Theo McKay. In a letter to the Times, he confirmed that the road laborer was sometimes being cheated out of his just wages. Because his work was vital to progress, U’Theo stated, “a man like this should get the reward of his labor. . . . The work on the New Roads and on the new rail line in Clarendon furnishes many cases in which he has not been rewarded for his toil. Surely it won’t be long before the horny handed sons of toil are given ample protection for every day the world is awakening more and more to their great importance.”47 In part, U’Theo’s remarks reflected his reading of Lord Sidney Olivier’s Capital and Labor in the West Indies, in which Jamaica’s new Fabian Socialist governor had argued against the traditional plantation system and for the small peasant landholder as the future backbone of a more equitable economic system in the West Indies. U’Theo may have also remembered his own father’s beginnings as a road mender.48
It was against such a background of public concern and controversy that Songs of Jamaica appeared in early January, 1912. The Jamaica Times editor, Thomas H. MacDermot, gave it a glowing review. He complimented its local publisher, Aston W. Gardner, for competence in producing the book. He also paid tribute to Walter Jekyll’s concise introductory remarks on the nature of the Jamaican dialect and “in passing” praised “the tactful and able help [Jekyll] had given in guiding these poems into publication in a form so creditable to all concerned.”49
MacDermot’s praise of McKay was heartfelt and bountiful. He noted McKay’s rich lyric gift and predicted that the young poet was “destined” like “one of our mountain springs ... to yield a great deal more of work as excellent as this, and still more so. . . . We venture to say it; here we have a poet.” While MacDermot admitted that the poems in Songs of Jamaica varied in quality and that some might have “more wisely been left out,” he nevertheless maintained that “as a whole, and speaking of the great majority of the poems, we have here outstanding merit. It is absolutely correct to say that the publication of this volume is an event of note in Jamaican literature.” MacDermot went on to point out the variety found in McKay’s poems, their “humour and pathos,” their “spontaneity of feeling, and the facility with which feeling finds varied forms of expression.” He took special note of the realism of many of the poems and asserted that they “give us genuine pictures of life in the countryside as it can be seen today by those who have eyes to see.” A few poems he found too didactic; others had obviously forced rhyme schemes that led to a lack of “lyric ease and flow.” These flaws, he predicted, would be overcome with practice. All in all, McKay had clearly found an ally in MacDermot, who in closing extended “a hearty sincere welcome to Songs of Jamaica. . . . It does its author credit; it does Jamaica credit, Jamaica who has produced him. We shall look forward to his future . . . with confidence.”50 The book also received favorable, if more restrained, notice in the Daily Gleaner and in other newspapers and journals in more distant parts of the empire. For the rest of the year, McKay received fairly frequent notice in both the Times and the Gleaner, and published poems in them with fair regularity.51
The Daily Gleaner of January 27, 1912, published a long poem (124 lines) by McKay entitled “Peasants’ Way O’ Thinkin’,” which again described the economic bind faced by Jamaica’s poor. This time the peasant narrator begins by commenting at length on whether import tariffs should be lowered or removed, a question that had been debated extensively for months in the Jamaican press. He asserts that the question has been debated too long by the government. Why not, he maintains, listen to the poor? After all, they know their own interests, and they most certainly know that a reduction of duties upon food imports would benefit them, not to mention reductions on other items such as clothes.
We wouldn’ mind ef dem could try
Mek calico cheaper fe buy;
Tek duty off o’ we blue shirt
An also off o’ we t’atch hut.
Mention of the house tax signals an expansion of view. The peasant narrator proceeds to question whether tariff reduction would in fact lead to prosperity for the poor. After all, wages are extremely low. Furthermore, the East Indian, the Chinese, and above all, the petty Syrian merchants on the island squeeze the peasants for every possible penny and keep them in debt by selling them “fripp’ries an’ de fin’ries” on trust. And to top it all, he continues, we are always reading
“in dese ya modern days / Wha’ foreigners think of our ways.” In some respect, he says, their comments are funny and even flattering “an’ giv to life a bit o’ spice.” But, he adds, the things written about us do not really reveal the way we think.
For hardly can de buccra find
What passin’ in de black man’s mind;
He tellin’ us we ought to stay,
But dis is wha’ we got to say:
“We hea’ a callin’ from Colon,
We hea’ a callin’ from Limon.
Let’s quit de t’ankless toil an’ fret
Fe where a better pay we’ll get.”
Although they may miss Jamaica and its free and easy ways, they will at least be able to make a decent living abroad, “And dere’ll be cash fe sen’ back home.”52
Having stated the case for migration, the narrator then observes that since Jamaica is home, “we’re boun’ to come back here some day.” And then with bittersweet irony, he concedes what the rest of the poem explicitly denies, namely that the poor peasant will then be stereotypically contented with his lot.
We may n’t be rich like buccra folk’
For us de white, for dem de yolk;
Da’s de way dat the egg divide.
An’ we content wi’ de outside.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A piece o’ lan’ fe raise two goat,
A little rum fe ease we t’roat,
A little cot fe res’ we head—
An’ we’re contented tell we dead.53
In “Peasants’ Way O’ Thinkin’” McKay used the dialect with irony and restraint to present the authorities and the literate public a serious message: that Jamaican blacks were far from naively contented with their lot.
By late February, 1912, popular discontent surfaced in Kingston in a well-organized campaign of direct action against an increase in streetcar fares. The Canadian-owned streetcar firm in the city had long been losing public confidence because of its failure to provide the adequate and reliable services promised in its public franchise. Public dissatisfaction became militant during the last week in February when the company decided to reduce the number of tickets that could be purchased for a shilling from seven to six. The price increase amounted to little more than a farthing, or a fourth of a penny.
Opposition to the fare increase took the form of a campaign of “passive resistance.” The public was urged to stop buying groups of tickets ahead of time. Organized groups instead began to board the trolley cars, each individual insisting on paying the individual twopence fare in farthings, which he would slowly and deliberately count out to the harassed conductor. Then he would demand a voucher, or receipt, which the company by law was obliged to provide upon request. From the first, the “passive resisters” appeared well organized, determined, and good-natured. By Friday, February 23, they had succeeded in blocking all services. On that same day, two men among the demonstrators were finally arrested for refusing to pay the fare without first obtaining vouchers, which the conductors had refused to issue. The arrests excited public anger and resulted in even larger crowds along the streetcar lines the following day. On Saturday, demonstrators packed the cars and more surrounded them on the outside, effectively disrupting all service.54
On Sunday, service resumed until about four in the afternoon, when “the resisters” returned, this time followed by “hooligans” and “more ignorant and wilder” elements who precipitated violence. Many cars were damaged and one was burned. Once again service was brought to a standstill. In desperation, the streetcar company appealed to the government for additional protection. On Monday night, a peaceful demonstration by the “passive resisters” in downtown Kingston attracted a large crowd. Once again, violence erupted, despite efforts by the “passive resisters” to contain the crowd. In the midst of the ensuing pandemonium, Governor Olivier arrived on the scene and attempted to address the mob. Wading into the crowd in an effort to restrain passions, he was stoned by a few before cooler heads could stop them. He escaped the indignity without serious injury, the riot act was read, and the crowd was dispersed by police gunfire and batons. One rioter was shot and killed.55
While deploring mob violence and looking with apprehension and disfavor upon the tactics of the “passive resisters,” neither the Daily Gleaner nor the Times supported the streetcar line in the dispute. They instead appealed for restraint on all sides and urged the government and the courts to take steps to correct the tangled problems of public transportation in Kingston. The Jamaica Times believed that the only solution lay in government ownership of the streetcar lines. In the aftermath of the rioting, the Times also cautioned “the country people” that the dispute in Kingston was between the people and the streetcar company, not between the people and the government.56
For a while, it appeared that the passive resistance movement against the streetcar line had been killed by the violence of its less restrained supporters, but late in March the passive resisters staged a surprising comeback and threatened once again to shut down the line. This time they were effectively contained by arrests and lawsuits. They did not bow out, however, without a strong fight and a final, militant assertion of defiance in the form of a strongly worded poem by Claude McKay, which appeared in the Gleaner on April 6, 1912. Although there exists no evidence to indicate that McKay actually participated in any of the demonstrations in February, March, and April, his poem provides proof enough of his total support of the passive resisters. Although entitled “Passive Resistance,” the poem ended on a note of defiance that threatened to match blow for blow, if violence should be visited upon the demonstrators.
There’ll be no more riotin’,
Stonin’ p’lice an’ burnin’ car;
But we mean to gain our rights
By a strong though bloodless war.
We will show an alien trust
Dat Jamaicans too can fight
An’ dat while our blood is hot,
They won’t crush us wi’ deir might.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We’ll keep up a bloodless war,
We will pay the farthings-fare
An’ we send the challenge forth,
“Only touch us if you dare!”57
McKay’s passionate assertion of the right of self-defense anticipated in tone and substance the militant protest poetry he would later write in the United States. McKay’s highly developed sensitivity to injustice made him a potential rebel in Jamaica, long before he became aware of American racial prejudice.
Jamaican history abounded with stories to spark his rebellious imagination. In the late fall of 1911, he recalled one famous island rebellion against injustice in a poem he submitted to T.P.’s Weekly of London, which solicited entries for an empire poetry competition. On May 3, 1912, the Gleaner announced that McKay had been awarded one of the prizes given by the London weekly for his poem “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives,” a celebration of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. In the poem, the mulatto politician George Gordon exhorts the “oppressed natives” to rise and crush those in Jamaica who would hold them in semiservitude and undo the great work of the English abolitionists who had freed them. In fact, Gordon never urged rebellion, but McKay obviously needed to believe in him as a Jamaican hero who courageously led black men in revolt against grave injustices. Thus, we hear McKay speaking through his mythical hero.
In the poem, the Morant Bay rebels are addressed as “sons of Afric soil,” who are “Dyin’ in a foreign land.” They are urged to crush the few who would deny them their legitimate freedom. The great abolitionists are invoked by name, and the rebels are reminded that no Englishman would ever bow beneath the kind of tyranny that oppresses them. A final appeal is then made:
Rise, O people of my kind
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Fight for freedom’s rights you blacks,
Ring de slaves’ old battle-song!58
In an unpublished fragment of My Green Hills of Jamaica, McKay maintained that in Jamaica, Gordon was a legendary hero whom “the peasants always talked about.” He recalled that when “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” was republished in Jamaica, “it was denounced by the leading ministers of various denominations as inciting to riot; but Mr. Jekyll wrote the Daily Gleaner that it was only a poet’s way of expressing his appreciation of a great personality.”59 Gordon had long held a special fascination for McKay. Another Jamaican newspaper, the Jamaican Tribune, had published a prize-winning essay he had written as a schoolboy on Gordon and the Morant Bay Rebellion.60
McKay’s outpouring of verse critical of Jamaican social and economic conditions might have caused concern in such conservative bastions as the established church and government circles, but he received no criticism from the leading newspapers of the day. Even the conservative Daily Gleaner welcomed McKay’s verse. The only extended controversy he aroused occurred after the Jamaica Institute’s decision in late April to award its Musgrave Silver Medal for distinguished achievement to Maxwell Hall, an English meteorologist who had studied the aftereffects of the great Kingston earthquake in 1907. The decision prompted T. H. MacDermot in a Jamaica Times editorial on March 9 to question the institute’s judgment. He said that McKay had been recommended for the award and maintained that the institute might have been better advised to seize the opportunity to recognize the talents and accomplishments of a native Jamaican writer. “However,” he concluded, “it is some honour for Mr. McKay that his work should have been proposed for the medal though it did not get it—this time.”61
In an anonymous letter to the Gleaner, a writer who signed himself “Truth” showed much more animosity to the institute’s board of governors, whom he accused of passing McKay over because of snobbery and ignorance of genuine literature.62 At the end of March, another anonymous writer, “Jamaican,*’ in a letter to the Times defended the institute’s decision. He noted that Songs of Jamaica was only McKay’s first book. Though “a very creditable first,” he asked if it was “not a little hasty on the strength of this alone to give him such a prize?” Some of the poems in the volume, he pointed out, were indeed good, others were only passable. “Then,” he continued, “we must remember that he had in preparing the volume for press, the help of a scholar like Mr. Jekyll.” The writer surmised that Mr. Jekyll had recommended McKay for the award. But wasn’t it reasonable, he wondered, to ask if Songs of Jamaica was McKay’s best work? In future works, perhaps, he would grow as a poet. In this light, the board’s decision not to give the award to McKay appeared reasonable. “Surely,” the writer concluded, “the Board of Governors must be credited with independence of judgment and a resolve not merely to toady to the opinion of even so good a scholar as Mr. Jekyll, when they reached the decision they did.”63
In his reply, MacDermot stated that in his original editorial on the subject, he had “recalled previous mistakes by the Board (or its Secretary Frank Cundall) in recognizing island talent to suggest that the opportunity might well have been seized to mark a complete break with old, unhappy far-off things, ‘even’ we may now add, if it did go a little too far in the other direction.”64 MacDermot’s campaign on McKay’s behalf brought results. A short item in the Daily Gleaner on May 4 reported that “Mr. De Lisser gave notice that at the next meeting of the Jamaica Institute’s Board of Governors he would move that Mr. Claude McKay’s claim for a Musgrave Silver Medal be considered.”65 At the end of 1912, after the appearance of Constab Ballads, the institute relented and awarded McKay, along with Hall, a medal.66
By then, however, McKay had left Jamaica. While the controversy over the Musgrave medal was developing, Claude was deciding to seek further education abroad. He had long since discovered he could not simply reintegrate himself into the community life of Sunny Ville as a poet-farmer. His family background, education, talent, and accomplishments obviously set him apart as one destined for a higher station in life. If he wished to remain among the peasantry, he must prepare to relate to them in a professional capacity both he and they could respect as natural and progressive.
Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute had been much in the news ever since the Daily Gleaner had first announced in October, 1911, that the International Conference on the Negro would be held there in April, 1912.67 In succeeding months both the Gleaner and the Times covered in detail the selection of Jamaican and other West Indian delegates to the conference. The Times in particular took a great interest in the event. As the conference date drew nearer, its editor advised Jamaica’s delegates not to feel inferior in their accomplishments vis-à-vis American blacks. Although smaller, Jamaica had also produced eminent men. Americans, he observed, needed to be educated about the realities of life in Jamaica. Earlier, the Timers “The People’s Parliament” had printed a long letter from a union of West Indian students attending Tuskegee, describing the school, its courses and costs, and explaining the steps necessary to gain admission.68
The conference coincided with the arrival in Jamaica of Miss Henrietta Vinton Davis, a black American “elocutionist,” who toured the island with another black American entertainer, Madame Naomi Bailey Hardy, an accomplished contralto. McKay persuaded Walter Jekyll to attend one of their performances in Kingston. Afterward, McKay met Miss Davis, who spoke in glowing terms of the wonderful work being done at Tuskegee. Her personal friendship with Booker T. Washington no doubt made her description of his school even more appealing to the troubled young poet, who had not yet found a way to support himself in Jamaica.69
Thus in the spring of 1912, McKay saw a way to further himself professionally and to remain in intimate touch with his origins: he would study agronomy at Tuskegee.
Walter Jekyll was horrified at the idea. So was T. H. MacDermot, who had by then become friends with McKay. They both reminded him that in the United States he would face a harsh, unrelenting white racism very different from the color-graded class consciousness found in Jamaica. Knowing his sensitivity and emotional vulnerability, they feared the harshly restrictive conditions of black American life would damage him emotionally, if not actually endanger his life. In My Green Hills of Jamaica, McKay recalled that MacDermot had said to him, “Claude, we hate to see you go because you will be changed, terribly changed by America.”70
At the time, such warnings meant little to McKay. He had been assured by Miss Davis and later by Dr. W. H. Plant, one of Jamaica’s delegates to the 1912 conference, that he would feel safe and well protected amid Tuskegee’s large student body. Washington’s careful management of the school had won him and his students a measure of respect in the larger community. Despite the generally deplorable state of race relations in the United States, McKay was assured he would have little to fear at Tuskegee. This was just what he wished to hear.71
In his mind’s eye, Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee loomed as beacons of black hope and accomplishment. As a symbol of progress in a progressive age, Washington’s achievements at Tuskegee, real and imaginary, obscured from McKay’s distant gaze the hard realities of American race relations. Besides, just as Washington symbolized hope for every black man the world over who knew of him, America held special significance for mankind in general, including black Jamaicans. As McKay later recalled, “Going to America was the greatest event in the history of our hills; America was the land of education and opportunity. . . . It was a new land to which all people who had youth, and a youthful mind turned. Surely there would be opportunity in this land even for a Negro.”72 Were not Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute proof?
Having resolved in his own mind the dilemma of what to do with his future, McKay returned to Sunny Ville full of hope. He continued farming. He also organized a James Hill Literary Society, which by June had thirty-five members. On June 5, 1912, the society sponsored “An Evening with Present Day Jamaican Writers.” MacDermot of the Times did not let the occasion pass without notice. In reporting the event, he stressed that it was “so much in a line” with the Times’s own policy over the years of “trying to bring Jamaica literary talent to the front” that he felt compelled to “give up space to an account of it, though our columns are hard pressed. We must have such a meeting fully on record.” MacDermot printed the entire program, which consisted of twenty-seven recitations from the works of various contemporary Jamaicans, including McKay, DeLisser, and MacDermot, as well as lesser lights, most of whom have been long since forgotten. McKay read from DeLisser’s works; other members of the society recited McKay’s poems and the works of the other authors represented. Besides Claude, U’Theo, Hubert, and Nathaniel McKay participated in the recitations. An “unusually large turn-out of members and visitors” attended, and the Times reported that “a very enjoyable evening was spent[;] although a select literary treat, it was nowhere behind in laughter and fun. The humorous side was much in evidence.”73
As the society’s secretary and the one who planned the event, Claude opened the evening’s entertainment. After the recitations, the society’s president, one E. A. Haynes, remarked “in a neat speech . . . that it was a great thing for Jamaica when such a fine literary treat could be given exclusively by her writers all [save two] native born. The descendants of slaves and their masters equally taking their place in the field of literature.” He went on to urge all Jamaicans to support their writers by buying and reading their books. “Who would have thought,” he concluded, “that say two decades back, such an enjoyable time could be spent without going to English and American books for the necessary pieces?”74
To MacDermot, such an occasion deep in the remote hills of Clarendon must have seemed miraculous proof that his long campaign to promote a specifically Jamaican literary consciousness had begun at last to bear fruit. For those who had staged the event, it represented one more step away from the shadows of slavery toward a new sense of island unity and purpose. More than thirty years later, U’Theo would invite the young dialect poet Louise Bennett to participate in yet another evening of Jamaican song and story in his native Clarendon.75
Claude, almost certainly, derived satisfaction from the success of the 1912 event. But he was already looking forward, a little nervously perhaps, to bigger successes. Constab Ballads was already in production and would be published in the late fall. He had accomplished much in 1912, but he still harbored doubts about the path he had taken as a poet. He knew his dialect verse was good as dialect verse. He still believed, however, along with other Jamaicans of his day, that to prove himself a real poet he would have to produce poems in standard English that reflected the great traditions of English verse. During the course of the year he had recited his dialect poetry before several island literary groups. They had all received him politely and had even praised his verse, but their reservations disturbed him. He remained too much a product of his time and place not to feel that he had yet to prove himself as a poet.
As he recalled in My Green Hills of Jamaica, “I used to think I would show them something. Someday I would write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them because they thought I was not serious, simply because I wrote poems in the dialect which they did not consider profound.”76 In Jamaica he had found neither a suitable career nor that exact poetic voice he could indisputably call his own. In the United States, perhaps, he could find both. In many respects, he fit into an easily recognizable mold. He had become the talented provincial, restless to explore the metropolis and, despite all his uncertainties, ready to test his metde in the larger world. As he afterward confessed to Frank Harris, at the back of his mind in 1912 “there had really been the dominant desire to find a bigger audience. Jamaica was too small for high achievement. There one was isolated, cut off from the great currents of life.” In Banana Bottom, McKay wrote of one character, a hill country musician, that “the peasants took Crazy Bow as a fine fiddler for the hill country, but laughed at the idea of greatness in him. Greatness could not exist in the backwoods. Nor anywhere in the colony. To them and to all islanders greatness was a foreign thing.”77
Jekyll had become reconciled to McKay’s going to Tuskegee. Always a great proponent of a prosperous, independent peasantry, he responded positively to McKay’s decision to study agronomy. Jekyll envisioned McKay returning to Jamaica to become a government agricultural instructor. Such a position would enable him to remain in touch with his sources as a dialect poet. Although McKay never specified the exact sum, Jekyll paid a significant portion of his school expenses. By the early summer, all arrangements had been made for McKay to enter Tuskegee in the fall. Until his departure in August, he had only to enjoy himself.78
The local folk helped him with his crops in return for a share of the proceeds. He had plenty of time to swim, party, and relax with friends. He always remembered that last summer in Clarendon as a time of almost idyllic pleasure. He grew especially close to Eulalie Imelda Lewars, a young daughter of a large neighboring clan. Her mellow brown skin and pretty face enchanted him, and she was bright, too, with every chance to win a scholarship when she finished her local education. On the whole, the Lewars were not inclined to scholarship. They were simple, warmhearted people who lacked the driving intensity of the darker McKays. They were nonetheless proud of Eulalie and thought it perhaps a good thing that such an accomplished young man as Claude should take an interest in her.79
Aside from their budding romance, Claude enjoyed above all else the local tea meetings, many of which he attended as a guest of honor. A major form of entertainment among the peasants, tea meetings were, in fact, not teas at all but dances that went on until late in the night. Staged in the open yards of their host, tea meetings followed a well-defined pattern of eating, drinking, and dancing, interspersed with deliberately exaggerated, ritual speech-making and climaxed by the auctioning off of pieces of specially baked bread. Symbolically, the bread represented the “crown” or “gate” of the village where the tea meeting was being held. The young men of the village were expected to protect their village gate by banding together and collectively outbidding all who would buy it at auction. To lose their gate to rivals from other villages meant some loss of face and rarely occurred. The crown, once bought, usually went to the suecessful bidder’s favorite girl. The money spent for crown and gate amply covered the host’s expenses for the evening’s entertainment. Claude loved the homey pageantry, excitement, and warm community intimacy of these events. For the young men of the hill country, tea meetings also provided opportunities to attract and win new lady friends.80
Good church members, of course, frowned upon tea meetings, with their drinking, dancing, flirtatious courting, and general atmosphere of irreverent hilarity. Claude recalled in My Green Hills of Jamaica that “my father did not like these affairs and thought they were bad for me, but as I was going away to America I was privileged to do anything.”81 The summer sped quickly along, and soon the parties were over. McKay had arranged to leave from Port Antonio on Jamaica’s northern coast in a United Fruit Company passenger-cargo ship, but late in July he first went to Kingston to say goodbye to all his friends there.
Walter Jekyll declined to see him off when he left Kingston for Port Antonio. “Mr. Jekyll did not come to see me off. He said he couldn’t stand it and might possibly break down and cry in public which he didn’t want to do. So I went up to his place to say farewell.” There he saw again all the people he had met over the years in his visits to Jekyll’s home at Mavis Bank. Many, he later recalled, “thought I would have been better off if I had gone to Europe but everybody wanted me to go someplace.”82
Returning to Kingston, he visited friends there, including T. H. MacDermot, and then went to Port Antonio to meet his girlfriend for “three glorious days” of “bathing on the beach and eating fried fish.” Very likely, his girl was Eulalie Imelda Lewars, for she told him upon his departure, “Remember to send for me when you’re settled in America and I will go anyplace where you are because I love you.”83 Two years later he would send for her.
In early August, at the age of twenty-one, McKay left from Port Antonio for the United States. After his departure, two farewell poems, both written in standard English, appeared in the local papers. Both were highly revealing confessions of his feelings on leaving his birthplace. “To a Friend” appeared in the Jamaica Times. It was both an admission of weakness and fear and a vow to overcome such shortcomings within himself. In the poem he bid an emotional farewell and confessed that his friend knew full well the personal uncertainties and fears that had beset him in the weeks before his departure. His comrade had sustained him but “henceforward ... I must depend upon myself alone.”
. . . comrade true,
The boy you know
Will come back home a man:
He means to make you proud of him,
Hell breast the waves and strongly swim
And conquer,—for he can.84
Obviously a bad poem, it nonetheless revealed those qualities of hesitancy and dependency, paradoxically combined with ambition and audacity, that would always characterize McKay’s personality. The other valedictory poem, “Clarendon Hills, Farewell,” which the Gleaner published, contained an equally revealing message, one that implied his trip might be much more than a temporary departure for educational purposes. In it, he confessed his estrangement from Clarendon. In returning there, he had “hoped to find repose” but instead found “old sad woes,” which led him to conclude that
Tis you that cause them, for in those day-dreams
Wherein I chiefly live I find of late
My love for you is turning into hate.
He then hears his reader accuse him of being fickle. Will he love one day and hate the next? Is that not breaking “faith with your old associates”? To which the poet slyly replies that “hills have no heart. . . / And taking love from them, to make amends, /1 give a double portion to my friends.”85 The hills McKay had loved had been the soft, comforting hills of infancy where “childhood pain could neber las’.”86 Now that he was an adult, the hard realities of life in Clarendon were apparent to him. He meant to escape.
T H. MacDermot truly appreciated McKay’s potential as a poet, and he wished to see that potential realized in Jamaica. McKay’s departure left him with uneasy forebodings and a distinct sense of loss. In the Jamaica Times of August 10, 1912, he described his final meeting with McKay.
We parted in Kingston and our surroundings were dust, hot zinc roofs, noise and other city horrors. But I think we felt we were away in the woods listening to some quietly murmuring brooklet and catching the notes of the John-to-whit concerning which that very week this paper printed a song, by McKay. He is off to a training center in America, to study agriculture and he is not likely to be back within three years. My heart smites me at the thought. Change he must in some things, still I feel pretty confident that the inner man of native modesty and simple beauty is going to defy “the world’s coarse finger and thumb.” [His] is a lovable disposition and after we [parted] I felt that Jamaica was suddenly a lonely place.87
Although he could not have known it when he left in August’of 1912, McKay was destined never to return to Jamaica. In the future, the Jamaica he would recall would not be the class-ridden colony of hard poverty and limited opportunities he had written about in his socially conscious dialect poems. It would be the proud, lovely, independent island land he had enshrined forever as part of that lost, idyllic childhood of his imagination. It would be this ideal Jamaica of childhood memory that would nourish him through the restless adventures that lay ahead.