The apprehension Thomas MacDermot felt on the eve of Claude McKay’s departure from Jamaica arose from the sure knowledge that the sensitive young poet would face in the United States a system of race relations that differed radically from his island experience. In Jamaica, there existed a legal structure that theoretically allowed civil equality to all while effectively maintaining a class system that masked a continued discrimination based on race.
Over the years, blacks with education, ability, and property had slowly joined the traditional white and mulatto elites as part of a ruling gentry that subordinated racial differences in the interests of class harmony. While the great black majority remained fated by poverty, illiteracy, and governmental neglect to a permanently inferior status, they suffered few of the brutal denials of legal rights that characterized American race relations during this same period. No elaborate system of formal racial segregation daily reminded black Jamaicans of the social disabilities that in fact still crippled their chances of upward mobility. Along with Jamaicans of all complexions, blacks enjoyed normal civil liberties and a social intercourse largely unfettered by legal restrictions based on race.1
By contrast, blacks in the United States, who constituted at most only about 12 percent of the country’s population, lived amid a large white majority whose racial prejudices imposed severe limits on black participation in every aspect of national existence. In fact, the status of Afro-Americans in the early twentieth century had reached its lowest level since the Civil War. By legal and illegal means, the Reconstruction amendments guaranteeing them full citizenship had been largely circumvented, especially in the South, and blacks had once again been pushed by the combined forces of law and popular prejudice into a permanently inferior color caste. The white majority that towered over them was by turn benevolently paternalistic and viciously repressive. In such a system, Afro-Americans were at best looked upon as creatures to pity and, at worst, as objects of contempt.2
Nothing in Claude McKay’s life could have prepared him for the harsh realities he would face upon his arrival in the United States. In Jamaica he had experienced life at all levels of the social structure. And although he had ardently championed the black peasantry and poor city folk in his dialect poetry, he himself had been spared the personal humiliations experienced by those at the very bottom of the island’s social structure, no matter how much he recognized their suffering as his own. The McKays were a proud, independent, black Jamaican family who expected to be judged by their ability and achievements. As the youngest McKay, Claude inherited in full measure his family’s social aggressiveness and sensitivity to class and racial nuances.3
At the age of twenty-one, Claude McKay remained a young man still unsure of his proper role in life. He combined a bold and adventurous mind with a certain need for personal support from an authority figure he could trust and respect. In Jamaica, U’Theo and Walter Jekyll had successively assumed this role for him. In the United States, he looked to Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute for similar support. When he left Jamaica, he did not know that Washington’s leadership was already being seriously challenged within black America by new leaders who scorned his compromises with southern segregationists and northern paternalists.4
When McKay disembarked in Charleston, South Carolina, in the late summer of 1912, he encountered a system of racial segregation that effectively denied blacks any social or civil intercourse with the white majority except as menials or supplicants. Any deviation from this pattern by blacks in the American South exposed them to severe rebuke, imprisonment, or even death at the hands of a lynch mob. McKay later wrote of the surprise, horror, and anger he experienced when he discovered for himself the nature of American racial prejudices. “I had heard of prejudice in America but never dreamed of it being so intensely bitter; for at home there is also prejudice of the English sort, subtle and dignified, rooted in class distinction—color and race being hardly taken into account. . . . At first I was horrified, my spirit revolted against the ignoble cruelty and blindness of it all. Then I soon found myself hating in return but this feeling couldn’t last for to hate is to be miserable.” McKay tried to avoid being consumed by bitterness. “I ceased to think of people and things in the mass—why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitten and probably transformed into a mad dog myself?” He instead turned to “the individual soul, the spiritual leaders, for comfort and consolation.”5 In times of great stress this type of contemplative retreat would not prove sufficient; in his poetry, McKay would eventually deal much more completely and thoroughly with his hatred of American racial prejudices.
In Charleston, he found white restaurants, water fountains, rest-rooms, and other public facilities closed to him. And where their black counterparts existed, he almost invariably found them inferior to those for whites. For the black traveler, public conveniences that whites took for granted often simply did not exist. On the train from Charleston to Tuskegee, for example, McKay probably rode with others of his race jammed into a dingy segregated coach with no dining-car service. There must have been moments on that journey through the cool pine woods and hot cotton fields of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama when he simply sat in stunned silence. Then, as later, he no doubt found relief in the matter-of-fact vitality and human warmth with which so many native blacks coped with their everyday humiliations. After all, he was not alone. In America, people of his race numbered in the millions. From the common man among them, as well as from their leaders and intellectuals, he would learn much.
Tuskegee, however, proved a disappointment. He noted in 1918 that he had been repelled by the “semi-military, machinelike existence there,” but he never elaborated upon his dissatisfaction in any subsequent writings.6 One can only conclude that McKay found the regimentation of student life personally intolerable. He had always resented discipline imposed upon him by others, whether by members of his family or by the Jamaican constabulary; he had enjoyed the pleasures of independence in Jamaica and had probably looked forward to even more in the United States. The student regulations and much of the curriculum at Tuskegee must have seemed to him designed for children. He was, after all, twenty-two and could discipline himself. He would not be told how to order his life.
More important, perhaps, Tuskegee provided him with few intellectual challenges. The school emphasized vocational training and the development of character and habits presumably acceptable to the great American middle class. Booker T. Washington’s goals were survival, acceptance, and economic success. And as Tuskegee’s ruler made clear, his program sought to take students from the poorest and most unpromising environments in the Deep South and recondition them into model citizens through a combination of hard work, discipline, moral training, and a basic education that usually did not go beyond the high school level. For a mature student such as McKay, whose literary education already equaled, perhaps exceeded, that of his teachers, the limited academic program at Tuskegee could not have provided much challenge. There were well-trained teachers at Tuskegee, but their classroom efforts were generally Aimed at students much less well prepared than McKay.7
Whatever the reasons for his disenchantment at Tuskegee, McKay in 1912 remained awed by Washington’s commanding presence. After Washington’s death in 1915, McKay movingly evoked the reverence he had felt in the presence of Tuskegee’s leader:
I vividly recall the noon-day hour
You walked into the wide and well-filled hall;
We rose and sang, at the conductor’s call,
Dunbar’s Tuskegee hymn. A splendid tower
of strength, as would a gardener on the flower
Nursed tenderly, you gazed upon us all
Assembled there, a serried, sable wall
Fast mortared by your subtle tack and power.
“In Memoriam: Booker T. Washington” was a splendid tribute. It also clearly revealed McKay’s initial desire to follow Washington’s leadership and to win the older man’s approval:
O how I loved, adored your furrowed face!
And fondly hoped, before your days were done,
You would look in mine too with paternal grace.
But vain are hopes and dreams!—gone: you are gone,
Death’s hand has torn you from your trusting race,
And O! We feel so utterly alone.8
Despite McKay’s unquestioning acceptance of the great Tuskegeean’s leadership, soon after his arrival at Tuskegee he began to make preparations to leave. For reasons he never chose to explain, he decided to transfer to Kansas State College in Manhattan, Kansas. The move appears to have been made amicably, without any unpleasant confrontation with anyone in Tuskegee’s administrative system. McKay simply concluded he could not fit into Tuskegee’s system of education. By October, arrangements had been made for his transfer. McKay arrived in Manhattan on October 30 and immediately settled down to “a special” two-year course at Kansas State.
For a Jamaican countryman with a romantic turn of mind, the Great Plains of distant Kansas must have seemed as foreign and exciting as Outer Mongolia. His first impressions were certainly favorable. On November 16, 1912, he wrote to J. H. Palmer, the registrar at Tuskegee: “I registered and took up my studies on the 31st. I like the place very much. The agricultural teaching given although, in some cases, of a very practical nature does not tend to alienate one’s mind from the farm, but is never kept longer than two hours at one subject. I have registered for a special course of two years.”* McKay thanked Palmer for his kindness to him while at Tuskegee and then noted in a postscript that “board here is high, costing sixteen dollars per month.”9
McKay remained at Kansas State for almost two years, from the fall of 1912 through the spring term of 1914. His transcript listed Walter Jekyll as his “guardian” and “means of support.” McKay designated Jekyll’s occupation as “gentleman,” a term that undoubtedly had a more specific meaning to McKay than it did to the Kansas State registrar.10
Over the years, McKay wrote surprisingly little about his experiences in Kansas. In McClure’s Magazine in 1928, he implied that Kansas had ultimately bored him, that he could not enjoy there much companionship with members of his own race, and that his eventual move to New York City had, among other things, brought him once again into welcome contact with a large and active black community. These remarks were written in Europe after the first flush of success with his novel Home to Harlem and almost certainly exaggerated the sterility of his sojourn in Kansas. In actuality, his two years there proved intellectually stimulating and far from dull, despite the harshly cold winters and long hot summers on the Great Plains. And McKay did associate while there with members of the small black bourgeoisie that then existed in the cities of the West; during holidays and summer vacations he visited Kansas City, Wichita, and Denver.11
It was probably in Kansas, too, that he first began his involvement with radical American politics. According to the Soviet translator of his Russian-language book, Negroes in America, McKay while at Kansas State became “a member of a small group of white students with a socialist bent. They were all sons of poor people, and, while studying at the college, took various odd jobs to support themselves.”12 McKay certainly had plenty of opportunity to hear politics discussed in Kansas. Progressive reform was at the moment triumphant in America. Woodrow Wilson had been elected president in 1912 on a reform platform. On the Left, the Socialist Party of America had also reached a peak of influence, as had the militantly active labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The union’s insistence on absolute racial equality in all its organizing campaigns especially appealed to McKay. On matters of race, the IWW was clearly well ahead of both the other labor movements and the general society. The Socialist presidential candidate in 1912, Eugene V. Debs, had received almost 900,000 votes. In the very recent past, Kansas had been an important center of populist agitation, and although it never became a Socialist stronghold, in 1912 the most popular Socialist newspaper in the history of the United States, the weekly Appeal to Reason, was published in Girard, Kansas.13
Of greater importance to his self-understanding, McKay learned from a sympathetic English teacher at Kansas about W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which had first appeared in 1903. His curiosity aroused, McKay had to journey to the Topeka Public Library to read the book. It proved an important event in his intellectual development. “The book,” McKay later reported, “shook me like an earthquake.”14
In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois first publicly criticized Booker T Washington’s accommodationist racial strategy and thereby launched his own career as a major spokesman for militant integrationist forces in America. The book was equally significant for its discussion of the problem of self-identification, which Du Bois maintained gnawed at the heart of the Negro’s “spiritual” life in America. Du Bois stated that in the United States, blacks had “no true self-consciousness” but could see themselves only “through the revelation of the other world,” that is, through the dominant white society’s conception of the Negro. Such a situation, he ventured, created a “double consciousness,” a sense of always seeing oneself through foreign eyes, “of measuring one’s soul by the tape of an alien world that looks on in amused contempt or pity.” As a result, Du Bois declared, “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings: two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” For Du Bois as for many after him, this psychological struggle was of central importance for the Negro in America. In fact, he wrote, “The history of the American Negro is the history of this struggle,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.”15
Du Bois’s message, written with great candor and passion, struck McKay with the force of revelation. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois had clearly analyzed not only a central psychological dilemma of American blacks but a problem Claude himself had not been consciously able to confront and resolve in his dialect poetry.The Souls of Black Folk forced him to confront his own deepest ambivalence as a black colonial reared in both the folk and the British imperial traditions. The shock he felt upon reading it was the shock of self-recognition.
McKay was not the only black writer to be stirred by Du Bois’s book. Langston Hughes wrote that “my earliest memory of any book . . . except a school book, is The Souls of Black Folk.”16 Another black writer, James Weldon Johnson, considered it “a work which . . . has had a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single textbook published . . . since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”17 Reading Du Bois’s book in lonely isolation all over America, young black intellectuals such as McKay and Hughes saw, perhaps for the first time, a vital part of their own personal problems clearly, passionately, and reasonably discussed. Certainly the problem of black self-integration and self-image was of central importance in McKay’s own writing, and it has remained a major theme in American Negro literature.
Kansas State provided McKay time for learning, personal growth, and reflection. But his academic and applied agricultural courses kept him busy. In his McClure’s article of 1928, McKay wrote that “there were too few Negroes in the college town for any lively social life and for two years I lived austerely and wrote no poetry.”18 An examination of his academic records shows that there would, indeed, have been little time for poetry. His transcripts reveal a full schedule of classes in applied agriculture and a considerable number of academic courses.
McKay entered as a subfreshman. By the spring term of 1913, he had proved himself a capable student. He did his best work in traditional classroom subjects. In his first year at Kansas State, he received Es (for excellence) in zoology and advanced grammar. In ancient history, college rhetoric, elementary botany, elementary math, and English literature he did well (G). McKay did fail two courses— Woodwork I and Stock Judging I—but in the remainder, including public speaking, at which he never excelled, he got Ps (for passing). By the fall of 1913, he had achieved the status of freshman and had scheduled a full course in agriculture—dairying, principles of feeding, sociology, agricultural education, and general entomology. He did excellently in agricultural education but merely passed the rest. In the spring term, his grades improved noticeably: five Gs (in poultry, soils, soils lab, “inter, law,” and agricultural economy) and three Ps (pork and meat products, general geology, and insects and spraying).19 His courses presented him with no serious problems.
But despite his best intentions, McKay had concluded by the summer of 1914 that he would not become an agronomist and that he therefore had no reason to stay at Kansas State. In A Long Way from Home, he wrote that after two years in Kansas he had been “gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me.” He had no desire to return home. “What I had previously done was done,” he noted. Just as he had earlier abandoned his wheelwright’s apprenticeship in Jamaica, he once more drew back from a practical vocational commitment and dreamed again of writing poetry. “Against [America’s] mighty throbbing force, its grand energy and power and bigness, its bitterness burning in my black body, I would raise my voice to make a canticle of my reaction.”20
This account of his decision to leave Kansas State was, of course, written in retrospect; what McKay omitted was as significant as what he included. He had not left Kansas empty-handed or without plans. For two years, he had corresponded with his Jamaican sweetheart, Eulalie Imelda Lewars, and in the spring of 1914 an unusual gift made it possible for them to plan a reunion and wedding in New York City during the summer. A person whom he later identified only as “an English admirer” of his Jamaican dialect poetry sent McKay “a few thousand dollars.”21 McKay never identified the donor or explained why he proved so generous. At one point, he did write that the money was “a legacy”;22 it almost certainly came from Walter Jekyll. At any rate, whether the money came as a wedding gift or whether its receipt enabled McKay to propose marriage, with it McKay abandoned Kansas for New York City and marriage.
After he spent two years in school and only occasionally visited Topeka and other western cities, the lure of the sophisticated and bustling metropolis in the East no doubt exerted its own powerful attraction upon McKay, as it did upon many other restless and creative writers and artists of the time. But New York seems initially to have attracted McKay for reasons other than art. As the child of an upwardly mobile Jamaican peasant farmer, he knew that with his newly acquired capital he should seek a proper investment. He and an otherwise unidentified “friend,” who had decided to accompany him, knew good business opportunities abounded in New York City.23 With its large, growing black population, including a considerable number of Jamaicans and other West Indians, New York seemed the perfect place to try one’s hand in business. In the forefront of his mind there remained the necessity of earning one’s way, so, shortly after arriving in New York, McKay invested the greater portion of his money in a business venture: he became a restauranteur.
His bride joined him in New York. On July 30, 1914, at five in the afternoon they were married in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan. It was a quiet ceremony, with the Reverend Charles H. Benselar officiating, and attended by only two other people, D. Delia Hope and Ambrozine Nelson (perhaps the companion who had accompanied McKay to New York from Kansas), who signed the marriage license as witnesses.24 Claude McKay was twenty-three years old; his bride was younger but, as it turned out, much more ready for marriage than was her handsome young groom.
McKay had yet to come to terms with himself, his ambitions, and his personal sexual inclinations. As the child of a rising bourgeois family, he clung stubbornly but tenuously to certain standard symbols of respectability—an education, the pursuit of a financially secure career, marriage, and the family. At the same time, he remained unfulfilled by the pursuit of these objectives. A certain unappeased restlessness continued to propel him away from the comforts of middle-class life.
Although he did not fully realize it when he arranged to meet his bride there, New York would provide more than enough stimulation to distract Claude from conventional pursuits and compel him toward his true career as a man of letters. The city overwhelmed him with its size, energy, and variety; above all, he was delighted to find in Harlem, fast becoming New York’s principal Negro section, a refuge among his own people where he could at last relax and relieve his pent-up emotions completely. He later wrote that “Harlem was my first positive reaction to American life. . . . After two years in the blue-sky-law desert of Kansas, it was like entering a paradise of my own people. . . . I gave myself entirely up to getting deep down into . . . [the] rhythm of Harlem life which still remains one of the most pleasurable sensations of my blood.”25 In 1914, Harlem did not yet have the frightfully congested and desperately frustrated population of its later years. The people were generally poor but hopeful. A fine new section of town filled with broad avenues, large, spacious apartment buildings, and tree-lined streets had become available to them. The bright, clear air of Harlem inspired an optimism, a certain indefinable freedom and exuberance. Despite the problems that remained, and they were many, it was a great time to be young, black, and ambitious. In Harlem, hope filled the air.26
In addition to being the financial and artistic capital of America, New York City was also well on its way to becoming the center of black American protest against racial injustices and the focal point of black artistic and intellectual endeavors. By 1914, the newly organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had established its headquarters in New York. The National Urban League, also in its infancy, likewise had its parent offices there. These two groups were rapidly emerging as the two principal black reform organizations in the country.
In contrast to Booker T. Washington’s counsels of patience and accommodation, the NAACP had from its inception in 1907 pushed toward a frontal challenge on constitutional grounds to the system of legal racial segregation that had grown up in the South and the less rigid, but no less real, system of discrimination that characterized the rest of the nation.27 Since its founding in 1911, the National Urban League had been dedicated to opening new economic opportunities for blacks, largely through the piecemeal method of individually persuading private businesses in the North to hire blacks in positions previously closed to them. As its name implied, the Urban League concerned itself with the social welfare of the growing black populations in the nation’s cities.28 The presence of the national offices of the NAACP and the National Urban League ensured that in the years ahead New York would become the focal point of a veritable Renaissance of black social protest, intellectual rejuvenation, and artistic activity. Viewed in this larger perspective, Claude McKay was only one of many young black men of ability, ambition, and social awareness who were for any number of reasons attracted to New York in the years around World War I.
Despite the rapidly accelerating movement of Manhattan’s black population northward to Harlem, McKay chose (perhaps because it was cheaper) to take over a small restaurant in one of the city’s older black neighborhoods. He later claimed his restaurant was located in “a tough district of Brooklyn,” but James Weldon Johnson in 1928 wrote that it had been located on West Fifty-third Street in the infamous Tenderloin area of mid-Manhattan.29 This would have placed it in the center of Manhattan’s older black area on a street that Johnson fondly remembered “was still a center of New York Negro life” in 1914. McKay denied the accuracy of Johnson’s statement.30 From McKay’s own vague testimony and from circumstantial evidence, it seems his restaurant was most probably located somewhere in the vicinity of Myrde Avenue, adjacent to the downtown Borough Hall section of Brooklyn. In Home to Harlem, one character remembers that the black cabarets and gambling joints along Myrde Avenue during the prewar era were exciting places, but another concludes, “Myrde Avenue . . . pretty name, all right, but it stinks like a sewer. Legs and feet! Come take me outa it back home to Harlem.”31
Wherever McKay’s restaurant was located, one thing we know is that vice of all kinds flourished around it. His venture carried with it risks both financial and physical. To protect himself, he bought a revolver.32 As it turned out, financial problems proved far greater than the physical dangers, and after a few months, his restaurant failed. McKay lacked the steady patience and single-minded dedication to business required for even minor success. As he later remembered, “high living” and “bad business” soon swallowed all his money.33 In 1918, he confessed in one of his only published references to his restaurant that it “proved a failure because I didn’t put all my time and energy into it.” His marriage was next to go. “My wife,” McKay wrote in 1918, “wearied of the life [in New York] in six months and returned to Jamaica.”34 After her return, she gave birth to their only child, Rhue Hope McKay, whom Claude, as it turned out, would never see.
Thus, although the city and its people proved exciting to McKay, his first year in New York ended with bitter failures in business and marriage. Both involved pain for himself and others. He seldom spoke of either in any of his published writings. He became especially secretive about his business failure; unresolved litigation or the threat of it, together with bad memories and perhaps a lingering sense of guilt, drove him to silence on the matter. After the publication of Home to Harlem in 1928, McKay wrote James Weldon Johnson, who had submitted a biographical sketch of McKay to Harper, that it would be better not to air the details of his old business venture. Johnson replied that the publisher had fortunately not mentioned anything about the restaurant in its publicity.35
But McKay’s marriage could not be so discreetly passed over. A child was involved, and despite McKay’s belated recognition that for him marriage was really out of the question, his wife had already sacrificed the possibility of further education in Jamaica to join him in New York. Her commitment had been total. She could not understand his warring emotions—his ardor and indifference, his ambitions and his reckless abandon, his gaiety and sudden, inexplicable periods of bitterness, his utter self-assurance and restless, uncertain questing. He bewildered as well as hurt her, and their brief, intense, and ultimately impossible relationship in New York embittered her life. She felt betrayed and abandoned and would in succeeding years try to reestablish a relationship Claude had long since dismissed.36
Some have considered the short story “Truant” a straightforward, thinly fictionalized account of McKay’s marriage. While it does accurately reflect McKay’s personal rejection of marriage, its details do not conform to his actual experience. In the story the character Barclay Oram is working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. His wife is an American black woman; they have a small child and live together in post-World War I Harlem. He had abandoned an education at a leading Negro university to marry her when she became pregnant. He later concludes that his job and marriage represent a dead end for him and quietly abandons his wife and child. McKay’s own marriage had taken place under other circumstances and much earlier, and had ended when Eulalie returned in disillusionment to Jamaica The story nevertheless does project with emotional accuracy, if not factual detail, the personal circumstances of his marriage. He writes that Barclay’s wife, Rhoda, had entered marriage “at that vague age when some women feel that marriage is more than the grim pursuit of a career,” and that Barclay himself “did not fully realize the responsibility, perhaps could not, of marriage. Never fully understood its significance.”
Barclay remembered now that he was as keen as Rhoda for the marriage. Carried away by the curiosity to take up a new role, there had been something almost of eagerness in his desire to quit the university. And it had seemed a beautiful gesture. . . . He remembered all, regretting nothing, since his life was a continual fluxion from one state to another. His deepest regret was always momentary, arising from remaining in a rut after he had exhausted the experience.
Rhoda now seemed just another impasse into which he had drifted. Just a hole to pull out of again and away from the [rail]road, that arena of steel rushing him round and round in the same familiar circle. He had to evade it and be irresponsible again.
Like McKay, Barclay ultimately decides he is not subject to conventional moral law, “the cold white law. . . . Spiritually he was subject to another law. Other gods of strange barbaric glory claimed his allegiance and not the grim frock-coated gentleman of the Moral Law of the land.” Barclay (read McKay) accepts isolation as a necessary condition of his existence. “Maybe,” he concluded, “his true life lay in eternal inquietude.”37
At the heart of McKay’s own marriage dilemma, of course, lay his homosexuality. New York, with its great concentration of population and teeming impersonality, tolerated the existence of a large though officially repressed homosexual community whose members found regular, if illicit, outlets for the exercise of their sexual and social tastes. McKay enjoyed this almost clandestine aspect of New York life, and after the dissolution of his marriage he pursued a love life that included partners of both sexes.38 Most of his affairs were brief but passionate. McKay mentioned at least one of his homosexual relationships in verse. In the commemorative poem “Rest in Peace,” he stated explicitly that the person whose unexpected death is reflected upon was “my friend and lover.” In other poems, he celebrated brief affairs with partners whose sex is never explicitly stated. They could well have been either men or women.39 Aside from the occasionally daring reference to homosexual love buried in his poetry, McKay rarely discussed homosexuality in his writings. An exception was one chapter in the unpublished novel “Romance in Marseille,” in which he sympathetically portrayed aspects of gay life in Marseilles.40 In general, however, McKay never openly explored or publicly acknowledged homosexuality as an aspect of his personal life. Although it inevitably emerged indirectly in his published novels and short stories, McKay, like many homosexual writers of his day, did not seriously challenge the rule that such subjects were not to be discussed openly in creative literature. Even if the rule had been relaxed, McKay may not have chosen to identify himself as explicitly homosexual. As in other areas of his life, he remained to the end highly ambivalent about his sexual preferences and probably considered bisexuality normal for himself, if not all mankind.
By 1915, after the failure of his business and his marriage, McKay had begun to move toward his chosen position as iconoclast and rebel. He would go his own way and by trial and error discover which paths best suited him. He abandoned altogether the idea of returning to school. In “Truant,” McKay through Barclay Oram hinted at his own gradual liberation from the spell of formal learning: “He had been enchanted by the words: University, Seat of Learning. He had seen young men of the insular island villages returned from the native colleges. They all brought back with them a new style of clothes, a different accent, a new gait, the exciting, intoxicating smell of the city—so much more intriguing than the ever-fresh accustomed smell of the bright-green hill-valley village. . . . For Barclay then the highroad to wisdom led necessarily by way of a university. It had never occurred to him that he might have also attained his goal in his own free, informal way.”41
In 1915, this realization had become a necessity for McKay. He had exhausted all funds, and no more were forthcoming. He had to find a job. As he explained in Pearson’s Magazine in 1918, pride, if nothing else, pushed all thoughts of returning to Jamaica from his mind. “I hated to go back after having failed at nearly everything so I just stayed here and worked desultorily—porter, houseman, janitor, butler, waiter—anything that came handy.”42 He also finally decided to write and to discover once and for all the extent of his literary talents. “I was determined to find expression in writing. . . . I took my menial tasks like a student who is working his way through a university. . . . If I would not graduate as a bachelor of arts or science, I would graduate as a poet.”43
McKay was not the only young man in America intent upon finding his voice in the years just before World War I. As the Irish painter John Butler Yeats had remarked in 1908, the fiddles were beginning to tune up all over America. The historian Henry May has made clear that by 1914 the new “music” from these fiddles had begun to contribute to the breakdown of the old basic assumptions about morality, progress, and Western civilization that the Victorian “custodians of American culture” had established.44
World War I and its disruptive aftermath, according to May, completed this process. Between 1912 and 1917—McKay’s arrival in the United States and the year he first published in America—there was occurring in literature and art what May has termed the “Innocent Rebellion.” In contrast to the less innocent, more thoroughgoing literary upheaval that developed after World War I and in the 1920s, the Innocent Rebellion between 1912 and 1917 was characterized by gaiety, optimism, and cheerful irreverence. Although it did not dislodge the “custodians of culture” from their seats of power in academia, publishing, and the arts, it did prepare the way for their eventual displacement.45 It was thus a time of great transition, both in the life of Claude McKay and in the history of American thought and art. The old, fundamental assumptions that had dominated American intellectual life since the Civil War—the belief in a universal morality, the inevitability of progress, and the sanctity of inherited Anglo-Saxon cultural norms—were all beginning to be questioned and undermined.
From the small towns and villages of the Midwest, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Floyd Dell, and others had begun to gravitate toward Chicago, where new literary magazines of significance, such as Poetry and the Little Review, supported their rebellion against nineteenth-century formalism. By 1915, the Chicago rebellion had acquired allies in New York, where younger critics and editors such as Walter Lippmann, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Max Eastman, and Joel Oppenheim added their cosmopolitan outlook and critical acuity to the Innocent Rebellion. Of particular importance were such new magazines as the New Republic, the Masses, and Seven Arts. Their editors and contributors generally felt that they were witnesses to the end of an era and participants in the shaping of a new one. In the process, they rejected what they considered America’s repressive Puritan heritage and began a search for a “usable past” upon which to build a brighter, freer, and more equitable future.46
Their efforts did not escape the notice of Claude McKay. Although his specific path to rebellion had been different from that of most of his white American counterparts from the East or Midwest, he had much in common with them. Like the young rebels of the prewar years, he had imbibed from infancy the literary culture of England. While Americans were intent upon searching for a usable national past, McKay had begun once again to think about the significance of the black experience in both Jamaica and the United States, to question his relation to it, and to ponder its larger meaning for black people everywhere. Like the young American rebels, McKay had early rejected a repressive Calvinist heritage, had eagerly embraced the more radical European critics of society and culture as they had been presented to him in Jamaica, and had simultaneously attempted in his dialect verse to create a specifically Jamaican poetry. After 1914, he moved toward participation in the larger literary rebellion then gathering strength in America.47
At first, his progress was not rapid. McKay had to work for a living, and the jobs he found were the traditional ones open to black men in American cities—“porter, fireman [to coal-burning boilers], waiter, bar-boy, houseman. I waded through the muck and scum,” he later wrote, “with the one objective dominating my mind.” He would become a poet and writer. “My leisure was divided between the experiment of daily living and the experiment of essays in writing.” The years from 1914 until his first big success in 1919 “sped by—five of them—like a rivulet flowing to feed a river.” The simile was apt. These years of labor in New York and other cities of the Northeast proved to be a crucial period from which he drew much material for his later stories, novels, and poems. In many of his future writings he would remember his work experiences in both their rich and barren days. During the winter of 1915–1916, he added to his initial restaurant experience by working briefly in a resort hotel in Hanover, New Hampshire. A little later, he found a position as waiter in a fashionable women’s club in New York. Finally he entered into the hectic rush and bustle of a job as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad during the height of America’s participation in World War I.48
All the while, he was writing and dreaming of finding an appreciative American audience. In his early American verse, he dropped dialect altogether and reverted in part to a stilted imitation of German and English romantic models he had first read in Jamaica. These verses, full of outmoded poetic diction and romantic clichés, often revealed the painful role confusion that still beset him. In some of these poems, McKay addressed himself directly to race and racial conflicts; he already spoke with an originality, directness, and obvious depth of feeling that contrasted oddly with the orthodoxy of his poetic forms and diction.
In January, 1916, while in Hanover, McKay sent samples of his current efforts to William Stanley Braithwaite, the poetry editor of the Boston Evening Transcript and the lone light-mulatto pillar of literary respectability among Boston’s surviving “custodians of culture.”49 In addressing this well-known critic, McKay adopted an almost girlish tone of shyness and hesitancy and even concealed his real name behind the pseudonym of Rhonda Hope. He explained that he had previously submitted his poetry to several newspapers but they had shown an interest only in those poems that bore directly upon racial themes. “This had set me to wondering,” he wrote, “whether Fine Arts is not beyond nation or race—if one’s mind can be limited to one’s race and its problems when Art is as sublime as He who gave it to man.”50 McKay surely knew of Braithwaite’s conservatism. He had been reading his annual anthologies of magazine verse since 1913; after his arrival in New Hampshire, he had also read Braithwaite’s columns on poetry every Wednesday and Saturday in the Transcript.51 In part he was attempting to strike a tone that would elicit Braithwaite’s sympathy and a response from him. But in part, too, he still had doubts about his literary gifts. If he sought to use Braithwaite by adopting a tone of somewhat hypocritical supplication it was because at base he needed the older man’s reassurance and advice. “I do not write because I am over anxious to win recognition and appreciation,” he explained, “but I have often thought that, if my gift is genuine, I should strive for that which might enable me to do yet better work than I can at present.”52 Braithwaite apparently gave him the warm response he sought. In reply McKay thanked him and added that “as a rule the race problem does not inspire me very much to poetic efforts. Of the many things I have written very few are of racial themes, but sometimes my emotions are stirred by something above the ordinary, I feel the urge to write and the thought will not down.”53
McKay sent Braithwaite seven poems. Three dealt with the inevitable disillusionments of love. One, entitled “Remorse,” may well have reflected the pain he experienced after the breakup of his marriage and his wife’s return to Jamaica: “I wail, ‘I love you, I repent, / Forgive me,’—all in vain.” A longer poem in this group, “My Ethiopian Maid,” may also have been at least partly inspired by his relationship with Eulalie. He describes his “Ethiopian maid’s” fair, creamy brown skin, her sunny round face, her passionate eyes, and beautiful voice but concludes that he can love her only “from afar . . . . ne’er shall I touch you, o beautiful star, / With hands that can only defile.” In “My Werther Days,” McKay evoked the memory of Goethe’s famous character and sang of his own disillusionment and of his inability to rise, like some, above a preoccupation with earthly love and set his heart on “things of heaven.”
I have not faith to turn mine eyes above,
The strongly-whirling world I but see through
The splintered window of my house of love.54
Despite his wholly justified concern that he not be categorized simply as a black poet writing narrowly on black themes, the best poems he submitted to Braithwaite did, in fact, explore most intimately his emotions as a black in an overwhelmingly hostile world. One of these was “In Memoriam: Booker T. Washington”; the other was an early version of “To the White Fiends,” which he later published with the modern forms of “you” substituted for the original “ye” and “thee.”55
Despite his use of clichés and forced rhyme schemes, McKay was already exploring the almost primeval horrors implicit in American race relations. Although he may have still questioned the legitimacy of such themes as subjects for poetry, they stirred in him emotions and thoughts that, as he noted in his second letter to Braithwaite, demandedexpression. McKay fully shared his people’s deepest emotional reactions to their plight as a suppressed and brutalized race. Their feelings were, moreover, as “universal” as those of all races and nationalities. McKay would shortly put aside any doubts about the appropriateness of racial themes in poetry.56
His immediate problem was to find an editor who would publish his work. His earliest American poems were apparently rejected by both black and white journals, but he persisted in sending his poems to those he judged might be most receptive. He wanted the widest possible audience. Although he would later publish in black newspapers and journals, McKay from the first also sought acceptance in national publications whose readers were predominantly white. From childhood he had immersed himself in the literary traditions of the English-speaking world; now he wanted to be recognized as a legitimate heir to those traditions. The fact that an increasing number of his poems dealt with the joys, sorrows, and pain of his race did not mean he felt estranged from those European and American poets whose works had provided him with his earliest literary inspiration and models. On the contrary, “I felt more confidence in my own way because, of all the poets I admire, major and minor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Burns, Whitman, Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud and the rest—it seemed to me when I read them—in their poetry I could feel their race, their class, their roots in the soil, growing into plants, spreading and forming the backgrounds against which they were silhouetted. I could not feel the reality of them without that. So likewise I could not realize myself writing without conviction.”57
In reality, few white editors in 1915 and 1916 ever considered giving blacks equal representation in their publications. Black writers as a rule only occasionally appeared in white publications, and almost none wrote regularly for journals. William Braithwaite was a rare exception among Afro-American journalists of his day. Had he been as frank as McKay on matters concerning race relations, even he would not have survived as a practicing journalist on a large metropolitan daily.
By 1916, however, certain influential critics and editors had already begun to challenge the national indifference toward black writers. Among the charter members of the NAACP, there were several prominent editors, journalists, and critics. They included Oswald Garrison Villard, soon to be editor of the Nation, a leading progressive weekly; the journalists William English Walling and Charles Edward Russell; and the Columbia University scholar and critic, Joel Spingarn.58 McKay especially admired the Nation and held Dillard in high esteem. A grandson of the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, he carried forward into the twentieth century the highest standards of the nineteenth-century reformists. McKay sent Villard some of his verses in 1916. Although Villard expressed an interest in them, he never published any.59
A year later, he had better luck with Joel Spingarn. A central figure during these early years of the NAACP, Spingarn had already distinguished himself in the history of American literary criticism by introducing to the United States the aesthetic ideas of Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher and historian, and by the publication in 1917 of his book Creative Criticism, which in its essentials anticipated the critical principles in the New Criticism of T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and R. P. Blackmur.60 McKay read Spingarn’s book and wrote to him. Spingarn was sufficiently impressed by McKay’s poems to recommend them to the youthful editors of Seven Arts, Joel Oppenheim and Waldo Frank.61
During its brief existence between 1916 and 1917, Seven Arts served as an important platform for the young men of the Innocent Rebellion. Its editors revived Walt Whitman’s call for a regeneration of American civilization through literature. They proclaimed their faith “that we are living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness.” By and large, the staff of and the contributors to Seven Arts formed the cutting edge of the critical rebellion then in progress against the dead weight of an expiring genteel tradition. They included Paul Rosenfeld, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Van Wyck Brooks, John Dos Passos, and Randolph Bourne. Oppenheim and Frank sought to publish new voices in fiction, poetry, and criticism. They believed literary spontaneity was a necessity if the dying hand of an empty gentility was ever to be removed from the living body of American literature. “We have no tradition to continue; we have no school of style to build up. What we ask of the writer is simply self-expression without regard to current magazine standards. We should prefer that portion of his work which is done through a joyous necessity of the writer himself.”62
Editors with such standards could hardly refuse the work of a young black man whose lyric forms, though traditional, expressed the spirit and consciousness of black America and uncovered the muffled voice of ancient Africa. In October, 1917, Seven Arts published two sonnets by McKay, “Invocation” and “The Harlem Dancer.” For these poems McKay used the pseudonym EH Edwards, which, as he noted in A Long Way from Home, “was adapted from my mother’s name.” He went on to explain that at the time he was working as a waiter at a fashionable women’s club in New York. Because its “members were students of the arts” and often discussed “the new and little magazines,” McKay believed that he should use a pseudonym in Seven Arts so that his job as a waiter would not be compromised.63
Both poems suggested that blacks had been cut off from their African roots and placed in false positions by white civilization and the circumstances of modern life. In the sonnet “Invocation,” McKay made clear the obstacles that stood between the poet and his ancestral spirit. Foremost among them were the distractions of “modern Time’s unnumbered works and ways.” But his awe and wonderment before contemporary life could not compensate for the eclipse of that ancient spirit that in the past had itself raised mighty civilizations “in the curtained days / Before the white God said: Let there be light!” Having suggested that the rise to hegemony of European civilization had thrown the African spirit into darkness, he appealed for it once again to
Bring ancient music to my modern heart,
Let fall the light upon my sable face
That once gleamed upon the Ethiopian’s art,
Lift me to thee out of this alien place
So I may be, thine exiled counterpart,
The worthy singer of my world and race.64
In “Invocation,” McKay first clearly revealed his comprehension of a dilemma common to the Western black intellectual: feeling a part of contemporary European civilization, possessing a “modern heart,” while remaining fundamentally “exiled” in “this alien place.” The dilemma was an old one and had most recently been given classic expression in Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. McKay would continue to explore its complexities and its ironies in other sonnets published over the next few years. The centrality of this problem in his poetry would place him near the beginning of a long line of twentieth-century black authors who would examine the same problem, each in his own way Richard Wright would later describe it in Black Boy as being “somehow in Western Civilization but not of it.” Ralph Ellison after World War II would liken it to invisibility, and in the 1960s, James Baldwin would conclude that “nobody knows my name.” In each case, different metaphors, styles, and literary forms would be employed to explore the highly personal yet broadly representative problems of black identity and alienation that Claude McKay began to face during World War I.65
In “The Harlem Dancer,” the other sonnet published by Seven Arts, McKay meditated upon a scene, perhaps in a Harlem bordello, of a woman gracefully singing and dancing before an aroused audience of young men and prostitutes. The poet-observer, however, looked upon the event with detachment. He perceived that the woman, too, was similarly detached. For the poet, half-hypnotized by her voice and the sway of her “perfect, half-clothed body,” she became a symbol of another, more distant, bucolic life he sensed still held her allegiance. Momentarily she swept him back to his own tropical past:
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.66
McKay must have been pleased to publish in Seven Arts. He shared its pages with some distinguished names, as well as with other young men and women whose reputations would grow in succeeding years. In the same October, 1917, issue in which his work appeared, there also appeared poems by Amy Lowell and Jean Starr Untermeyer, an antiwar essay by Randolph Bourne, and another statement on the war by Bertrand Russell, who questioned whether old-fashioned nationalism could or should survive the great bloodbath in Europe. The issue also contained a statement on black music and its critics by Carl Van Vechten, who, like McKay, was to play a prominent role in ushering in the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. But McKay’s first appearance in Seven Arts was his last. The magazine ceased publication with the October issue. The uncompromising antiwar essays of Randolph Bourne, which Seven Arts insisted upon publishing in the face of rising governmental and public intolerance of such criticism, frightened away the magazine’s wealthy sponsor.67
McKay probably would not have continued his association with Seven Arts had it survived. His personal involvement with the magazine, its editors, and chief contributors was slight. McKay in 1917 was moving toward a commitment to actual political, as well as literary, rebellion. The editors of and contributors to Seven Arts, with few exceptions, never went so far. Their protest remained largely literary and theoretical. Although some considered themselves socialists, they were white, middle-class, college-educated artists and critics whose participation in the radical political movements of their times would never go beyond their roles as critical observers. McKay certainly understood the chasms of class and color that prevented them from ever identifying completely with him and his race. Despite the real appreciation of men like Carl Van Vechten and Waldo Frank for the vitality of the popular Negro arts and music, their identity with it could never be complete. Their exceptional interest aside, the white world to which they belonged generally thought little of Negroes or their accomplishments. Bertrand Russell, for example, in the same issue of Seven Arts in which McKay’s poems appeared, concluded his essay on the lessons of World War I with the following observation: “Mankind cannot afford to risk another great war. Every advance in technical civilization must make war more deadly, and a great war a hundred years hence might well leave the world in the exclusive possession of negroes [sic]. If we wish to avert this calamity we must be bold, constructive, and not afraid to be revolutionary.”68
McKay’s appearance in Seven Arts did not change his life—he remained a waiter. Sometime in 1917, he left his position at the women’s club to take a job as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. It proved to be a memorable experience. In April, the United States entered the tragic conflict in Europe on the side of Great Britain, France, and the new provisional government of Russia. A great democratic world alliance against Germany and Austria, it seemed, had been formed. Using the latest techniques of mass advertising and propaganda to spur patriotism and a united war effort, the United States entered a period of unprecedented national mobilization of men, materiel, and manufacturing. An Allied victory could be assured only by quick action, and on the home front the nation’s railroads had to be operated at maximum efficiency to handle the increased flow of men and materials. The traditional private operation of the national railway systems quickly proved incapable of attaining the coordination and economy of command required by the circumstances, and the government soon took over the railroads for the duration of the war. Claude McKay was thus swept by the rush of events into a critical wartime industry. Along with other blacks who had begun during the war years to move in record numbers from the South into northern cities, McKay found all the work he could handle. With the great European immigration of previous years cut off, labor was in short supply everywhere.
Because of their vital role in the war effort, railroad workers were draft-exempt. McKay’s new job took him regularly from New York through Newark, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, the very center of America’s industrial heartland. Sometimes he also made the Washington run through Baltimore. From 1917 through 1919, he became a regular visitor to the Black Belt neighborhoods of the principal cities of the industrial Northeast and a witness to the enormous energy, chaos, and tensions unleashed during America’s first great crusade for democracy abroad.
We are out in the field,. . .
Thundering through from city to city
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Through Johnstown glowing like a world aflame,
And Pittsburgh, Negro black, brooding in iron smoke,
Philly’s Fifteenth street of wenches, speakeasies, and cops.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And darkly we wonder, night-wrapped in the light.69
His new job demanded energy and quick wit. McKay had both. He also possessed a decided restlessness and a desire not to finger too long in one place or with one person. The railroad seemed made to order for him. His brief encounters with diners, the constant travel, and his adventures with fellow railway men in the various cities along their route—all provided the challenge, variety, and adventure that suited McKay’s temperament. The hectic pace of wartime America complemented the tumult and rush of his own nervous energy. Both seemed at times compressed to bursting in the buzz of a crowded dining car rushing headlong across the eastern countryside.
The hours were in truth often long and tiring, but the pay and tips were good, and McKay stayed with the railroad longer than any similar job he ever had. He did not stick it out, however, for the pay alone. What he wrote of his character Ray, in the novel Home to Harlem, had been equally true of his own experience: “If the railroad had not been cacophonous and riotous enough to balance the dynamo roaring within him, he would have jumped it long ago.”70 He did not particularly mind the diners. In fact, he saw in them a certain romance that provided compensation for their occasional unpleasantness. “It was often a pleasure,” he once wrote, “something of an anticipated adventure each day to meet new passengers, remark the temperature of their looks and sometimes make casual conversation with a transient acquaintance.”71
McKay did his job well. He was promoted rapidly over others with longer service and in three months became a first pantryman, the dining-car equivalent of headwaiter. As he later explained to Max Eastman, “It was no easy assignment, for my associates were tough and conscienceless and I had to see that they did not steal all the supplies to take home. I did my job thoroughly and made them respect and like me.”72
During the next three years, from 1917 through most of 1919, Harlem remained McKay’s home base. He had a spacious furnished room on 131st Street in a rooming house owned by a “Mr. Morris,” a southern black man who also owned a saloon McKay frequented while in Harlem. For at least two of these years McKay also had a steady friend in Manda, a homely, wholly unpretentious young black woman recently removed from the South, whom McKay had picked up one night in LeRoy’s, an infamous cellar cabaret on the corner of 135th Street and Fifth Avenue, referred to by locals as “The Jungle.” As McKay described her in A Long Way from Home, Manda was plump, plain, and undemanding. “She was a real peasant type and worked as a laundress in a boarding house.” She appreciated McKay’s interest in her, and he appreciated her self-sufficiency and uncomplaining acceptance of his “little eccentricities.” It became her habit to drop by McKay’s room when he was in town. In the course of her stay, she would always tidy up his living quarters. If she found him reading or writing, she would leave him alone and go to the basement kitchen and cook them a meal. In short, she took care of McKay while demanding very little in return. As he would later remember it, they never had “a lot to say to each other” but nevertheless “sailed smoothly along for a couple of years. Manda was a good balance to my nervous self.”73
One eccentricity that did raise Manda’s eyebrows was the friendship McKay developed during these years with a young white man named Michael. Although McKay passed him off as the wayward son of a wealthy businessman, Michael was in reality a small-time crook who blackmailed respectable types after maneuvering them into compromising positions in parks, washrooms, and lavatories around the city. In appearance, this unsavory Irish lad possessed “a disarming cleanliness and wholesomeness” and looked “like a nice college student.” As McKay described it, their initial meeting might well have served as material for a scene in a silent “cops and robbers” melodrama. Late one night after a card game, McKay had stopped in a midtown restaurant for a meal when “a young fellow came in, sat down at my table, and taking my cap from the chair, put it on. Before I could say a word about such a surprising thing, he said in a low, nervous voice: ‘It’s all right, let me wear your cap. The bulls are right after me. . . . They won’t recognize me sitting here with you, for I was bareheaded.’” Michael accompanied McKay home that night. For a long time afterward, he made periodic visits to Harlem, where he sometimes in McKay’s absence used his room to hide from the police. McKay liked Michael. He was “refreshingly frank” about his exploits, and McKay never felt personally threatened by his new friend, “although I had some dandy suits in my closet and three Liberty Bonds in my trunk.” Michael, it seemed, “was profoundly sentimental about friendship, the friends of his friends, and anyone who had befriended him.” He hated only the police and the priests of the Catholic church, in whose orphanages he had been reared.74
When the mood struck him, McKay made friends easily, and he spent part of his spare time participating in the social life that centered around Harlem’s black cabarets. In them, he found others who were, like himself, expatriated countrymen and women, single, often alone, and out for a good time before returning to their rooms or the boring routines of their menial jobs. In the few brief hours of their socializing, they lived with an intensity and abandon that McKay found intoxicating: “The cabarets in Harlem in those days enthralled me more than any theater downtown. They were so intimate. If they were lacking in variety they were rich in warmth and native excitement.”75
These years proved the decisive period in McKay’s life, the crucial turning point, when he broke through the inhibitions that had previously restrained him and discovered a milieu more congenial to his temperament.
It was not until I was forced down among the rough body of the great serving class of Negroes that I got to know my Aframerica. I was perhaps then at the most impressionable adult age and the warm contact with my workmates, boys and girls, their spontaneous ways of acting on and living for the moment, the physical and sensuous delights, the loose freedom in contrast to the definite peasant patterns by which I had been raised—all served to feed the riotous sentiments smoldering in me and cut me finally adrift from the fixed moorings my mind had been led to respect, but to which my heart had never held.76
It was probably during this period, too, that McKay experimented with cocaine and opium. Years later a friend from his railroad days wrote McKay and reminded him of the time they had gone to New York’s Chinatown in search of “Chinese tobacco.”77 In Home to Harlem, a chapter entitled “Snow Storm in Pittsburgh” relates how the characters Jake and Ray sniff cocaine one night during a layover of their dining-car crew. Jake remarks he doesn’t have the habit but is walling to try anything “once again.” One of the dealers who sells them the cocaine reminisces about a group he used to know who “hed no use foh nothing but the pipe ... the Chinese stuff.”78 McKay’s flirtation with drugs never developed into habitual use, nor does he ever seem to have developed a serious drinking problem; his finely tuned nervous system needed little of the added stimulation drugs or alcohol provided. But like most everyone else in his social milieu, he did drink and smoke, sometimes to excess. As he grew older, he curbed both habits for health reasons.
All the while, McKay continued to write, to read, and to dream of future literary triumphs. His rushed and harried railroad experiences, the intense if confined vitality of the burgeoning Black Belts of the Northeast, the mounting tensions between blacks and whites as the war threw them into unfamiliar intimacy, his growing understanding that the Great War in Europe represented the death throes of a vanishing era, and his corresponding sense that his old literary idols could provide no sure guidance along the uncertain way ahead— all these varied forces only stimulated his creativity and contributed to a restless output of poetry. Once while waiting tables on a busy train he was seized with such lyrical desire that he could not function. He told the steward he had “unbearable” stomach pains and locked himself in the lavatory, where he wrote out his work on a “scrap of paper.”79
His appearance in Seven Arts had been a fleeting triumph. After its demise, he continued to seek publication in other magazines. At last, in 1918 he received a note from a boyhood idol: the great Irish editor Frank Harris, who had published Pearson’s Magazine in New York since 1916. Harris informed McKay that he desired to publish some of his poems in Pearson’s and asked if they could not meet to discuss McKay’s work. McKay felt that at last his chance had come. His talent had been recognized by a man who had earlier, as editor of the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review in London, published such talents as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. These men and others, whom McKay had idolized from afar, had been befriended at various points in their career by Harris. Now, it seemed to McKay, his own turn had come. Through Pearson’s he would gain a readership much larger than the one he had enjoyed in Jamaica. His long struggle would be rewarded. After six years in the United States, he felt at last on the verge of success.80
To McKay, Harris was “a romantic luminary of the writing world.” He had read Harris “avidly” since he had assumed the editorship of Pearson’s during the war, and had taken personally Harris’ first editorialin which he had stated that “the purpose of Pearson’s was to reach and discover the obscure talents of America who were perhaps discouraged, engaged in uncongenial labor when they might be doing creative work.”81
McKay’s first meeting with Harris took place in Harris’ apartment on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. Harris offered McKay wine, and the two relaxed. McKay reviewed his career in Jamaica, showed Harris scrapbooks full of literary mementos he had brought from Jamaica, and told him of Walter Jekyll, his move to Tuskegee and then to Kansas, and his life in New York. Harris listened with interest. McKay’s story set off within the aging man an explosion of memories and opinions. He expounded on the intellectual dishonesty of Herbert Spencer, talked of his own sojourn to Kansas as a young man, and assured McKay he could teach him more in one evening than Jekyll had over several years. As the evening wore on and the wine continued to flow, Harris talked; his wife returned from the theater and went upstairs to bed. Harris continued to talk, reviewing his own career and expounding on the men and events he had known. McKay sat enthralled. He later stated that Harris had launched into his long monologue “like a perfect little boat riding the great waves.”82
Alone with one of the great conversationalists of the age, McKay witnessed a sterling performance. Harris was in the twilight of a great, if checkered, career, and McKay noted that his “hand had grown shaky as we drank, and he spilled some of the wine as he poured. But it seemed to me that it was more with memories and words that he was intoxicated; that the wine was a tonic only to them.” McKay finally took his leave in the early morning hours, “uplifted by Frank Harris’ grand voice, roaring like a waterfall in my head.” As he later wrote, it had been “nearly an all-night seance,” an altogether “unforgettable experience” of a man “talking for the beauty of talking, talking exquisitely, talking sensibly.”83
The talk resulted in McKay’s appearance in the September, 1918, issue of Pearson’s Magazine. Along with five of his poems, Pearson’s also printed a short autobiographical statement in which McKay succinctly reviewed his career up to 1918. In it, he included his reaction to the Great War. For him, as for many others around the world, it had swept away many illusions. The old assumptions about the natural superiority of European civilization, which he had incorporated into his early dialect poetry, had already been severely shaken by what he had seen of American racism. “And now,” he wrote, “this great catastrophe has come upon the world proving the real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence.”84 Although he did not mention it in the article, the war also swept away McKay’s unquestioned acceptance of European rationalism. In 1944 he noted in a letter to an old friend that “I used to have great faith in agnosticism, up until World War I, when the German and British agnostics or rationalists lost all sense of reason, became rabid nationalists 2nd began denouncing one another.”85
The statement in Pearson’s provided important clues to why McKay would eventually turn to religion, but it gave little hint that within a few short months he would embrace international communism. In his most desperate moments he may have sought comfort from the great spiritual counselors of world literature, but in his more hopeful moods he still believed in progress and the efficacy of collective action in human affairs. In Jamaica, he had become well acquainted with Fabian socialism through his brother’s interest in the ideas of Sir Sidney Olivier and through his own love of George Bernard Shaw’s works. In the United States, particularly in New York, he became acquainted with more radical variants of socialist thought and action.
In addition to the American Socialist party, whose dominant reformist wing most closely resembled the English Fabians, the United States also harbored more extreme adherents to socialist theory. These included revolutionary Marxists and members of the IWW, an anarcho-syndicalist offshoot of the Socialist party, which reached its peak of activity and influence during McKay’s first years in the United States. In New York, and perhaps earlier in Kansas, McKay had readily available to him the literature of all these groups. The dramatic strikes, revolutionary zeal, and unadulterated idealism of the IWW certainly aroused McKay’s sympathies. If the Translator’s Note in McKay’s Russian book Negroes in America (1923) can be taken at its face value (McKay was in 1923 trying to convince the Russian authorities he was in fact a revolutionary), after he left the railroad sometime in 1919, he took for a brief time a factory job in New York and while there joined the “Wobblies,” as IWW members were called. In his book, McKay devoted considerable space to the IWW and lauded its work. In all likelihood, it was in 1918 the one revolutionary organization he most admired, for it was uncompromisingly active and militantly egalitarian in respect to blacks.86
McKay’s interest in the IWW was almost certainly reinforced, too, by his growing friendship with Hubert H. Harrison, one of Harlem’s pioneering black Socialists. In 1913 and 1914, Harrison had, in defiance of Socialist party directives, become an outspoken defender of IWW activities. When the Socialists suspended him from membership for three months, he left the party.87 Harrison was the first black intellectual in New York whom McKay got to know really well, and he trusted Harrison’s political opinions, which were grounded in a sound knowledge of men and events.88 Born in the Virgin Islands and educated in New York public schools, Harrison became one of the first and greatest in a long line of Harlem street-corner orators. He also contributed articles and book reviews to a number of newspapers and magazines through the years. A man of imposing physique, encyclopedic knowledge, and rare oratorical ability, Harrison became something of a legend in his lifetime, though he has since been largely forgotten. Henry Miller has described him as a soapbox orator without peer:
There was no one in those days, . . . who could hold a candle to Hubert Harrison. With a few well-directed words he had the ability to demolish any opponent. He did it neatly and smoothly too, “with kid gloves,” so to speak. . . . He was a man who electrified one by his mere presence. . . . Harrison . . . , no matter what the provocation, always retained his self-possession, his dignity. He had a way of placing the back of his hand on his hip, his trunk tilted, his ears cocked to catch every last word the questioner, or the heckler put to him. Well he knew how to bide his time! When the tumult had subsided there would come that broad smile of his, a broad, good-natured grin, and he would answer his man—always fair and square, always full on, like a broadside. Soon everyone would be laughing, everyone but the poor imbecile who had dared to put the question.89
Another major influence that steered McKay toward a commitment to political radicalism was the Masses, the one literary magazine in New York that gave consistent coverage and support to IWW activities. Quite aside from its position on the IWW, however, the Masses could have hardly failed to attract McKay’s attention. Described by Daniel Aaron as “that spectacular organ of socialism, anarchism, paganism, and rebellion,” it combined concern for artistic expression with a deep social consciousness and an abiding commitment to revolutionary change. The Masses printed a broad spectrum of radical opinion and never adopted a rigidly doctrinaire line in politics or art. It proclaimed its certainty that life, spontaneous creativity, and true social justice stood above any particular dogma.90
In its very organization and in its every issue, the Masses tried to put into practice its professed principles. Its masthead proclaimed: “THIS MAGAZINE IS OWNED AND PUBLISHED COOPERATIVELY BY ITS EDITORS. IT HAS NO DIVIDENDS TO PAY, AND NOBODY IS TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF IT. A REVOLUTIONARY AND NOT A REFORM MAGAZINE; A MAGAZINE WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR AND NO RESPECT FOR THE RESPECTABLE; FRANK, ARROGANT, IMPERTINENT, SEARCHING FOR THE TRUE CAUSES; A MAGAZINE DIRECTED AGAINST RIGIDITY AND DOGMA WHEREVER IT IS FOUND: PRINTING WHAT IS TOO NAKED OR TRUE FOR A MONEY-MAKING PRESS; A MAGAZINE WHOSE FINAL POLICY IS TO DO AS IT PLEASES AND CONCILIATE NOBODY, NOT EVEN ITS READERS—THERE IS A FIELD FOR THIS PUBLICATION IN AMERICA.”91
The Masses had made its first appearance in 1913, the year of the IWW-led strike by textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey. It continued to publish until the government banned the November-December, 1917, issue from the mails because of the magazine’s militandy revolutionary criticism of the American war effort. In February, 1918, the Masses reappeared as the Liberator, with an editorial staff now toughened by two wartime trials for sedition and immeasurably heartened by the recent example of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.92
Like others who had been moved by the magazine’s commitment to social justice, McKay had especially liked the Masses’ superb illustrations and cartoons.
I liked its slogans, its make-up, and above all, its cartoons. There was a difference, a freshness in its social information. And I felt a special interest in its sympathetic and iconoclastic items about the Negro. Sometimes the magazine repelled me. There was one issue particularly which carried a powerful bloody brutal cover drawing by Robert Minor. The drawing was of Negroes tortured on crosses deep down in Georgia. I bought the magazine and tore the cover off, but it haunted me for a long time. There were other drawings of Negroes by an artist named Stuart Davis. I thought they were the most superbly sympathetic drawings of Negroes done by an American. And to me they have never been surpassed.93
Davis and Minor were only two of the artists whose talents illuminated each issue of the Masses. Others included John Sloan, George Bellows, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Maurice Becker, and John Barber. Together they constituted a unique gallery of the period’s noteworthy artists, even though their emphasis on social realism was soon to be eclipsed by “the advent of modernism” from Europe.94
McKay had submitted poems to the Masses, but none had been accepted for publication. In April, 1919, however, the Liberator finally printed one of his poems, “The Dominant White,” and at least one person on the magazine’s editorial staff took a special interest in him. Sometime in the spring of 1919, McKay received a note from Crystal Eastman, the older sister of Max Eastman, the chief editor who had guided the journal’s progress from its inception. In March, 1918, Crystal had joined Max as the co-owner and editor of the new Liberator. While Frank Harris evoked for McKay the literary heroes of his colonial boyhood, Crystal and Max Eastman seemed to him the living embodiments of the revolutionary present.95
Crystal had liked his poems and his autobiographical statement in Pearson’s, as well as the latest batch of poems he had submitted to the Liberator. She invited McKay to discuss his work with her in the Liberator offices on Fourteenth Street. There he met her, a solid woman almost six feet tall, whose handsome face and easy, yet dynamic, grace commanded respect. A labor lawyer who had drafted New York State’s first workmen’s compensation law, she had also in 1917 cofounded with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas the American Civil Liberties Union. As a suffragist, radical feminist, anti-militarist, and socialist, Crystal Eastman had, throughout the recent war, waged unceasing battle against the hysterical repression that had swept the home front and that had not yet receded. Like her brother, she had survived the reactionary climate of the war determined to advance the cause of socialist revolution. In addition she continued to demand equal rights for women. Her hard work, dedication, and achievements as a social reformer and revolutionary, in fact, equaled her brother’s.96
McKay immediately recognized in Crystal a kindred spirit. Their conversation was easy and relaxed. He told Crystal about his life on the railroad and of that day when his urge to write had forced him into the cramped privacy of the dining-car washroom. When she observed that the retreat had enabled him to produce a poem and thereby rid him of his “birth pains,” they had a hearty laugh. From the first, they established a friendship McKay would treasure the rest of his life. “The moment I saw her and heard her voice,” McKay wrote in his memoirs, “I liked Crystal Eastman. I think she was the most beautiful white woman I ever knew.” For McKay, the essence of her beauty lay “in her magnificent presence.” And, he added, “she had a way of holding her head like a large bird poised in a listening attitude.” Crystal arranged for him to meet Max, who served as chief editor of the new Liberator and who “had final word on all contributions.”97
Shortly afterward, McKay spent an afternoon with Eastman, who subjected McKay’s poems to a close critical examination. What he saw impressed him, and McKay left assured that the Liberator would soon publish a whole page of his poetry. As with Crystal, McKay’s first meeting with Max Eastman had gone well. While Crystal had surprised and delighted him, Max had seemed to him “the composite personality of The Masses and The Liberator” he had always imagined him to be: “colorful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely or carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance.”98 Max was also without doubt one of the handsomest public figures of his generation. At thirty-six he possessed, like his older sister, the same combination of height, unconscious grace, and striking features that commanded attention and admiration. In addition, Max’s distinctive hair, already prematurely silver white, accentuated his distinguished air. Unlike his sister, however, he did not exude an aura of dynamism but appeared very relaxed and attentive, winning those around him by enveloping them in his own apparent self-confidence and objective conviction.99 To McKay, he appeared the very embodiment of reasonableness and good sense. He would always look upon Eastman as a man whose critical opinions he trusted. Although they would later have differences over politics and religion, McKay usually accepted Eastman’s literary judgments, especially his critical evaluations of poetry. Their friendship was to grow, deepen, and survive even those occasionally bitter disagreements that led to temporary silences between them. Eastman was to become a friend to whom McKay would turn in moments of greatest need. Few of his relationships would prove so durable.100
In 1919, of course, McKay was not the only young writer who looked upon Max Eastman as a heroic defender of revolutionary truth and justice against a rising capitalist reaction in postwar Europe and America. Since he first assumed the Masses editorship in 1913, he had inspired many others with the courage to act upon their own socialist convictions. “Your place,” he had written, “is with the working people in their fight for more life than it will benefit capital to give them; your place is in the working-class struggle; your word is Revolution.” Joseph Freeman later wrote that “these words were not merely an expression of opinion; they were absolute truth. We remembered them for years, and cited them verbatim to convert others.”101
After the outbreak of the war, Eastman had spoken courageously against American intervention. In 1918, he and several other staff members of the Masses had twice stood trial in federal courts accused under the terms of the wartime Espionage Act with conspiracy to obstruct the draft. In both trials, Eastman’s eloquence as a defendant had resulted in hung juries, and the charges were dropped. When McKay met him in 1919, Eastman was at the height of his fame as a militant hero of the American Left, still very much absorbed as the editor of the Liberator in battling the mounting Red Scare at home and publicizing the accomplishments of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.102
Eastman’s courageous editorship of the Liberator, combined with his good looks and relaxed presence, explain in part why McKay from the first accepted his leadership and critical opinions. But other, less obvious factors were equally important. Despite clear differences in their backgrounds, the two had much in common. Eastman had been born in upstate New York in 1882. Both Eastman’s mother and father had been Congregationalist ministers. Like McKay, he had rejected his parents’ religion but had remained strongly influenced by his mother, the stronger, more innovative, more aggressive of his parents. Eastman went to Williams College and did graduate work in philosophy at Columbia under John Dewey. Like McKay, he had early acquired a naive faith in science. Unlike McKay, however, Eastman’s uncritical belief in the broad efficacy of the scientific method persisted through most of his life. This blind faith that the methods of science were generally applicable to all areas of human endeavor made the “scientific” socialism of Marx and Lenin especially attractive to Eastman. In 1919, both he and McKay had become convinced that socialism was “an experiment that ought to be tried.”103
Eastman and McKay also generally shared the same ideas about the arts, especially poetry. Neither was a stylistic innovator; both adhered stubbornly to classical forms in their verse. Although McKay had earlier achieved moments of genuine innovation and originality in his dialect verse, he had abandoned such experiments in the United States and never returned to them. McKay applauded Eastman’s attacks on the modernists in art and literature, even though he would eventually be more inclined than Eastman to tolerate such innovators as T. S. Eliot.104
Eastman was not obviously egomaniacal like Harris. He represented to McKay all that was finest in the American, Anglo-Saxon Protestant intellectual tradition. Then, too, there was something undeniably aristocratic in Eastman’s appearance, apparent self-assurance, and way of life that appealed enormously to McKay. In one of his earliest surviving letters to Eastman, McKay wrote, “I was glad to see how you live—so unaffectedly free—not striving to be like the masses like some radicals, but just yourself. I love your life—more than your poetry, more than your personality.”105
Eastman took the place that Jekyll had occupied in McKay’s life: patron, friend, confidant, and sympathetic critic. Although he was McKay’s senior by only eight years, in many respects he became, like Jekyll before him, a father figure for McKay. This situation had its inevitable ironies. As William O’Neill has made clear in his biography, Eastman harbored deep insecurities of his own, despite his outward calm. His relationship with his own father had never been intimate and he himself had a series of father substitutes. As the youngest child in his family, Eastman, like McKay, always had doubts about his personal adequacy. Like McKay, too, he had always been a “mama’s boy.” Unlike McKay, he never allowed whatever homosexual inclinations he may have had to surface. He instead became a practicing advocate of free love between men and women and had innumerable affairs. In his forties, he did eventually establish a stable, though nonmonogamous, union with his second wife.106
From the first, the friendship between Eastman and McKay went beyond a mere patron-client bond, even though this would always be an undeniable element in their relationship. This aspect of their friendship resulted partly from their initial acquaintance as editor and author, partly from Eastman’s far more secure position as a middle-class white man in a white society, and finally from the fact that McKay never succeeded as well as Eastman in making and keeping money. No matter how precarious Eastman’s finances were at any given time, he usually had more money than McKay and was always willing to help him. On his side, Eastman sincerely admired and respected McKay as a man and a writer. He was convinced that McKay had something he feared he himself lacked—lyric genius. He always insisted that McKay remain true to his vocation as creative artist and writer. Naively and with a wholly unconscious condescension, he believed he had discovered in McKay the greatest lyric poet the Negro race had ever produced. Eastman soon came to appreciate, too, McKay’s company—his quick wit and ready laugh, his sharp, intuitive political judgment, and his alertness to social and intellectual nuances. Eastman also quickly learned that McKay could be moody and remote or bitingly sarcastic and bitter. At such times, he left McKay alone. Eastman knew McKay as a black had cause for bitterness most white Americans could only imagine. Their friendship had, after all, begun during a time of extreme tension throughout the nation and the world.107
In the transition to peace, the nation in 1919 was reacting with fear and violence toward the unsettling changes the war had wrought at home and abroad. The specter of Communist revolution had already become a reality in Russia, and from there threatened all of Europe. Now, at the war’s end, it seemed that a Communist leader might also gain control of Hungary. A Communist attempt to seize power in Germany had been temporarily thwarted, but the newly created Third Communist International had already announced its intentions to spread its revolutionary activities to every capitalist nation, including the United States. In the spring of 1919, unknown terrorists in America had almost succeeded in mailing packages containing bombs to several important government officials. The crusade to make the world safe for democracy had evidently not made the United States immune to the radical consequences of the Great War in Europe.108
In the United States a rising tide of disillusionment and reaction had set in against the consequences of the war and against President Wilson’s efforts to effect through American acceptance of the Versailles treaty the machinery to avert another world war. A hurried demobilization of troops, fears of a severe economic recession, a rapidly rising rate of inflation, and an outbreak of labor-management disputes in industry had all combined to exaggerate the fear that revolution threatened the internal stability of the United States. These events enabled those who sought scapegoats to direct the nation’s aggression from the German Hun to foreign-born political radicals within the United States. They were perceived as diabolical carriers of the new Bolshevik plague. The resulting Red Scare in the spring and summer of 1919 led to mob action against radicals and to police raids on radical organizations and their meetings. Mass arrests eventually resulted in the deportation of several hundred East Europeans from the United States to Russia.109
This rising nativist reaction to distant events in Europe represented only half of the domestic hysteria unleashed in 1919. America’s black population also suffered as a result of the reactionary dementia that seized the nation. The demands of wartime industry for labor had led to an accelerated migration of blacks to urban industrial areas of the North. In addition, 200,000 black soldiers had served in France. Everywhere the traditional patterns of race relations appeared threatened. In the South, blacks on the move, blacks in the army, blacks with any initiative whatsoever were all looked upon as potential troublemakers. Lynchings rose dramatically and in 1919 reached a crescendo of primal savagery. Several blacks were tortured and burned at the stake in ritualistic mass exorcisms of southern communal fears.110
In the North, events took a different turn. There blacks had moved into urban milieus different from those in the South and had entered jobs traditionally held by white European immigrants. As in the past, blacks also occasionally allowed themselves to be used as strikebreakers in fiercely bitter industrial disputes. Some were unwittingly husded into these positions by agents promising high salaries and steady jobs. Others knowingly undercut the collective efforts of white laborers because they knew these same workers had often barred blacks from their unions. In the rising labor turmoil of 1919, blacks became easy targets for many disaffected urban whites in the North, who already felt threatened by rising inflation, an uncertain job market, and the social changes of the war years. The new black migrants further threatened them with more job competition and inexplicable cultural differences. Differences in skin color only accentuated all the other sources of conflict between blacks and whites in 1919. By the war’s end, Negroes had come to embody for the northern industrial worker many of his worst frustrations and fears. As a consequence, the Red Scare became for blacks the Red Summer of 1919, a nightmare of bloody riots and violent death. From May until January, there occurred no less than twenty-five racial riots in urban centers throughout the country. The Chicago riot in July was perhaps the worst. When it was over, authorities counted 38 Negroes and whites dead, more than 520 injured, and many more homeless.111
Black hopes for a better life had been raised by the changes World War I had brought to their lives and by the Wilsonian rhetoric extolling America’s role as a defender of democracy. They had expected a larger share of justice at home, and at the end of the war they were in no mood to acquiesce meekly in the destruction of their limited gains.112 It was against this background of international change and domestic reaction that Claude McKay first met Crystal and Max Eastman.
Through the spring and summer of 1919, McKay still held his job as a dining-car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Since his arrival in the United States he had suffered great anguish over the cruel inequalities of American race relations. His emotions ranged from horror through gloomy depression and self-pity to forthright anger. Outbreaks of mob violence against blacks never left him indifferent. McKay’s description of the character Ray in Home to Harlem was equally true of himself: “Any upset—a terror-breathing, Negro-baiting headline in a metropolitan newspaper or the news of a human bonfire in Dixie—could make him miserable and despairingly despondent like an injured child. While any flash of beauty or wonder might lift him happier than a god.”113
Because his job carried him constandy from city to city, McKay traveled during the first half of 1919 with an almost constant dread of imminent danger. He remembered those days most vividly in A Long Way from Home: “Traveling from city to city and unable to gauge the attitude and temper of each one, we Negro railroad men were nervous. We were less light-hearted. We did not separate from one another gaily to spend ourselves in speakeasies and gambling joints. We stuck together, some of us armed, going from the railroad station to our quarters. We stayed in our quarters all through the dreary ominous nights, for we never knew what was going to happen.”114
As McKay suggested, blacks in the summer of 1919 were prepared to strike back when attacked.115 Although McKay abhorred violence, he believed in self-defense and hated the injustices around him. Like Ray in Home to Harlem, he was a “reservoir of intense emotional energy. Life touched him emotionally in a thousand vivid ways. Maybe his own being was something of a touchstone of the general emotion of his race.”116
In the face of gathering violence, he began to write poems filled with hatred for those who would drown in blood all black hopes and aspirations. After the heavy clouds had gathered and the storm of racial turbulence had broken across the nation, he carried these new poems to Crystal and Max Eastman. Max did not hesitate to publish them. As early as 1912, he had advised blacks in a Masses editorial to arm themselves, and when attacked, to fight back: “We believe there will be less innocent blood and less misery spread over the history of the next century if the black citizens arise and demand respect in the name of power than there will be if they continue to be niggers (that is to say, servile), and accept the counsel of those of their own race who advise them to be niggers.”117
By the spring of 1919, McKay at last stood ready to proclaim his own political militancy and to plunge into the turbulent, exhilarating waters of revolutionary politics and art. His previous life seemed but a slow preparation for such commitment. With the Masses and the Liberator he could both serve the cause of social justice and find himself as writer and artist.
In the July, 1919, Liberator, Eastman printed seven poems by McKay in an explosive two-page spread. With heavy sarcasm and devastating irony, McKay contrasted the nobly expressed ideals of America at war and the actual conditions of mob violence and primitive passions that prevailed within its borders:
Black Southern men, like hogs await your doom!
White wretches hunt and haul you from your huts,
They squeeze the babies out of your women’s wombs,
They cut your members off, rip out your guts!
It is a Roman Holiday: and worse:
It is the mad beast risen from his lair,
The dead accusing years eternal curse,
Reeking of vengeance, in fulfillment here—
Bravo Democracy! Hail greatest power
That saved sick Europe in her darkest hour!118
After “A Roman Holiday,” there followed “If We Must Die,” an exhortation to black men not to go meekly:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!119
Frank Harris the previous summer had urged McKay not to hold back his real feelings when writing of mob violence against his race but to rise and storm the heights, “like Milton when he wrote ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.,,, Harris had pointed specifically to McKay’s sonnet “The Lynching” as an example of a poem whose expressed sentiments did not really plumb the horror of racial repression in the United States. In it McKay had compared the mutilated black victim of a lynching to a Christ figure and had commented upon the satanic, unearthly “glee” with which men, women, and children went through the rites of his crucifixion. Harris had objected that “a sonnet like this, after reading the report of the St. Louis Massacre in 1917 . . . sounds like an anti-climax.” He had then quoted Milton: “Avenge O Lord! thy slaughtered Saints whose bones / Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.” Those lines, Harris had stated, “have the sublime human cry of anguish and hate against man’s inhumanity to man. Some day you will rip it out of your guts.”120
In the summer of 1919, McKay at last responded to the desperate conditions of his people with an urisparing, unapologetic condemnation of those responsible for the violence against them. In “If We Must Die,” he appealed directly to his people to resist with courage and determination those who would murder them. The poem eloquendy expressed black America’s mood of desperation and defiance that summer. McKay had first read the poem to the men of his dining-car crew. They had reacted with intense emotion. Even the irresponsible fourth waiter, a man afflicted with “a strangely acute form of satyriasis,” had wept.121
Whatever flaws one may find in the construction and diction of “If We Must Die,” whatever echoes one may hear in it of the heroic sentimentalism of Victorian England, McKay had written a poem that immediately won a permanent place in the memory of a beleaguered people. Because of it, American blacks embraced him and have ever since claimed him as their own. “Indeed,” McKay eventually concluded, “that one grand outburst is their sole standard of appraising my poetry.”122 White America has remained less impressed. As late as September, 1971, Time magazine could report that rebellious black inmates at Attica State Prison in upstate New York had “passed around clandestine writings of their own: among them was a poem by an unknown prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic style, entitled ‘If We Must Die/”123
McKay’s dramatic appearance in the July, 1919, Liberator marked his definitive break with the status quo. In his poems he did not merely condemn racial injustices; he renounced the entire social, economic, and political order that had allowed these injustices to occur. In so doing, he joined other American radicals, black and white, who after World War I looked to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as an example of how to achieve the unfulfilled democratic promises of the “old regimes” throughout Europe and America. Like other radicals, McKay yearned for a restructured Western civilization in which Negroes, along with all men, could live in dignity and freedom. McKay’s denunciation of white America was thus qualified by his belief that in a future social system dedicated to the worker, not the capitalist, black and white laborers would no longer have to compete for the “almighty dollar” but could work together for a classless society. Only by a communist reordering of society could either blacks or whites achieve true freedom.
It should be emphasized that the most important and enduring ideological aspect of McKay’s rebellion was the fierce, unswerving loyalty he demonstrated toward the “common people”, of his race, a loyalty that amounted at times to an incipient black nationalism and that seemed to contradict other aspects of his thought. In the four years following World War I, McKay would reveal in clear, unmistakable terms his disgust with the American system of race relations. Against a system apparently bent on depriving blacks of their basic human dignity, McKay lashed out in his poetry with a virile and unabashed hatred rarely equaled by any American writer, black or white. In the process, he did not refrain from criticizing the more conservative members of his own race for what he considered their timidity and neglect of duty.
Almost all the poems in his July, 1919, Liberator appearance dealt directly with racial themes. One exception was a sardonic portrait entitled “The Capitalist at Dinner.” In the best cartoon tradition of the period, “the capitalist” is depicted as a disgustingly fat man with a pimply bald head, seated before an overladen table:
The entire service tries its best to please
This overpampered piece of broken health,
Who sits there thoughdess, querulous, obese,
Wrapped in his sordid visions of vast wealth.
Great God! If creatures like this money-fool,
Who hold the services of mankind so cheap,
Over the people must forever rule,
Driving them at their will like helpless sheep—
Then let proud mothers cease from giving birth;
Let human beings perish from the earth.124
In a poem entitled “The Little Peoples,” McKay noted that in Europe “the big men of the world” had met and decreed that “the little nations that are white and weak” should henceforth be free. Then observing that the position of black men had not changed, despite the great events of Europe, he taunted them for their apathy:
But we, the blacks, less than the trampled dust,
Who walk the new ways with the old dim eyes,—
We to the ancient gods of greed and lust
Must still be offered up as sacrifice!
Oh, we who deign to five but will not dare
The white man’s burden must forever bear!125
In the context of its presentation, “If We Must Die” was a veritable call to arms. By appearing in the Liberator, McKay willingly cast his lot with those despised radicals who were defiandy announcing the death of Western capitalism and the birth of an international proletariat revolution. At the age of twenty-nine, he had made his commitment.
Since his arrival in the United States in 1912, McKay’s inability to fit into the conventional order had led successively to his leaving college, failure in business, and a broken marriage. Even in Jamaica, where racial handicaps had been less pressing, his social sensitivity had made adjustment difficult. Once he was in the United States, his being a Negro undoubtedly added enormously to the problems created by his intense emotional life. He was made forcefully aware of the harsh ambiguities involved in being a Negro in America and, indeed, throughout the Western world. His tendency to rebel, already evident in Jamaica, only increased as the reasons for rebellion multiplied. When his rebellion finally burst forth on the pages of the Liberator, he was prepared for full-fledged participation in radical politics.