8

The Expatriate Years, 1925–1929: Home to Harlem and Banjo

As the fall of 1925 approached, McKay had no time to consider all he had achieved in “Color Scheme.” He had received his last monthly stipend from the Garland Fund without having found a publisher. He had endured both poverty and the personal humiliation of asking for charity from friends, and his letters began to register again tension, anger, and self-pity. To Walter White, he angrily exclaimed, “So there you are! I am in [a] hell of pecuniary fix! No, thanks, I don’t expect you to help me personally and I[’m] fed up with begging! . . . But my position is tragic. I am always working under the shadow of insecurity and it paralyses one’s best efforts.” White sympathized with McKay, but he could do little to help him. Between his duties with the NAACP and devotion to his own writing, White had all he could manage. Schomburg, too, had many personal responsibilities. But why, McKay echoed repeatedly, had they taken so long to answer his letters and inform him of their progress toward finding a publisher for his manuscript?¹

Even as he bombarded White and Schomburg with such complaints, McKay began to write again and to turn toward others better situated to help him escape his latest impasse. Since arriving in France, he had written one or two short stories, and he now began to write others. If “Color Scheme” could not be placed, perhaps he could sell a few stories and eventually publish them as a collection. Meanwhile, he took what little money he had and returned to the French Mediterranean.

The Eastmans had recently settled on Cap d’Antibes between Cannes and Nice, and McKay decided to visit them. He badly needed advice and guidance, and he trusted no one more than Max Eastman; above all, he considered him a first-rate editor. After the disastrous handling of “Color Scheme,” Eastman’s availability seemed providential.

McKay had left Brittany in September, 1925, full of despair and anxiety. Financially, his situation seemed hopeless. If only he had been in the United States, he might have had better luck. If circumstances did not improve quickly, he would go to Marseilles and try to get work on a ship bound for America. This prospect only deepened his anxieties. He was no longer as fit as he had been, and a job as a stoker on a merchant ship was physically demanding. He also seriously doubted that American immigration authorities would allow him to reenter the United States. Immigration laws had become more restrictive since 1922, and his radical past would count against him.²

When McKay arrived in Cap d’Antibes, he learned that the Eastmans might soon leave. Discouraged, he journeyed to Marseilles. While he was waiting there for a ship, McKay’s luck changed. Eastman and Eliena decided to stay and wrote urging him to return, so he hastened back to Cap d’Antibes. Soon his mood lightened. Eastman read all his short stories. He meticulously pointed out those parts that needed improvement or that might prove censorable, and he encouraged McKay to continue along the fines he had already set for himself. To Walter White, McKay wrote, “I was discouraged and demoralized at first. But Max Eastman has put heart into me again to continue.”³

McKay hoped White could find a journal that would accept his short stories. Fading a quick sale, he wanted White to find him an agent, for he was broke. He detested relying on the charity of friends and decided to look for work. For a while, he picked up a few dollars serving as “a valet” for a wealthy American. This job apparently lasted only a short while. It was hardly a position McKay relished.⁴

He tried his hand at other jobs. In the process, he left the Eastmans and moved into a room of his own in Nice. In May, 1926, he informed Alain Locke that “I have been doing everything to live— working as [a] domestic, on buildings, [as an] errand boy.” Over the winter, he had also received checks from Boni and Liveright for several of his poems that they had included in their anthology of Masses-Liberator verse. From Bookman, he also received a small sum for his poem “Mulatto.”⁵

McKay had originally sent “Mulatto” to Alain Locke for inclusion in his special Harlem edition of the Survey Graphic, which appeared in 1924, but Locke had declined because of its bitterly radical tone. This infuriated McKay, and he had hastened to condemn Locke for his timidity.

You know of course that I am suicidally frank. Your letter has angered me. Your attitude is that of Booker T. Washington’s in social reform[,] Roscoe C. Bruce in politics[,] and William Stanley Braithwaite in literature. It’s a playing safe attitude—the ultimate reward of which are dry husks and ashes!. , . There are many white people who are longing and hoping for Negroes to show they have guts. I will show you by getting a white journal to take Mulatto. . . . No wonder the Negro movement is in such a bad way. No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects. When Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line. . . . Send me back all the things—and I do not care to be mentioned at all—don’t want to—in the special Negro number of the Survey. I am not seeking mere notoriety and publicity. Principles mean something to my life.

McKay proceeded to warn Locke that if he published his other poems and omitted “Mulatto,” “you may count upon me as an intellectual enemy for life!” He closed by admitting surprise at Locke’s action, “yet not too much” because “you are a dyed-in-the-wool pussy-footing professor.”*

Locke ignored McKay’s protests and published several of his other poems in the Survey Graphic’s special edition devoted to Negro arts and letters. Among them was a two-part sonnet sequence entitled “The Negro Dancers.” It had originally appeared in the Liberator, but McKay later omitted it from Harlem Shadows and intended to exclude it from all future collections. Locke’s including the poem without any consultation frustrated and angered McKay. Locke used his Survey Graphic selections as the basis for his influential 1925 anthology, The New Negro.⁶

Meanwhile, McKay implored Locke to restore the original title of “The White House,” which Locke had arbitrarily changed to “White Houses” in the Survey Graphic. Otherwise, McKay grudgingly forgave Locke his editorial indiscretions and errors. “How can I fight you from way over here?” he lamented. “How can I? So better let it be as it is. Tell me about yourself.” By the spring of 1926, McKay had yet to see The New Negro, and he reminded Locke to send him a copy.⁷

Early in the spring of 1926, McKay found a job he actually liked. The Hollywood movie director Rex Ingram had only recently opened his own studio outside Nice. He hired McKay, first as an extra and then as a reader, summarizing novels that seemed likely material for conversion into motion pictures. Quite aside from this work, McKay’s verse interested Ingram, who also held radical social views and wrote poetry.⁸

Although now nearly forgotten, the Irish-born Ingram in 1926 stood near the pinnacle of his profession. In 1921, he had made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which Rudolph Valentino had first attracted the attention of the movie-going public. Ingram had moved to St. Augustine, just outside Nice, to escape the pressures of Hollywood and to gain greater control over his melodramas. He had quite early attracted to his new studios Max and Eliena Eastman, as well as several other curious American artists and writers in Cap d’Antibes. At least one, the magnificendy bearded and broad-chested artist Waldo Peirce, had already been featured by Ingram in the role of Neptune rising from the sea in the film Mare Nostrum. With the approach of spring, Ingram again found several willing extras among the affable American expatriates. This time the Eastmans brought along their black radical friend and introduced him to the famous director.⁹

Thus, much to his delight, McKay found himself caught up in the wondrous world of silent-screen make-believe. Along with Eliena and several of her acquaintances, he suddenly became a dancer. They were probably all among the extras in The Garden of Allah. Everyone had such a good time that Eastman celebrated the event in a poem that he sent to Waldo Peirce, who had returned to New York City. “We need you Waldo, as the fifes the drums, / . . . We’re all becoming movie stars.” And “Claude,” he noted, “[was] dancing ragtime and the Mumbo-Jum.”¹⁰

For Eastman, it was all a blissful good time, but for McKay complications soon developed. The studio’s general manager tried to limit his time in the film because he feared that a black man’s presence, even as an extra, would be resented by American audiences. McKay also heard from French acquaintances on the set that many of Ingram’s technical assistants objected to his presence. Still, after his abbreviated role as an extra, McKay stayed on as a reader. Ingram no doubt understood that McKay needed an income. Much to the envy of the more seriously ambitious actors and actresses among the extras, McKay occasionally dined with Ingram at his private table.

Despite his friendship with Ingram, McKay could not escape racist sniping that went on at the studios. One Italian in particular had acquired an outspoken prejudice against blacks during his years in the United States. He sought every opportunity to remind McKay that in America he would not be allowed to associate freely with whites as he was now doing in Nice. This person had charge of seating employees on buses that took them back to Nice after the day’s work. He often kept McKay waiting until the last bus. One day Claude lost his temper and demanded an explanation. The Italian only goaded him by asking rhetorically if McKay wanted to box with him. McKay flew into a rage and exclaimed, “Look here, I won’t defile my hands with your dirty Dago skin, but I’ll cut your gut out!” Suiting action to words, he pulled a knife from his pocket and proceeded to chase his tormentor around the bus. In an instant, however, his sanity returned. He put his knife away, and in a scene worthy of a Jean Cocteau movie, a French acquaintance sped him away on a motorcycle. The incident shamed and embarrassed McKay. He knew the old stereotype about blacks fighting with knives would be confirmed in everyone’s mind. He expected to be fired, but Ingram said nothing. “Rex Ingram’s face revealed,” McKay later claimed, “that he possessed an intuitive understanding of poets. He is Irish. He knew I had suffered enough from the incident.”¹¹ McKay stayed on until the studio closed in the summer.

In spite of the anxiety he suffered over his future as a writer, McKay spent a good deal of time in Nice with people he enjoyed. The black American singer and actor Paul Robeson and his wife Essie were there for a while, and McKay passed at least two pleasant evenings with them. Mrs. Robeson, however, considered McKay’s salty tongue and bohemian morals a harmful influence on her husband, and she did her best to limit their acquaintance. Besides the Robesons, McKay encountered several old friends in Nice. One was Charles Ashleigh, whom McKay one day met while on his way to buy some vegetables for a dinner he and a woman friend were preparing. McKay simply forgot the vegetables, the dinner, and the woman, and accompanied Ashleigh back to his hotel in nearby Cagnes, where they stayed for a week. McKay also saw from time to time in Nice and elsewhere in the Midi an unsavory East European whom he had first met in Berlin and whom he identified only as “Bull Frog” in A Long Way from Home. Like his young friend Michael in New York, though on a larger, more sophisticated scale, Bull Frog extorted money from wealthy individuals whom he artfully manipulated into compromising situations. Most of his victims were aging widows. Although McKay did not approve of his character, he sometimes consented (no doubt for pay) to translate into fluent English letters Bull Frog had originally composed in French for his occasional English victim. Bull Frog preyed on the wealthy but also aspired to be accepted by them. His audacity intrigued McKay, who corresponded with him throughout his stay in France. Their infrequent literary collaboration was as close as McKay ever came to the life of an unabashed con man.¹²

One friend whom McKay genuinely treasured in Nice was Frank Harris, who was spending his last days there. McKay saw him frequently during the winter and spring of 1926. He respected Harris’ spirit and tenacity in the face of old age and adversity, though he wondered if Harris had not over the years sometimes overstepped the bounds of honesty and truth in his efforts to keep himself financially solvent. One day Claude dared to question Harris about an old business deal in New York that McKay suggested had bordered on extortion. “He just exploded,” McKay remembered, “with a mighty sermon about the artist and intellectual integrity. . . . Whatever he did he had reserved intact his intellectual integrity.” His answer pleased McKay immensely. Harris, he concluded, “was aware that there was plenty of dross inseparable from the gold of life, and he embraced the whole.”¹³

In the early summer of 1926, Rex Ingram closed his studio. McKay decided to finish his collection of short stories in Marseilles, where he could live more cheaply. As an encouraging farewell, Ingram generously provided McKay a free train ticket and a 600-franc bonus. With this sum, he could work comfortably on his fiction for the rest of the summer.

In Marseilles, McKay worked hard to revise and polish his stories. Louise Bryant Bullitt had promised to take his stories back to New York if he got them into shape before her departure.¹⁴

As usual, McKay’s money did not last as long as he had hoped. Once in Marseilles, he began to socialize regularly with the black dockers, beached seamen, and other black residents of the vieux port, who composed a small, transient international community of black men from Senegal, South Africa, Dahomey, Morocco, the West Indies, and the United States. Few had much money, and McKay must have initially stood more than one round of drinks. The black dockers, however, had regular incomes, and they soon found McKay an occasional day’s work helping to unload ships. Among the seamen, several were also musicians, who often were able to earn money and meals playing in the quarter’s numerous cafes. Altogether, McKay found among the Africans, West Indians, and Afro-Americans of Marseilles a community of interests and a sense of kinship he had found nowhere else in Europe. One Senegalese had only recently acquired a bar on the waterfront with money he had saved working in the United States. Blacks from all over the world soon gathered regularly at his place, and McKay spent many hours there. Despite wide disparities of origin, language, and occupation, McKay found again in Marseilles companionship with fellow blacks, and “it was good to feel the strength and distinction of a group and the assurance of belonging to it.”¹⁵ His experiences in Marseilles during the summer of 1926 would eventually form the basis of his second novel, Banjo.

His most immediate task, however, was to make sure that his stories would be adequately revised before they were submitted to a publisher. He had already sent rough copies to Louise Bryant Bullitt back in March, and on June 24, he wrote imploring her either to return his stories with her comments and corrections or to shape them herself for submission to a publisher. In the letter, he poured out all the frustrations and anxieties that he had endured over the last year. When he had sent the stories to her in March, he declared, he had “just reached the end of my rope.” He had ceased to write poetry “altogether” and had devoted all his time to the stories in the hope that he could “get in on the Negro Vogue” that was creating so much stir among New York publishers. He had tried to work “as a general servant” for a month and then “on a building,” but “I found that work in France was very much more exacting than in America. I had no time to think, much less write. . . . I decided to try to write or starve.” He omitted any mention of his work with Ingram or his current social activities in Marseilles. He instead expressed bitter disappointment that she had kept the stories for over three months when she had promised him before he left Nice that she would send them in a week.

And here I am—hoping and waiting on them to help me—existing, trying to write in swarms of flies and bugs and filth, when, maybe, my stories corrected and sent to America might change my wretched situation a little. Just might—I don’t know—but isn’t it better to hope? . . . Marseilles is my last and cheapest stand. I don’t want to be driven out of here by hunger and want as I was out of Cagnes, Nice, and Menton.

After all, the few things I manage to turn out are the only joy I have. Before I must leave Marseilles for God knows where I want to work out these stories. Otherwise I’ll always carry along with me the haunting feeling of work uncompleted.*

Eleven years later in A Long Way from Home, McKay made no mention of the extreme anxiety and frustration under which he labored in Marseilles. In his memoir, he remembered only the relief and warm comradeship he found among his black companions there and his fascination with the mean but colorful atmosphere of the vieux port. One could conclude that his letter to Louise Bullitt was a calculated effort on his part to getaquick response, just another variant on the “begging letters” he had alluded to in one letter to Walter White.¹⁶

There was an element of deliberate calculation in such letters. At the same time, they revealed the impatient beseeching of a person who had never really outgrown his childhood dependence upon others. Thus, while he could genuinely enjoy Marseilles and the companionship he found there, he could also be utterly miserable, helpless, and dependent on friends to provide him reassurance and practical support.

Louise Bryant Bullitt did not let him down. She had been remarkably supportive of McKay ever since the winter of 1924, when she first provided the money for him to recuperate and write in the south of France. From time to time, she had continued to send him small amounts even as her personal life began to deteriorate.¹⁷ Louise had never emotionally recovered from the death of John Reed. Although she had a child after her marriage to William Bullitt, their union was rapidly falling apart. She drank heavily, and he grew impatient with her reckless dissipation. He also distrusted her odd circle of bohemian friends. Even Louise became disillusioned by their incessant requests for money. Bullitt would soon divorce his wife, and Louise, her health utterly wrecked, would rapidly accelerate her downward spiral to premature death.¹⁸

Even as her own doom began to close around her, however, she continued to assist McKay. She returned his stories to him in Marseilles. After revising and polishing them, he managed to return them to her just before she left Paris for New York at the end of August. After placing his latest work in her care, McKay remembered in A Long Way from Home, he spent what remained of the summer enjoying himself. He swam almost daily; in the evenings, the vieux port provided a continuous spectacle, and McKay saw it all, including “men’s fights and prostitutes’ brawls, sailors robbed, civilian and police shooting.”¹⁹

While he may, in fact, have relaxed and enjoyed Marseilles, McKay did not actually stop writing after he finished his short stories. On August 1, he wrote Schomburg, whom he hoped to see soon in Paris, that he was on “the last lap of [a new novel] (handwritten) and it will soon be finished. Then I must revise and rewrite.” He had taken a new tack, he informed Schomburg. “There are no obviously naughty things in it.” He wanted to have it ready for “the market immediately after my short stories are published.” From the plot summary he provided Schomburg, McKay had, indeed, retreated to a safe and well-worn subject. The story concerned “an octoroon girl” in Harlem who in the process of choosing among a white man, a black businessman, and a near-white adventurer “is finally broken by inexorable circumstances.” Despite his initial optimism about the story, he soon abandoned it altogether and decided that it had been a false start.²⁰

Schomburg, who had spent the summer touring Europe, wanted to see McKay, and he unwisely suggested that he might commission Claude to produce a handwritten copy of Harlem Shadows so that McKay could afford to meet him in Paris. Claude lost no time accepting; the prospect of visiting Schomburg in Paris delighted him. “I am happy—like a kid—about it,” he revealed. Schomburg, unfortunately, soon had second thoughts about the plan (he realized, too late, that he could not afford it). As a consequence, McKay’s letters soon degenerated into a series of all too familiar “begging letters.” On August 26, he wrote that because he thought Schomburg would pay him for a handwritten copy of Harlem Shadows, he had told Louise Bryant to keep the 1,000 francs she had promised him and to hire instead a typist to provide clean copies of his stories. Now he could not renew his pension at the beginning of September. “I have not a sou,” he complained. “I am in the tightest corner, believe me, that I’ve ever been in since I came to Europe and I’ve been in very tight ones!” Two days later, Schomburg informed McKay that he would soon be leaving Paris and could not afford to see him or to send any money. McKay replied immediately. He felt “dreadfully disappointed.” If only Schomburg could send him a little money, he would “always feel indebted” to him. “I feel I am going under just when I am on the point of success.” He could not appeal to Louise Bryant again. She had already “done so much.” Schomburg must do something before he sailed. “And don’t leave me in the lurch,” Claude implored. Couldn’t Schomburg at least “find someone to lend me 100 dollars?” Perhaps McKay had Louise in mind because he thoughtfully included her address in this final appeal to Schomburg.²¹

The well-meaning, ever-tolerant Schomburg simply lacked the resources to lift McKay out of his latest financial hole. Others did not. A few weeks later, just as the cool dry winds of the northern mistral swept over Marseilles, McKay received an invitation from Max and Eliena to stay with them once again in Antibes. At about the same time, he also received word from Louise that Harper and Brothers had expressed interest in his short stories. She had previously shown them to the leading American literary agent in Paris, William Aspen-wall Bradley, and she strongly urged McKay to allow Bradley to represent him in any dealings with Harper. At long last, McKay’s luck was about to change. Louise had found in Bradley someone able and willing to manage his literary career.²²

William Aspen wall Bradley had worked in New York as a writer and editor before World War I, and during the war had served in France as a captain in the United States Army. After the war, he had remained in Paris and married a native Frenchwoman, Jenny Serreyr. By 1926, he had established himself as the leading representative of American expatriate writers in Europe. His wife, a woman of talent and great resourcefulness, maintained an influential and well-known literary salon. By 1926, Bradley had acquired many distinguished clients, including Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Louis Bromfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Glenway Wescott, and Edith Wharton. Louise Bryant had secured for McKay the most capable American agent in Europe.²³

In the early winter, Bradley visited McKay in Antibes and persuaded him to expand one of his short stories into a novel. Harper wanted McKay’s stories, but they preferred a novel. It would sell better and would bring him more money and prestige. McKay readily agreed to Bradley’s suggestion. Both thought that “Home to Harlem,” a story about a young black soldier’s return to Harlem after World War I, could easily serve as the basis for a novel about Harlem life in the years just after the war. McKay had already written one Harlem novel, “Color Scheme,” and most of his other short stories dealt with various aspects of life there. He felt confident that he could expand Jake’s adventures in “Home to Harlem” into a full-length novel.²⁴

By February, 1927, he had finished the first two chapters. In a letter to Bradley, McKay exuberantly reported that “I am having a picnicdoing it. Everything is clear and I see through the whole story to the end. I ought to have the thing done by the end of March.” He added that “the background and most important settings” were “coming quite naturally” from his other short stories. “I thank you very much indeed,” he concluded, “for giving me the right idea.”²⁵ In actuality, it took McKay slightly longer to finish than he anticipated. He completed Home to Harlem at the end of May, but this scarcely made any difference. He worked to the end with the relief and confidence that came with having a publisher, an adequate advance, and a representative in whom he could confide and trust.

He had never before had a formal literary representative. He had previously depended on patrons and editors for support and advice. At the beginning of his new relationship with Bradley, its monetary aspect made him nervous. Bradley asked him to sign an agreement that McKay would retain him as his representative for the length of his contract with Harper, which called for two more novels and a collection of short stories. Since he had negotiated the contract, Bradley believed he should remain McKay’s representative through its fife. McKay hesitated, then agreed, but he made clear to Bradley that he expected more from their relationship than a simple business arrangement. In effect, McKay sought from Bradley the same kind of unselfish support he had received in his earlier relationships with patrons and editors. To Bradley, he anxiously explained that “Louise Bullitt had written that I should put myself entirely in your hands. Therefore I knew that your interest in me was not that of a mere representative. If I thought so, I could not have written to you always as I did, nor expected so much of you in other matters.”²⁶

Bradley liked McKay, whom he found generally friendly and charming. Like other successful literary agents, he understood that part of his job sometimes involved soothing temperamental egos. He did not, therefore, take offense at McKay’s condescension toward “mere” literary representatives. On the contrary, he proceeded firmly and ably to manage McKay’s business affairs for the next six years. On his side, McKay appreciated Bradley’s role, but he always remained mildly rankled that Bradley should calmly skim from his income the literary agent’s standard 10 percent.²⁷

One of the first things McKay asked Bradley to do was recover the short stories he had previously submitted to Opportunity, the monthly magazine of the National Urban League. It had become one of the chief promoters of the New Negro in literature and had begun to sponsor an annual short-story competition for black writers. In 1926, McKay had entered “Home to Harlem” in the Opportunity contest and had sent the magazine other stories as well. After acquiring a publisher and an agent, McKay became concerned that Opportunity would publish all the stories without any remuneration.²⁸

Since 1924, he had lost confidence in New York’s black editors. It was not only Alain Locke; W. E. B. Du Bois had also disappointed him. After his illness in 1924, McKay had sent several poems to Crisis, along with a plea for money. Before he received any reply, his financial situation improved, and he immediately had second thoughts about the quality of the poems and asked Du Bois to return them. He received no reply, and Crisis in 1926 inexplicably published the poems without any explanation or remuneration. In the absence of his literary editor Jessie Fauset, Du Bois himself had apparently been responsible for this questionable decision. McKay reproved Du Bois, maintaining that Miss Fauset would not have done such a thing.²⁹

After his experiences with Du Bois and Locke, he expected the worst from Opportunity. If its editor discovered that Harper planned to publish his stories, McKay believed that he might publish them first, “thinking,” as McKay explained to Bradley, that “I am helpless over here.” A formal request by Bradley for their return, McKay thought, would forestall such an occurrence. “I can do nothing with them,” he complained. “Negro editors are in a class by themselves and do not follow any of the rules of journalistic decency.”³⁰

McKay’s fears proved groundless. Opportunity returned his stories, and he maintained good relations with its editors over the next few years. In general, however, Du Bois and other blacks in positions of influence had grown wary of McKay. Du Bois could not understand why he did not simply “come home,” especially if he were sick or starving in Europe. Walter White had ceased to write him with any frequency. McKay’s repeated requests for favors even as he sniped at the NAACP could not have endeared him to White. Alain Locke had already smarted under McKay’s rebukes, and he too ceased to write him. All were angered by McKay’s opinion of them; they had questions of their own about his motives and goals. McKay reacted with anger. To Alain Locke, he exclaimed, “I am sorry that ‘because of your much abused candor in the past’ you dropped corresponding with me also!. . . Nobody in America writes to me now. I suppose I am in disgrace—a back number.”³¹

Toward the end of May, 1927, McKay sent Bradley the last chapters of Home to Harlem. In composing the novel, McKay had drawn liberally for material from several other short stories he had written. At least one story, “He Also Loved,” which related the total dependence of a pimp upon his prostitute, had been inserted in its entirety as a separate chapter in Home to Harlem. McKay also informed Bradley that the new novel was “in feeling . . . very much after the pattern of [“Color Scheme”].” In one vital respect, however, the two differed significantly. Ray, the central character in “Color Scheme,” was an alienated black intellectual. In Home to Harlem, the central character, Jake, was an uneducated man of the people whose instinctive wholesomeness and vitality were emphasized throughout the book. In Home to Harlem, Ray appeared only as a contrast and complement to Jake. McKay cast Ray as a wandering Haitian intellectual whose education had instilled in him an awareness of the larger structure of society. He possessed powers of conceptualization and analysis that Jake lacked, but he also lacked Jake’s spontaneity and confidence. McKay felt that bringing the two together strengthened the novel. In a sense they were two sides of one personality, each incomplete without the other. As McKay admitted to Bradley, “Ray . . . gives me a chance to let myself go a little.” McKay named him after “a railroad pal” and he felt that without Ray he could not have gotten “the railroad scenes ‘pat.’”³²

McKay believed his treatment of Ray in “Color Scheme” had not been successful. “As the principal character,” McKay explained to Bradley, “I don’t think Ray stood up as well as he does in a secondary role. Maybe I was more interested in his ideas than in his life. I think I’ve found out how to get at him now.” Even so, McKay recognized he could not develop Ray with the same objectivity as he did Jake. He feared that the intrusion of Ray’s ideas distracted from “the main telling of the story.” McKay still regretted the fate of “Color Scheme.” At one point he declared to Bradley that “I am quite sure that if you had seen it, it would have turned out differently.”³³

Well before he submitted his last chapter of Home to Harlem to Bradley, McKay had already decided on the subject of his second novel. It was to be a fictional account of the black seamen, drifters, and dockers he had gotten to know in Marseilles during the summer of 1926. McKay saw a good story in their marginal existence amid the degradations of the vieux port, where the naked exploitation of man’s sexual needs epitomized for him the corrupt greed at the heart of Western materialistic society. Marseilles both fascinated and repelled McKay, and he looked forward to rendering his impressions in fiction. In the early spring of 1927, he had returned there for a weekend to see how his black friends had fared over the winter. Time had taken its toll. “Their number,” he reported to Bradley, “was diminished by about one-half. Two had died in hospital and three others, after being very ill in hospital were sent home by the American Consul. The guitarand banjo players were hired by some kind of traveling show, but a few remain rather sad, dirty and scantily-clothed, but hanging on to the beach all the same and having no desire to leave it.”³⁴

McKay again returned to Marseilles in May, shortly before he mailed Bradley the final chapters of Home to Harlem. He remained there for a year, writing the greater part of his picaresque novel Banjo. This took longer to write than Home to Harlem. It was a big ger novel with a different setting and atmosphere. Before composing Home to Harlem, McKay had already spent four years wrestling with Harlem material in “Color Scheme” and his short storie In the interval, McKay had his usual problems. His health continued to bother him: he suffered periodically from high blood pressure, severe headaches, and occasional pains in his arms and hands, and one summer night he fainted inems encouraged moderation. He tried to drink and eat sensibly, and he sought a warm, sunlit room.³⁵

Harper’s advance for Home to Harlem had not exceeded five hundred dollars, and by the time McKay settled in Marseilles, little of it remained. He hoped that Harper would advance an equal amount for Banjo. In the meantime, he took a cheap, ill-lit, scarcely heated room on the Marseilles waterfront. The room faced away from the sea and proved as dismal and shut-in as an East Side tenement.³⁶

McKay was soon explaining to Bradley that he had to have a regular income in order to do his best work. He also appealed once again to Louise Bryant Bullitt for help, and he urged Bradley to sell some of his short stories to magazines in the United States or Europe. For some months he lived from hand to mouth, and at one point almost decided to take a berth as a messman on a freighter bound for Singapore. Bradley, however, sent him small sums at critical junctures and encouraged him to continue writing. In November he visited McKay in Marseilles, interceded on his behalf with Mrs. Bullitt and others in Paris, and generally stayed in close contact with him through the fall and early winter. By February, 1928, Bradley secured another small advance from Harper and arranged to dole it out to McKay in monthly installments through the spring. After some searching, McKay found a large sunny room with a fireplace and settled down to complete Banjo.³⁷

Meanwhile, in the early spring of 1928, Home to Harlem finally appeared. McKay had corrected proofs in early December and had been pleased to see that Eugene Saxton, his editor at Harper, had not “chopped it up” as badly as he had feared. While writing Home to Harlem, McKay had stressed he wanted no trouble with censors and was willing to change or delete passages to conform to acceptable standards. Harper did change a few words here and there, but generally left McKay’s phrasing untouched. Later in the winter, Saxton sent him a dummy of the dust jacket, and shortly thereafter Home to Harlem went on sale in American bookstores.³⁸

By the spring of 1928, interest in black writing, art, and music had peaked in the United States, especially in New York, and Home to Harlem, assisted by a fair amount of publicity, began to sell at a rate far beyond everyone’s expectations. In April, McKay mischievously reported to Bradley that “I see Home to Harlem like an impudent dog has [moved] right in among the best sellers in New York.”³⁹ Its success spurred McKay to finish Banjo. By May, he had completed all except the last two chapters. By then, Marseilles had become oppressive to him; in the course of a year of struggle and work, the meaner aspects of the vieux port simply depressed him.

In February, one of the Nigerian seamen upon whom he was basing the character Taloufa in Banjo returned to Marseilles minus both feet. At the end of 1926, he had stowed away on a French ship bound for New York, but he had been discovered and locked in an unheated water closet during the crossing. In New York, immigration authorities had immediately hospitalized him. His feet had been frostbitten beyond recovery; his legs had to be amputated below the knees. In the ensuing publicity, a New York lawyer secured a settlement of $17,000. After the lawyer took his $5,000 fee, the British consul in New York forwarded $10,000 to the victim’s Nigerian home. With the remaining $2,000, the rehabilitated seaman began a long voyage home that for some reason included a final stop in Marseilles. Two days before finally sailing for Africa, the double amputee was jailed by French authorities for having illegally embarked on the ship in 1926. McKay, the Senegalese bar owner, and others immediately protested. McKay in particular warned that as a writer he was in a position to make a cause célébre of the case. After two weeks, the prisoner won his release and left for home. The incident reinforced McKay’s growing contempt for French justice.⁴⁰ At the same time, he recognized a good story when he saw one and decided to make the episode the basis for his next novel.

By the spring of 1928, McKay had definitely had enough of Marseilles. A few black beachcombers had reappeared, but the vieux port no longer appeared as beguiling as it had during his first long summer there “when the franc was cheap and food and wine were cheaper.” Now, he thought only of the need to “get out and away from this atmosphere that has become depressing [in order] to read [Banjo] over and make it better in perspective.”⁴¹

Early in the summer, McKay left. He accompanied to Barcelona a West Indian boxer who had a bout there. The Spanish sporting crowd impressed him with its fair-minded appreciation of excellence, and Barcelona charmed him with its festivals. He decided to remain the whole summer. Spaniards, McKay quickly learned, lacked the brisk impersonality of French shopkeepers; on the weekends, there were dances in the streets. His spirits quickly lifted, and he settled down to complete his second novel. On August 24, 1928, he announced with relief to Bradley that “at last I have finished Banjo, three-hundred and seventy-odd pages, and I am fagged out.” Still, it was not completely finished. He needed to rewrite and revise and that would take a while longer. McKay predicted he could finish his revisions in a month, but other things intervened to delay him. One was the death of an old friend. In the same letter to Bradley, he also noted that “I have just seen by the Nation that Crystal Eastman is dead. She was one of my best friends and I feel terribly down.” Crystal had died prematurely in London of a chronic kidney disease. Her last years, McKay knew, had not been happy, but her death nevertheless came as a shock. He still remembered her as “big with primitive and exceptional gestures.” And she had “imprinted on her mind,” he believed, a “Book of Woman” that no one else could write. Now, he believed, “life” had been cheated of one of its elemental forces. He still carried in his billfold the farewell note she had written him six years earlier on the eve of his departure for Russia. He took it out, read it once again, and cried.⁴²

Although Crystal’s death saddened him, his personal fortunes remained on the upswing.Home to Harlem continued to sell well through the summer. White reviewers generally praised it, and it stirred loud controversy in the black press. Since his departure from the United States in the fall of 1922, the explosion of literary interest in things black had generated controversy as well as exhilaration and optimism. When Home to Harlem appeared, it immediately became the focus of a battle that had been raging in the black press since 1926 between members of the younger generation of writers and older racial leaders who had nourished them to maturity. It involved, as McKay had foreseen, questions of artistic freedom versus traditional preoccupations with racial advancement.

A whole new generation of young black poets, short-story writers, and novelists had emerged since McKay’s Harlem Shadows in 1922. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, and Wallace Thurman were all about ten years younger than McKay, and between 1922 and 1928 they had begun to produce the kind of freer, more varied and self-assertive literature that had first been suggested by McKay’s poetry after World War I. Langston Hughes, for example, had adapted Carl Sandburg’s style to produce free-verse poems in which he attempted to capture in the rhythms of jazz and the blues, the life and spirit of the black common folk. Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rudolph Fisher also embraced more directly their folk roots in the short stories they produced during these years. In 1928, four black novels besides McKay’s appeared, by Rudolph Fisher, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset.⁴³

Du Bois, Fauset, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Charles S. Johnson of Opportunity were leaders among the older generation, and they all served as anxious guardians of the New Negro movement. They had laid the basis for the younger writers’ success by providing contacts with white publishers, critics, and editors. Du Bois, Fauset, and Charles S. Johnson had also promoted younger writers by publishing their works in Crisis and Opportunity. As men and women devoted primarily to the achievement of justice for blacks, they remained concerned that the new movement contribute to their larger aim: the end of legal segregation and the abolition of old discriminations based on race. As middle-class progressive leaders, they wanted to project a positive, even a heroic, image of blacks and black life. Some among them were embarrassed and ill at ease when a lively and imaginative young writer such as Langston Hughes chose to extol the virtues of the lowest and least enlightened elements within the black community. Nor, as Locke’s handling of McKay’s poetry proved, were they always comfortable with expressions of black bitterness. Equally alarming in their eyes were the well-meant but misguided enthusiasms of those white critics and admirers of Afro-Americans who, as the movement progressed, seemed bent upon locking blacks into a new version of an old stereotype, that of the primitive, joyful, happy-go-lucky “prancing nigger” of the old plantation myth. In the new version (the positive version, as it were), blacks became the repository of an elemental health that Europeans no longer possessed because of their bankrupt morality and excessively mechanistic civilization.⁴⁴

Black music, dance, and the plastic arts of Africa, in particular, had a directness and vitality that inspired artists, writers, and critics in Europe and America to praise and emulation. This new appreciation of black arts and culture had begun in Europe before World War I and had influenced great artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. By the 1920s, this appreciation had moved from fine arts to literature. To varying degrees and at various times, it inspired a host of white writers, including southern writers such as Julia Peterkin, DuBose Heyward, E. C. L. Adams, Roark Bradford, Clement Wood, Howard Odum, and Paul Green.⁴⁵

In New York, the white critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten tried in every way possible to support the efforts of black writers in the 1920s. In 1926, when McKay was abandoning his efforts to find a publisher for “Color Scheme,” Van Vechten had produced Nigger Heaven, his own novel of Harlem life. In it he included middle-class blacks striving for respectability as well as the new popular image of a black subculture that thrived instinctively in amoral abandonment of all middle-class pretensions. The result was a curious hybrid that pleased some white reviewers but no blacks except Van Vechten’s loyal friends such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.⁴⁶

In truth, the efforts of the black middle class to guide, if not control, the New Negro movement and to keep it safely within the bounds of their own preoccupations proved impossible. In the same year that Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven appeared, the youthful Langston Hughes announced to the world that his generation of black writers had passed beyond the genteel treatment of black life and intended to express their “individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” He went on to add that “we build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.” While many older racial leaders stood aghast at such bold pronouncements, white literary sophisticates in New York, led by Van Vechten, plunged headlong into black Harlem for a refreshing immersion in black culture. Their interest was not restricted to abstract literary activities. Black song, dance, and sex had to be experienced in their native milieu to be truly appreciated. By the mid-1920s, whites were flocking to Harlem nightclubs and cabarets, and books by and about Negroes were actively sought by publishers.⁴⁷

It was altogether an extraordinary phenomenon. Never before had black artists and writers had such opportunities to be seen, heard, and read. The “Negro Vogue” among whites quickly became so intertwined and confused with the serious efforts of black writers to define themselves, their art, and their relationship to their people that conservative black critics accused Langston Hughes and others of selling out to a jaded white audience who refused to recognize any aspect of black life not associated with exotic dance, jazz, cabarets, and bathtub gin. The Jazz Age had arrived, over black conservative protests.⁴⁸

In the larger perspective, of course, as Nathan Huggins has insisted, the New Negro movement, and particularly its younger participants, were part of the American literary revolt against the genteel tradition, a revolt in which Claude McKay had begun to participate after 1914. Integral to this revolt was a search for new aesthetic forms and values. For better or worse, the Negro writer of the 1920s could not avoid the new image of black primitivism that whites thought they saw in Harlem. For both young black writers and their conservative critics, the question of how to deal with this image in their own works had become by 1928 a subject of serious controversy.⁴⁹

Home to Harlem appeared in the midst of this debate and immediately became a focus of intense condemnation and intense praise. Conservative blacks greeted it with dismay, while the young—Langston Hughes chief among them—were overjoyed to find that McKay had given new life to their cause. In Home to Harlem, the working-class black man, far removed from the worries, frustrations, and thwarted ambitions of the educated middle classes, lived a life of positive self-affirmation unknown to those obsessed with the injustices imposed by white society. Although he knew that his life was narrowly restricted to segregated Black Belts and that his occupation was confined to menial tasks, within those confines he managed to keep his wits intact and never lost his ability to experience directly the elemental pleasures as well as the sorrows of life. He lived for the moment, unencumbered by any restraints except those imposed by his innate sense of elemental decency and good taste. With the exception of Ray, the sensitive and frustrated Haitian intellectual, there were no representatives of the black middle class. There were no black families either (except in the distant rural past), no really permanent relationships, and no overweening worldly ambitions.

The hero of Home to Harlem, Jake Brown, was, in effect, the natural man forever dear to pastoralists and their urban counterparts, the authors of picaresque novels. But Jake was no Don Quixote: his sense of the real was too firm. Neither was he a Tom Jones: he was no innocent. If anything, he embodied traditional black folk sense moved to the city. He was the product of a hard realism that expected and asked no favors. Yet he was not lacking in generosity. Above all, Jake accepted himself, trusted his native wit, and affirmed his worth by never violating with his actions his inborn sense of dignity. In essence, McKay agreed with those who argued that blacks were closer to nature and spiritually healthier than whites. The Jake Browns of the world, McKay maintained, were different from whites. They accepted their differences, even rejoiced in them, and desired only to remain themselves.⁵⁰

In relating the story of Jake’s desertion from a black work crew in wartime Brest and his postwar return via London to Harlem, McKay gave scarcely a hint that the black middle class and its leadership existed, much less counted, in Jake’s vagabond life as an itinerant seaman, longshoreman, and railway chef. McKay instead sketched in a rogue’s gallery of Harlem “low-life” characters. Love-starved “grass widows” and the “sweetmen” who alternately preyed and depended upon them, pimps and prostitutes, homosexuals and drug addicts, loan sharks and labor scabs, alcoholics, gamblers, sadomasochists, and corrupt cops—all were found in Home to Harlem. In 1928, the existence of such types in black communities, though privately acknowledged, was not publicly advertised in respectable Negro publications. Neither was black sensitivity to the various shades of skin complexion that characterized every black community. McKay readily acknowledged that such sensitivity existed and then proceeded to name in riotously sensual language all the rich shades of color found within the Harlem community. To those who believed in decorum and restraint and also to those whose first concern was always to project black grievances onto the national stage, Home to Harlem seemed a betrayal of racial trust and solidarity.⁵¹

The novel was, as McKay had intended it to be, a militant assertion of the artist’s right and duty to discuss any aspect of black life that moved him to creative expression. Such right and duty encompassed even the endorsement of white stereotypes if they contained aspects of black existence vital to the black man’s character and survival. McKay had obviously accepted the basic contentions of the new primitivism. But in creating Jake Brown, he created a real man and not a mere caricature embodying the current white image of the primitive Negro. In Home to Harlem, Jake moved through a real world that imposed upon him a marginal status as a worker and citizen, whether in the army in Brest, as a docker in London, or as a railroad employee in the northeastern United States.

McKay’s Harlem was not the exotic neighborhood of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, but the Harlem he had known as a solitary young black workingman. It was the Harlem of the rural migrant whose family was elsewhere—in the Carolinas, Alabama, Georgia, or the is lands of the Caribbean—and whose only pleasures were those he fashioned for himself in the hours between dusk and dawn after a long day on the road or at menial jobs in the city. It was the Harlem of the picaresque black wanderer, who found there “down home folks” like himself, trying as best they could to fashion their lives anew in an alien environment. They had scant material resources but great energy, imagination, and stamina. If they often reveled by night, they also toiled by day. Ultimately they questioned their solitary lives. Some knew perpetual defeat. Jake was the shining exception, the exemplar by which those who knew him could measure themselves. But not all could move unscathed through Harlem’s “semi-underworld” as he could.⁵²

Ray, the wandering intellectual, marveled at Jake’s sure instinct for life. He himself was full of self-doubts, hesitations, and inhibitions. Above all, he rebelled against the idea of trying to raise a family in such an environment. He did not know what the future held, but he knew he needed time and freedom to think, observe, and write. The schoolboy ideas he had absorbed from his Victorian mentors had seemingly all been rendered invalid by the Great War and the Russian Revolution. He now had to fashion values of his own in order somehow to resolve the paralyzing ambivalences within himself. At the novel’s conclusion, Ray signs aboard a merchant ship bound for Europe. In Home to Harlem, McKay had in fact written the first chapter of his own search for meaning and value. Despite all the brave assertions of black vitality and joy in the novel, it was a troubled book by an author whose own unresolved tensions and self-doubts were never far from the surface.⁵³

To his contemporary critics and admirers, however, Home to Harlem was simply a confirmation of their own ideas about the direction taken by the New Negro movement. Back in 1925, Langston Hughes had informed McKay that “you are still the best of the colored poets and probably will be for the next century and for me you are the one and only.” Shortly after Home to Harlem appeared, he wrote again, praising the book. “Undoubtedly,” he stated, “it is the finest thing ‘we’ve’ done yet. . . . Your novel ought to give a second youth to the Negro Vogue.” Its critics, he asserted, were “amusing and pathetic. . . . Everyone’s talking about the book, and even those who dislike it say it’s well written.”⁵⁴

Of the older generation, James Weldon Johnson alone remained warmly supportive of McKay. A literary artist himself, he did not shock easily. He had moved in black literary, musical, and theatrical circles in New York since the first decade of the century, and he welcorned the new white interest in black culture as a significant advance in American interracial understanding.⁵⁵ Since the winter of 1928 he had been urging McKay to return to the United States. “You ought to be here,” he advised, “to take full advantage of the great wave of opportunity that Negro literary and other artists are now enjoying. In addition, we need you to give more strength and solidity to the movement.” Before Home to Harlem appeared, he wrote for Harper a promotional sketch of McKay, and afterward he assured Claude that “I think you’ve written a wonderful book.” They were to remain friends.⁵⁶

Other black leaders were less positive in their assessments of Home to Harlem. W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, saw no merit in it. In his Crisis review, he summed up his reaction by saying that after reading Home to Harlem, he had felt distinctly unclean and in need of a bath. The review stung McKay. He respected Du Bois’s long record of achievement as a racial leader. His Souls of Black Folk had been important in the development of McKay’s own self-awareness. When he answered Du Bois’s attack, therefore, his letter contained a note of anguish and regret as well as defiance. Du Bois, McKay asserted, had stepped “outside the limits of criticism” and had become “personal” in his attack on Home to Harlem. He had questioned McKay’s motives, wondering publicly how far one could sink in search of money and popularity. He had, McKay maintained, brought his argument “down to the level of the fish market.” Replying in kind, McKay said Du Bois understood nothing about aesthetics and was “not competent or qualified to pass judgment upon any work of art.”⁵⁷

As for his motive in writing Home to Harlem, McKay protested that he had since “boyhood” been “an artist in words” and had stuck to his vocation “in spite of the contrary forces and colors of life that I have had to contend against through various adventures, mistakes, successes, strength and weakness of body that the artist-soul, more or less, has to pass through.” He sympathized with and pitied Du Bois for not understanding his motives because Du Bois had, after all, been forced by circumstances into the role of a racial propagandist and had been cut off “from contact with real life.” Propaganda, McKay maintained, was “but a one-sided idea of life. Therefore,” he wrote, “I should not be surprised when you mistake the art of life for nonsense and try to pass off propaganda as life in art!” McKay closed by asserting that “deep-sunk in depravity though he may be, the author of Home to Harlem prefers to remain unrepentant and unregenerate and he ‘distinctly’ is not grateful for any free baptism of grace in the cleansing pages of the Crisis. .. . Yours for more utter absence of restraint.”⁵⁸

Du Bois was not alone in questioning McKay’s motives. One columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier compared McKay to Thomas Dixon, the notoriously racist author of The Clansman, who wrote “solely [for] shekels, shekels and still more shekels.” William Ferris in a syndicated column also charged that McKay, driven by a desperate need for money, had finally gotten it by holding “up his own race to ridicule and contempt before the Caucasian world.” Dewey Jones in the Chicago Defender concurred and lamented that “white people think we are buffoons, thugs and rotters anyway. Why should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That’s what Claude McKay has done.”⁵⁹

Not all black reviewers questioned McKay’s motives, but most did label Home to Harlem a black version of Nigger Heaven. At best, they said, both books were misguided; at worst, libelous. Almost all black critics pointed out that McKay’s characters represented only a portion of Harlem’s “many thousands,” most of whom led quiet, respectable lives far from the saloons, cabarets, and gin mills depicted in Home to Harlem. The book, they charged, would only reconfirm in white minds all the old stereotypes regarding blacks.⁶⁰

Such opinions were probably reinforced by the praise with which some white critics greeted the book. For instance, John R. Chamberlain in the New York Times betrayed an enthusiasm that verged on caricature: “[Home to Harlem] is beaten through with the rhythm of life that is a jazz rhythm . . . the real thing in Tightness. . . . It is the real stuff, the lowdown on Harlem, the dope from the inside.” Chamberlain’s review was, in fact, more perceptive than such phrases indicated. He recognized that McKay had evoked “the things that he himself has actually experienced. His workers are not mere puppets; they are McKay recast to fit the story.” But his review still contained enough to confirm the black critics’ conviction that McKay’s work seriously distorted the reality of black life in America. “If there is a moral or a point or whatever you want to call it to this novel,” Chamberlain wrote, “it is the Negro is happiest when he makes no attempt to assimilate an alien white culture.”⁶¹ All white racists could applaud such sentiments, but McKay’s black critics knew that America’s racial dilemma could never be resolved so simply.

Chamberlain meant well. Others who praised Home to Harlem were more consciously racist. Louis Sherwin of the New York Sun, for example, prefaced his praise of the novel by avowing “a vast disesteem for the jig-chasing passion that has obsessed the literati of this village for the last few years.” He found Negro spirituals to be only “ludicrous” versions of Methodist hymns, and “newly literate Ethiops . . . just as sophomoric and self-conscious as a parvenue . . . from Iowa.” In his view, however, McKay was “a superior craftsman” who had produced “far and away the best book I have ever read dealing with the African stepbrother and infinitely superior to any work by a white man on this subject.”⁶²

Not all whites were so laudatory in their condescension. A more respectable critic, Carl Van Doren, noted the episodic structure of the book and discounted it as a novel. He declared it instead a compilation of Harlem folklore. In a much more sympathetic review, Burton Rascoe agreed that Home to Harlem was “not a novel in the conventional sense,” but he nevertheless thought it a book “to invoke pity and terror, which is the function of tragedy, and to that extent—that very great extent—it is beautiful.” Like Chamberlain, Rascoe recognized that McKay wrote from intimate experience and deep conviction about “the lost generation of colored folk in the teeming Negro metropolis north of One Hundred and Tenth Street, New York.” It was, he concluded, “the story not of the successful Negroes. . . [but] of the serving class . . . and all those who compensate for defeat. . . in the white man’s world by a savage intensity among themselves at night.”⁶³

All reviewers agreed that McKay had written in vibrant, often poetic language and that his characters were vividly drawn. One note of praise that especially pleased Claude came from F. Scott Fitzgerald. McKay and Fitzgerald had met back in 1926 while McKay was staying with the Eastmans in Antibes. McKay had been in the kitchen preparing a meal when Fitzgerald arrived, and much to everyone’s merriment he at first thought McKay was a servant. They subsequently enjoyed the evening together. After the publication of Home to Harlem, Fitzgerald wrote McKay that “[I] can’t tell you how I enjoyed your book. . . . For me it was one of the two most worthy novels of the spring.” Fitzgerald noted a “Zola-Lewis” influence in the railroad scenes, which stood in contrast to “the emotion of the purely Harlem scenes.” Another well-known literary figure of the period, Dorothy Parker, also praised Home to Harlem as one of the more interesting novels of the season.⁶⁴

After five years of struggle and pain, McKay rejoiced in such praise. To James Ivy, who had written to congratulate him and to remind him of their brief meeting years ago in Greenwich Village, McKay answered exultantly, “Oh yes I remember you all right and thanks for your letter. . . . The reviews in the big-boss press are great, all of them, and the book is selling in spite of its stark realism.” As for his black critics, McKay dismissed them as “ignorant” in the ways of art and artists and simply “afraid of [the] white man’s ridicule and mockery.”⁶⁵

In a brief essay in McClure’s, McKay explained that Home to Harlem had grown out of his early experiences in New York. After he left Kansas, he wrote, “Harlem was my first positive reaction to American life.” Once there, he had given himself “entirely up to getting deep down into. . . [the] rhythm [of Harlem life].” As a consequence, as he explained in a letter to James Weldon Johnson,

I consider Home to Harlem a real proletarian novel, but I don’t expect the nice radicals to see that it is, because they know very little about proletarian life and what they want of proletarian art is not proletarian life truthfully, realistically and artistically portrayed, but their own fake, softheaded and wine-watered notions of the proletariat. With the Negro intelligentsia it is a different matter, but between the devil of Cracker prejudice and the deep sea of respectable white condescension I can certainly sympathize, though I cannot agree, with their dislike of the artistic exploitation of low-class Negro life. We must leave the appreciation of what we are doing to the emancipated Negro intelligentsia of the future, while we are sardonically aware now that only the intelligentsia of the superior race is developed enough to afford artistic truth.*

Writing for the Amsterdam News, the black journalist J. A. Rogers reported from France that McKay had told him that “it will take the Negro in America another thirty or forty years to see Home to Harlem in its true light—to appreciate it in the spirit in which I wrote it.”⁶⁶

Once again, as he had first done in his dialect poetry and again in his American verses during and after World War I, McKay had explored in Home to Harlem areas of the black experience that had seldom, if ever, been given such direct expression by a black artist. Like his poetry, Home to Harlem had stylistic flaws. It was loose and episodic, and it flirted dangerously with common white stereotypes of black life. As he had intended, however, it broke free from the restraints of respectable black caution to help open new areas of exploration for the black literary artist. As McKay had predicted to Alain Locke after the failure of “Color Scheme” in 1926, “I have difficulty enough in getting out a book, but when I do put it over it will be a book to wake the world up. Am I too boastful?”⁶⁷ As events proved, he was not.

Among younger black writers and critics, Home to Harlem aroused enthusiasm, but among established racial leaders (with the exception of James Weldon Johnson) it did little to enhance McKay’s reputation or position. In 1928, when Harper submitted his name for consideration for the Harmon Foundation’s Annual Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes, the hostility of the black establishment became evident. During the selection process, Walter White wrote confidentially that “Home to Harlem does not impress me as being as fine and as sincere an accomplishment as Mr. McKay is capable of. I do not mean by this to imply that I believe him guilty of intellectual or artistic dishonesty. I do know that he has suffered greatly within recent years from illness and poverty. It is out of this suffering that I believe the shortcomings of Home to Harlem emerged.”⁶⁸

Among the five final judges, there was only one black, the conservative critic and poet William Stanley Braithwaite. His first choice for the award was Nella Larsen for her novel Quicksand. His second choice was Jessie Fauset for Plum Bun, another novel; he bestowed upon McKay an honorable mention. One of the four white judges, the journalist W. D. Howe, did not include McKay on his list. The other three—the editor John C. Farrar and two university professors, Dorothy Scarborough of Columbia and J. Melvin Lee of New York University—chose McKay, who in early 1929 was duly awarded in absentia the Harmon Gold Award for literature. It included a cash prize of four hundred dollars. At the presentation ceremony in the AME Zion mother church in Harlem, James Weldon Johnson accepted it on McKay’s behalf. But by their actions, White and Braithwaite gave notice that the black establishment generally did not appreciate McKay’s accomplishments in Home to Harlem.⁶⁹

For McKay, its success made all the aggravations of the previous five years worthwhile. In one letter to Bradley, written in early September, 1928, he reflected candidly on some of the reasons his success had been so long in arriving. “Yes,” McKay agreed, “it was a hard struggle as you say, but I have never felt personally bitter about Me for it, because I realize that most of it is the direct result of my own temperament. I had a number of easy chances which I let slip from temperamental reasons. However if I had not travelled that hard road I cotdd not have come through with Home to Harlem!”⁷⁰

While completing the final revisions of Banjo, McKay at last felt prosperous enough to embark upon a new adventure. He had always been curious about life in Africa, and his encounters in Marseilles with black and brown people from all parts of Africa had stirred his interest even more. Among the blacks he had chanced upon in the vieux port was a Martinique seaman who had a home in Casablanca and who sailed regularly between North Africa and various southern European ports. He insisted that of all the African ports and countries he had seen, Casablanca and Morocco were the best. He urged McKay to visit him there. McKay had been in Barcelona three months when he encountered the same seaman, who again invited him to Casablanca. This time McKay accepted the invitation. His summer in Barcelona had made him aware of Moorish influences upon Spanish history, architecture, and customs. His new-found appreciation of Spain impelled him farther south.⁷¹

McKay left Barcelona in late August, shortly after he completed his initial draft of Banjo. He went first to Nice, where he relaxed and socialized for two weeks. In early September he returned to Spain, and by way of Seville crossed over to the international city of Tangier, where he lingered briefly before proceeding to Casablanca at the end of September, 1928. McKay remained in Morocco for around seven months. His acceptance of Moslems and Moslem customs proceeded slowly at first, and then more rapidly as he got better acquainted with the Moors.⁷²

The Martinique seaman, he discovered, was one of several non-Moslem blacks who had “gone native” to the extent of taking Moslem wives and living together around an enclosed court in an old Arab section of Casablanca, far removed from the modern European quarter of the city. Their adoption of Arab customs, however, stopped short of complete integration. For example, they allowed their wives to eat with them in McKay’s presence, and they retained their French citizenship, which enabled them to make “about six times what the natives doing the same work got.” McKay ruefully concluded that his friend “was ‘really’ living white in Africa.” In Casablanca, McKay quickly became aware of some of the inequalities of French rule in Morocco and of the restiveness of the native population under colonial domination. He wanted to see other cities in the interior that he hoped would be less dominated by the European presence.⁷³

Before setting off for Rabat, Fez, Marrakesh, and other towns in Morocco, however, he assured Bradley that he would soon be receiving the completed manuscript of Banjo. During his journey to Casablanca, McKay explained, “I toted Banjo along with me, re-reading, emendating and retyping and pasting all the time, and it is now almost as I want it. I shall send it off during this week.”⁷⁴ True to his word, McKay finished Banjo in Rabat and then plunged enthusiastically into the life around him.

To his surprise, he found that it reminded him in great ways and small of his native island. On his first day in Casablanca, Morocco’s long historical connection with black West Africa had been brought vividly home to McKay by a group of “Guinea sorcerors or Gueanoua,” as they were called in Morocco. They were all black West Africans or descendants of West Africans. He happened upon them near the home of the Martinique sailor. The Gueanoua were “exorcising a sick woman” and as they “danced and whirled like devils” before him, McKay realized with a shock that their performance duplicated almost exacdy the trancelike dances of the Myal cults of Jamaica, which he had witnessed as a young man. He stood transfixed until a dancing woman threw herself “in a frenzy” upon him. Other participants informed him that he “was a strange spirit and a hindrance to the magic working.” He left the scene with the feeling that he was in some unexpected ways much closer to home than he had been in a long time. At first he compared the Arabs of Morocco to the East Indians he had known in Jamaica. He admired their self-sufficiency but felt little kinship with them. He informed Bradley that he had never felt such distance with the Chinese minority in Jamaica, and he could not explain the reasons for his lack of intimate feeling for East Indians and Arabs.⁷⁵

Such aloofness soon vanished. In Rabat, he began to see the native life more clearly as “a big tree with solid roots and spreading branches.” By contrast, the city’s European section seemed only “an imported garden, lovely and carefully tended,” but black Africa’s contributions to Moroccan history and culture left an even more indelible impression on him. He was surprised to discover that “even the illiterate Moor” was familiar with “the history and the poetry of Antar,” one of the poets of the Arabian Pleiades and a child of a black slave mother. In the cafes he frequented, he often heard songs from Antar. Upon learning that he was a poet himself, his Moroccan acquaintances would sometimes exclaim that “our greatest poet, Antar, was a Negro.” Since Antar was “as great in Arabian literature as Homer in Greek,” McKay in later years bemoaned the black American’s ignorance of him. Some of his verses seemed to speak directly to the Afro-American’s own history and condition:

I have borne the evils of fortune, till I have discovered its secret
   meaning . . .
I have met every peril in my bosom,
And the world can cast no reproach on me for my complexion:
My blackness has not diminished my glory.⁷⁶

The black African element in Morocco’s great age of Islamic conquest, too, stirred McKay. At Shellah he saw the tomb of “the Black Sultan, who, according to the native legend, was the greatest ruler of Morocco, having united all of North Africa under his rule, [and] conquered Spain.” After visiting Marrakesh, he reported to Bradley that it was “still semi-savage with the Arabs always coming into the city from the . . . country and [blacks] from the Soudan and the Senegal bush.”⁷⁷

McKay seemed not at all upset by the lingering forms of slavery still practiced in Morocco in 1929. At Fez, where he finally made intimate contact with native Moroccans, he visited “an old medieval house with a wonderful court where young girls—blacks and Arabs— are actually sold—secretly. But it is not the white-slavery traffic, nor the old time Negro slavery. It is rather a way of getting a domestic servant or a slave wife.”⁷⁸ McKay, perhaps, would not have been so complacent had he seen men, as well as women, on the auction block. As he viewed it, such surreptitious slave markets were hardly more than another example of the Arab male’s complete dominance over his women.

In Fez, he enjoyed a reception among the Arabs comparable to the hospitality extended to him in Russia. He received coundess invitations to Arab homes, enjoyed “many dens where they smoke the ‘kiff,’” and in general had “such a great good time in the native town” that he temporarily abandoned his hotel, donned the local garb, and “went native.”⁷⁹ As in Spain, he saw in Morocco a civilization vastly different from the bourgeois culture of France. In Morocco, especially, each of the different ethnic groups—Arab, Berber, black African, and Jew—managed somehow to retain internal community cohesiveness, dignity, and tradition, despite poverty, colonialism, and material backwardness. Each group had its place and function in the overall society, and McKay began to feel some such balance of ethnic groups would eventually be the answer to the race problem in the United States.

Morocco whetted his desire to see black Africa. In fact, Bradley secured from Harper an advance sufficient to finance such a trip, but at the last moment McKay decided to postpone it. By January, he had begun to worry about correcting the proofs of Banjo, which he was expecting soon. “Just now,” he explained to Bradley, “I think it is more important to have ‘Banjo’ all right than to go on to West Africa.” In addition, his North African journey had been more expensive than he had anticipated. To see Africa thoroughly would be even more costly. He concluded that it would be better to wait until he had digested his Moroccan experience and written about it before proceeding farther south. When he did go, he hoped to proceed from West Africa around the Cape all the way to Egypt and to write something significant. “This is a big programme,” he admitted, “and I had better wait to see if it is realizable.” His objective would be to convey “the human element from the American Negro’s point of view.” And in anticipation of A Long Way from Home almost a decade later, he revealed that he had already found in North Africa the kind of balance among diverse ethnic groups that in his opinion should hold the most interest for Afro-Americans. To Bradley, he confided that “I am sure I won’t strike any other place like it of more interest to American readers from a sociological angle.”⁸⁰

McKay had found in North Africa the kind of cultural and ethnic pluralism in a colonial setting that he had first experienced on a smaller scale in Jamaica. In the decade just ahead, he would (rightly or wrongly) hold the North African example up as an ideal to be striven for by American blacks. In North Africa, ethnically diverse groups lived in what appeared to him a relatively harmonious and complementary balance. Instead of demanding integration, black Americans within the United States, McKay eventually concluded, would do better to strive for the kind of internal community cohesiveness and complementary functionalism he had observed in North Africa. The central importance of his North African experiences in the development of his thought made it easier for McKay to decide not to take his West African journey. Unfortunately, the opportunity to visit black Africa never arose again.⁸¹

Even if he had decided to go ahead with the trip, McKay might we have found his entry into West Africa blocked by colonial authorities. Before leaving Morocco, McKay discovered that his radical past had not been forgotten. In Fez, his constant association with Moroccans, including disaffected intellectuals, caused the French some concern. They had long been aware of McKay’s Communist activities after World War I. Once in 1924 he had been questioned by the police in Toulon. In France, however, he had posed no threat to the government, and he had not been bothered. His presence in French North Africa was another matter. There, the French viewed his racial and political militancy as a definite threat. He was accordingly summoned before a French police official and in the presence of a British consul was advised to stop associating with the natives. McKay argued that he was neither a political propagandist nor an agitator. He emphasized that his Moroccan friends had not protested his company, and he knew that the British, who had legal jurisdiction over all British subjects in Morocco, could bring no charges against him because he had not violated any laws. The meeting ended in an uncomfortable standoff. Among his new Moroccan acquaintances, McKay had experienced a singular freedom from the obsessive racial consciousness that had dogged him since childhood. His encounter with the colonial authorities jarred him into a renewed awareness of his unusual position as an articulate black within the framework of Western imperialism. No matter how nonpolitical his life had become, he remained suspect.⁸²

McKay eventually discovered that British colonial authorities distrusted him even more than the French did. On his return from Morocco, they refused him entry into Gibraltar. Despite his abandonment of communist politics, British security circles still considered him a dangerous character. Since his year in London, he had intensely disliked the British. Their actions in Gibraltar convinced him that they had encouraged his harassment by French authorities in Morocco.⁸³

In January, 1929, McKay setded briefly in Tangier to await the page proofs of Banjo. When they arrived, he discovered that his prose had been heavily edited. Many words and phrases he had used to capture the rough atmosphere of Marseilles’s old port had been deleted. The editors had substituted words and phrases McKay considered to be mere literary clichés that destroyed totally his artistic intent. As with Home to Harlem, he had given Eugene Saxton permission to alter passages that might bring censorship proceedings, but Home to Harlem had been accepted with few changes. McKay could not understand why Banjo had been revised so extensively. He had certainly not agreed beforehand to such substantial alterations, and he immediately decided to force Saxton to restore his manuscript to its original form. McKay wrote Bradley that he expected his total support. He would never accede to Banjo’s publication in its altered form and would consider all obligations to Harper at an end if they published it as it stood.⁸⁴ He then explained to Eugene Saxton why Banjo had to be cleansed of the editorial alterations:

I am not a Jim Tully writing roughly and at random ... I am a poet and have always striven conscientiously to find words to say exactly what I see and feel. I took a long time to write “Banjo” in the face of real difficulties, writing and re-writing to find the right words to render the atmosphere and the types that moved in it. . . . And then someone ups and wantonly compromises the character of my writing by replacing my personal words with cheap two- and three-syllabled stock words. . . .

I prefer to be crude and ungrammatical and achieve a clean and clear expression thereby, rather than spill the sap of my thoughts into dead husks of words.*

Harper made the corrections but at McKay’s expense, and Banjo duly appeared in the late spring of 1929. Through reflection upon his life among the beached black seamen of Marseilles, he sought to make a significant statement about the status and condition of blacks in Western civilization. In the process, he once again endorsed the notion that ordinary, unlettered black folk enjoyed a more direct, vital, and realistic relationship to life than the educated of their race whose preoccupation with social advancement robbed them of spontaneity, happiness, and the direct appreciation of the world as it actually existed.⁸⁵

McKay conceived and wrote Banjo in a more purely picaresque mode than Home to Harlem. Its subtitle, “A Story Without a Plot,” indicated that it encompassed a season of random adventures. As in Home to Harlem, his characters existed precariously but with zest amid the bawdy residue of commerce and industry, this time in the vieux port, “the Ditch” of Marseilles, as the black seamen dubbed it. It provided a colorful, infamous setting full of easy sex, endless con games, and much misery for the unwary. In fact, the vieux port was known to all seamen and seasoned international travelers as a place where literally anything could be had—for a price.⁸⁶

The novel’s chief character, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, called “Banjo” because of his mastery of that instrument, was a more roguish version of Jake Brown in Home to Harlem. Like Jake, Banjo chanced upon Ray, the wandering Haitian intellectual, and a friendship quickly developed. McKay used it to present once again his own relationship to folk types such as Banjo, who moved through “the Ditch” with a sure confidence gained from years of living solely by his superior wit and intuition.

After several years of living and writing in Europe, Ray admired more than ever the free-spirited vagabondage of such a man as Banjo. Ray shared, he knew, something of Banjo’s adventuresome, uninhibited spirit, his love of life, and the ability to rise above or descend into his surroundings. But Ray was burdened with the urge for self-expression, and in Banjo, years of hand-to-mouth living abroad had taken their toll. “Now,” Ray felt, “he was always beholden. . . . He was always writing panhandling letters to his friends, and naturally he began to feel himself lacking in the free splendid spirit of his American days. More and more the urge to write was holding him with an enslaving grip and he was beginning to feel that any means of self-expression was justifiable. Not without compunction. For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist . . . who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.” Such passages, of course, were pure autobiography, and Banjo contained many. Through the mouth of Ray, McKay reflected upon his own life, criticized the Afro-American elite, editorialized upon the significance of black folk culture, and condemned the overweening hypocrisy of European civilization in its treatment of black colonials. At the same time, he painted a grimly realistic picture of Marseilles and the black men he had known there.⁸⁷

McKay’s description of the vieux port was thorough, unsparing, and accurate. After reading Banjo, Rex Ingram wrote Claude a congratulatory letter. “You have certainly studied your subject well,” Ingram said. “I know the quarter of Marseilles well and you have it to the life.” During World War II, the vieux port became a center of French resistance activity. In retaliation, the Nazis mined the entire quarter, and demolished it as they evacuated the town toward the end of the war. Because it no longer exists, McKay’s description of its congested alleyways, dark habitations, seedy bars, and sinister denizens has become for some French a classic evocation of the quarter as it was between the wars. As one French writer stated in his account of the vieux port’s fate, “Tout s’est efface dans la poussére des explosions de dynamite. Nous refaisons souvent, par la pensee, nos promenades errantes dans la ‘fosse’ comme l’appelaient Ray, Malty, Banjo et Gingembre, ces personages de couleur du livre de Claude Mac Kay [sic]: Banjo”⁸⁸ (Everything was obliterated in the dust from exploding dynamite. In our thoughts we often wander again through the “ditch,” as it was called by Ray, Malty, Banjo and Ginger, the people of color in Claude McKay’s book Banjo).

Despite its apparent formlessness, Banjo had a loose structure that accurately reflected the black seamen’s haphazard existence between jobs. In Part I, the seamen come together. The atmosphere of “the Ditch” is described, and the rhythm of their daily life is set. In Part II, Ray enters to share the stage with Banjo. Banjo collects a group about him who form a band that plays in various dives for drink, food, and small change. At the end of this long interlude, the band breaks up and the men drift off to look for work or new adventures. In Part III, they return briefly, but the life of “the Ditch” has become harder, its magic worn thin. Some grow ill; others sign aboard a new ship being fitted for a voyage to the Caribbean. All eventually go their separate ways.

Through their peregrinations about Marseilles and its environs, Banjo remains McKay’s archtypical black vagabond, the natural man making his way by fair means or foul in an unnaturally harsh world. “I ain’t got no head for remembering too much back, nor no tongue for long-suffering delivery. I’m just a right-there, right-here baby, yestiday and today and tomorrow and forevah. All right-there right-here for me now.” To which his light brown companion, the West Indian Ginger, who held the record in the group for the longest time on the beach, replied, “Hallelujah! Lemme crown you. You done said a mou’ful a nigger stuff.”

Not all his companions shared Banjo’s healthy hedonism. Bugsy, for example, was consumed by a fierce hatred for all whites and was dominated by a quick pugnaciousness that he directed toward anyone who crossed him. After the group’s breakup and later return to “the Ditch,” they found Bugsy, who had fallen ill, dead in a dark fetid room. In death as in life, he greeted them wild-eyed, but cold and stiff. By contrast, the slow-witted, ineffectual Lonesome Blue had no defenses whatever against the dangers of “the Ditch.” Consumed by syphilis, ragged, dirty, and listless, he passed up several opportunities to be sent home by the American consul. He had finally been given up as hopeless, even by his sympathetic companions, who shunned him in the hope that isolation and loneliness would drive him from Marseilles. Another, the sensitive young Goosey, had quit his ship in Marseilles after an altercation with one of its officers. He too was race-conscious to an extreme. While highly resentful of whites, he remained haunted by the fear that his fellow blacks on the beach, by their panhandling, drunkenness, and indiscriminate womanizing, confirmed all the old white stereotypes of Negroes.

Finally, there were the Senegalese, as all West Africans were called. Some were dockers. Some had lost their papers and passports to thieves and were officially fisted as of “doubtful” nationality. They generally formed a separate group, somewhat apart from and a little strange to their West Indian and Afro-American fellows. But color brought them together, and from them Ray learned much about how carelessly Great Britain and France treated colonial workers. All the black seamen had been touched in one way or another by the Garvey movement, by radical agitation in Europe, and by the growing movements of anticolonial protest in West Africa, India, and the Middle East.⁸⁹

Banjo contained, in effect, a rich mix of images, impressions, and messages that often tended to undermine, if not overwhelm, McKay’s continuing insistence that the primitive, “natural” response to life of a man like Banjo revealed the essence of black life. Life for blacks was obviously more complicated, more varied, more rigorously challenging, and more problematic than Banjo could comprehend or cope with alone. To a considerable degree, his happy jazzing involved an individualistic evasion of hard problems that he, in fact, simply could not face. McKay nonetheless considered him the personification of blackness and black culture. Banjo had to be the starting point in any realistic self-definition because it had been the rhythm, music, dance, and fundamental durability of the Banjos and Jakes of the race who had given blacks in America the strength to rise above and to survive their harsh existence. In short, they had accepted themselves and had drawn enormous strength from such self-acceptance.⁹⁰

In McKay’s opinion, the black bourgeoisie hardly qualified as a true middle class because they lacked property, wealth, and power. To him they were only a pathetic imitation of the white American middle class. He regarded them as a tragically misguided and impotent intelligentsia. If they desired a genuine racial renaissance, Ray (read McKay) advised them that they “should study the Irish cultural and social movement. . . and read about the Russian peasants . . . and . . . their lowly, patient, hard-driven life, and the great Russian novelists who described it up to the time of the Russian Revolution.” He also advised them “to learn all you can about Ghandi [sic] and what he is doing for the common hordes of India.” In the meantime, they should not despise but should try to understand Banjo’s “Hallelujah Jig.”

Lay off the coal, boy, and scrub you’ hide,
   jigaway. . . jigaway
Bring me a clean suit and show some pride,
   jigaway . . . jigaway.

McKay denied that any feelings of “superior condescension” lay behind Ray’s “love [for] the environment of the common black drifters.” Rather, “he loved it with the poetical enthusiasm of the vagabond black that he himself was. . . . Among them was never any of the hopeless, enervating talk of the chances of ‘passing white’ and the specter of the Future that were the common topics of the colored intelligentsia. Close association with the Jakes and Banjoes had been like participating in a common primitive birthright.”⁹¹

McKay’s critics were wrong to assume he could write in this vein merely for money, although as George Orwell once pointed out, money is always a motivation among writers of every race, nationality, and ideological persuasion. And McKay was not blind to the opportunities that lay at hand. As Banjo forthrightly declared at the beginning of his novel, “The American darky is the performing fool of the world today,” and he ought to turn that situation to his own advantage. Again, near its conclusion, he touched upon the theme from a slightly different direction. “The wul’,” he declared, “ain’t gone a’mourning forevah because [of the Great War’s carnage]. Nosah. The wul’ is jazzing to fohgit. . . . And Ise jest gwine on right along jazzing with the wul’.” To the departing Goosey, whose hatred of whites was tempered only by his fear of their ridicule, he added, “I ain’t swore off nothing like you.” Blacks will find “white divilment” wherever they go, he counseled. “But we niggers am no angels, neither.” Goosey would eventually learn, Banjo believed, “to know life” in its fullness just as he himself did.⁹²

Many of those critics who had applauded Home to Harlem also welcomed Banjo. But some questioned McKay’s easy acceptance of broad generalizations about the black man’s “primitive vitality.” As one noted, “He shares with his brothers of the Klan a dangerous proclivity to generalize—only he reverses the values. To him, the Negro is superior in all that appears important: a capacity to feel and enjoy, to be generous and expressive, to be warm and irresponsible, to live without shame and inner repression. . . . Are Negroes . . . the uninhibited children of joy that Claude McKay believes?” Another critic observed that McKay’s easy characterizations failed to provide any true test of his characters, especially Ray. “We should like to see a novel devoted to Ray in which he would be forced to think and feel his way out of some real problem.” Walter White in the New York World took issue with McKay’s analysis of the Afro-American elite. He argued that McKay’s animosity actually flowed from his black West Indian background where a wealthy class of mulattoes stood aloof from their black kinsmen. McKay wrongly believed, WHiite asserted, that a similar situation prevailed among Afro-Americans. Despite this shortcoming, White conceded that “Banjo represents in some respects a growing power on the part of Mr. McKay in the selection and handling of his material.” To many in the Afro-American press, Banjo only confirmed their earlier conclusions about McKay. In brief, they believed that he was simply pandering to vile white prejudices. As Aubrey Bowser in the New York Amsterdam News concluded, “He knows he is slurring his own people to please white readers.”⁹³

Banjo enjoyed some success in the United States; it sold well, though not as well as Home to Harlem. But it made an overwhelming impression on French West African students in France when it appeared there in translation late in 1929. In Banjo, McKay gave an unsparingly harsh account of French duplicity in its treatment of black colonials. Nor did assimilated black Frenchmen from the West Indies escape his censure. In one chapter, Ray advised a young mulatto student from Martinique that because of his education he had learned to despise his own race. When he came to maturity he would realize “with a shock that you don’t and can’t belong to the white race. . . . And instead of accepting it proudly and manfully, most of you are soured and bitter about it—especially you mixed-bloods.” He urged the student to look for his roots among his own people in Africa and America instead of merely accepting French culture as the ultimate achievement of human civilization. “‘Getting down to our native roots and building up from our own people,’ said Ray, Is not savagery. It is culture.’”⁹⁴

Banjo quickly became a bible of inspiration to such young black literary aspirants as Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Cesaire, and Leon Damas, who would shortly launch their own literary careers. Lilyan Kesteloot has emphasized that Banjo’s success did not stop with the first “triumvirate” of black writers. Ousmane Soce remembered that “Banjo was displayed in black-student bookshelves right next to a book by [the anthropologist] Delafosse,” who was also writing sympathetically of African culture. In 1950, Joseph Zobel remembered in La Rue Cases Negres that Banjo also aroused much discussion in Martinique. Finally, in 1956, Sembene Ousmane from Senegal wrote Le docker noir, a novel that Kesteloot believed “was more influenced by Banjo than by the novels of Richard Wright, to which Le docker noir is occasionally compared.” In interviewing Senghor, Damas, and Cesaire in the early 1960s, Kesteloot found they could “still cite entire chapters” of Banjo. “What struck me in this book,” Cesaire recalled, “is that for the first time Negroes were described truthfully, without inhibition or prejudice.”⁹⁵

Cesaire and Senghor would eventually incorporate into their own works many of the ideas contained in Banjo. For them, too, blacks would possess a natural spontaneity and a direct emotional involvement with the world and with each other that Europeans had lost in the process of industrialization, mechanization, and urbanization. In essence, as Senghor remarked, “Claude McKay can be considered ... as the veritable inventor of Negritude . . . not of the word . . . but of the values of Negritude.”⁹⁶ For young French West Africans and West Indians, McKay would not have to wait “thirty or forty years” for his aesthetic purposes in Home to Harlem and Banjo to be understood and appreciated.

By the time the first American reviews of Banjo appeared, McKay had returned to France. He had left Tangier in late February, 1929, and had made his way leisurely through Spain, viewing with appreciation the landmarks and monuments left from the great age of struggle between Moslem and Christian. He visited Granada, where he contemplated the Alhambra and considered its significance in Spanish and Islamic history. He also journeyed to Seville to see “the Giralda that legend attributed to the Black Sultan.” Such reminders of the African and Islamic presence in Spain made McKay appreciate the deep-rooted significance of Spanish Catholicism. More than ever, he admired the Spanish above all of Europe’s peoples. Their national character, he realized, had been forged out of a mighty struggle, and their friendliness, dignity, and pride of place were genuine.⁹⁷

In Madrid, he lingered long enough to purchase two tailored suits and a new hat before proceeding by way of Marseilles and Nice to Paris. He remained in Paris from April until July, 1929, and while there he encountered many Afro-Americans prominent in the Negro Renaissance. McKay welcomed the chance to talk with them about the significance of all the new developments in black arts and letters that had occurred since he had left the United States in 1922. Above all, he wished to discover just where he stood in their eyes. Because Home to Harlem had been roundly denounced in the Afro-American press, he wondered what he could expect from his peers should he decide to return to the United States.⁹⁸

James Weldon Johnson had recently urged that he return, but McKay had hesitated. Although his newly won notoriety as a novelist pleased him, it also made him wonder if there would ever be a place for him in the Afro-American community. He continued to insist that as a writer his role was to report truthfully his own experiences and convictions. Such independence, he believed, remained at odds with the Afro-American elite’s drive to break down the barriers of segregation and social inequality in American society. His stay in Paris allowed him to renew some old personal acquaintances from Harlem, to meet other American blacks for the first time, and to gauge their attitude toward the New Negro movement and toward him.⁹⁹

From a purely social point of view, McKay enjoyed himself.Blackbirds, a popular musical comedy from New York with an all-black cast, came to Paris while he was there, and McKay met the entire company. He also met in Paris several members of the early dramatic production of DuBose Hey ward’s Porgy.¹⁰⁰

By 1929, black artists, writers, and musicians attracted as much attention in French literary circles as they did in New York. When William Aspenwall Bradley and his wife gave a party for the members of the Blackbirds cast, everyone present, including McKay, had “a grand gay time together, dancing and drinking champagne.” McKay also met the Afro-American poet Countee Cullen in the spring of 1929. From the first, McKay and Cullen got along well together and remained friends. Cullen possessed none of McKay’s mercurial irritability, and the two never quarreled. Years later, when McKay mentioned this fact to Cullen, he just laughed and pointed out that he never quarreled with anyone.¹⁰¹

By 1929, Alain Locke must have surely been more wary of McKay than Cullen ever had reason to be. McKay had long since lost all respect for Locke’s critical acumen. Locke had refused to acknowledge any wrong in his editing of McKay’s poems for the Survey Graphic in 1924 or for his inexcusable reprinting of them in The New Negro the following year. All this led to bitter exchanges in which McKay told Locke at one point that “there is no question but, that, in spite of your doctor’s degree, you have not acted as a man of honor.” McKay also stated that though he doubted Locke would understand, he had to explain that “I am a man and artist first of all. The imprisoning quality of my complexion has never yet, and never will, move me to bend to flunkeyism and intellectual imprisonment with the sorry millions that are likewise tinted.” Locke deeply resented McKay’s criticisms. Still, in their mutually condescending ways, they met cordially in Paris once again. Both were dressed in the latest fashion and when Locke exclaimed that their gloves were identical, McKay could not resist remarking, “Yes, but my hand is heavier than yours.”¹⁰² So much for their friendship.

McKay also met at this time Carl Van Vechten, Joel A. Rogers, and John Hope, president of Atlanta University, who, McKay duly noted in A Long Way from Home, looked even more “Nordic . . . than Walter White.” Like White, however, he proved “affable” and invited McKay to visit Atlanta when he finally returned to the United States. As a fellow novelist and chronicler of Harlem night life, Carl Van Vechten intrigued McKay even more than had President Hope. Claude found the author of Nigger Heaven wholly at ease with him and definitely not patronizing, but the two still had trouble communicating during their one morning together in Paris. They were introduced after midnight at the Cafe de la Paix by a young black man described by McKay as “one of Mr. Van Vechten’s Harlem Sheiks.” Van Vechten had already had a few drinks. As a matter of course, he assumed McKay would drink with him. Claude, however, ordered a soft drink. He had good reason for abstaining. He still suffered from chronic high blood pressure and severe headaches, and a French doctor had recently warned him not to drink any alcoholic beverage, even wine. Van Vechten, who was already tipsy, naturally did not understand the situation. After a while, he excused himself to go to the men’s room and never returned. McKay eventually paid both their bills and left. The two did not get together again until after McKay’s return to New York in 1934. By then, Van Vechten had himself stopped drinking.¹⁰³

The one person in Paris during the summer of 1929 who roundly condemned both McKay’s and Van Vechten’s novels of Harlem was the Jamaican-born writer and journalist, J. A. Rogers. He shared the opinion current in the Afro-American press that both men had catered to prurient white stereotypes of black sexuality. Neither Rogers nor McKay apparently took the other very seriously. McKay poked fun at Rogers’ penchant for journalistic sensationalism; Rogers was sure McKay had sold his black soul to Mammon in writing Home to Harlem. Beneath their intellectual differences, an old Jamaican class difference also divided the two men. As a light-complexioned Jamaican, Rogers had very early become aware of McKay’s rural prejudice against the island’s mulatto gentry. Neither ever quite forgave the other the accident of his birth. A mutual friend, James Ivy, later remembered with great amusement how each would visit him in the 1930s and refer disparagingly to the other’s complexion.¹⁰⁴

Rogers’ opinion of Home to Harlem was not shared by all blacks in Paris. Some among the Blackbirds cast warmly defended McKay’s book. He listened with keen interest to all those who ventured any opinion about the Negro Renaissance and his place in it. Most were young and aspiring writers, artists, actors, or teachers. They tended to look upon McKay, now nearly forty, as at best a precursor of their movement. His two recent novels were welcome but late additions to the Harlem Renaissance. The egoism of the young did not disturb McKay. The apparent narrowness of their vision did. Many, he felt, had no clear understanding of the potential importance for their racial group of a genuine artistic renaissance. McKay understood the importance of cultural renaissance in European and Arabian history, and he had followed the more recent national revivals of Russian and Irish literature. The possibility of a Negro renaissance had “deeply stirred” him. This did not mean that his notions of a black renaissance were grandiose. As he put it, “My idea of a renaissance was one of talented persons of an ethnic or national group working individually or collectively in a common purpose and creating things that would be typical of their group.” Among those American blacks in Paris in the spring of 1929, he met few who shared this vision. Their social pretensions, he felt, obscured from their view the larger artistic and cultural meanings potentially inherent in their activities. “I was surprised,” he later wrote, “when I discovered that many of the talented Negroes regarded their renaissance more as an uplift organization and a vehicle to accelerate the pace and progress of smart Negro society.” They were so flattered to be patronized by white, upper-class connoisseurs of the arts that they never realized that “perhaps such white individuals were searching for a social and artistic significance in Negro art which they could not find in their own society.” Above all, they failed to understand that white interest in them as artists did not connote the social acceptance of blacks in all areas of white society. Moreover, the interest and support shown black artists in 1929 did not mean that they could expect such patronage indefinitely. They must learn to stand on their own feet and pursue their own ends, irrespective of the temporary white interest in the exotic aspects of Harlem night life.¹⁰⁵

In effect, McKay felt the same kind of ambivalence toward the Afro-American elite in Paris that he had felt seven years before in New York City when he had first become acquainted with the NAACP’s top leadership and Harlem’s middle-class social set. He liked to socialize with them, but he knew their preoccupations with social advancement, particularly their relentless battle against the color line, conflicted with the central thrust of his writing. As a writer his main concern was with self-acceptance and the assertion of his race’s positive existence in the immediate present. Whatever possibilities blacks had for advancement, as individuals or as a group, had to rest upon their present strengths. These, McKay firmly believed, showed themselves to best advantage in the Jake Browns and Lincoln Agrippa Dailys of the race, not in the socially ambitious elite, who he believed were futilely obsessed with winning acceptance from their white counterparts.