Written between 1929 and 1933, first named “The Jungle and the Bottoms” and then “Savage Loving,” Claude McKay’s novel was ultimately titled Romance in Marseille. With a few minor corrections, our text reflects the 172-page, evidently final typescript of Romance kept in the Claude McKay papers at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. An earlier eighty-seven-page version of the novel, filed as “Romance in Marseille,” is archived in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven. For more information on the novel’s provenance, see “A Note on the Text.”
INTRODUCTION
1. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story Without a Plot (1929), New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970, 11.
2. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937), New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007, 231.
3. Claude McKay, Romance in Marseille, New York: Penguin Classics, 2020, 4.
4. Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de Voyage: Le Midi de la France (1842), Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1887, 171.
5. Romance in Marseille, 5.
6. Ibid., 24.
7. Ibid., 28.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 94.
12. Ibid., 73.
13. Ibid., 74.
14. Ibid., 112.
15. Banjo, 316.
16. While in most of the complete typescript of Romance in Marseille McKay uses “Lafala,” the typed name “Taloufa” appears, redacted and replaced by the printed “Lafala,” eight times, on pages 10, 16, 24 (three times), 26 (twice), and 28, to be precise.
17. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
18. Romance in Marseille, 28.
19. Ibid., 4.
20. “Champion Escapes from Ireland in Spite of Refusal of English and American Ships to Sell Him Ticket,” Afro-American (April 13, 1923): 14.
21. “Bring Balto. Boys from West,” Afro-American (Aug. 18, 1928): 20.
22. “Stowaway Freed When Ship Docked,” New York Amsterdam News (May 16, 1928): 3.
23. “Jailed on Arrival in England as Stowaway,” New York Amsterdam News (April 18, 1928): 3.
24. “Three Stowaways Found on Byrd Ship,” The New York Times (Aug. 27, 1928): 1.
25. “Drop Stowaway on Byrd Ship,” The Pittsburgh Courier (Sept. 22, 1928): 15.
26. “Stowaway to Carry Appeal to Australia,” Chicago Defender (Oct. 20, 1928): 4.
27. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in The New Negro (1925), ed. Alain Locke, New York: Atheneum, 1992, 412.
28. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Claude McKay’s Banjo and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” The Crisis 36 (July 1929): 234.
29. “Kept Manacled on Ship, Says Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 24, 1927): 27.
30. Ibid.
31. For more on this remarkable public hospital, opened in 1902, see Lorrie Conway, Forgotten Ellis Island: The Extraordinary Story of America’s Immigrant Hospital, New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
32. “Ship’s Officers Deny Cruelty to Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 25, 1927): 38.
33. “Kept Manacled on Ship, Says Stowaway,” The New York Times (May 24, 1927): 27.
34. “Stowaway Fails in Suit,” The New York Times (May 27, 1927): 41.
35. Romance in Marseille, 3.
36. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Romance in Marseille, 19.
40. Ibid.
41. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
42. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 185.
43. Claude McKay, letter to “Le Directeur en Chef, La Compagnie Fabre,” Jan. 13, 1928, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Feb. 10, 1928, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records, 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
51. Romance in Marseille, 100.
52. Ibid., 101.
53. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, New York: Penguin, 1997, xxiii.
54. Romance in Marseille, 130.
55. Banjo, 326.
56. The typescripts catalogued as “Romance in Marseille” and “Marseilles,” respectively, can be found in two rich U.S. rare book and manuscript archives. The shorter typescript, titled by McKay as “The Jungle and the Bottoms” and likely revised between December 1929 and June 1930, is housed in the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University in New Haven. The longer typescript—almost certainly containing what was originally called “Savage Loving” and produced between 1932 and 1933—is kept in the Claude McKay Letters and Manuscripts at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem.
57. Langston Hughes, letter to Claude McKay, July 25, 1925, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
58. The most frequently cited if not quite standard editions of McKay’s first two published novels are these: Home to Harlem, foreword by Wayne F. Cooper, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, originally published by New York’s Harper & Brothers in 1928; and Banjo: A Story Without a Plot, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970, originally published by Harper & Brothers in 1929.
59. Romance in Marseille, 4.
60. For basic information on this working history, see Claude McKay’s letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, March 18, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
61. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), in Gertrude Stein: Writings, 1903–1932, ed. Catherine Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, New York: Library of America, 1998, 900.
62. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. A Long Way from Home, 214.
66. Ibid.
67. Though St. Dominique was inspired by “this” Senghor, the character is also semi-autobiographical, possibly taking the place that an alter ego named Malty occupied in the now-lost original draft. The fictional St. Dominique fills the office that McKay himself had filled when Nelson Simeon Dede was jailed, acting on Dede/Lafala’s behalf when the shipping company plots with the French authorities to imprison the protagonist. This feature of the narrative, however, differs significantly from the Ray-as-verbal-proxy McKay of the previous novels.
68. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
69. See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Review of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and Melville Herskovits’ The American Negro,” The Crisis 35 (June 1928): 202.
70. In his least temperate Harlem Renaissance-era statement on aesthetics, W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimed that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. . . . I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” See W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Criterion of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32 (Oct. 1926): 290–297. For more on McKay’s anti-Du Boisian attitude, see his letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
71. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
76. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Aug. 28, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. The term “Dreamport” appears in the Beinecke version of the Romance in Marseille manuscript, though redacted, with “Marseille” written above it.
80. Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
81. Romance in Marseille, 29.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Claude McKay, letter to Willian Aspenwall Bradley, Dec. 21, 1929, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909-1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
85. Romance in Marseille, 17.
86. Ibid., 41.
87. Ibid.
88. Home to Harlem, 128–129.
89. Romance in Marseille, 129.
90. Ibid., 55.
91. Ibid., 19.
92. Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 268.
93. Ibid.
94. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1995, 379.
95. Ibid.
96. See Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude McKay, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922; and Claude McKay, Complete Poems, edited by William J. Maxwell, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
97. The Garland Fund was officially known as the American Fund for Personal Service.
98. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 212.
99. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 221.
100. Claude McKay, letter to Arthur A. Schomburg, July 17, 1925, Arthur A. Schomburg Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York.
101. Langston Hughes, quoted in A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, 44.
102. Rean Graves, quoted in Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940), New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, 237.
103. See Richard Bruce [Nugent], “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists 1.1 (1926): 33–40.
104. Wayne F. Cooper, 221.
105. Home to Harlem, 92.
106. Romance in Marseille, 119.
107. Ibid., 41.
108. Ibid.
109. See Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, June 25, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, June 27, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
110. See Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, July 4, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin; and his letter to Max Eastman, Dec. 1, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
111. See Shireen K. Lewis, Race, Culture, and Identity: Francophone West African and Caribbean Literature and Theory from Négritude to Créolité, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006, 28.
112. Lennard J. Davis, Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, New York: New York University Press, 2002, 30.
113. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 274.
114. Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, Dec. 1, 1930, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
115. Claude McKay, letter to William Aspenwall Bradley, Sept. 18, 1930, William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records 1909–1982, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
116. See Wayne F. Cooper, 269, 412 note 16.
117. See Wayne F. Cooper, 275.
118. Rudolph Fisher, “White, High Yellow, Black” [review of Claude McKay’s Gingertown], New York Herald Tribune Books (March 27, 1932): 3.
119. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 274.
120. Ibid.
121. Wayne F. Cooper, 279.
122. Both McKay and Bowles wrote about their Tangier encounter, McKay accusing Bowles of precipitating his troubles with the French colonial administration: see Paul Bowles, Without Stopping, New York: Putnam, 1972, 147–149; and McKay’s letter to Max Eastman, likely May 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington. See also Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007, 66.
123. See Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, April 21, 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
124. Ibid.
125. Romance in Marseille, 94.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid., 76.
128. See Dorothy Parker, “Review of Home to Harlem” (1928), The Portable Dorothy Parker, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006, 503. In his memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), McKay chafed at the allegation that the publication of Nigger Heaven had anything to do with his writing Home to Harlem, pointing out he had produced a short story of the same title a year before the appearance of Van Vechten’s novel, adding “I never saw [his] book until the late spring of 1927. . . . And by that time I had nearly completed Home to Harlem.” See A Long Way from Home, 217.
129. Dorothy Parker, “Big Blonde” (1929), in The Portable Dorothy Parker, 187.
130. Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, likely May 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
131. Wayne F. Cooper, 288.
132. Clifton Fadiman, letter to Max Eastman, Sept. 12 1933, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
133. Ibid.
134. A Long Way from Home, 193.
135. Ibid., 192.
136. Ibid., 193.
137. Ibid.
138. Romance in Marseille, 19.
139. DuBose Heyward, Porgy, New York: George H. Doran, 1925, 12.
140. See Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964), New York: Scribner, 2010, 15.
141. See Harold Jackman, letter to McKay, June 3, 1927, Claude McKay Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.
142. See Thomas C. Mackey, Pornography on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents, Denver: ABC-Clio, 2002, 154.
143. Claude McKay, letter to Max Eastman, 28 June 1933, Claude McKay Papers, Lilly Library Manuscripts Collection, Indiana University, Bloomington.
144. Ibid.
145. Claude McKay, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 288.
146. Ibid.
147. Ibid.
148. James Weldon Johnson, quoted in Wayne F. Cooper, 289.
149. A Long Way from Home, 261. Thanks to Jack Bruno for noting the reference. See also Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology, London: Wishart & Co., 1934.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Lafala: A would-be West African name, as the introduction discusses, derived from the name of the character Taloufa in McKay’s earlier Marseille novel Banjo (1929). “Lafala” is also possibly tailored from either or both of the Arabic words “fallah”/“fellah” (فلاح), meaning peasant, and “falah,” roughly meaning success and well-being. The latter is employed in the daily Islamic call to prayer, which McKay heard often while living in Morocco. Perhaps not coincidentally, over the course of the novel, Lafala rises from something of a peasant to something of a great success—neither, however, as measured in Islamic terms. In any event, his African/Arabic moniker predicts his union with Aslima, a black Moroccan prostitute with a more definitely Arabic name.
2. fine bodies supported by strong gleaming legs: Lafala’s tribal memory ironically echoes protagonist Jake Brown’s praise of the women of modern black New York in McKay’s earlier novel Home to Harlem (1928): “‘Oh, them legs!’ Jake thought. ‘Them tantalizing brown legs!’” (8). The reverence of Lafala and his people for physical vitality—a vitality he fears he has lost forever—reflects a dominant theme of the Harlem Renaissance expressed in the work of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and others as well as McKay. New Negro authors created portraits of black beauty and robustness, both modern and “primitive,” to combat racist myths of black ugliness and physical incapacity.
3. “The Moonshine Kid”: The title of this tune, and its association with the erotic pleasures of community, foreshadows Babel’s “Moonstruck” song, performed at Marseille’s Café Tout-va-Bien in chapter 21.
4. from Africa to Europe, from Europe to America: This passage, among many others in Romance in Marseille, may be read through the lens of historian Paul Gilroy’s influential theory of a Black Atlantic “counterculture of modernity” in which transnational black identities emerged with the assistance of new technologies of culture and transportation, first among them rapid transatlantic shipping. Gilroy notes that McKay’s own involvement with ships and sailors—he worked as a stoker on at least one ocean journey from New York to Liverpool—offers “support to [Peter] Linebaugh’s prescient suggestion that ‘the ship remained perhaps the most important conduit of Pan-African communication before the appearance of the long-playing record.’” See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 13.
5. It was a time of universal excitement after the war and . . . a dark cry of “Back to Africa” came over the air: McKay here describes the enthusiasm for African origins and Pan-African politics that surged among blacks in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the New World after the Great War. It took shape in the populist “Back to Africa” movement of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a group led by McKay’s fellow Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), and in the international Pan-African Congress of black diplomats and intellectuals first organized by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Ida Gibbs (1862–1957), the initial meeting of which was held in Paris in 1919. See Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism: A History, London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
6. “WC”: A water closet or room containing a flush toilet.
7. “Race ain’t nothing in this heah hoggish scramble”: The “ain’t” in this sentence, missing in McKay’s original but clearly intended given the context, was inserted by the editors.
CHAPTER TWO
1. girdles: Lafala’s girdles are belts or sashes worn across the waist that pay tribute to his West African birthplace. In an effort at cross-cultural sympathy, his Jewish lawyer compares Lafala’s handiwork to the girdles once worn by members of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Morris chair: A type of solid, wood-and-leather reclining chair first sold by the Arts and Crafts designer William Morris (1834–1896) around 1866.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Bellows of the Belt: Likely a parodic version of The Inter-State Tattler, a black-owned Harlem gossip sheet and society newspaper published in “off-color” blue ink between 1925 and 1932, the height of the Harlem Renaissance.
2. United Negro: As noted in the introduction, probably a lampoon of the Garvey movement’s weekly newspaper, The Negro World, which ran from 1919 to 1933. Based in New York and “Devoted Solely to the Interests of the Negro Race,” as its masthead declared, the Negro World reached up to 200,000 subscribers at its peak, complementing its worldly name with international distribution and regular sections printed in French and Spanish.
3. C.U.N.T. (Christian Unity of Negro Tribes): As the introduction observes, in part an undisciplined swipe at the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the leading U.S. civil rights organization launched in 1909. The NAACP’s widely circulated monthly magazine, The Crisis, was from 1910 to 1934 edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, a vocal critic of McKay’s deliberately bourgeois-shocking fiction. McKay hailed The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but took Du Bois to task in print for “sneering” at the Russian Revolution, which the younger black writer once went on record to defend as “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” See Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 140–141. In “Back in Harlem,” a chapter of his 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home, McKay notes that he admired the NAACP stalwarts James Weldon Johnson and Mary White Ovington. But he mocks Walter White, the organization’s well-connected assistant executive secretary, for his surname and light complexion, and Jessie Fauset, the literary editor of The Crisis, for her “fastidious and precious” novels. In the end, McKay seconds Hubert Harrison’s often-quoted radical view of the NAACP as the “National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.” See A Long Way from Home, 90–92. As the misogynous thrust of “C.U.N.T.” indicates, McKay’s pseudo-organization also takes unsubtle aim at the historical prominence of women in the African American church and at middle-class black women’s groups such as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), its motto “lifting as we climb,” founded by the educator and activist Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) in 1896.
4. Nubian Orphanage: Nubia, a domain along the Nile River, was home to one of the oldest civilizations of Africa, born as early as 2500 BCE and extending from Khartoum to Aswan. The racial identity of its people, who ruled Egypt in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, has been debated by ancient and modern scholars. In African American slang, however, the term “Nubian” came to refer to a dark-skinned person of (definitely) sub-Saharan African ancestry. Hence the butt of McKay’s satire: this is a “Black Belt” orphanage operating under the blackest of names that refuses to embrace black children. McKay may be targeting one actual orphanage in particular, the Colored Orphan Asylum (COA), founded in 1836 by three white Quaker women. The COA, located in Harlem at the turn of the twentieth century, in fact took in black orphans unable to find shelter in other institutions but long refused to promote black staff beyond menial positions. See Catharine Reef, Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages in America, New York: Clarion, 2005, 13.
5. He did not belong to any of the two free states . . . and was therefore either a colonial subject or a protected person: By 1914, the close of the European imperial “scramble for Africa,” only two never-colonized “free states” remained on the African continent: Liberia and Ethiopia, the latter a central concern of the posthumously discovered McKay novel Amiable with Big Teeth (2017). Lafala, his place of birth reminiscent of the “British sphere” of Nigeria but never specified, is not a native of either of these two holdout states, and is thus “a colonial subject or a protected person” of one of the fifteen European powers which divided up or parceled out Africa at the Congress of Berlin in 1884.
CHAPTER SIX
1. a Pyrrhic victory . . . to Aslima: A Pyrrhic victory is one so costly for the winner that it is tantamount to a defeat. Named after King Pyrrhus of the Hellenistic state of Epirus, who defeated the Romans in two great battles during the 280–275 BCE Pyrrhic War yet saw his army destroyed in the process.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Marseille lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun: Marseille, the second-largest city in France in McKay’s era and ours, is a major Mediterranean port that recorded a population of 800,801 in 1931, around the time of McKay’s writing; Paris, by contrast, was then home to 2,891,020 people, more than two million more. Established as the Greek colonial outpost of Massalia, Marseille remains a port of empire in McKay’s imagination, the seaside hub where Metropolitan France, and by extension Europe, communicates with its black and Islamic colonies. It also beckons as an international black crossroads, a not-just-Francophone refuge where one could live among “Negroids from the United States, the West Indies, North Africa and West Africa, all herded together in a warm group” (McKay, A Long Way from Home, 213). Both traditionally and in McKay’s Romance, Marseille is associated with revolutionary history (the rallying march of the French Revolution that became the French national anthem is of course “La Marseillaise”); with the hot, dry climate of Provence (dictated by “the glory of the meridian sun”); and with an outsider culture of regional independence and self-organized crime centered on the bars and brothels of the city’s Vieux Port or “Old Port” (often called “Quayside,” home to the “peddler and prostitute, pimp and panhandler” [29], in McKay’s novel).
2. Aslima: A transliteration of the female Arabic name تسليما—“Taslima” is the more common version—that can mean “greeting” or “salutation.” In a now lost, initial draft of the novel, Aslima is “Zhima.”
3. La Fleur Noire: As the introduction notes, French for “the Black Flower,” and perhaps a tip of the hat to the decadent proto-modernism of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), or The Flowers of Evil, which McKay read in the original French.
4. prinked herself up: Adorned or dressed herself with the intention to preen.
5. the rubicund’s face: In other words, the face of the rubicund—or blooming and full-blooded—gentleman. McKay goes on to employ this nominalization of the adjective “rubicund” several other times.
6. pianola: A type of mechanical player piano, introduced in the 1880s, that lost ground to the gramophone beginning in the 1920s.
7. Café Tout-va-Bien: French for the “Café Where Everything’s Fine,” a description not always true of this main “rendezvous of the colored colony” (31) in McKay’s novel.
8. Diup: “Diop,” close to McKay’s variant, is a common surname in Senegal and Gambia. To take just one example, Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) was a Senegalese historian whose studies of trans-African cultural continuities helped to inspire Afrocentric thought in the United States.
9. spumante: A sparkling white Italian wine produced through the “méthode champenoise,” or method of secondary fermentation, sometimes favored as a less expensive alternative to certified French Champagne.
10. “La Reine Fleur!”: French for “the Flower Queen,” here said mockingly of La Fleur Noire by her rival Aslima.
11. when he handed her money, she obstinately refused it: Aslima’s refusal to accept Lafala’s money for sex recalls an early incident in McKay’s first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928), when the prostitute Felice returns to the protagonist Jake Brown the fifty dollars she had demanded for a night of love the evening before. “‘Just a little gift from a baby girl to a honey boy!’” Felice writes on a note pinned to the cash (16). Realizing that he is as especially fond of Felice as she is of him, Jake spends the rest of the novel searching for her “leaf-like face” tinted “to a ravishing chestnut” in city crowds (11). When he finds her at last, back home in Harlem, the two quickly cohere as a couple and, after a contrived misunderstanding, prepare to shove off for Chicago in the final scene. In Romance in Marseille, by contrast, Aslima’s gesture of refusing payment from Lafala may be calculated to produce a bigger payoff, at least initially, and is not fully reciprocated. Near the end of this later novel, a cash-rich, love-poor Lafala shoves off for Africa on his own.
12. Titin: A name possibly derived from the gigantic Titans of Greek mythology, somewhat appropriate given Titin’s birth on Corsica, a Mediterranean, if not Greek, island, and his reputation as one of Quayside’s toughest pimps.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. stoker: Someone who does the hot, dirty, and difficult job of tending a furnace on a steamship or elsewhere. When perhaps the most famous black poet in the English-speaking world, McKay worked as a ship’s stoker to pay part of his way from New York to Moscow in 1922. Jake Brown, McKay’s protagonist in Home to Harlem, enters the novel as a replacement stoker on a freighter from Cardiff to New York. But Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the blunt-force Native Son (1940), is the best remembered and most politically pointed stoker-type in African American literature.
2. “all your Lynchburgs in the States”: Not just a reference to Lynchburg, Virginia, and Lynchburg, Tennessee, and other towns named Lynchburg in the United States, but a punning generic term for the many locations in the American South where African Americans were lynched, or subjected to extra-judicial killing.
3. bistro: A type of small, modest restaurant, selling alcohol and home-style food, born in Paris in the nineteenth century. As the context of this use indicates, the Café Tout-va-Bien has some characteristics of a bistro as well as a café.
4. “split”: Rock and Diup attempt, to the tune of comic asides on the differences between male and female anatomies, to do the split, or “splits,” a difficult, gymnastic dance move in which one lowers quickly to the floor with legs held at right angles.
5. the apéritif hour: The hour for apéritifs, or pre-dinner alcoholic drinks. Common choices for such drinks, meant to rouse the appetite, would in Marseille include vermouth, champagne, and other sparkling wines, and pastis, the anise-flavored spirit especially identified with the city. Digestifs, in opposition to aperitifs, are taken after the meal is through.
6. habitués: A French term, assimilated into English, for regular, habituated patrons.
7. “‘Toujours’”: “Always,” in French, and here a song title. Perhaps a reference to the hit ballad “L’Amour, Toujours L’Amour,” or “Love Everlasting,” written by Rudolph Friml, introduced in a 1922 musical, and frequently recorded in the 1920s and 1930s.
8. “the jolly pig”: Aslima’s dance in imitation of a jolly pig embellishes a long line of flirtatious baby talk in the novel in which she and Lafala compare their erotic satisfaction to the happiness of “sweet” and “darling” pigs. Both they and McKay, then, flout the Islamic prohibition on the consumption of pork, and the letter of Islamic law in general. See this verse, among others, from the Quran: “Allah has forbidden you only carrion, and blood, and the flesh of swine . . .” (16: 115).
9. “Halouf!”: A French word, extracted from an Arabic source (حَلُّوف), meaning “pork,” and emphasizing the uncleanliness of this meat.
10. Cardiff: The capital city of Wales since 1955, and, beginning in the nineteenth century, a major Atlantic seaport built to facilitate the transportation of coal.
11. cerise: In English, a shade of bright, deep red. In French, the equivalent of “cherry.”
12. “pea-eye”: As in “P-I,” short for “pimp,” used in Harlem slang of the 1920s.
13. “métier”: French for a job, trade, or specialized skill. Aslima’s employment of the word suggests that she sees pimping as a line of work much like any other.
14. “Lalla”: “Lady,” in Berber; a title of respect meaning “Lord” as well as “Lady” used to refer to women in the Moroccan nobility who are descended from the Prophet Muhammad and one of the ten Moroccan noble families; and/or one of “the most widespread terms for a female saint in Morocco.” See Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988, 21. Whichever resonance Aslima intends, she employs the term ironically.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Marrakesh: A Moroccan city founded in 1062 that is set between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara Desert. McKay, perhaps thinking of its shimmering khettera, or ancient irrigation channels, compares the city to “jewels of wild tropical extravagance” (44). Marrakesh impressed McKay as Morocco’s most “Negroid” city, a depot of the African slave trade transformed into something “like a big West Indian picnic, with flags waving and a multitude of barefoot black children dancing to the flourish of the drum, fiddle, and fife” (A Long Way from Home, 234). If McKay’s Morocco can be said to contain a version of McKay’s Marseille, then Marrakesh is it. Interestingly, McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home observes that it was “the Senegalese in Marseilles [who] often mentioned Marrakesh as the former great caravansérai [sic] for the traders traveling between West Africa and North Africa” (234). The affair between Lafala and Aslima symbolically travels between these African regions as well. The third-person narrator’s impressionistic guide to Marrakesh and other touchstones in Aslima’s past shows McKay’s Afro-Orientalism in full bloom. For more of this charmed, fascinated, and exoticizing mode, see McKay’s “Cities” poems “Tanger,” “Fez,” “Marrakesh,” “Tetuan,” and “Xauen,” written around 1934 and collected in his Complete Poems, 225–228. And see part six, “The Idylls of Africa,” in McKay’s memoir A Long Way from Home, 227–260.
2. Djemaa el-Fna: A large square and bazaar in the medina quarter, or old city, of Marrakesh, also transliterated from Arabic as “Jemaa el-Fnaa.” Known as “the largest market in Africa,” the Djemaa el-Fna’s traditional animal trainers, storytellers, and musicians inspired the United Nations to establish the UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity program in 2001.
3. muezzin: One appointed to call Muslims to prayer, often from the minaret of a mosque.
4. marabouts: Muslim religious teachers or wandering holy men, as in Sufi Murshids or guides. Often expert in the Quran, marabouts have been prominent in West Africa, especially Senegambia, and in Morocco and other areas of the Maghreb.
5. hetairai: The hetairai, from the ancient Greek for “female companions,” were a class of prostitutes permitted to educate themselves and live apart from male supervision. Though often slaves and foreigners, like Aslima, they were in certain respects, like La Fleur, less housebound and more self-determining than married Attic women. Pablo Picasso, whose Blue Period precedes McKay’s novel in its fascination with evocative prostitutes, painted a portrait of a bold, gem-wearing courtesan titled L’Hétaïre in 1901. McKay’s typescript of the completed Romance in Marseille employs the somewhat mistaken term “hetairiti.”
6. Fez: An older city than Marrakesh, founded in 808. Thanks to its prestigious Al Quaraouiyine mosque and university, the latter one of the world’s oldest continually operating institutions of higher education, Fez became Morocco’s earliest spiritual and cultural capital. In his series of “Cities” poems, written in the early 1930s, McKay praised Fez as “Baghdad / In Africa” (1–2), a place of “labyrinthine lanes and crooked souks, / And costumes hooding beauty from men’s sight” (3–4). See the poem “Fez” in McKay’s Complete Poems, 226.
7. Moulay Abdallah: Once a government center under the Marinid dynasty, this quarter of Fez was dotted with brothels and dancehalls and largely closed to foreigners during McKay’s time in Morocco.
8. Moorish rugs: Prized rugs in the style of the nomadic North African Muslims who invaded Spain in 711, a people conventionally thought black by Europeans, as in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1603). McKay may hope that these rugs underline the complexity of Aslima’s mixed black-Arab identity: her mother, Romance tells us, was a Sudanese sold as a slave to the Moors.
9. Casablanca: The largest city in Morocco, a port located on the Atlantic coast, Casablanca has long been an economic capital of the Maghreb. Casablanca was attacked and occupied by French forces in 1907; at the time of McKay’s writing, the city was formally colonized, and almost half of the city’s population was European.
10. a young Corsican: A young person from Corsica, a mountainous island in the Mediterranean Sea, variously occupied by the Italians, the British, and the French, the last of whom were granted formal control at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Marseille, from its establishment, contained a significant number of Corsican immigrants, but McKay may have chosen a Corsican origin for Titin because the island’s most significant product was Napoléon Bonaparte, born there to a family of minor Italian nobility in 1769. In his fondest, wildest dreams, Titin is a similarly brave conqueror of the wealth and women of France and its possessions.
11. a romantic sheik picture: McKay refers to the Rudolph Valentino silent film sensation The Sheik, directed by George Melford and released by Paramount Pictures in 1921, or possibly its sequel, The Son of the Sheik, also starring Valentino, directed by George Fitzmaurice for United Artists in 1926. In the shorter, earlier Beinecke Library-held version of Romance in Marseille, the sheik picture indeed features Valentino. The finished version of Romance joins both films in relying on an Orientalist palette to paint a racially mixed, erotically charged North African scene.
12. “Pied-Coupé”: Sing-song French—the second and fourth syllables are both pronounced “AY” [eɪ], and thus rhyme—for “Chopped-Off Foot,” or, less literally, “Stumpy.” This is Titin’s consistent, abusive nickname for the amputated Lafala. Thanks to the Francophone scholars Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Brent Hayes Edwards, Andrea Goulet, Musa Gurnis, Jane Kuntz, Gayle Levy, and Allan Pero for their help with this and other French terms.
13. “And who’re you kidding with that open knife, yourself or me?”: The resemblance between George Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875) and this scene of a spirited “gypsy” seductress, a jealous three-way entanglement, and a promise of tragic lovers’ violence is not strictly accidental. In his 1937 memoir, McKay mentions attending a Parisian Opéra Comique production of Carmen in Toulon in the mid-1920s. See A Long Way from Home, 196. Aslima deepens her resemblance to the character Carmen by dancing flamenco in chapter 19.
14. mulcting: Swindling or defrauding.
CHAPTER TEN
1. yearly festivities: Probably a reference to the annual celebration of Bastille Day, called “la Fête nationale” in France, that commemorates a turning point of the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. Bastille Day festivities in Marseille’s Vieux Port are traditionally among the most spectacular in the country, with the holiday in the city spanning several days and including parades, music, and folk-dancing, all represented in McKay’s rendition.
2. “beguine”: A “beguine,” in this sense, is a crush or attraction, as in the French expression J’ai le béguin pour toi (“I’ve got a crush on you”). While the use of the word in this way may date from the Middle Ages, “beguine” also refers to a form of dance and music originated by African-descended people in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, its rhythm compared to the rhumba and bolero. In Romance, a novel featuring several Martiniquais characters and repeated references to the musical beguine, McKay plays a running, punning game with the two meanings of the term. A few years later, so did the American composer Cole Porter, who legendarily wrote the song “Begin the Beguine” (1935) as a paying customer on a Cunard ocean liner.
3. “when them redskins wouldn’t stand being good an’ native them ofays had to import us to implace them”: Lafala’s African American friend Rock laughs to keep from crying about the historical replacement of Native American slaves with imported African captives—the former common in Virginia, for example, between the founding of Jamestown and the end of the eighteenth century. Rock calls white European settlers “ofays,” using the African American slang term taken from the Pig Latin translation of “foes.”
4. Vin Mousseux: A sparkling French white wine not necessarily produced in the Champagne region in the northeast of France. Like Italian spumante, it is served in the Tout-va-Bien as a cheaper stand-in for true champagne.
5. castaneting her fingers: Moving her fingers as if playing the castanets, small percussion instruments resembling concave shells used by singers and dancers in Spanish folk music, among other styles. Castanets evoke a Spanish atmosphere in the music of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), a significant influence on the plot of Romance in Marseille.
6. “‘I’m not a Senegambian,’ said Lafala”: The proprietor of the Tout-va-Bien derisively links Lafala with the royalty of Dakar, the largest city in Senegal, but Lafala quickly specifies that he is not a Senegambian, a resident of the area of West Africa comprising not just Senegal but also Guinea-Bissau and the Gambia.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. serviettes: Napkins—in this case, especially unsanitary ones.
2. a loving feast: Like other aspects of Aslima’s dream or vision of “The Sword of Life!,” a grandiose prophecy of her love and martyrdom for Lafala, the “loving feast” embroiders and secularizes Islamic tropes and traditions. In this case, the tradition is Iftar, a fast-breaking meal eaten after sunset during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. the Domino: With some dose of irony, McKay seems to have named this Marseille café patronized by pimps in mind of a haunt of revolutionary artists in the Soviet Union. In his 1923 essay “Soviet Russia and the Negro,” McKay recalls visiting the Domino, a Moscow café where young Mensheviks and amateur anarchists shared their poetry and other writings. See The Crisis 27 (December 1923): 61–65.
2. a Levantine sort of person: A sort of person hailing from the Levant, in the largest sense a loose cultural region of the eastern Mediterranean stretching from Greece to Libya. McKay may also or instead be thinking of the “Levant States,” a term used to refer to Syria and Lebanon in the wake of the French mandate granted after World War I.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1. “guillotine”: The machine for efficient beheading—thought more humane than the ax—introduced during the French Revolution. It remained France’s means of legal execution until the country abolished capital punishment in 1981.
2. the golden age of her people conquering all that . . . earth between the Pillars of Hercules and Marseille: Aslima here identifies with the Moors, the enslavers of her mother, and recalls their emergence from Africa and conquest of Portugal and Spain that began in 711 in sight of the Pillars of Hercules, promontories in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Moors were turned back from west-central France at the Battle of Tours in 732.
3. a legend that the cathedral was built on the site of a mosque . . . [and] a silent prayer that the lost dominions of her people might be restored: Aslima quietly recalls the legend that Marseille’s iconic Notre-Dame de la Garde (Our Lady of the Guard), a Catholic basilica sitting on the highest point of the city overlooking the Vieux Port, replaced a Moorish mosque built over the body of a Muslim holy man. European historians believe that the first version of the Notre-Dame was constructed on the limestone foundations of an ancient fort in 1214; the heavily touristed, Neo-Byzantine structure prized by Aslima, topped with a 135-foot-tall bell tower, was finished in 1864. Her “silent prayer,” along with other elements in this scene, indicates that Aslima has come to cast her struggle with Titin as one between Islamic and Christian civilizations.
4. The official’s sentiment towards Negroes was based upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin and David Livingstone: The official’s sentiment is therefore built on the antiquated, patronizing forms of nineteenth-century Christian abolitionism expressed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the consequential 1852 antislavery novel by the American Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and in the restless African explorations of the Scotsman David Livingstone (1813–1873). Before he shook hands with the journalist Henry Morton Stanley on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, Livingstone had crisscrossed the continent as a representative of the London Missionary Society, hoping to end the slave trade while converting African souls to Christianity and European-style commerce.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1. Seaman’s and Workers’ Club: This club is modeled on Marseille’s Communist-sponsored “International Seamen’s Building,” a favorite of Lamine Senghor, McKay’s Senegalese Communist friend, as the introduction explains. The shorter, Beinecke Library version of Romance in Marseille refers to the club as the “Proletarian Hall,” a name that, in contrast, highlights its Marxist mission.
2. following the era of the Russian Revolution: McKay ties the formation of Marseille’s Seaman’s Club, and others elsewhere like it, to the overthrow of Russia’s czarist government and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. Such local radical institutions were sometimes supported or controlled by the Communist International, or Comintern, a worldwide association of national Communist parties directed from Moscow and founded by Vladimir I. Lenin in 1919.
3. mistral wind: The cold wind that blows with great force—at an average rate of forty-five miles per hour—from the Rhône Valley to the Mediterranean Sea, particularly in the winter, and with special power in Marseille.
4. Etienne St. Dominique: The significance of St. Dominique’s name—shared in part by François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), the military hero of the Haitian Revolution—is discussed at some length in the introduction.
5. brasserie: A type of French eating place more formal than a café or bistro, and thus fancier than the Tout-va-Bien, but still more relaxed than a full-fledged restaurant. Revealingly, “brasserie” also means “brewery” in French.
6. Falope Sbaye: “Falope” is a given name, roughly meaning “thanksgiving,” among the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria and Benin. It is an appropriate choice for this character, a clerk in a coastal trading business from West Africa.
7. an impressive magnified photograph of Lenin on the right of which there was a smaller one of Karl Marx: Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), the Volga-born Russian revolutionary, initiator of Bolshevism, and founding father of both the Soviet Union and the Communist International, here takes visual and ideological precedence over Karl Marx (1818–1883), the exiled philosopher, historian, economist, and German revolutionary who was the single greatest intellectual influence on modern socialism and communism. McKay, then a Communist who admired what he perceived as Lenin’s “simple voice and presence,” pulled all the strings in his possession to meet the great Bolshevik when traveling through the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, but was unable to speak with him. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), the People’s Commissar of War, was more obliging, asking McKay “straight and sharp questions about American Negroes. . . .” See McKay’s A Long Way from Home, 124, 160.
8. “Workers of the World, Unite to Break Your Chains!”: An often-quoted digest of the final three lines of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848), whose most influential English translation closes with this peroration: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
9. “Is it the same as the Back-to-Africa organization?” . . . That was the only movement that had penetrated his ears in the portholes: Lafala wonders if Communism is the same as “Back-to-Africa” Garveyism, the latter depicted by McKay as the radical movement with the better ability to communicate with black sailors. St. Dominique, Romance’s specimen Communist, genuinely respects, enjoys, and assists Marseille’s black workers, but is a soft-handed, soft-spoken intellectual who makes few converts. So is the president of the Seaman’s Club, “a very polite person from the middle class” who “had been a professor” (76).
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1. Babel: Babel’s name evokes the biblical story of the Babylonian city, in which Noah’s descendants began building a tower that would reach into heaven. For the sin of their presumption, their single, common language was splintered into many, and they were scattered across the earth. See Genesis (11.1–9). Though the opinions of McKay’s Babel sometimes speak for the Quayside community as a whole, his name reminds us of the linguistic divisions among Marseille’s blacks, and of the forced diaspora that dispersed Africans around the Atlantic world.
2. Genoa: Sitting on the Ligurian Sea, Genoa is the chief port of Italy and one of the busiest of the Mediterranean. Nicknamed “La Superba,” or the Proud One, the city is the (assumed) birthplace of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), the Italian explorer who led the first European excursions to the Caribbean and Central and South America. Babel’s canny, frustrating, and partially stowaway ocean journey reverses the path of Columbus with a twist.
3. East-of-Suez rate: The East-of-Suez rate would be one less fair than that offered to a largely European crew—the phrase “East of Suez,” chiefly British, referred to the non-European theater of empire east of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Rudyard Kipling, whose collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) was a somewhat guilty sourcebook for McKay’s Jamaican dialect poetry, popularized the phrase in his poem “Mandalay” (1890): “Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst” (43–44). See Peter Washington, ed., Kipling: Poems, New York: Everyman’s Library-Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 49–51. In the opening pages of Home to Harlem, Jake Brown, steaming back to New York from the Great War as a stoker, is said to “despise the Arabs” with whom he works because of their “way of eating” (2). Yet when a white sailor attempts to establish a comradeship based on mutual distaste for “dirty jabbering coolies,” Jake demurs: “He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not as a stoker” (3).
4. “coolie crew”: A crew of sailors from Asia, described using a derogatory term—“coolie”—that emerged in South Asia in the seventeenth century. Such a crew, Babel suspects, would be paid at the “East-of-Suez rate” whatever the initial guarantee.
5. “a darter of a dawg”: A daughter of a dog, in distinction to a son of a bitch.
6. one of those miniature republics . . . in the Spanish Main: One of those small states, created from former possessions of Spain’s New World empire, in Central America or the north coast of South America.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1. Latin peoples: Those peoples with native modern languages derived from Latin, including the French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese—and, as McKay conceives it, the Corsicans.
2. a woman whose card of identity was the yellow one of prostitution: Prostitutes in Marseille and elsewhere in France were licensed by the national government and asked to carry identity cards—cartes d’identité—noting their profession. Such official recognition, ordered by Napoléon in 1804, came at a price. As Titin’s comment suggests, “once a woman was registered, it was difficult for her to resume legitimate work” or to alter her social identity. See Rachel G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 193.
3. whoreson: A bastard son of a whore or prostitute. Nearly as unflatteringly, “whoreson” can also refer to a wretch or scoundrel.
4. “une jeune fille de famille”: French for “a young family girl,” or, more precisely, a young girl from a decent and respectable family.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1. like a hero straight out of Joseph Conrad, an outstanding enigma of Quayside: Like a hero from the pages of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), the great realist-to-modernist author of Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907). Conrad’s Polish origins, like McKay’s birth in Jamaica, helped to make him a perceptive participant-observer of English society and English prose. In tune with McKay’s Marseille fictions, several of Conrad’s best-known novels employ nautical settings and characters to explore the social and psychological effects of European imperialism. McKay may well be thinking of one famously enigmatic Conrad character in particular, the eponymous hero of the novel Lord Jim (1900), in describing the enigmatic Big Blonde. Akin to Lord Jim, McKay’s oddly refined dockworker is strong, light-haired, and quick with his fists, in flight from crimes that may have cost him his “respectable position in the merchant service” (95). Much as Conrad’s hero retreats from shameful tragedy aboard the Patna to a Malay island in the South China Sea, Big Blonde flees from an American ship or port to bury his mysterious guilt amid the variously “colonized” people of Marseille’s black Quayside.
2. Sometimes he was jailed for a short term; sometimes he went into hiding: One of several stretches of tough-guy, telegraphic narration in Romance in Marseille that demonstrate the influence of Ernest Hemingway’s direct, pared-down style. The prose of McKay’s previous novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) is on average more lyrical and less staccato, its rhythms stamped by the quite different muse of D. H. Lawrence. For more on the shape of McKay’s admiration for Hemingway, see the introduction.
3. Petit Frère: This French nickname for Big Blonde’s friend and lover means “Little Brother.” For the remainder of Romance in Marseille, young, effeminate gay men may be called petit frères, or “little brothers,” in McKay’s Quayside idiom.
4. demi-johns: Glass bottles with narrow necks and wide bodies sometimes covered with wicker, from the French dame-jeanne, or “Lady Jane.” In Britain, a standard demi-john contains 4.5 liters—an imperial gallon—of beer or another liquid.
5. political secret police: As noted in the introduction, the political secret police plot of Romance in Marseille, ultimately revealed as a red herring, makes hay from McKay’s frightening run-ins with French and British agents in Morocco. For more on these run-ins, see Wayne F. Cooper’s biography Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, 278–279. McKay’s American FBI file, international in scope and the first compiled on a major black author, is discussed in Gary Edward Holcomb’s Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. It can be read in full at William J. Maxwell’s online F.B. Eyes Digital Archive (http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/).
6. bal-musette: A popular type of café or bar, first found in Paris in the 1880s, in which patrons danced tangos and “bourrées” to the sound of an accordion or musette, an instrument of the bagpipe family. The (originally) working-class dancers and musicians of bal-musettes were painted by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Georges Valmier (1885–1937), and other French-based modernist artists. In addition to this visual inspiration, the bal-musette may have appealed to McKay as the indigenous French equivalent of the jazz club.
7. cache-col: French for a scarf or muffler, in this instance worn with style.
8. the loving omelettes: Not a tender breakfast, but apparently McKay’s humorous coinage for a style of close dancing. Like the eggs in an omelet, beaten together into a single mass, the pajama-clad girls sharing this dance seem to blend into each other indistinguishably.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1. And through St. Dominique he had obtained a few pieces of African wood sculpture . . . from some West African seamen: St. Dominique’s white college friend, now a municipal clerk in Marseille, has become interested in his city’s black population thanks to his passion for modern art. In this, he resembles the European modernist artists he admires, many of whom were enthralled by the traditional African art they first encountered in the early 1900s. In France, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and their colleagues in the School of Paris studied West and Central African masks and sculptures that offered lessons in abstraction, vivid stylization, and pictorial flatness. Examples of so-called “art nègre” could be seen at the Musée d’Ethnographie on the Trocadero near the Eiffel Tower, but McKay’s municipal clerk joins Matisse, André Derain (1880–1954), and the Belgian painter James Ensor (1860–1949) in purchasing African carvings for his own collection. McKay complained, sharply and precociously, about the unscrupulous and alienating display of African art in Western collections in his 1923 study The Negroes in America, written for Soviet use in the Soviet Union. The Benin bronzes in the British Museum, he charged, doubled as tokens “of British piracy, exploitation, and deceit. . . .” In the same book, McKay suggested that Fauvism, Cubism, and other Parisian avant-gardes were hatched by those who “followed the [French] tricolor into the African jungles and returned to Paris with samples of Negro art.” See The Negroes in America, translated from the Russian by Robert J. Winter, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979, 56–57.
2. Aframerican: With its American emphasis, its fondness for generous author photographs, and its coupling of black art and black advancement, this magazine is reminiscent of the NAACP’s Crisis, one of the two “chief journals of African American literature and criticism” during Harlem Renaissance. (According to George Hutchinson, the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine was the other.) See Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1995, 127. Whatever the Aframerican’s inspirations, McKay carefully and self-referentially situates St. Dominique as a foreign survivor of the New Negro movement’s American publicity apparatus.
3. “It’s a matter of economic determinism—”: St. Dominique, a Marxist, believes that the psychology of racially mixed “mulattoes,” and of everyone else, is finally determined by economic relationships, the basis of all other social ideas and arrangements.
4. “It’s a stinking proletarian case, from Marseille . . . to New York and back”: Much as St. Dominique’s Marxism leads him to view race consciousness as an economically determined matter, it instructs him to consider the case of Lafala’s stowaway, amputation, and jailing as a “stinking proletarian case”—a case, that is, more closely linked to the victim’s working-class identity than to his racial one.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1. a radio set . . . at the same time as the pleasure-lovers of those places: The Tout-va-Bien’s new radio instantly familiarizes patrons with the popular song “masterpieces” introduced in the vaudeville houses of Broadway in New York, the theaters of Piccadilly in London, and the cabarets of Montmartre in Paris. This aside represents one McKay contribution to the deep vein of attacks by literary modernists on supposedly alienating new sound technologies, a vein running from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) to Richard Wright’s “Long Black Song” (1938). Guglielmo Marconi’s design for a radio transmitter was first patented in the United States in 1901.
2. The craze of the Charleston and Black Bottom was about dead. . . . But the beguine was there, . . . the Aframerican shuffle and the African swaying: McKay’s narrator observes that the fad for the Charleston, an African American–authored dance that peaked in the mid-1920s, had nearly passed at the Tout-va-Bien. (Whatever its legal status, this café sometimes serves as a showcase and blender of various national black dance styles.) The fad for the Black Bottom, a similarly exuberant African American dance, commercialized by the Broadway show George White’s Scandals of 1926, had faded as well. (McKay’s Pan-African Quayside, called “the Bottoms” in the first draft of Romance, is a different kind of black Bottom.) But the narrator notes that another black step, related to the most basic moves in African and “Aframerican” dance, survived to take their place. This was the beguine, the slow, rhumba-like dance style identified with the island of Martinique, St. Dominique’s birthplace in the French Caribbean.
3. Aslima also felt the beguine for Lafala: For this alternative but still-music-related sense of “beguine,” see the note for “beguine” in chapter 10.
4. Her primitive flamenco went naturally well with the music . . . revealing the African influence of both: Aslima may feel the beguine for Lafala, but she flaunts her love through the flamenco, among other things a highly syncopated, formally demanding dance form pioneered by Andalusian “gitanos,” the Gypsy, or Roma, people of southern Spain. Aslima’s “primitive” interpretation of the dance reveals its African ties and its kinship with the beguine. Modern scholarship has tracked McKay in detecting Moorish influences on flamenco.
5. “The Queen!”: Embarrassing La Fleur, the patrons of the Tout-va-Bien elevate Aslima to royalty after her flamenco performance. Earlier, it was La Fleur who was hailed as “La Reine,” or the Queen, if in jest.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1. nor the music of hymen . . . glorious like the songs of Solomon’s loves: Nothing will keep Big Blonde from his date with Petit Frère—not “the music of hymen,” erotic songs and poems celebrating marriage, as glorious as “the songs of Solomon’s loves” found in the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. Solomon’s songs in the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon celebrate, in intensely sensuous terms, the love between man and woman and of the Lord for his people. Big Blonde’s love for his Little Brother is thus stronger than the most captivating literature of straight and sacred Eros.
2. the Grand Maquereau: French slang for “the Big Pimp.” Less colloquially, a “maquereau” is, as it sounds, the fish known in English as “mackerel.” Karl Marx included the exploitative, human sort of maquereaux in his famous roll call of bottom-dwelling types—the “maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati,” etc.—belonging to the so-called “lumpenproletariat,” a political anxiety for Marx but for McKay a choice fictional subject. See Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), New York: International Publishers, 1987, 75.
3. if Big Blonde was less interested in petit frères and more in petites filles: In other words, if Big Blonde was less attracted by little boys and more by little girls.
4. “What is this thing called love?” said Falope: Falope’s question salutes Cole Porter’s song “What Is This Thing Called Love?,” an eventual jazz standard introduced in the musical Wake Up and Dream (1929). “What is this thing called love?” asks the first line of lyrics, “This funny thing called love?” (1–2). With this allusion, McKay rivals the radio-listening habitués of the Tout-va-Bien in rapidly absorbing the latest popular music. Porter claimed the tune was suggested by witnessing a native dance while visiting Marrakesh. See Charles Schwartz, Cole Porter: A Biography, New York: Dial Press, 1977, 143.
5. “it’s five in mine,” said St. Dominique: With “five in mine,” St. Dominique points to the five letters in “amour,” the word for love in his native French. The English word “rope,” like “love,” has four letters, a commonality Babel cleverly notes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1. the Petit Pain: French for “the Little Bread,” or more exactly, “the Bread Roll.”
2. throwing dice for a game called “Pigs” with three lads evidently of the slum proletariat: “Pigs” is a craps game of folk origins. See John Scarne and Clayton Rawson, Scarne on Dice, Drake, Ohio: Coachwhip, 2017. Aslima and Lafala speak of their love affair as another kind of piggish game.
3. The proprietor said they couldn’t dance for he had no dancing license: Though dancing breaks out there, the Petit Pain café is not licensed for it. In interwar France, only businesses such as a bal-musette, a club usually featuring an accordion band, were sanctioned for dancing.
4. an old cocotte: An elderly, once-fashionable prostitute.
5. “cul-cassé”: Likely McKay’s reversal and back-translation of the French slang term casse-cul, used to refer to a coward, a villain, a “pain in the ass,” and a “bugger” (one who engages in anal copulation). The last of these meanings is particularly significant in view of the context, a desperate character’s effort to insult a gay man. A caisse-couilles, meanwhile, is a “ball-buster.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1. bloomers: An alternative to the skirt, bloomers are a pant-like, roomy woman’s garment covering the lower body. Introduced to Western women in the mid-nineteenth century, they were named after the American feminist Amelia Bloomer (1818–1894). Significantly for Aslima, bloomers were associated with exotic “Turkish dress” as well as with enhanced liberties for women.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1. instantaneous photographer: A term introduced during the nineteenth century for a photographer who captured life in motion with a quick exposure, in this instance to profit from the tourist trade. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), famous for his stop-motion pictures of animal locomotion, was sometimes labeled an instantaneous photographer in his day.
2. “And I’ve got to go with the broad alone”: Babel’s song exploits the double meaning of “broad” as both a woman and a ship in early twentieth-century American slang. Lafala, for his part, finally goes with the latter sort of broad alone.
3. “Mektoub! Mektoub!” (Destiny! Destiny!): McKay explicitly self-translates the Arabic term “mektoub” or “maktoob” (مكتوب), meaning fate or predestination, as “destiny.” In his memoir A Long Way from Home, he interpolates his poem “A Farewell to Morocco,” which concludes with another common translation of the term: “It is written.” See A Long Way from Home, 341. With Aslima’s cry of “Mektoub!,” McKay’s novel too has been written, and has nearly reached its destined end.
4. chorean state: A state characterized by nervous, involuntary movement. The highly unusual word “chorean” is most likely McKay’s attempt to adjectivize the noun “chorea,” which refers to a neurological disorder that causes irregular bodily contractions.