Banjo by Claude McKay

First published: 1929

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: Marseilles

Principal Characters:

• Lincoln Agrippa Daily (Banjo), a vagabond from the South
• Ray, a West Indian would-be writer and a beachboy
• Latnah, a woman of mixed blood who befriends Banjo
• Bugsy, small, wiry, aggressive boy who is antiwhite
• Taloufa, a young Nigerian who has been in Wales and the United States and supports the Back-to-Africa cause
• Goosey, a flute-playing mulatto and an exponent of the uplift philosophy of the Harlem Renaissance intellectuals
• Buchanan Malt Avis (Malty), a West Indian drummer and beachboy
• Ginger, a long-term beachboy, former seaman, and ex-convict
• Dengel, a Senegalese

The Novel

Banjo is subtitled “A Story Without a Plot,” but it is not a novel in the manner of Virginia Woolf—although it is conversational and at times even dialectical. Rather, it is an episodic narrative involving a small group of relatively permanent residents of the Vieux Port section of Marseilles and a larger cast of incidental characters who are encountered briefly in the varied but fundamentally routine activities of unemployed black seamen trying to maintain a sense of camaraderie and well-being. It is, therefore, basically a picaresque fiction that offers a measure of social criticism (sometimes at considerable length, at other times with considerable force); this social message, however, is extraneous to the novel and is a structural weakness.

Except for occasional excursions to Aix-en-Provence and other nearby locations in the Midi for seasonal employment or diversion, the characters spend their time frequenting the bars, nightclubs, and restaurants of the Ditch, Boody Lane, and Bum Square—names that they have given to the Quartier Réservé, rue de la Bouterie, and Place Victor Gelu in Marseilles.

Some chapters introduce Arabs, Orientals, and Europeans, who are shown less favorably than the motley assortment of blacks who constitute McKay’s principal concern; other chapters present hospitals, rooming-houses, bordellos, gambling rooms, and pornographic movie houses. Both people and places sample the exotic as well as the erotic, and Marseilles becomes an overseas replica of the New York City of Home to Harlem (1928).

The book is divided into three sections. The first introduces Lincoln Agrippa Daily (Banjo), strolling along the breakwater and encountering Malty, Ginger, Dengel, and Bugsy, who have arrived in the boxcars of a train. All are seeking “the joy stuff of life” and believe that they can find it by playing as a black band in the cafés and “love spots.” In the second part, Ray (who has left Harlem to become a seaman) appears and joins Banjo’s little group, becoming a somewhat sobering influence through his incessant philosophizing, though participating in the life of the Monkey Bar, the Anglo-American Bar, and similar establishments. Yet times are changing: White crews are replacing black ones on ships, and work is scarce; foreigners are being subjected to irritations. The beachboys are broke and scatter: Banjo accompanies a group of Europeans to Nice and Monte Carlo; Ray and Malty (in company with Latnah) go to the vineyards; Goosey and Bugsy are sent by a municipal agency to an up-country factory; only Ginger and Dengel remain, taking their chances on the docks of Marseilles: “Now that Banjo was gone and the group dispersed, the spell was broken.”

The third section of the novel opens with Ray, Malty, and Latnah (enjoying a beer on the waterfront after their return from bringing in the vintage) spotting Banjo working as a coal handler. He has been tricked out of his banjo and has undergone a complete metamorphosis: “Even the wine he drank afforded him little pleasure,” and Ray finds him “exasperatingly melancholy.” To Ray, the life of the Ditch has become “gray,” and he decides to move on. Banjo dreams of reuniting his musicians (instrumentless and without rehearsals) in a band. Bugsy dies; Banjo is hospitalized and then cared for by Latnah; the boys are beaten by the police, sign on as crew for a voyage to the West Indies, and foresee a new lifestyle. Banjo, however, influenced by Ray’s outlook and arguments, takes his advance of a month’s pay and skips ship before sailing, in order to continue the vagabond existence. The novel concludes with Banjo addressing Ray: “Come on, pardner. Wese got enough between us to beat it a long ways from here.” Though the goal of a band has disappeared, Banjo clearly has a new goal: conjunction (the word he uses in referring to women, particularly Latnah) of the physical and the intellectual.

The Characters

As in any eponymous work, the author’s principal focus is on Banjo, whose name receives special notice from McKay: “The banjo dominates the other instruments. . . . And Banjo’s face shows that he feels that his instrument is first . . . the banjo is preeminently the musical instrument of the American Negro.” Yet Goosey, the “yellow” exponent of the philosophy of uplift, a thoughtful and at times philosophic character who can be thought of as a representative of the W. E. B. DuBois-Alain Locke school of thought, counters that the banjo is a symbol of Dixie, of bondage, of slavery; and he advocates blacks’ playing the violin, the piano. He and Taloufa refuse to play “any of that black-face coon stuff,” he says, to which Banjo replies that he likes the instrument and sees “saxophone-jazzing” as “the money stuff today.” His liking for the banjo is clearly the effect of his being a “child of the Cotton Belt.” His enthusiasm for the ukulele and mandolin likewise reveals an attachment to the old days and ways of the South, but wherever he goes in Marseilles he finds that though people are amused by the banjo, they are more often entertained by the piano. The beachboys are therefore clearly identified with a musical tradition and technology that have been superseded, and when Banjo and Ray set off together at the end of the story, they do so as itinerant workers rather than as poets or troubadours, regardless of their spiritual state of mind and predilections. Ray is an unsuccessful writer; Banjo is an unsuccessful musician; the arts are merely accompaniments to their lives.

The beachboys of the Ditch are a polyglot group: They represent the broad spectrum of blacks: West Indian, African, and American. Yet they have a cohesion that is admirable, and overall Banjo represents the hegemony of blackness: He deprecates both racial inferiority and “passing.”

Yet none of the black characters is an exclusivist: They all share a common sympathy toward and appreciation of Latnah, who is olive-toned, of mixed race, and “not young and far from old, with an amorous charm.” She suggests an Earth Mother who comprises every admirable trait: sensuality, practicality, compassion, energy, and adaptability among them. She is, however, unique in the novel: The other women are prostitutes, minor criminals, European ruins, and jaded drifters. It is instructive when Ray laments that it would have been good if he and Banjo had been able to take Latnah with them as they left Marseilles. “Don’t get soft ovah any one wimmens, pardner” is Banjo’s response. One wonders just how they will fare without her love and care.

The remainder of the central group of characters are not well limned, yet they do develop sufficient individuality to become discernible. Bugsy is consistently antiwhite; his complexion is described as dull black, but this might as well have been used to describe his mental type; he is fittingly small, wiry, and aggressive. Taloufa, the Nigerian who was born in the bush, is young, well-traveled (he has been in Wales, the United States, and Europe), and an advocate of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. When he landed in England, the authorities wanted to deport him to West Africa, but “Taloufa did not want to go there. Christian missionaries had educated him out of his native life.” When he returned to Marseilles (with his guitar), he was “broke, but unbroken.” In many ways he is an interesting and absorbing—though minor— character, since he represents the great mass of present-day Africans who are cut off from traditional village life and not integrated into contemporary urban and industrial society. Malty, the West Indian drummer and guitarist, is ebullient and indefatigable: He is reminiscent of the type of person whom McKay admired and remembered from his Jamaican days. Each of these (and the score of minor characters such as the Arab taxi-driver-cum-tout and Chère Blanche, the prostitute) is memorably drawn in colorful vignettes.

Critical Context

In essence, Banjo is a continuation of Home to Harlem: The location has been shifted from the United States to France, but the dramatis personae are remarkably similar, and their exploits differ only insofar as Harlem and Marseilles differ. Naturally, the problem then became what to do with a third novel. The answer was to shift from the urban world of men to the rural world of men and women, families and children, teachers and preachers in Jamaica, and remarkably, Banana Bottom (1933), with its balance of sense and sensuality, showed that McKay could combine emotional and social realism, propaganda and polemics, characterization and plot. It seems that he recognized the limitations of Banjo and that it did not enhance his growing reputation as poet and fiction writer.

One of the most frequently cited weaknesses in Banjo is the tendency for Ray’s comments to overwhelm the story and change the balance from fiction to propagandist tract, and when Goosey adds his philosophical—and at times sophomoric—musings, the novel is endangered. Yet the inclusion of discussion on major matters of the day (such as race, capitalism, socialism, and xenophobia) should not be condemned per se: The unemployed and discriminated against are often voluble critics of social policy and not infrequently have some well-informed, first-class exponents of their causes as spokesmen.

While advocating the cause of the black masses, McKay leaves the reader confused at times about his social policy. Latnah, the quintessential black mother-figure, is deserted by Banjo for Chère Blanche, the “pink sow”; and after loving and nursing, feeding and housing him, she is unceremoniously left in the Ditch while he and Ray head off on their continuing odyssey. In his fiction, as in his personal life, McKay was unable (until Banana Bottom) to develop a lasting black married relationship. Ironically, it is Latnah who criticizes Banjo for his lack of race pride—the one thing that he thought that he exemplified.

In his unpublished “Romance in Marseilles” and “Harlem Glory” (both written some time after 1935, when he was already in declining health, fortune, and reputation as a Harlem Renaissance writer), McKay tried to recapture the spirit of the two cities and their black communities, but he was too far from his sources in time and geography, and the novellas lack the qualities of the earlier works. One short story, “Dinner at Douarnenez,” which was first published in 1985, conveys McKay’s deep attachment to France and his belief that blacks have generally been more welcome there than in other countries. Most of the social and political topics that Ray addresses are the subjects of articles in The Liberator and Amsterdam News, for which McKay worked as a journalist; many of them were treated also in The Negroes in America (1979), which McKay wrote when he visited the Soviet Union in 1922-1923 but which remained unpublished until its discovery decades later among some materials in the New York Public Library.

Bibliography

Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Traces McKay’s life from his birth in Jamaica through his years in America and England and his journey to Russia as well as his eventual conversion to Catholicism. A chapter is devoted to the period in which he wrote Banjo.

Draper, James P., ed. Black Literature Criticism. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Includes an extensive biographical profile of McKay and excerpts from criticism on his works.

Giles, James R. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Giles provides a critical and interpretive study of McKay, with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.

Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Tillery’s biography is a well-documented and fascinating study of McKay’s life. Focuses on McKay’s turbulent life and personality and examines his various associations with black radicalism, socialism, and communism and his ultimate rejection of them for the refuge of the Catholic church.