Home to Harlem by Claude McKay

First published: 1928

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: Immediately following World War I

Locale: Harlem, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Principal Characters:

• Jacob (Jake) Brown, a tall, brawny, black Army deserter
• Ray, a Haitian immigrant to the United States
• Felice, a high-priced Harlem prostitute
• Congo Rose, an entertainer at the Congo nightclub
• Agatha, a beauty-parlor assistant
• Zeddy Plummer, a compulsive gambler who threatens to report Jake as an Army deserter
• Billy Biasse, the operator of a longshoremen’s gambling parlor

The Novel

The title Home to Harlem suggests that the famous New York “Black Belt” is the place to which African Americans return when they want to find true comfort and harmony, when they want to be among their “family” and friends, even though, like most of the characters, they have migrated from elsewhere—from Haiti, from Virginia, from Maryland (as in the cases of Ray, Jake and Zeddy, and Agatha, respectively). The novel is essentially an account of life in Harlem as seen through the experiences of Jake, who (though not a native New Yorker) has come to regard Harlem as his hometown and is constantly comparing it with other places in his experience. Though the brief sojourn of Jake gives a linear development to the plot, Home to Harlem is actually a cyclical novel, for it is apparent that Jake has opened and closed one episode of his life in Petersburg, Virginia, another in Europe (with the Army), and a third in Harlem, before entering on yet another in Chicago with Felice.

The story opens with Jake working as a stoker aboard a freighter en route from Cardiff, Wales, to New York. He had joined the Army with patriotic motives, but when he was assigned to carrying building materials for barracks, he became disillusioned, donned civilian clothes, and went to London, where he worked on the docks and lived in the East End. He was horrified by the race riots of 1919, so he shipped out for America, for Harlem, for brown lips “full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love.” His London mistress was now just “a creature of another race—of another world.” It is this antithesis of the white and black cultures that informs the whole novel: McKay emphasizes the difference between the controlled, puritanical behavior of white society and the free, spontaneous, libidinous life of the black ghetto, in which sex, drugs, alcohol, knives, guns, unemployment, and poverty are pervasive. The several chapters are essentially episodes in Jake’s life that describe his contacts with these aspects of Harlem life.

Back in Harlem, Jake visits saloons, restaurants, and a cabaret, the Baltimore, where he meets Felice, a young prostitute, and he spends the night with her. As her name suggests, she is the personification of happiness—in herself and for Jake—and is instinctively warm and responsive. Jake also meets Zeddy Plummer, a “stocky, thick-shouldered, flat-footed” former Army buddy who knows that Jake deserted and advises him to be circumspect. Zeddy’s life is saved by Jake during a fight with a loan shark, but Zeddy later threatens to inform the police that Jake is an Army deserter, proving his contention that in Harlem friendships are often temporary and unreliable—a fact that the novel demonstrates amply.

Searching for Felice (and, ultimately, for happiness itself), Jake visits the Congo, a popular nightclub, where he meets Congo Rose, who wants him as her “sweetman”—a role he deprecates, since he feels that men should not live off women. Nevertheless, he moves in with her, even though he feels no love, or even deep desire, for her; he agrees “simply because she had asked him when he was in a fever mood for a steady mate.” This sexual imperative is the basis of most of the relationships in Home to Harlem, though occasionally some are dictated by economic necessity. Signs that Rose has other sex partners, as well as her clear masochism, impel Jake to take a job on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a waiter.

It is while working for the railroad that Jake meets Ray, a serious-minded Haitian immigrant who aspires to be a writer and who is intent on introducing his colleagues to literature, politics, and black achievements in the world. Ray is himself introduced to the black subculture of flophouses, drugs, and easy sex and becomes a close friend of Jake, through whom he meets Agatha.

After a series of adventures in the nightlife of Harlem, Jake meets Felice again, and they decide to leave for Chicago, where, they believe, they will be free of the problems of Harlem and will be able to make a new life.

The Characters

As in almost all of his fiction, Claude McKay offers in Home to Harlem characters who represent the polarities that he attempted to bridge: the intellectual and the emotional, the potent and the impotent, the hardworking and the indolent, the caring and the carefree, the permanent and the transient. (All these were ultimately fused in Bita Plant, the protagonist of McKay’s 1933 novel Banana Bottom. )

Jake, having been separated from black women for two years while in Europe, is keen to resume his physical contact with them upon his return to Harlem; however, he is not one of the unthinking, faceless men of the crowd. Rather, he is a hardworking man with leadership qualities (as demonstrated by his leading a longshoremen’s team), with a keen sense of duty (as he shows by enlisting in the Army), with a quick perception of being deceived (as he shows when he is made to lug lumber instead of being given front-line combat duty), with a sense of self-esteem (he is unwilling to be kept as a sweetman), and with a desire to improve his lot within the existing social and political system. That is, he is generally conservative yet ambitious; he is not a reactionary and not a progressive. He bonds well and readily with other African Americans, yet he is not dependent; he listens and learns and has confidence in being able to cope and to endure. In many ways, he is a most admirable character: He is resilient and resourceful, adaptable and yet not flaccid.

Ray, on the other hand, is a lonely adventurer, and his principal trait is his inability to come to terms with the existing social situation. He is an intellectual, a reader (while stopping over in Pittsburgh, he buys and reads four regional black newspapers; he quotes William Wordsworth’s sonnet on Toussaint-Louverture verbatim; and he alludes to works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Henri Barbusse, and other important writers, both contemporary and classic), and a cultured person (he frequently speaks in French). He is proud of the black cultural heritage and is eager to teach his railroad companions about their social and cultural background, although he is often regarded as somewhat eccentric, especially for someone in his line of work.

Because Ray enters the novel so late and leaves Harlem (with its possibility of at least reasonable comfort in the company of Agatha, who is roughly his equivalent in respectability and achievement) for continued vagabondage in a lowly occupation, he does not become a character to be admired: His actions are less admirable than his ideas. While he has an interest in befriending other black men, it is a passing interest; and he is unable, it seems, to establish a true interest in women, whether from a physical or an intellectual motivation. In these respects, he is a true foil to Jake. Jake leaves Harlem with a goal (a new life with Felice); Ray leaves Harlem only to escape. Ray is, in fact, little more than a voice for McKay’s social and political opinions and a vehicle for displaying the author’s own intellectual interests. He is pessimistic: “Civilization is rotten,” he says on one occasion; on another, he tells Agatha, “The more I learn, the less I understand and love life.” As most critics have pointed out, Ray is fundamentally an authorial self-portrait.

The other characters are representatives of the Harlem underworld. Zeddy Plummer, Jake’s razor-wielding Army buddy, is an informer, a sweetman, a strike-breaker, a gambler, a heavy drinker, and an inept hustler. Billy Biasse (whose name also serves to characterize him) is prejudiced and is interested in small-time racketeering, yet he is also a realist eking out an existence in a rough-and-tumble, dangerous environment. The many minor female characters are generally presented as admirable in the sense that they are hardworking (whether as beauty-parlor technicians or as prostitutes) and are prepared to be the breadwinners for their unemployed sweetmen; even if these women are exploited and preyed upon, they are able to survive rather well. Only Felice, however, seems capable of warm and instinctive responses; the other women have been deprived of true affection and simple love.

Critical Context

The initial reception of Home to Harlem was extraordinary. The novel was praised by white critics and condemned by most black ones. It was the first book by an African American to receive the gold medal of the Institute of Arts and Sciences. It was praised by The New York Times for the verisimilitude of the speech of the characters and by The Bookman for the accurate transcription of Harlem slang and dialect, as well as for its evocation of the terror lingering in the streets and apartments of the Black Belt. The New York Herald-Tribune commended McKay for his stark realism, and for his ability to present sordid truths about black life in New York “with the same simplicity that a child tells his mother” of what has happened.

Many readers, especially black ones, thought that McKay was merely trying to present the life of Harlem in a manner that would be of interest to white readers. The high-minded W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading voice of the black intelligentsia at the time (and a cultivated mulatto who spent his summers in Paris) attacked Home to Harlem in The Crisis, his influential magazine. In the June, 1928, issue, Du Bois wrote:

“Home to Harlem for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. . . . It looks as though McKay has set out to cater to that prurient demand on the part of the white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying.”

Alain Locke, perhaps the principal philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance and a protégé of Du Bois, also attacked McKay. Both Locke and Du Bois, however, were far removed from the life of the multitudes of Harlem and were keen to address themselves to the social advancement of the “Talented Tenth” that occupied much of Du Bois’s thought. Both Du Bois and Locke were eager to publicize the academic and cultural achievements of African Americans and had little in common with the unemployed, the exploited, the tenement dwellers who made up the bulk of the black community in the United States. Later, Richard A. Long questioned the reliability of McKay’s depiction of Harlem life, and Nigel Thomas argued that Home to Harlem should never have been published. Thomas suggested that too much of McKay’s material is presented in summary form, that scenes in the book are often lacking in artistic unity, that there are too many debates between Jake and Ray, and that the tone of the novel is too overwhelmingly brutal.

By way of rejoinder to these objections—and specifically to those of Thomas—Hope McKay Virtue, the author’s only child, has made the point that the novel was the first of its kind and that it depicts a time and community with which its detractors have been unfamiliar. Historically, Home to Harlem is important as the first African American novel published by a white publisher in the United States to receive widespread critical attention and recognition. Moreover, the book helped to establish the tradition of social realism long favored by black writers, and it helped to pave the way for the politically significant writers of the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The success of Home to Harlem also allowed McKay to devote his time to writing fiction; without this apprentice piece, his much greater subsequent novel Banana Bottom might never have been written.

Bibliography

Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Argues that the “Harlem School” of novelists portrayed the distinctive culture of black America in a distinctive language, which included slang and dialect. Bone argues that Jake represents instinct, while Ray is the inhibited, overcivilized thinker, a figure for McKay himself.

Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. This prize-winning study is the authoritative source of information on the writer’s life. Almost every article on McKay is considered, and the documentation is authoritative and exhaustive.

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.

Hegler, Charles J. “Claude McKay’s If We Must Die,’ Home to Harlem, and the Hog Trope.” ANQ 8 (Summer, 1995): 22-26. Hegler points out that McKay uses the same symbolic figures in his poem “If We Must Die,” where he protests the slaughter of penned and ignorant hogs, and in Home to Harlem, where his characters become the alienated “hogs” of Chicago, searching but never finding a home.

Pyne-Timothy, Helen. “Perception of the Black Woman in the Work of Claude McKay.” College Language Association Journal 19, no. 2 (December, 1975): 152-164. Asserts that the black woman in McKay’s works sustains the needs of the black man and defines the future of the race. These women manage to survive even though many are exploited and betrayed by the men they have attempted to help. Notes that McKay openly opposed marriage between black men and white women.

Ramchand, Kenneth. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Faber, 1970. Notes that McKay was absorbed by the “Negro Question,” by vagabondage, and by the urge to be a famous writer. Ramchand argues that McKay’s characterization of the “primitive Nego” runs close to the white stereotype; that his polemics tend to weaken the imaginative vitality of his novels; and that his celebration of racial self-esteem acted to diminish the possibility of an integrated society in America.

Roberts, Kimberly. “The Clothes Make the Woman: The Symbolics of Prostitution on Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 16 (Spring, 1997): 107-130. Roberts examines the use of prostitution as a metaphor for the position of African American writers.

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.