Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance

1. Code Name Sasha, “My Real Name”

1 Code Name Sasha, “My Real Name” [A] great amount of confusion has been caused by various ways of spelling the name of this delegate, due to the variations which can occur in transcribing the name from Russian to English script. It has been rendered Sasha, Sayesh, and Sascha. From all the information gathered, it appears that all these renderings refer to the same person, who is listed as an American delegate. Claude McKay FBI file 61–3497 She hinted even that there was something suspicious about my use of my real name in Moscow. For all the American delegates had secret names. Mrs. Stokes’s own was Sasha. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home 24 * Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha The following investigation places Claude McKay’s first and unquestionably most important memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), next to his FBI file in order to demonstrate that in certain respects the once classified dossier is a more dependable portrayal of his years in Europe and North Africa than his own autobiography. My purpose is to confront the question of whether, when it comes to McKay’s queer black Marxism, A Long Way from Home is a completely reliable resource and, more important, why it isn’t. I inquire into the text’s passionate denunciation of Communism and the resultant generally complacent view of the memoir, prefiguring the Communist repudiations of writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, to serve as the archetypal African American refutation of international leftism. For over half a century, critics have counted on A Long Way from Home when a black repudiation of Communism was needed, and indeed, this is understandable because the autobiography , read in comparative isolation, delivers the message that its author was never truly a committed Marxist and has long since suspended his onetime association with subversives. My aim is to search into the core of McKay’s memoir and to locate the still smoking residue of his queer black Marxism, made manifest by the survival of McKay’s “real name”: Sasha. Among the final communiqués collected in his FBI file is a succinct memorandum , dated May 11, 1940, requesting that a bureau agent deliver the “papers” of one Claude McKay. The signature on the order to take delivery of the documents —the correspondence and other materials that would become his 119page classified dossier—is “John Edgar Hoover, Director.” If by the early 1940s McKay was on the verge of being all but forgotten in the world of black literary arts, his historical and literary memory is preserved by the grim fact that even as late as 1940 Hoover placed an order for the collected prose not of but on Claude McKay. Right-wing zealots like Hoover thought of Red and black as furtively interconnected, assembled in order to stage “a Communist war on whiteness” (Maxwell, New Negro 92). But another identity category may be added to the union of the Red and the black in the aroused imagination of the Right. For Hoover and his ilk, Communists, Negroes, and homosexuals formed a degenerate , subversive ménage à trois whose united aim was to overthrow the white heterosexual nation. Moreover, this profane threesome did not at all times form discrete classes of identity. Under the racist and anti-Red propaganda apparatus of the late 1930s and within the government’s undertaking to purge Communists from the Federal Writers Project (FWP), the organization that made the writing of his 1937 autobiography possible, the designation “Communist” was habitually tantamount to “queer” (D’Emilio 40–53). And the combination of “Negro” Code Name Sasha, “My Real Name” * 25 and “political” was instinctively synonymous with “Communist,” as McKay’s dossier validates. The mania for seeing Communist, Negro, and homosexual as interchangeable, with each side of the tripartite mind of Evil goading the other toward new deeds of iniquity, attained its most fanatical expression by the mid1950s , even in, and perhaps most intensely in, the minds of frustrated, closeted homosexuals like Hoover. But the postwar fever pitch of the McCarthy witch hunts during the cold war period, fed by the FBI’s ferocity in nailing radicals like Wright, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, was the historical waste product of the interwar period Red Scare, the unambiguous correlation between leftist rebellion, African American resistance, and homosexual revolution. Though not generally among the items catalogued when his firsts are inventoried, McKay was...