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15. “Home to Harlem” Again: Claude McKay and the Masculine Imaginary of Black Community
- University of Minnesota Press
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361 “Home to Harlem” Again: Claude McKay and the Masculine Imaginary of Black Community THABITI LEWIS 15 When Claude McKay first set foot in Harlem, he was far from naive or new to America. In fact, when this twenty-one-year-old arrived in the United States from Clarendon Hills, Jamaica, in August 1912, not only was he a fairly well traveled and well educated man of peasant origins but he brought with him a distinct outsider perspective. This worldly intellectual man of working-class sensibilities possessed not only a global black diasporic perspective of the world but an interest in what he termed “the lust to wander and wonder.” After a stay in the Midwest, he set out for New York City, pursuing business opportunities (owning a restaurant ) he felt existed there. The failure of McKay’s business venture and marriage cleared space for him to devote attention to his art. To support himself while he wrote, he worked a series of odd jobs available to black men in American cities, such as a porter, janitor, bar boy, coal shoveler, houseman, butler, and waiter. McKay later wrote that he “waded through the muck and scum” so that he could become a writer. So from 1914 to 1919, McKay’s “leisure was divided between the experiment of daily living and the experiment of essays in writing,”1 and these experiences not only shaped his political radicalism but also provided ample material for his first novel, Home to Harlem (1928), which targeted the common man. This essay discusses McKay’s Home to Harlem with an eye toward the predominately masculine lens through which he explores the variety and scope of black urban diasporic life—its global and multiregional perspectives. McKay’s depiction of black life and notions of community in 1920s black America examines the wonder, excitement, and limits of Harlem through recognition of alternative locations where black community thrived. In the spirit of this collection, I am reading Home to Harlem as a literary depiction of an expansive African diasporic reality in the early twentieth century. McKay’s complicated and primarily masculinist presentation of modern industrial life focuses on proletarian characters that map out the divergent diasporic routes of the New Negro reality and Renaissance. 362 THABITI LEWIS His global and working-class perspective in Home to Harlem is unique and stems from his Caribbean roots and peasant origins to reveal black space, place, and cultural production in the person of the “common man” (who is also decidedly his own man). This approach is a subtle alternative to the official Renaissance and its focus on either pastoral notions of “folk” or the “Talented Tenth.” Thus this essay explores McKay’s novel as an alternative or a renewed understanding of the New Negro. To be sure, it is an “understanding” that attempts to engage a culturally diverse notion of African American community while expanding notions of race by traveling through the divergent contours of urban space and the folk inhabiting these oppressive spaces. Home to Harlem is dynamic in its range of perspectives and experiences from which to explore African American notions of beauty, politics, and cultural production of the New Negro. Indeed, McKay is interested in a wider lens through which to view the New Negro—one that embraced a working-class perspective and an individual sense of respectability. The novel does more than capture Harlem ’s creativity; it also embraces the jazz of black culture. Indeed, it captures the wretchedness, crime, poverty, unemployment, and overcrowding of Harlem that forced people to alternate locations such as Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Harlem is essentially one nodal point in the protagonist Jake Brown’s navigation of a wider black experience. His tour of black life in low places throughout the African diaspora in multiple cities is a riff on the jazz of black culture. For McKay, the New Negro is both international and regional; he is individual soloist and a representative of communal aspects of black life. McKay’s narrative, adroitly powered by jazz, the meanderings of a soldier, and the locomotive symbolism of a train, reflects his modernist proclivities toward fragmentation that delicately balances the communal and individualism. The rhythms of black life are diverse in this story. Thus McKay effectively absorbs a popular symbol of black progress during this era—the black soldier—to show the myriad ways in which masculinity imagines and performs community. Home to Harlem is a novel that has several tentacles. Its plot feels episodic...