“Theah’s Life Anywheres Theah’s Booze and Jazz”: Home to Harlem and Gingertown in the Context of National Prohibition

“Harlem was the paradise of bootleggers,” Claude McKay recalls in Harlem Glory (1999), his brief, posthumously published account of this prominent African American community during the 1930s, and he further notes that “Prohibition had made the defiance of the laws general and racketeering respectable” (15). McKay’s retrospective assessment of Prohibition-era Harlem was fairly accurate; like many urban neighborhoods, Harlem was awash in bootleg liquor during the nearly fourteen years of National Prohibition (1920–1933). McKay himself was a habitual violator of the Prohibition laws, and underground drinking establishments such as cabarets and buffet flats frequently surface in his fiction. Yet McKay seldom commented in his writing specifically on the federal liquor legislation that so dramatically changed American life. However, understanding the context of National Prohibition and the significant effects it had on American society in general and the Harlem community in particular allows twenty-first century readers to appreciate better the political undertones of McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928) and his collection of short stories Gingertown (1932), both published prior to the 1933 repeal of Prohibition.

When National Prohibition went into effect in January 1920, the saloons and cabarets that dominated the social life of Harlem closed their doors. In their place, scores of illicit speakeasies and nightclubs sprang up to supply bootleg liquor to their thirsty patrons. Protection money paid to police and underworld kingpins allowed these businesses to avoid raids and remain in operation. Harlem establishments ranging from the swanky Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn to the low-down speakeasies such as the Coal Bed, the Air Raid Shelter, and the Glory Hole not only served illegal alcohol but also provided entertainment in the form of jazz singing and dancing (Lewis 242). In his 1927 essay “Negro Life in New York’s Harlem,” Wallace Thurman describes a “typical” speakeasy, located in a “musty, damp basement behind,” called the Glory Hole:

It is a single room about ten feet square and remains an unembellished basement except for a planed down plank floor, a piano, three chairs and a library table. The Glory Hole is typical of its class. It is a social club, commonly called a dive, convenient for the high times of a certain group. The men are unskilled laborers during the day, and in the evenings they round up their girls or else meet them at the rendezvous in order to have what they consider and enjoy as a good time. The women, like the men, swear, drink and dance as much and as vulgarly as they please. . . . Such places as the Glory Hole can be found all over the so-called “bad lands” of Harlem. They are not always confined to basement rooms. They can be found in apartment flats, in the rear of barber shops, lunch counters, pool halls, and other such conveniently blind places.

(48)

Despite McKay’s relative silence regarding the politics of National Prohibition, the clandestine nature of illegal drinking joints must have appealed to the rebellious, iconoclastic side of the author, who spent much of his adult life allied with socialist and other radical organizations—including the International Workers of the World—that championed the less powerful and the dispossessed.

Interpreting McKay’s Harlem-based fiction through the lens of Prohibition-era culture becomes even more complicated when one considers that the expatriate McKay actually spent relatively little time living in the United States during National Prohibition. When the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages, was ratified in January 1919, the twenty-nine-year-old struggling writer was occupying a rented room in Harlem on 131st Street. One year later, when the death knell finally sounded for John Barleycorn, McKay had already left the bustle of Lenox Avenue for an extended sojourn in England. He returned to Harlem in the winter of 1921, and worked briefly as an editor for the Liberator magazine, before leaving the country again in September 1922. He traveled from London to Berlin and finally to Moscow, just in time...