Reading post: Home to Harlem and three other novels of the Harlem Renaissance

My next book for the Classics Challenge is Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, published in 1928. This fulfills category #8, "Classic with a Place in the Title." Home to Harlem is a novel of the Harlem Renaissance, when African Americans began an outpouring of great art (literature, music, painting, etc.) and thought. All this work was centered around Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City, beginning just after World War I, say 1918 or so, and extending through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Since the Harlem Renaissance was such an important period in Black literature, I decided to read other books of that time period as well, as discussed below. 

 

I should note that because we have reached the 1920s, for me this is no longer ancient history. My parents were both born in 1922, so they were alive when all these books came out. Did either of them, or their siblings, ever read any of them? I highly doubt it. The Lincoln, Nebraska, public library probably didn't own a copy of Home to Harlem. (As far as I can tell, it still doesn't.) And I further doubt any of my relatives had heard of the Harlem Renaissance. Still, it was happening.

Home to Harlem is such an interesting book, and very enjoyable reading, not really what I was expecting at all. Before I read it, I read a contemporary review by W. E. B. DuBois in which he criticizes McKay for catering to

that prurient demand on the part of white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying--if enjoyment it can be called (DuBois, 1928, "Two Novels," reprinted in The Black Novelist, ed. by Robert Hemenway, 1970).

In Home to Harlem the characters do have a lot of sex, and nobody seems to get married (or pregnant, which mystified me), but there aren't any details beyond a few kisses. For example, here is a sexual interlude between Jake, the main character, and Rose, a woman he is about to leave (because he hit her and he doesn't want to be a man who hits women, although Rose feels it makes him more attractive):

"You'll spile you' new clothes," Jake said, desperately.

     "Hell with them! I love mah daddy moh'n anything. And mah daddy loves me, don't he? Daddy!"

Rose switched on the light and looked at her watch.

     "My stars, daddy! We been honey-dreaming some! I am two hours late!"

Obviously we know what happened during that blank line, but there are no other details given.

When I started reading the book, it reminded me of Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods, due to the similarity of the setting. But Harlem is really a completely different book. Jake is not a victim like the Hamilton family in Sport. He's handsome, intelligent (though uneducated), and has a strong moral code -- which nevertheless does not prevent him from drinking heavily, sleeping around, and occasionally using what I think is cocaine. Much of the time he is also happy, despite what he has to put up with from white people. In the second chapter, after returning "home to Harlem" after service in WWI, he meets "a little brown girl" in a cabaret and is immediately smitten. He has $59, and by the end of the evening he has spent it all, because the girl (who is a prostitute), requests his last $50.

     "How much is it going to be, daddy?" she demanded.

     "How much? How much? Five?"

     "Aw no, daddy...."

     "Ten?"

     She shook her head.

     "Twenty, sweetie!" he said, gallantly.

     "Daddy," she answered, "I wants fifty."

     "Good," he agreed. He was satisfied. She was responsive. She was beautiful. He loved the curious color on her cheek.

When I read this, I was sure this was the beginning of a disaster. Jake would spend all his money, fall deep into debt, become entangled in unsavory schemes -- his life would fall apart while I watched. But that doesn't happen. In fact, the girl ends up putting the $50 back in his pocket with a love note the next morning, and he spends the rest of the book trying to find her again. That's the plot of the book, to the extent that it has one. We follow Jake as he cruises through life, looking for his lost love -- but sleeping with plenty of other women along the way, making good friends, working as a longshoreman and later as a cook on a train, and drinking drinking drinking.

Jake's appeal is part of what makes the book enjoyable. But it's also interesting from a sociological standpoint: a description of life in Harlem in the early 20s. Claude McKay was born in Jamaica and came to New York in 1912 when he was 22. He published two books of poetry that year, and then went to college. He spent time in England (1920), Russia (1922), and France (1923-1927), where he wrote this novel. Presumably the novel was set around 1918-1921 because that was the last time he lived in Harlem before writing it. (It began as a short story which he wrote in 1925.) McKay worked as a cook for a railroad, as Jake does, and probably lived many of Jake's other experiences as well. Jake befriends a waiter on the train, Ray, who has spent time in college and is perhaps supposed to represent McKay more directly. White people don't make a lot of appearances in the novel -- they're in the background, making endless trouble for Black people, but we don't often see them up close.

I enjoyed reading about Jake's life and was rooting for him at the end, when he and Felice go off to start a new life in Chicago. It's unclear whether life there will live up to their expectations, but you sense that Jake will be able to cope with quite a bit of adversity.

For my next book I went back in time to pick up Cane by Jean Toomer (1923), widely considered one of the best works to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Since the title refers to sugar cane, I really should have chosen this for my "Classic with Nature in the Title," but I didn't think of it at the time.

Cane is not a novel, but rather a collection of short, impressionistic prose pieces, interspersed with poetry. It's divided into three sections: the first is a series of brief portraits of women in the South (Georgia), the second takes place in Washington DC and Chicago and is probably more autobiographical, and for the third we are back in Georgia for one long story that was originally intended to be a play. Everyone who reads Cane likes different sections of it, but my favorite was definitely the first, with its evocative, poetic descriptions.

She sprang up. Rushed some distance from me. Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying. Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her. It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice. A child's voice, uncertain, or an old man's. Dusk hid her; I could hear only her song. It seemed to me as though she were pounding her head in anguish upon the ground. I rushed to her. She fainted in my arms. (from "Fern," Part 1 of Cane)

The last section, Kabnis, seemed a bit overwrought and unconvincing, and the middle section contains a story ("Bona and Paul") which I thought could have come out of an undergraduate creative writing class (to be fair, Toomer was in his early 20s when he wrote all of Cane). But throughout the work, Toomer's writing is very beautiful -- art, rather than propaganda. We've come a long way from Clotel and Iola Leroy.

Toomer's biography is interesting. His grandfather was P. B. S. Pinchback, who among other things served as the acting governor of Louisiana for about six weeks in 1872-73, the first African-American governor ever and the last anywhere in the United States until 1990. Pinchback had at least 3/4 European ancestry, and Toomer was also mostly white. Pictures of Toomer look entirely white, but of course this was the era of the "one-drop rule" and so he was discriminated against for his African ancestry, despite its invisibility. He responded by declaring that he was neither Black nor white, but "American," a new race. After Cane, he wrote almost no more fiction.

I wondered whether Jean Toomer and Claude McKay knew each other. I think they must have, at least slightly. One article I read notes that Claude McKay wrote Jean Toomer a note of congratulations after Cane was published. So Cane may have influenced McKay's novel, but McKay may have influenced Toomer's work first, because he was a noted poet before 1923.

The next two books I read were collected in a volume called Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s, a Library of America collection edited by Rafia Zafar (it also includes Home to Harlem and Cane, but I read them as separate books since I own them both). I skipped the fifth book in the collection, Plum Bun, by Jessie Redmon Fauset, because it didn't sound as interesting as the others, but she was actually a very important writer of the period and I should probably read something by her eventually.

I don't really like reading Library of America collections, because they are fat little books with small print, but they do have their uses. For one thing, they collect important works that libraries don't necessarily own otherwise. Also, this book contained very good biographical sketches of each author, much better than what you usually get on Wikipedia.

 

The third Harlem Renaissance novel I read was Quicksand by Nella Larsen (1928). Larsen is better known for her second novel, Passing, but that was checked out at the library (I might read it later). I was interested to read Quicksand, because in the article I quote from above by W. E. B. DuBois where he criticizes Home to Harlem, he lavishly praises Quicksand, published the same year.

I have just read the last two novels of Negro America. The one I liked; the other I distinctly did not. I think that Mrs. Imes, writing under the pen name of Nella Larsen, has done a fine, thoughtful and courageous piece of work in her novel (DuBois, 1928, "Two Novels," reprinted in The Black Novelist, ed. by Robert Hemenway, 1970).

He goes on to say that Quicksand is "not near nasty enough for New York columnists," and his comments made me think I would not like Quicksand much. It sounded entirely too wholesome. But it isn't. Nella Larsen was the daughter of a white woman from Denmark and a Black man from the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands -- did you know that? I didn't) who probably did not marry Larsen's mother and deserted her and his child. This meant that Larsen had no "people" -- she was not from the Black middle class that was beginning to develop. Therefore, although she was fairly light-skinned, she was discriminated against within the Black community for her shady background. All this is contained within Quicksand, which is apparently highly autobiographical. Helga, the heroine, is not light enough to pass for white, and she does not do well with Black people either.

We begin with Helga teaching in a school for Black children in the South. Disgusted by the patronizing words of a visiting speaker, she quits her job and returns to Chicago, where she has an uncle (a white Danish immigrant like her mother). But once there she learns that her uncle has married, and her aunt is horrified at the thought of a "colored" niece. Through a piece of luck, Helga goes to work for Mrs. Hayes-Rore, a Black woman who lectures on "the race problem" and eventually introduces Helga to her late husband's nephew's widow, Anne, who invites Helga to live with her in Harlem. There Helga is exposed to Black culture, but she doesn't feel at home. Eventually she decides to go to Denmark, where some of her mother's family still live. There she is treated better, but as something like a freak show. She is painted, and then courted, by a famous artist, but he only likes her for her dark skin, not herself. After returning to New York, one rainy night she stumbles into a Black mission church, seduces a minister, and ends up in the South where she realizes once again that she is miserable.

It's an odd book -- suffering, I suppose, from having been a first novel (too many loose ends that don't get properly tied up, with an ending that doesn't match the rest of the book). But Larsen writes well, and we get a strong sense of Helga's personality and discomfort in all her different worlds, in none of which she feels at home. I liked Home to Harlem much better, but Quicksand isn't the boring, traditional novel I was expecting. It was interesting to read about Harlem from a woman's perspective.

Finally I read The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman (1929). Characters in all the Harlem Renaissance books I read seem obsessed with color, though opinions on which color is best differ somewhat. In Home to Harlem, Jake (who is described as "chocolate") loves his little brown girl better than "high-yaller" Rose, but the "burning passion" of "chocolate-to-the-bone" Suzy is "the yellow youth of her race." Claude McKay plays with color terms like the poet he is.

Dandies and pansies, chocolate, chestnut, coffee, ebony, cream, yellow, everybody was teased up to the high point of excitement.

But in The Blacker the Berry, color is a serious problem for the dark-skinned heroine, Emma Lou. It is somewhat OK in the world of this novel for a man to be dark, but not a woman. As a student at the University of Southern California (which Thurman also attended, briefly), she is too dark for the African-American sorority. When she moves to Harlem, she can't even get an office job because of her color, many landladies won't rent a room to her, and most men will not date her. At a midnight revue she attends, the prejudice is made fully clear:

Then followed the usual rigamarole carried on weekly at the Lafayette concerning the undesirability of black girls. Every one, that is, all the males, let it be known that high browns and "high yallers" were "forty" with them, but that....They were interrupted by the re-entry of the little black girl riding a mule and singing mournfully as she was being thus transported across the stage:
     A yellow gal rides in a limousine,
     A brown-skin rides a Ford,
     A black gal rides an old jackass
     But she gets there, yes my Lord.

Emma Lou, unfortunately, holds the same prejudice, and refuses to go out with dark men, instead falling for a young man, Alva, who is half Filipino. Alva, who is also involved with other women and perhaps men (Thurman was himself gay), supports himself with Emma Lou's money and only takes her out where his friends won't see her. Still, she loves him and keeps hanging on, way past the point of sanity.

Emma Lou finally realizes that she needs to change her thinking about color and about herself. While acknowledging that discrimination exists, she does not herself need to discriminate against other dark-skinned people, and she can find a satisfying life for herself despite others' prejudice. But it takes her almost the entire book to figure this out. I lost patience with her during the second chapter. According to Wikipedia, the novel's honesty about color issues has led to important discussions and research about race and color. But as a work of art it is somewhat lacking. Again, it is a first novel, with a first novel's typical failings.

It's been so interesting reading these books, most of which I had never heard of before (Cane is the one exception). So interesting to learn about what Harlem was like in those days, and something about what was happening to people of African ancestry in America in the 1920s. Such a contrast between this outpouring of creative brilliance and the ridiculous way white people were still treating Black people in this country. As they continue to do today.

For my next "challenge" we're moving only slightly forward in time, to the 1930s, so it's still the Harlem Renaissance era, but with a different focus -- genre fiction. Should be fun.