Claude McKay's Home to Harlem

Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, originally published in 1928, is possibly the most important novel to come out of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. It is thus a uniquely valuable window into that time and place, since its broad novelistic canvas presents us with a view of Harlem life that is both detailed and sweeping. As with any novel, it is probably an error to view Home to Harlem as primarily an example of social observation; McKay's picture of the Harlem social setting is not an end in itself, but a canvas upon which plot and character are played out.

Nevertheless, McKay may be said to bring to the book a distinct vision of the African-American experience, at least as that experience was lived in the Harlem of the 1920s. That vision, implied thoughout the book and made explicit at the very end, is that the sensual life of Harlem, for all its raw sexuality and violence, is more fully alive and therefore more fully human than white-imposed standard which more conservative civil-rights activists perhaps thought the black community should seek to emulate.

Our concern here is with the setting and atmosphere of Home to Harlem--with McKay's picture of the community and its life--rather than with the novel as a work of fiction. We must explore this world through the mechanism of the plot, however, since that plot is central to the picture that McKay paints us. His protagonist, Jake, volunteered for service in the First World War. Finding that black troops were used

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ccupation of Haiti, Ray has also become a dining-car worker. Ray has much that Jake admires and wishes for himself. Broadly educated, he has literary perspectives Jake can scarcely imagine; he also has a warm relationship with an adoring girlfriend, Agatha, and takes no part in the restless sexual prowl of men both in Harlem and on the railroad. But Ray himself is deeply restless and frustrated with his life. He is deeply cynical about the refined sensibilities taught him by his education. No [he tells Jake], modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our education like--like our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of the old dead stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for. (p. 243) If Ray has lost confidence in education, he has also lost confidence, perhaps, in life. He saw destiny working in her large, dream-sad eyes, filling them with the passive softness of resignation to life, and seeking to encompass and yoke him down as just one of the thousand niggers of Harlem. And he hated Agatha and, for escape, wrapped himself darkly in self

Category: Literature - C