doned the novel again, seemingly for good,
in 1933. McKay barely mentions it in his
1937 memoir and apparently forgot about
the project entirely until an 87-page draft
popped up again in a collection to which he
had donated his papers. (He was not an
ardent organizer of his own work.) McKay
left a longer, 172-page draft in the posses-
sion of his only child, who eventually
donated it to the New York Public Library’s
Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture, while the shorter one wound up at
Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library. The Schomburg text won out as
the final version, and the two have now
been reconciled for the first timeto yield
the book as published. Romance in Mar-
seille, in other words, was never actually a
lost or forgotten novel; it was just peculiarly
hard to track down.
If you skip the introduction andsurren-
der access to Google, you could easily mis-
take it for a novel written last year. It’s
about bodies, disability, sex, Islam, slavery,
and capital. There are lesbians. There is
gender-bending. There is socialism. All of
this in 130 pages—custom designed, it
would seem, for the obliterated modern
attention span! But as with any novel, the
themes are only bits of thread unless woven
into a dazzling tapestry of a character,
which is what we have in Lafala.
In one of many brain-rupturing pieces of
data embedded in this edition’s introduc-
tion, it turns out that Lafala was based on a
real person of McKay’s acquaintance: a
Nigerian seaman named NelsonSimeon
Dede, who had stowed away on asteamer
from France, gotten captured, lost both
feet, won restitution, and returnedto Mar-
seilles with prosthetics and an upgraded
net worth. McKay recognized the stow-
away as a piquant racial metaphor for the
philosophical condition of the fugitive.
Lafala, his fictional version, is handsome,
charismatic, “very black,” not particularly
saintly, and pretty Zen about the distribu-
tion of his fortunes and misfortunes. In the
misfortunes column, he’s got the trauma of
being locked in a freezing toilet-jail and
having both legs sawed off so he can never
dance or breezily stroll again. On the plus
side, the money isn’t terrible, and having
cork prostheses is interesting, andwomen
love to fondle his stumps. Life isa tragic
joke is Lafala’s operating thesis.
After the amputations have healed,
Lafala sails back to Marseille courtesy of
the same shipping company that froze his
feet. He’s eager to be back where the “thick
scum of life foams and bubbles and breaks
in a syrup of passion and desire.” The port
city is home to a thicket of bums, peddlers,
pimps, fishermen, sailors, barflies, idlers,
dockers, gangsters, leftists, and families,
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