Though far outnumbered let us show us
brace.
And for their thousand blows deal one
deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly
pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back.The speaker in “America” resolves to face the hate
he experiences in America strong and erect, “as a
rebel fronts a king in state”: “And I am sharp as
steel with discontent; / But I possess the courage
and the grace / To bear my anger proudly and un-
bent.”
Though he was associated with the radical
political left, specifically the Communist Party,
McKay remained an incurable romantic, infected
by the pastoral legacies of agrarian Jamaica. This is
clearly the theme in “Home Thought”:
Amid the city’s noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river’s brink,
And dexterous Davie climbing high above,
The gold fruits ebon-speckled to remove.For McKay, modernity’s greatest crime is the loss
of memory, the disorientation and fragmentation
it creates. He poignantly records this sense of loss
in his autobiographical poem “Flame Heart,” in
which more than lost childhood and youth are
lamented; also lamented is a modern world that
inhibits an intimate relationship between humans
and Nature: “I have forgotten much, but still re-
member / The poinsettia’s red, blood-red, in warm
December.” One finds in McKay’s speaker’s recol-
lection clear resonance and allusion to the British
romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth,
in its tendency to celebrate feeling, imagination,
and intuition over analysis and reason: the emotive
over the rational, the romantic over the modern.
In addition to poetry, McKay is the author
of three novels, HOME TO HARLEM (1929), Banjo
(1929), and Banana Bottom (1932), and Ginger-
town (1932), a collection of short stories. Home to
Harlem is the story of Jake Brown, a World War I
soldier who goes AWOL in Europe to return home
to Harlem, which he recalls in idyllic terms, to find
a more rewarding life. Caught up in the rhythms
of the Jazz Age found in Harlem cabaret, exposed
to the exploitation known by the common la-
borer through his job as a waiter on the railroad,
and frustrated by his efforts to find his lover, Jake
comes to see Harlem from a different perspective.
At the end of the novel, Jake and his girlfriend, ap-
propriately named Felice (“Happy/Happiness”)
leave Harlem in search of a more meaningful
wholeness and fulfillment. With its daily struggle
for survival, rampant exploitation and violence,
and disappointments, Harlem, the black mecca,
had come to epitomize the modern world.
Written during an era that, as one critic notes,
“pandered to the stereotypes of the primitive ex-
otic” (McDowell, 80), Home to Harlem pulsates
with the requisite controversial stereotypes: caba-
ret scenes, exotics, primitives, boozers, jazzers, and
dancers, popularized by CARL VAN VECHTEN in his
best seller, NIGGER HEAVEN (1925), in which, many
readers and scholars have argued, blacks are essen-
tialized as racially, culturally, and sexually differ-
ent. Ironically, Van Vechten had set out to validate
the complexity of Harlem—to “reject definitions
of the Negro as a type,” as Nathan Huggins argues
in Harlem Renaissance. In the end, however, Hug-
gins concludes, “the reader was expected to accept
the Negro as a natural primitive, [who] when he
was true to himself... was saved from civilized
artificiality” (102–103).
Reviewers hotly debated whether McKay had
done the same in Home to Harlem. LANGSTON
HUGHES praised it as “Undoubtedly the finest thing
we’ve done yet.... Everyone is talking about the
book, and even those who dislike it say it’s well
written.” However, W. E. B. DU BOIS of the NA-
TIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COL-
ORED PEOPLE and in general the black middle class
found little or no merit in Home to Harlem. In his
CRISIS review, DuBois wrote that he felt “unclean
and in need of a bath,” after reading the novel.
A more objective reading of Home to Harlem
reveals ways in which McKay did more than merely
appropriate Van Vechten’s themes, discourse, and
paradigm. For example, read as a naturalistic
novel, in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and348 McKay, Claude