and the news of Lafala’s fortune travels
quickly. He’s set upon by a wide range of
mercenaries, most of whom he cheerfully
repels. At a café, he spots Aslima—the pros-
titute who originated this whole fiasco—
and confronts her. She apologizes and
claims some responsibility for his lack of
feet; after all, if she hadn’t robbed him, he
wouldn’t have had an international melt-
down. They call a truce and become joyfully
re-entangled, but the prostitute’s motives
are murky. The “hardiest hustler” on the
shore, Aslima is a canny handler of the local
male population. Is she aiming to regain
Lafala’s trust only to rip him off again? Is
she in it for love this time? Will she return
to Africa with Lafala, as he wishes? Only
chapters eight through 23 will tell.
Prose-wise, there are a lot of superlatives
to be highlighted in those chapters.
Romance in Marseille contains the best
description I’ve ever read of human legs, as
well as the best description of waking up
and feeling like shit, the best description of
erotic satisfaction, and—to dip into extrav-
agant specificity for a moment—the best
description of a Corsican pimp fretting that
his girlfriend is mentally distancing herself
from him.
McKay, who was born in thehills of
Jamaica in 1889, was a headliner of the
Harlem Renaissance. The son of farmers,
he worked up an interest in English
poetry—Milton, Keats, Shelley,Pope—
thanks to his older brother, a schoolteacher,
and an English neighbor who encouraged
McKay’s literary experiments. He immi-
grated to the U.S. in 1912, enrolled at
Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State Col-
lege, and left the South two yearslater for
New York. His first American poems were
published a few years later, and his first
novel, Home to Harlem, was the move-
ment’s first official American best seller.
But he spent nearly as much time out of the
country as in it, traveling from England to
Russia to Germany to France to Spain to
Morocco over the course of 12 years.
Home to Harlem got mixed reviews.
Langston Hughes loved the book. W.E.B.
Du Bois wrote that it nauseated him and
made him feel like taking a bath. It depicts
what McKay called the “semi-underworld”
of single, black working-class men in New
York City after World War I: a landscape of
pool halls, cabarets, SROs, labor disputes,
and women in Champagne-colored stock-
ings. Like Romance in Marseille, it’s a pica-
resque novel starring a working-class sin-
gle man. Unlike Romance, its world—its
characters, its economy—is entirely black.
It’s very good, and it reads like it was pub-
lished in 1928, which it was (not a com-
plaint, just a fact). Marseille, though, is a
novel out of time. ■
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