November 5, 2020 43
hard work, like the odor of stabled
horses, were not unpleasant even
in a crowded café. It was good to
feel the strength and distinction of
a group and the assurance of be-
longing to it.Marseille was to prove fertile ground
for McKay’s creativity. It led, the fol-
lowing year, to his first novel, Home to
Harlem. Though it became a best seller,
the book caused the revered critic and
scholar W. E. B. Du Bois to recoil from
its sexual explicitness, writing in The
Crisis, “After the dirtier parts of its
filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.”
A decade later McKay’s Marseille
sojourn provided models for the char-
acters, and inspired the plot and theme,
of what would become Romance in
Marseille, a daring work of nostal-
gia, sex, and violence populated with
pimps, prostitutes, and “bistro ban-
dits” (barflies). Had the novel been
published in McKay’s lifetime, it would
surely have sent the editor of The Crisis
back to his bathroom.
Du Bois never had to hold his nose
because the manuscript, having un-
dergone several iterations and titles,
including The Jungle and the Bottoms
and Savage Loving, failed to find a
publisher. Even McKay’s agent hesi-
tated to promote a book that he saw
would be rejected and considered ob-
scene. McKay reworked, redrafted, and
eventually abandoned it in the 1930s.
For decades two hand- corrected type-
scripts languished in archives at Yale
University and the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture. It has
now been published by Penguin Clas-
sics for the first time, seventy- two years
after McKay’s death.
At the start of the novel, in the 1920s,
the great drama that will propel the
plot and determine the future and
fortune of the protagonist has already
occurred. In the main ward of a New
York hospital, a young African sailor,
Lafala, “lay like a sawed- off stump and
pondered the loss of his legs.” He’d
stowed away on a ship from Marseille
to New York; when discovered, he was
locked in a freezing water closet; by the
time the ship docked, gangrene had
set in on his feet. Recovering from the
double amputation of his legs, Lafala
is resigned to his powerlessness and
distracted by welcome dreams of his
death, in which he is greeted in heaven
by “all the jazz hounds who raised hell
in the mighty cities.”
Lafala is something of an enigma.
Early on, McKay only offers sketches
of the handsome youth, blessed with
a “shining blue blackness” and “ar-
resting eyes,” who’d fled Marseille in
humiliation after being duped and
robbed by a prostitute, Aslima, with
whom he’d fallen in love. Other than a
reverie of Lafala’s former life in his un-
named African homeland, McKay does
not dwell on the psychological trauma
visited upon the young stowaway; there
are no reflections, for instance, on any
post- operative physical discomfort or
neurological aftereffects. In the first
few short chapters, Lafala is so thinly
drawn that McKay risks making him
appear merely a cipher for a governing
idea of a black everyman subjugated
by inhumane and racist corporations.
He’s saved from that reductive inter-
pretation through his association with
a fellow patient called Black Angel, the
only other black man in the hospital.
Black Angel introduces Lafala to the
idea of restorative justice, engaging a
lawyer to take up Lafala’s case and to
sue the shipping company for the inhu-
man treatment and consequent harm
that have left him without his legs. If
he can’t walk again, he can at least be
compensated sufficiently to purchase a
pair of replacement cork limbs. Despite
callously suggesting that Lafala must
have had some underlying condition
that accounted for the gangrene, the
shipping company eventually makes
an out- of- court settlement. The young
African becomes a cause célèbre, and
black American newspapers, intrigued
by the particularities of his case, boldly
lead with the premature headline: “AF-
RICAN LEGS BRING ONE HUNDRED
THOUSAND DOLLARS.”
McKay didn’t have to dig deeply to
conjure such a storyline. He needed
only to sit and listen to a Nigerian stow-
away he met in France, Nelson Simeon
Dede, who was similarly abused by a
shipping line (the Fabre Company) and
suffered frostbite. He, too, successfully
sued the company when his legs were
amputated below the knee.
Romance in Marseille is a pitiful
tale, but McKay said his intention was
not to write “a sentimental story.” He
succeeded. The shipping line’s amo-
rality is embodied in the official sent
to deal with Lafala. His eyes are “full
of the contempt of the aristocrat,” and
he has a voice that is “cold, smooth and
timbreful like tempered old steel.” His
maneuvering to deny Lafala’s cunning
lawyer his extortionate fee is motivated
by financial priorities, not altruism.
The corporation’s indifference to the
amputee’s suffering is stark, reflect-
ing the attitude of the ship’s captain;
a white stowaway would not have been
treated so harshly. Lafala was a de-
spised African who crossed the Atlan-
tic locked away in inhuman conditions
that echoed those of enslaved Africans
during the Middle Passage whose bod-
ies were plundered without fear of cen-
sure or demand for reparations.
Lafala, though, notwithstanding the
compromises to his mobility, quickly
adjusts to the luxuries afforded by the
compensation he receives. Buoyed by
his new wealth, he decides to return to
Marseille, now traveling first class at
the shipping line’s expense:And like all vain humanity who
love to revisit the scenes of their
sufferings and defeats after they
have conquered their world, Lafala
(even though his was a Pyrrhic vic-
tory) had been hankering all along
for the caves and dens of Marseille
with the desire to show himself
there again as a personage and es-
pecially to Aslima.He’s determined to win over Aslima
and thereby to exact his revenge. The
previously ridiculed and spurned young
sailor returns a new man, propped up
on expensive artificial limbs, dressed
like an English gentleman, wielding an
elegant cane. As might be expected, his
newfound riches cast him in a favorable
light among the habitués in the drink-
ing dens of the Vieux Port, as well as
the prostitutes.Lafala’s company is coveted imme-
diately both by Aslima (also known as
the Tigress) and La Fleur, her popularrival. They’re both formidable but with
contrasting physical characteristics.
The Tigress, a “burning brown” ex-
hibitionist who’s “stout and full of an
abundance of earthly sap,” is portrayed
sympathetically; La Fleur less so. She’s
a “new- fangled doll done in dark-
brown wax” with the heart of a “cold”
“tropical green lizard” whose prefer-
ence, outside of work, is for her female
lover. But neither La Fleur nor Aslima
is a match for the naked misogyny, only
partially veiled, that they encounter
in the colony. Misogyny bolts the men
together and trumps any competition
between them.
The prose becomes more muscular as
Lafala pulls into port. Writing and lan-
guage that had appeared self- conscious
and stilted, even a little pedestrian, in
the earlier chapters becomes looser and
more confident as the novel advances,
fired especially by the complexity of
Aslima’s character. The monochro-
matic world of the New York hospital
ward gives way to the exuberant Tech-
nicolor of Marseille, even if Lafala still
seems at times a colorized version of a
black- and- white self.
At first he’s dogmatic in his cold
stance toward Aslima, having been
spurned by her previously, but the Ti-
gress is also a wily temptress, and after
withstanding the most perfunctory rep-
rimand from Lafala, she showers him
with affection. He attempts to resist
her: “He wasn’t going to fall that way
like an overripe fruit.” But it’s soon ap-
parent that Lafala’s resolve is shakable.
When aroused by Aslima, his blood
is “warm with carnal sweetness.” He’s
not alone. Her strange allure among
the drifters of the Vieux Port is nearly
universal. Though we’re told on one
occasion that her impromptu flamenco-
inflected dancing approximates a pig
squealing in the rain, she transfixes her
audience. To shouts of “bravo” and ap-
plause from the bar crowd, “she struck
an attitude as if she were on all fours and
tossing her head from side to side and
shaking her hips, like an excited pig
flicking and trying to bite its own tail.”
Indeed, Aslima later offers her body to
Lafala to do anything he’d like with,
even descend literally and metaphori-
cally into the gutter with her to luxuri-
ate in mud and filth like pigs.
McKay was determined to write the
unfettered truth, as he saw it: “I make
my Negro characters yarn and backbite
and fuck like people the world over.”
In Romance in Marseille he revels in
conveying the quayside’s hedonistic
and bacchanalian spirit. McKay’s own
experiences of the city—“sometimes [I
was] approached and offered a consid-
erable remuneration to act as a guide
or procurer or [to] do other sordid
things”—informed his depiction, espe-
cially of the most unsavory characters,
the protectors. They’re exemplified
by Aslima’s thuggish Corsican pimp,
Titin, whose “prematurely caved in”
face, “glassy beady eyes and spoonlike
mouth” are a physical manifestation of
his corruption and the sly intelligence
that equips him to understand “the
mawkish weaknesses of the hetairai,”
or prostitutes.Marseille’s tough, bawdy, and li-
centious waterfront is a siren song for
Lafala just as it was for the roustabout
McKay. It was the kind of world in
which he’d been immersed during his
time in Harlem and earlier in Jamaica,when he had served briefly as a po-
liceman. He soon realized that he was
unsuited to the job, confessing that he
turned “a blind eye to what it was my
manifest duty to see,” as he recalled
in the preface to his poetry collection
Constab Ballads (1912):I had not in me the stuff that goes
to the making of a good consta-
ble; for I am so constituted that
imagination outruns discretion,
and it is my misfortune to have
a most improper sympathy with
wrong- doers.Lives in the “colored colony” are
visceral, and love is the cousin of dis-
gust. McKay captures the tension in
the quayside crowd between sexual in-
dulgence and a real, though fragile and
hypocritical, code of decency—one
that only surfaces rarely, like an ar-
chaic law that has long been on the stat-
ute books and thought to be outdated.
There’s a thin line between what’s con-
sidered coarse and what is considered
refined, and the temperament of the
crowd frequently pivots from bonho-
mie to sudden violence.
McKay ably depicts the reversals and
disappointments that induce a kind of
learned helplessness among the sea-
men, vagabonds, and other formerly
itinerant adventurers. They had suf-
ficient energy and chutzpah to leave
their homelands but stall on arrival
at their destination, never confident
enough to move inland from the port,
and soon become broken, shipwrecked
men awaiting rescue from their stupor
through a berth on the next ship.
Late in the novel (here again there
are similarities with McKay’s Harlem
experience), Lafala is courted by rad-
ical left- wing intellectuals. St. Domi-
nique, modeled on McKay’s friend
Lamine Senghor, a Senegalese Commu-
nist and black nationalist, is a brotherly
mentor to the waterfront seamen and a
spiritual adviser with ambitions of rais-
ing their political consciousness. He
detects in Lafala a nascent hunger for
a life of meaning beyond endless sexual
gratification, which has been evident in
Lafala’s intention of marrying Aslima.
The idea of marriage is a fantasy that,
left unchecked, grows into a grand de-
lusion as the lovers hatch a plan to es-
cape Marseille and return to Africa.
At the same time, there are whis-
pers throughout the colored colony of
Aslima’s alleged insincerity—that all
along she’s been scheming, embarked
on a long con that will culminate in a
sting on her lover’s finances. Years of
sex work have made her cynical, but
McKay also conveys her tenderness as
she moves toward the light of her bet-
ter angels. Who is really being manip-
ulated? Is Aslima actually deceiving
her pimp or the amputee? Is Lafala
being duplicitous in his promotion of
their shared Garveyite back- to- Africa
dream? Will he abandon her at the
quayside and board the ship alone?
McKay keeps us guessing.
Toward the end of Romance in Mar-
seille, the narrator tries to make sense
of the magical grip Aslima exerts on
Lafala: “Something was always burn-
ing, never consuming itself and going
out, but always holding him.” It’s a de-
scription that also captures the endur-
ing appeal of McKay, the romancer and
dreamer who in this novel, unrealized
in his lifetime, forges a tender tale, a
mounting litany of loss and regret. Q