Making It New: 1900–1945 479(1893–1955), the author of an authoritative study of lynching, Rope and Faggot: The
Biography of Judge Lynch (1929), as well as two notable novels, Fire in the Flint (1924)
and Flight (1926) concerned, respectively, with racial violence and crossing the color
line. They also included two utterly different figures: George Schuyler (1895–1977)
and Claude McKay (1890–1948). Schuyler is a curious figure. Starting as a socialist,
he became a convinced anti-communist whose political position was measured
by the title of his 1966 autobiography, Black and Conservative. From almost the
beginning, however, he argued that there was essentially no difference between black
and white Americans. “The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon,” he
wrote in his 1926 essay, “The Negro Art-Hokum.” And he deployed his considerable
gifts for satire and polemic to ridicule and attack what he termed the “colorphobia”
of both white and black Americans. In his satirical novel Black No More (1931), for
instance, Schuyler imagined a situation in which a black doctor invents a formula
that makes blacks white. As blacks become white, as a result, whites work strenuously
to become black so they can retain their dearly cherished difference and separation.
In his later years, because of his attacks on black leaders, Schuyler was dismissed as
someone who had simply sold out to the white establishment. He is perhaps more
accurately seen as an unreconstructed isolationist. “I have always said and written
just what I thought without apologies to anyone,” he once wrote. “I shall continue to
pursue this somewhat lonely and iconoclastic course.”
Claude McKay, besides being different, is a very more considerable figure. Born in
Jamaica, McKay became known as “the enfant terrible of the Harlem Renaissance”
after the publication of his most famous poem, “If We Must Die” (1919) established
him as a militant. In the poem, written in response to the race riots that erupted in
Chicago and other cities, McKay advocated violent resistance to violence. “If we
must die, O let us nobly die,” he declared. “Like men we’ll face the murderous,
cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Other poems attacked
lynching (“The Lynching” (1920)) and slavery and its heritage (“In Bondage”
(1920)), or revealed an intense love–hate relationship with his adoptive home.
“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger’s
tooth /,” McKay wrote in “America” (1921), “Stealing my breath of life, I will confess /
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!” But, as his collection of poems Harlem
Shadows (1922) reveals, McKay was also inclined toward more sensuous, romantic,
and even nostalgic modes. He celebrated the vibrant, sensual life of Harlem (“The
Harlem Dances” (1917)), the lush vegetation of his birthplace (“I Shall Return”
(1920)), and the emotional and earthier pleasures of love (“Flower of Love” (1953),
“A Red Flower” (1953)). And the mixture of racial concern and sensuous impulse
comes out, with especial clarity and intensity, in his three novels: Home to Harlem
(1928), Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1937).
In Home to Harlem, for example, the portrait of the hero, Jake Brown, was
controversial at the time, especially in the eyes of African-American reviewers. Jake
is a freewheeling, high-living ex-soldier returning to the “mad riotous joy” of Harlem
after World War I. Back in “the contagious fever” of “chocolate Harlem! ... dark-
eyed Harlem!” he gets caught up in the “haunting rhythm” of the world surroundingGGray_c04.indd 479ray_c 04 .indd 479 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM