480 Making It New: 1900–1945him. And he abandons himself to “pure voluptuous jazzing”: a life of dancing and
sex, gambling and city ambling, drink and drugs. Some critics of this, McKay’s most
successful novel, argued that Jake was merely a stereotype of black vagrancy,
reproducing an image of the streets and nightclubs of Harlem already made popular
in Nigger Heaven (1926) by the white writer Carl Van Vechten (1880–1966). That,
however, ignored what McKay presented as the positive side of Jake’s character: his
freedom from pretence, his vigorous assertion of his own manhood, and his
instinctive distrust of the seductions of white society. It also ignored the importance
of another major character, an alienated Haitian intellectual called Ray, who is both
attracted to and disturbed by the hedonism of Jake – and who consistently expresses
his impatience with what he calls “the contented hogs in the pigpen of Harlem.”
Registering the bleaker side of his surroundings, their “brutality, gang rowdyism,
promiscuous thickness,” Ray does not want to become a “Harlem nigger,” he reflects.
Instead, he has “dreams of making something with words.” “Could he create out of
the fertile reality around him?” he asks himself. For him, Harlem may be a possible
source and subject, but it can never be a home. And, at the end of the novel, he decides
to leave it and all it represents. The narrative maneuvers its way between the figures
of Jake and Ray, who clearly express the two sides of their creator, the sensuous and
the reflective, the romantic hedonist and the dispassionate activist, the man who
feels at home in Harlem and the one who feel at home nowhere. McKay was to
continue the story of Jake and Ray in his two later novels. These were never as
successful. Nor was his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), or his
sociological study, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940), or his memoir, My Green Hills
of Jamaica (completed in 1946, published in 1979). And his later commitment to
what was widely perceived as an unprogressive political program – he became a
vociferous critic of communism and converted to Catholicism – made him
increasingly isolated. He remains, however, one of the most significant figures of the
Renaissance, as well as one of the most symptomatic.
So, for that matter, do two African-American women writers of the period who,
like McKay, suffered neglect during their later years only to be rediscovered after
their deaths: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Nella Larsen (1891–1964).
Hurston was born, as she tells the reader in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road
(1942), in Alabama. Her family then moved, while she was still an infant, to
Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black community in America. Her father
was a preacher, and three times mayor of Eatonville. Her mother, a former
schoolteacher, advised Zora to “jump at the sun. You might not land on the sun, but
at least you’ll get off the ground.” But the idyll of her childhood ended when her
mother died in 1904. No Longer “Eatonville’s Zora,” she remembered, she “became
a little colored girl”; and her life turned into “a series of wanderings,” involving
various menial jobs, until she became a student at Howard University in Washington.
At Howard, she began to write. Some of her work attracted the attention of major
figures in the Harlem Renaissance, including Locke, who published one of her stories
in The New Negro; and in 1925 she moved to New York, where she began to study
anthropology at Barnard College. This revitalized her interest in the black folkloreGGray_c04.indd 480ray_c 04 .indd 480 8 8/1/2011 7:54:03 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 03 AM