Home To Harlem

Although he does not love Rose like the woman he met on his first day back, Jake stays with her. He enjoys his physical relationship with her, but he feels no spiritual connection with her and refuses to take money from her, choosing instead to work as a low-level, casual longshoreman.

When not with Rose, Jake goes to cabarets and borrows money from Nije Gridley, a loan shark who grew prosperous during the boom years of the war but nevertheless complains about borrowers not making good on their loans.

Zeddy tells Jake about a well-paid job unloading pineapples on the shore. Jake works the first day with no problems but quits on the second day after a white union organizer tells him that he is a scab (a replacement worker for people on strike). Jake rejects the organizer’s attempt to recruit him to join the union because of racist practices within the union. He also helps defend another black scab from striking workers who assault him,advising the man that it is wrong to help out management in this way. When the two head to a club, they discover many men with injuries sustained during scuffles with striking workers.

Jake angrily confronts Zeddy about sending him on the job, but Zeddy is angry in turn. Zeddy explains that he was paid to recruit men and that labor conditions are so unfair for black people that he is fully justified in getting whatever work he can find.

Without a job that following week, Jake is forced to borrow money from Nije, who finds out from Jake that he will be going to a buffet flat (an apartment in which food, sex, and gambling are on offer for a charge). Nije is especially interested when he discovers that Jake will be there with Zeddy, who (unbeknownst to Jake) has been avoiding Nije because he owes him money.

That night, Jake stops Zeddy from killing Nije with his knife during a confrontation over the outstanding debt. Zeddy is angry with Jake about his intervention in the fight, but a bystander—a woman—explains that he is lucky that Jake saved him from legal trouble. Other patrons are angry that Nije managed to get into the buffet flat at all. Zeddy calms down eventually and a blues piece begins to play. The chapter closes with an image of the blues “chasing out the shadow of the moment before” as the men and women dance (54).

Zeddy, encouraged by Jake’s success with Rose, is eager to find a woman. Before coming to New York, Zeddy had been married to a light-skinned woman back in Petersburg, Virginia, who left him for a white man. Zeddy, by the standards of the day, is not considered to be very attractive, but there are many men even less physically attractive who manage to find women to keep them. Zeddy’s problem is that he lacks the charm that Jakehas, and he gambles away the wages that would otherwise attract women to stay with him.

One Saturday, however, Zeddy gets an invitation from a light-skinnedacquaintance to go to the Brooklyn flat of Ginhead Susy, a cook who has a dark complexion, a large bosom, and wears tiny heels and flashy clothes; she is considered unattractive by her peers. After her light-skinned husband left her when she was a girl, she developed a “yellow complex” (57) that made her surround herself with men who had lighter complexions.

To attract such men, Susy hosts all-male parties with free liquor. Despite her efforts to use liquor and money to procure a light-skinned lover, Susy is never able to keep such men long. The men who do stay with her are subject to such ridicule by their peers that they eventually leave, ashamed to be with such an unattractive woman.

Susy is friends with Lavinia Curdy, a light-skinned black woman who is also considered unattractive. She is obsessed with darker-skinned black men because the man who served as her pimp when she was a sex worker as a girl was dark-skinned. She tells Susy that lighter-skinned men are lazy freeloaders who expect to be kept men. Susy should find a darker manand stop spending money on the parties. When Susy comes home one day to find that her most recent light-skinned lover has stolen from her, she resolved to follow Ms. Curdy’s advice, with little success.

Zeddy, Jake, and another friend—Strawberry Lips, a man who embodies the stereotype of black men found in minstrel shows—arrive at Susy’s flat and begin gambling. Ms. Curdycondescendingly tells two men discussing famous acquaintancesthat in her days as a sex worker, she associated with famous people as well. All anyone needs is “coin and clothes”(67); she feels completely comfortable mixing with the crowd at the flat despite her early associations with a higher class of people.

The feeling in the room devolves to a “jungle atmosphere” (68) as the women grow more intoxicated and size up the men. While the men gamble and drink against the background of the music, Suzy zeroes in on the light-skinned man who invited Jake and the others; Ms. Curdy is attracted to Jake. Repulsed by Ms. Curdy’s appearance, Jake rebuffs her flirtation.

Jake reflects on his past experience with women. Hethinks that women always outdo men in terms of coarse behavior and viciousness. Back in Europe, women were the instigators of fights between men, “victims of sex” who fought out of some “vague feeling about women” (70).Jake is sure that the woman he met on his first night in America would never do such things.

As the party begins to break up, Suzy turns her attention to Zeddy, while Ms. Curdy focuses on wooing Strawberry Lips. A fight breaks out between a “light-brown boy” (72) and another over the gambling table. After Suzy throws the two out, a disgusted Jake collects the boy, leaving behind a content Zeddy. The boy has no money, so Jake buys him something to drink and gives him money for carfare. The chapter closes with Jake’s observation that Myrtle Avenue has a “‘pretty name’” but “‘stinks like a sewer’” (74). He wants to go back to Harlem.

Jake does not see Zeddy again until a week after the party in Brooklyn. The two run into each other in front of Uncle Doc’s. Jake discovers that Zeddy is now Ginhead Susy’s kept man and thinks he will be able to come to Harlem more often once the honeymoon stage of their relationship is over. He admits that Susy is unattractive, but he is pleased with their sexual relationship and how wellfed she keeps him.

Jake goes to another party at Susy’s flat one Sunday. Susy has gin cocktails and excellent food on offer, an expensive spread that sheprobably feels no worry about because she is “of the ancient aristocracy of black cooks” who is assured of employment from rich, Southern whites who love her food (77).

When the party ends, Zeddy tells Susy he is going down to Harlem to socialize with his friends. Susy tells him he cannot go because Harlem is full of sin and women intent on stealing away men from other women. When Zeddy tells her that he is only going to hang out with boys, Susy takes him to mean gay men. If he wants to have sex with other men, he can bring him to her place—she won’t mind and will even serve them liquor.

Zeddy insists that he is going until Susy threatens to throw him out. He tells Jake that dark-skinned, ugly women are the worst and that he refuses to let Susy limit him. Jake tells him he must if he wants to keep his place. He doesn’t have that problem with Rose because he makes his own money.

From then on, Zeddy’s idea that being a kept man is good is complicated by his experience with Susy. Although he thinks being a kept man is more respectable than selling sex on the streets, he feels confined by Susy’s restrictions on his behavior. He is forbidden to go to Harlem or complain about his lodgings or food. When Susy hosts her Saturday parties, she orders Zeddy around like a servant in front of the guests. Ironically, her control over Zeddy makes her attentions more attractive to some of the lighter-skinned men who formerly scorned her.

Susy and Ms. Curdy talk about love and sex.Ms. Curdy says that a woman is most attractive to men when she is engaged with another man. Susy agrees and adds that she learned early on that both women and men can be bought. The ideal of romantic love she learned as a girl is not to be believed. Susy observes that the whites she has known as a servant are no more secure and satisfied in their love lives than she is unless they pay for it.Ms. Curdy agrees, saying she saw the same as a high-class sex worker.

Meanwhile, Zeddy discovers that he is being ridiculed because of the nature of his relationship with Susy.He fights a man after being insulted for being kept and is teased by Billy Biasse (called “Wolf” because of his attraction to men). Zeddy starts staying out late to show he is not under Susy’s control and comes back to Susy’s flat drunk several times.

One night, after no one shows up at Myrtle Street except for Strawberry Lips and Ms. Curdy, the party decides to go to Harlem. They end up at the Congo, where Zeddy is entertaining and drinking with another woman at a table he shares with Jake and his companion.

Rose and her dancing partner, a young man who is carefully made up and has straightened his hair, begin dancing to a popular song. The sound of the piano and their dancing sweep away the audience. After the song and dance are over, Zeddy is startled when he recognizes Strawberry Lip’s boots on the feet of a patron coming down the staircase into the Congo. When Ms. Curdy and Susy follow, Jake tells Zeddy he is in trouble. Zeddy denies this. Ms.Curdy spots Zeddy. Both Zeddy and Jake ignore Strawberry Lips when he tries to get their attention. Susy tells Ms. Curdy she will not confront Zeddy in the club, however.

Meanwhile, a fight breaks out between two West Indian girls over a man.The bystanders are titillated by what they see but ridicule the Caribbean dialect in which the young women speak. Susy, Ms. Curdy, and Strawberry Lips leave the club. Both Ms. Curdy and Susy deplore the atmosphere in Harlem and express a preference for Brooklyn because they claim it is quieter, an idea Strawberry Lips attempts to counter. Susy cuts him off by saying that “Harlem is a stinking sink of nigger iniquity. Nigger hell,” and that she refuses to behave like the two brawling West Indian girls (99).

When Zeddy returns to Susy’s place that night, he finds a suitcase containing the clothes he brought to Susy’s place originally and a note telling him to keep out. She has kept back all the fine clothes she bought for him. Zeddy pleads to be let in, but Susy tells him no and refers to him with racial insults. Zeddy gives up and leaves, remarking, “Black woman is hard luck” (101).

Harlem is full of talk about the closing of the Baltimore, a speakeasy rumored to have been protected byTammany Hall, the political machine that runs much of New York. The Baltimore was not closed by the police for indecency, as was usually the case with raids. Jake, as it turns out, was involved in its closing.

Through his connection to Rose and his natural charm, Jake has gained access to the private and exclusive parties of Harlem. One night, he goes to one of these parties at Madame Adeline Suarez’s buffet flat. Her flat is generally open only to important black people and whites from uptown. Madame Suarez claims to be of Cuban descent to elevate herself in the eyes of black clientele and competitors.

Jake, a common laborer, is an exception only because of his attractiveness. He is surprised to find the company to be racially mixed but is so intrigued by the gentility of the company and the beauty of the carefully groomed women that he finds himself at home there. Jake is generally at home wherever he goes, however.

Jake is struck by the elegance of the women, all of who are relatively light-complexioned black women whom he compares to the “wonderfully beautiful pictures of women of ancient Egypt” (105). Madame Suarez’s flat is one of those places in Harlem where whites and blacks meet on terms of relative equality to socialize and play, so even white women are there.

One night, Jake sees three white men at the flat. These guests bring champagne for the entire house and spend money carelessly. Madame Suarez shows them the entire house. On another Saturday, the men return with two additional men. The atmosphere that night is wild, the women having been swept away by the sound of a popular jazz song.

At the peak of excitement raised by the dancing of the women, the five white men reveal themselves to be members of the Vice Squad, a special unit charged with prosecuting crimes against morality. The white men had spent two weeks posing as whites interested in slumming in Harlem. With plenty of money to spend, they managed to get an invitation to Madame Suarez’s.

The entire neighborhood looked on as the veiled women and Madame Suarez were taken to Night Court to be sentenced. While the women who worked for her were fined, Madame Suarez was sentenced to six months in prison. The sentencing judge was especially harsh in condemning the white women arrested in the raid for mixing with blacks; he regretted not being able to order them whipped.

Madame Suarez’s boss, also the owner of the Baltimore, was convicted as an accessory, and connections to a black member of the Tammany Hall machine notwithstanding, was forced to shut down the Baltimore as well. In the aftermath, whites and unknown blacks that looked like they might be white had a hard time getting into speakeasies for several weeks.

Jake arrives home one day just as a taxi pulls away from Rose’s lodging house. When Jake enters Rose’s room, he notices the smell of strange cigarettes, a box of these same cigarettes, and two glasses beside his bottle of Scotch whisky. Rose is doing her hair and claims her visitor was Gertie Blake. Jake, who knows that Rose frequently has company over and uses flirtation to increase her tips, is convinced she is lying. He assumes her company was a white man, but he is not at all jealous since her earnings pay for their lifestyle.

His lack of jealously upsets Rose, who wisheshe would treat her like other sweet men by being “brutal,” beating her up, and taking away her money in response (113). She takes pride in the bruises and black eyes inflicted by sweet men on her, even if the damage requires her to stay in until it heals. Jake’s failure to meet these expectations diminishes her interest in him, but Jake doesn’t care. He “did not love her, had never felt any deep desire for her,” and only went along “because she had asked him when he was in a fever mood for a steady mate” (114). He idealizes the girl he met at the Baltimore on the night he came back to Harlem, and Rose seems coarse by comparison.

Jake comes home another day and once again discovers traces of the same guest. He is momentarily aroused by the sight of a half-dressed Rose. When he touches her, she rebuffs him, and he calls her a slut. She scratches him, then he slaps her twice, much to his shame since his mother always told him that he should never lay his hands on a woman. He believes Rose drove him to hit her, so he vows to leave.

When he comes back, he overhears Rose telling her friend Gertie Blake about the blows to her face. Jake didn’t hit her hard enough for her tastes but the slaps to her face at least confirmed to her that he was a real man. Unable to face the two women, Jake leaves and comes back later to find Rose getting dressed up. Without a word to her, Jake begins packing his things in a suitcase. Rose seduces him, telling him the physical violence excites her. Afterward, Rose gets dressed for work and tells Jake to come by the Congo to celebrate later. Jake instead packs his suitcase and leaves after she departs.