Home To Harlem

Home to Harlem is a work that represents African Americans as people who live comfortably in their own bodies, feel no sense of shame about sex, and reject societally imposed standards of morality. Claude McKay’s decision to portray African Americans and their culture in this way reflects his engagement with primitivism.

Primitivism inart and literature emerged out of Western artists’ encounters with African culture and African art, especially during the early twentieth century. Westerners who espoused primitivism tended to see primitive cultures as less complex than Western cultures and more in touch with basic human drives such as sex, violence, and interaction with nature. These traits were seen as positives, an antidote to a Western culture that, after all, had produced violence on a massive scale with World War I. These artists and writers agreed with Ray’s sentiment that “civilization is rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it” (243).Some Westerners were much more explicit in their appropriation of primitive cultures; artists such as Picasso,for example, were inspired to experiment with more simple forms as a result of their engagement with African culture.

Like their white peers, this movement also influenced African-American writers and artists during this period. The issue for these writers was that their relationship to Africa and Western culture was not the same as that of their white peers.Many whites, as a result of white supremacy, were associated with a presumably more civilized Western culture; African Americans, mostly the descendants of African slaves, were presumed to be more primitive because of their connections to Africa. For African Americans, the assumption that they were more primitive than whites meant that African Americans were associated with unbridled sexuality, violence, and a lack of artistic refinement.

McKay, notwithstanding the possible danger of having his work read as confirmation of these stereotypes, represents African-American culture in Harlem as one that has a relationship with Africa,in which African Americans are more in touch with primitive drives, and in which whites are also able to get in touch with themselves as a result.

In Chapter 13, for example, the black dancers in the house in Philadelphia feel an intimate connection to their African past when they dance to jazz that shows the mark of African influence in the drums.This association between jazz and primitive Africa persists throughout the novel, in fact, and is underscored in McKay’s tendency to describe black dancers with imagery associated with animals and the jungle.That whites are seen as beneficiaries of the presumably more primitive African-American culture is supported by the easy acceptance of the five undercover Vice Squad agents as whites who “were wearied of the pleasures of the big white world [and] wanted something new—the primitive joy of Harlem” (109).

McKay’s decision to use primitivist representations of African Americans was a controversial one that made him a target of those who believed that it was the job of the black writer to represent more respectable images of African Americans to counter racial stereotypes.W.E.B. DuBois, a central figure early in the Harlem Renaissance, famously wrote in his June 1928 review of the novel in The Crisis that reading the novel made him want to “take a bath.”Such a reading reflects the idea that art is created to serve ends beyond itself. McKay, like many of the younger African American writers of the period, rejected this burden and instead chose to participate in modernist experimentation, including primitivism, with the explicit aim of shocking readers and critiquing the hypocrisy of society.

When McKay chooses to represent a Harlem populated by black pimps, sex workers, gamblers, drug addicts, and madams, he is both engaging with an important and innovative form of representation and presenting images that confirmed negative ideas people already had about African Americans. 

The Great Migration is the movement of African Americans from the South to other parts of the United States (especially the Northeast) from the end of the nineteenth century into the first six decades of the twentieth century. Millions of African Americans left the South to take advantage of economic opportunities and to escape the poor racial climate in the South. In Home to Harlem, many of the characters in the novel are emigrants from the South. Their status as emigrants from the South plays an important role in their identities.

Jake, the protagonist of the novel, is originally from St. Petersburg, Virginia, a place he left ten years prior to the events of the novel, never to return despite having a mother and sister there. Although Jake never explicitly states what it is he left behind, his musing on how much better off his sister would be if he had an education implies that life back home provides few chances for self-improvement. The lack of opportunity in the South is one of the pushes that likely led Jake to Harlem.

Virginia has, nevertheless, left its stamp on Jake in many ways, including the way he speaks and his preferred foods. McKay uses atypical spelling to represent Jake’s broad, Southern accent (e.g. “Ah’m” for “I’m” and “gwine” for “going to”). Jake’s favored foods are those prepared by Southern cooks like Aunt Hattie and traditionally associated with the South, such as collard greens.

Jake’s decision to come back to Harlem after World War I is more complicated than his decision to leave the South. One of the central drivers of the narrative is his desire to return to Harlem, which he has idealized while abroad as a place where he would be at home as an African-American man. The reality of Harlem does not fulfill his dreams, however. On his return to Harlem, Jake is confronted by a lack of opportunities for work. Throughout the novel, Jake supports himself with casual labor on the docks and as a cook on a dining car. These jobs demonstrate the degree to which race still imposes some limitations on his opportunities.

Jake’s vision of Harlem is also based on its identification with black community. Despite his sense that he will be more at home in this setting because it is a black-dominated space, Jake confronts a series of betrayals and nearly fatal violence in the contest for Felice, all at the hands of other African Americans who make up his social circle. By the last third of the novel, Jake has come to understand,“It’s the same ole life everywhere […] Same bloody sweet life across the pond […] Don’t tell me about cut-thwoat niggers in Harlem. The whole wul’ is boody-crazy” (243). Black people’s behavior in Harlem is just a variation on dynamics of human behavior that Jake has seen during his travels through the world.

Having figured this out, Jake no longer defines himself simply as a Harlemite. His decision to go with Felice to Chicago, another important destination for African Americans during the Great Migration, shows that his identity is less about place and more about relationships with others and mobility by the end of the novel

Jake is not the only character whose identity is shaped by geography. Ray, Jake’s close friend, is an emigrant from Haiti (“Hayti” in the novel after the common usage of the day) who is forced to live in the U.S. after the invasion of Haiti by US forces. Within the novel, Ray becomes a voice for understanding black identity in an international context, called Pan-Africanism, while his relationship with Jakeshows the perils and opportunities that exist in establishing connections between people of African descent across the world. Jake’s travel abroad also serves as an important experience that changes his perspective of both the world and home.

The friendship between Jake and Ray blossoms on the train when Ray gives Jake a detailed history of his Haiti. Founded when the slaves on the Caribbean island put the principles of the French Revolution into practice by revolting against their slave masters, Haiti struggled in diplomatic isolation but managed to survive as an independent nation before the U.S. invaded in 1914-1915, supposedly to protect US political interests in the Western Hemisphere.Due to its early history and towering figures,such asits revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, Haiti became a symbol of terror to Western powers and of hope to oppressed people of African descent everywhere.

Ray’s knowledge of the history of his country and people of African descent in general explain his discomfort with the subordinate position he is expected to assume in racist America and his more nuanced understanding of the impact of white supremacy on black and white people. His discussion with Jake in Chapter 10 of ancient and modern black countries,such asLiberia and Abyssinia,as well his revelation of the US invasion of Haiti,opens up to Jake a perspective on black identity that is new to him, who, despite his travels, hasn’t thought about people of African descent as a source of pride or a foundation for an identity.

On hearing about Toussaint Louverture, Jake is rapturous as he imagines the possibility of serving under a black man rather than the whites who forced him to perform manual labor during his stint in the military.This sense of pride is in marked contrast to the attitude he and other African Americans assume when confronted with Africa and black immigrants from the Caribbean, for example: “Africa was jungle, and African bush niggers, cannibals. And West Indians were monkey chasers”(134).Jake’s identification as he encounters immigrants of African descent and Africa is as an American. As is frequently the case for Jake, however, personal relationships trump all other concerns. As a result of his friendship with Ray, Jake comes to see himself as part of a larger story of African people in the West.

Although Ray has a strong personal connection to Jake, his relationship with African-American culture as a whole is a difficult one because of his cultural origins and his rejection of a subordinate status that comes with being black in America. As a Haitian immigrant, Ray’s education, language, and cultural orientation are French and Haitian, differences that alienate him from the African Americans working on the train, whom he describes using animal imagery more than once, a testimony to his feeling that many of them accept their subordinate status. He fears that identifying himself with them on the basis of race will mean accepting that same status, and indeed, the segregationist laws of the U.S. make no distinction between Ray and African Americans.

By the end of the narrative, Ray has set off to sea, unable to accept the confines of his role in the U.S., despite Jake’s warning that life is the same wherever one goes.

Jake’s understanding of this fact is a direct result of his own experiences while abroad in London. As an African-American traveler abroad, Jake experiences the novelty of a relaxed color line, most apparent in his ability to engage white women sexually. After his return to Harlem, Jake frequently compares the U.S. to the international cities he visited as a soldier and a deserter. The comparisons ultimately reveal to Jake the sameness of human nature regardless of geographic location. By the end of the novel, Jake, with the encouragement of Felice, refuses to become an exile from the U.S.

McKay uses the relationship between these two characters and the different choices they make to offer commentary on the importance of national and international contexts for understanding the identity of people of African descent.