Novel
Home to Harlem
Claude McKay · 1928
Opening lines
All that Jake knew about the freighter on which he stoked was that it stank between sea and sky. He was working with a dirty Arab crew. The captain signed him on at Cardiff because one of the Arabs had quit the ship.
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Jake, a Black soldier who deserted in France and then worked on the London docks, returns to Harlem as a stoker on a freighter. On the first evening, in a cabaret, he meets a girl with whom he spends the night; in the morning, he finds in his pocket the banknote he had given her, with a note. He has forgotten the street and the house, and does not see her again. As a docker, he lives for a time with Rose, a cabaret singer, then leaves her and goes off as a cook on a dining car, where he befriends Ray, a Haitian student turned waiter, who reads a French novel and tells him the history of Haiti.
Context
The novel grew out of a 1925 short story, which his agent urged him to develop. McKay finished it in Antibes in the summer of 1927, five years after leaving America and without having seen Harlem again; in it he uses scenes drawn from his work as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The book was published by Harper in 1928 and became a bestseller. Du Bois wrote in The Crisis that after certain passages he felt like taking a bath; Langston Hughes saw in it, on the contrary, something that could restore youth to the Black vogue.
Who it is for
A novel in tableaux rather than a continuous plot, in the spoken language of Harlem. Translated into French by Louis Guilloux in 1932, then again in 2022.
Prizes and reception
The first bestseller by a Black novelist in the United States; its author receives the gold medal of the Harmon Foundation.
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