His Vagabond Heart

Perhaps the key legacy of the poet, novelist, and essayist Claude McKay is that he refused to remain still. Living up to his self-description as a “vagabond,” McKay emigrated from his native Jamaica to the United States in 1912. He arrived in South Carolina, moved from there to Tuskegee, Alabama, and then to Kansas State College in Manhattan, Kansas, before decamping to that more iconic Manhattan in 1914. After the publication of his celebrated poem “If We Must Die” in 1919, he spent two years in Holland, Belgium, and England before returning to the United States for activist work and the publication of his crucial fourth book of poetry, Harlem Shadows (1922). McKay spent the next decade or so in Europe and North Africa, pursuing a lifestyle of bohemian adventurousness, leftist radicalism, literary innovation, and spiritual evolution. His three published novels, his autobiography, his essays on Harlem, and his poems on faith (unpublished in his lifetime) reveal his yearning for a home that relied on no nation, was driven by no diasporic exile, and was beholden to no aesthetic or social theory. Though he is rightly remembered as an important pioneer and militant voice of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay should also be remembered for how he refused these and other roles. What readers should honor 100 years after the publication of his most important book of poetry is his “vagabond heart.”

When seen through the lens of his rebellious vagrancy, McKay becomes an unlikely figure to write a book that was, according to his fellow Harlemite James Weldon Johnson, “one of the great forces … in bringing about the Negro literary renaissance.” The youngest child of a Jamaican farmer who had risen from laborer to owner, McKay was a literary leading light in Jamaica for poems that articulated his insistent identification with what he called the “peasants” of his native land. He came to this sensibility through an impressive informal education made possible by his lucky association with British folklorist Walter Jekyll, who allowed the young man to use his library. McKay studied the leading Romantic poets of the British tradition and major German philosophers such as Schopenhauer. Jekyll also encouraged McKay’s interest in poetry and urged him to transform his identification with Jamaican peasants into verse written in Jamaican dialect. The results were the books Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, both published in 1912. Songs of Jamaica won an award and a stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences for its celebratory portrait of peasant life. In both books, McKay found himself torn between the conventions of dialect verse that rely on romanticizing those whose language it depicts and his emerging political sensibilities, which led him to acknowledge those subjects’ struggles and exploitation, as he did in some poems in Constab Ballads. At this point in his life, before his political sympathies found expression in communism, that identification with the peasant motivated him to use his award money to finance a move to the US. He persuaded Jekyll and his family to support his education in agronomy so he could return to Jamaica to enhance his community’s farming practices. Nothing in this résumé evokes the upwardly mobile, largely genteel model of race pride and ethnic affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance.

However, by the time McKay published Harlem Shadows, he had left behind much of his romanticized notions of peasant life and tropical ease in favor of a Modernist engagement with the cultural tensions between rural and urban, nostalgia and Modernity, and his defining themes of displacement, yearning, and migration. In the intervening years, McKay confronted the worst of racial segregation in the US South, worked as a porter on a train between New York City and Philadelphia, and traveled to Europe, where he worked on the periodical Workers’ Dreadnought in London. During this time he also published his third poetry collection, Spring in New Hampshire (1920). These travels profoundly influenced his poetry.

McKay offered in Harlem Shadows a genuinely new sensibility in African American and Black Caribbean arts. “The Tropics in New York” elegantly captures how Harlem Shadows unites racial uplift to the displacements of the African diaspora and to bohemian self-cultivation. The poet-speaker looks through a shop window at tropical fruits “bringing memories / Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies / In benediction over nun-like hills.” McKay upends the nostalgia for natural beauty typical of pastoral poetry, including his own Songs of Jamaica, by revealing how such beauty and its sense of home fail to console: “A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.” Those “old, familiar ways” are inaccessible here because the speaker is as displaced as the fruit in the store, and those old ways are as fictitious as the ideals of primitivist innocence that white New Yorkers in Harlem often projected onto descendants of Africa. Neither the fruit nor the poet can go home again, and the poem laments a bygone home that can only be imagined in the face of the modern forces of capital and migration.

Many poems in Harlem Shadows likewise link African heritage to the American poetic imagination through displacement and alienation in ways that challenge central aspirations of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke’s defining 1925 essay “Enter the New Negro” declared that the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North in the early 20th century was only a salutary movement from the medieval to the modern, as he put it. But even he had to acknowledge that the “masses” were moving ahead of the educated and tentative leaders and that although there was a great “race-welding” afoot in Harlem in the emergence of a “common consciousness,” the denial of equal rights by US custom and legislation could yet send Black people migrating to the radicalism of the left. Harlem’s bourgeois promise may go unfulfilled, in other words, and McKay perceived this possibility even before the movement began. “Subway Wind” laments the breezes a subway train generates in its wake “down through the city’s great gaunt gut,” “leaving the sick and heavy air behind” as “pale-cheeked children seek the upper door.” Not a wind of optimistic social change, that “captive wind,” like the poet who notes it, yearns for that place “where fields lie idle in the dew drenched night, / and the Trades float above them fresh and free.” As it causes the pallor of the white children who rise out of the pit, the ill wind seems to trap the speaker below the surface. It evokes how urban life and its fantasies of cultural newness and economic freedom from Southern poverty may be a trap for migrating African Americans that’s as misleading as memories of a romanticized Jamaican paradise. As the scholar Sonya Posmentier argues, McKay’s version of the pastoral reveals “a relation among the Trade Winds that blow between the United States and Jamaica, the trade in fruit, the trade in human bodies, and the trade in cultural practices.” This “trade” between a heartfelt but ambivalent nostalgia and a potentially false urban hope hardly seems fair.

McKay’s status as a Harlem Renaissance pioneer is thus a beautiful paradox. He projects the yearning and displacement of the émigré onto the denizens of Harlem and locates the possibility of freedom in alienation rather than in uplift. In the title poem, “Harlem Shadows,” the speaker observes with grief the nocturnal lives of Harlem sex workers, the  “little dark girls who in slippered feet, / Go prowling through the night from street to street!” The language of the poem aligns them with the proletariat and the peasant, workers diminished in a “stern harsh world” that has pushed into “poverty, dishonor and disgrace, / Has pushed the timid little feet of clay, / The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!” Though critical of collective struggles produced in a racist capitalist society, McKay most fully mourns the unacknowledged internal life that drives those feet. This sympathy is explicit in “The Harlem Dancer,” which portrays its main character as a skilled and beautiful object of lust for “The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls.” More than an entertainer, the dancer embodies an honored, if primitivist, diasporic selfhood that “seemed a proudly-swaying palm / Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.” The poem implies that the storm pertains to both the immediate financial needs and the history of enslavement that necessitated her expression of her beautiful tropical sensibility in a Harlem cabaret. In the midst of a literary movement dedicated to the assertion of race pride and cultural unity, McKay emphasizes the divided, displaced selves of these “New Negroes,” concluding of the Harlem dancer that “looking at her falsely-smiling face, / I knew her self was not in that strange place.”

The publication of Harlem Shadows arguably launched McKay into his lifelong honoring of the self that was and was not in any of the strange places in which he lived. During the next decade or so, McKay traveled throughout Europe, including Paris and Moscow in 1923, living the life of a cosmopolitan bohemian, a leftist celebrity, an innovative novelist, and an impoverished refugee by turns and all at once. William J. Maxwell, editor of McKay’s Complete Poems (2004), notes that many poems in Harlem Shadows “anticipate the cocktail of sexual liberty and antiracist schooling” articulated in McKay’s novels Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) because McKay “cannot refuse bohemian codes of expressive egoism and the cross-wiring of political and amorous dynamite.” Heroic libertines Jake in Home to Harlem and Banjo in Banjo pursue similar aspirations for emotional validation and personal fulfillment, as McKay did, in a world marked and marred by the labor exploitations of ongoing industrialization and globalization as well as the ambivalent prospects of the Bolshevik revolution. Uneducated Jake works in a railway car with Ray, as much an intellectual avatar of McKay as Jake is of McKay’s libertine self. As the two characters trade meditations, it becomes clear that McKay prefers Jake’s assured commitment to day-to-day pleasures, including non-monogamous sexual exploits presented without judgment, to Ray’s tortured and satirized intellectualism. Like Ray and Jake, Banjo occasionally debates the major political issues of the day, but the novel “without a plot,” as the book’s subtitle avers, is more occupied with characterizing the complex and ultimately affirming social interactions of the multiracial and international dockworkers in Marseilles, of which McKay was one for a time.

What is clear in retrospect is just how fully this bohemian sensibility leavened McKay’s political radicalism as he melded sexual liberty with critiques of race and class politics. Although many readers may be familiar with the Harlem cabarets and speakeasies that provided monied New Yorkers with alcohol during Prohibition and sex for a price, and many may also be aware of the same-sex desire and homosocial bonds among such Harlem Renaissance figures as McKay, Locke, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, many may not know of such gender-bending events as the yearly balls at Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge. In his autobiography The Big Sea (1940), Hughes observed that the ball was the “strangest and gaudiest of all Harlem spectacles,” with “the queerly assorted throng on the dancing floor, males in flowing gowns and feathered headdresses and females in tuxedos and box-black suits.”

McKay likely did not attend such balls, but he clearly borrowed language and sensibilities from their existence in such underappreciated love poems as “To O.E.A.,” whose references to fairies evoke both the idea of woodland magical creatures and the denizens of the Hamilton Lodge, whose yearly affairs were sometimes called “The Dance of the Fairies.” McKay did not use gendered pronouns and often evoked Christian imagery to convey how the intensity of a given love affair depended in part on its usually unspoken illicit nature. The scholar Lindsay Tuggle describes this approach to liberated same-sex desire as the “glass closet,” McKay “simultaneously divulging and withholding elements of the author’s sexual subversion with a kind of wink-and-nod transparency.” Maxwell suggests that McKay wrote only “half-hearted allusions to the war between the body and soul,” as other free-love poets did, so that he could depart from those conventions “in the name of freer love.”

Intertwining these complex pursuits of freedom, McKay exemplified for readers and fellow artists how a political ferocity in the name of collective resistance could be conveyed with individuated literary elegance. In his memoir A Long Way From Home (1937), he declared that he was surprised when his militant anthem “If We Must Die” was taken as a call for racial unity in the face of the Red Summer race riots of 1919. He declared, “For I am so intensely subjective as a poet that I was not aware, at the moment of writing, that I was transformed into a medium of mass sentiment.” Yet this intense subjectivity, this “bohemian egoism” clearly makes a poem such as “The Baptism” so fierce a description of a trial by racial fire with which readers of the African diaspora can identify. And the intensity of individual witness makes “The Lynching” a stirring denunciation not only of the act itself but also of a community and a culture that allow it. That poem concludes, “The women thronged to look, but never a one / Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue; / And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.”

Black nationalist critic Addison Gayle was correct when, in 1972, he called McKay a “Black poet at war,” claiming him as a forebear because, as Maxwell put it, McKay used the sonnet “for propelling disciplined expressions of black rage and resistance into the mainstream of African American literature.” Though the sonnet was and is classic, decorous, and restrained as a form, it was and is also an expression of what Heinrich Heine called the “traditionalism of the excluded,” a dissident conventionality that motivated the prideful use of the form by such Harlem Renaissance poets as Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and McKay. Indeed, McKay’s consistent call for a defiant, self-assertive Black consciousness addressing itself to Black people in poem and novel made McKay what poet and statesman Leopold Senghor called “the veritable inventor” of Negritude, that anticolonial, self-assertive aesthetic pursued by the African diasporic writers of the French colonies. McKay’s Banjo “was really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity,” as Martiniquan Negritude writer Aimé Césaire wrote. Cesaire even committed passages of the novel to memory.

What Cesaire saw as dignity might best be understood as the manifestation of what one critic called McKay’s “politics of refusal,” his usually willful but sometimes enforced withdrawal from what he saw to be unjust social and economic systems. But the withdrawal was always motivated by a sense of some larger possible unity that could include rather than exclude. Though his father was a farmer, McKay’s identification with the peasant was in part a resistance to his father’s slightly elevated status. McKay’s immigration to the US was inspired by his desire to improve the lives of those peasants, but that sojourn became the beginning of a lifelong quest to find an art commensurate with his ambitions for individual fulfillment. Though Harlem Shadows constitutes one undeniable origin point for the Harlem Renaissance, McKay left Harlem for Paris soon after its publication and two years before Locke’s declaration of the movement’s independence. He has been proclaimed as the movement’s militant voice even though, from Moscow and elsewhere, he turned that voice against the respectable and mannered leaders of the movement, declaring to Hughes that he appreciated the positive reception of the largely white communist left more than the reprobation or esteem of figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who opined that reading Home to Harlem made him want to take a bath.

McKay never returned to Jamaica, but he was proud to know that his books were popular there, even if his brother and people of his brother’s social class could not afford to buy them. Finally, he came to lament the devolution of the Bolshevik revolution into Stalinism and found himself turning to Catholicism toward the end of his life. However, remembering that even his willfully peripatetic existence was not fully of his own choosing is crucial. Because of his radical politics, he could not return to the US because of FBI interdiction until 1934. What an odyssey!

Sickly in his last years, McKay lived and taught in Chicago until his death in 1948, leaving a legacy exemplified by Harlem Shadows but much larger than that. This legacy includes the then-unpublished “Clinic” poems circa 1923 that projected his illness and depression onto his perception of urban decay and the “Cities” series of poems, which were, unlike Bertolt Brecht’s “Reader for Those Who Live in Cities,” “more a judgmental grand tour than a guide to the commonplace alienations of urban living,” as Maxwell argued. There are also the religious poems late in his life that his publishing friends Cedric Dover, Max Eastman, and Carl Cowl believed would mar his radical reputation and so excluded from The Selected Poems of Claude McKay they were preparing. It’s hard to see why because try as he might to be wholly devoted, McKay nonetheless avers “I do not go to church in search of God,” “I go to church and priest for discipline, / There is no discipline of greater merit, / Than agitates precisely from within, / And makes the body subject to the spirit!” Here the bohemian still lives, though yearning to be at peace with himself through God.

Harlem Shadows contains all of this mighty yearning of the Black diasporic sojourn through that weary and wearying modern world. By the time he returned to the United States in 1934, McKay had indeed, in Maxwell’s words, won “a rare triple crown: a place in the oral memory of the [Jamaican] people; prominence in the front lines of a black literary modernism; and historical stature as a flawed but trailblazing black nationalist ancestor.” He won those laurels through his heroic dedication to his vagabond self in the face of national and artistic homelessness. Through it all, he imagined and wrote with resilience, seeing his creativity as perhaps his truest self and his truest rebellion.

In this light, it makes sense that Harlem Shadows ends with a two-sonnet sequence titled “Through Agony.” The “you” to whom it is addressed could be a lover, a disrespectful publisher, a racist society, or all of the above. Whoever it is, the “you” causes real pain, making “all my swarthy strength turned cold like steel.” Though “My wounded heart sinks heavier than stone,” the speaker takes his leave of “you” in order “To mourn your vivid memory alone / In mountain fastnesses austerely gray.” Once again, the tensions between rural and urban, conventional literary romanticizing and the social realities of the poet-speaker, love of a dream and love of a forbidden person arise to bring their alienation. Yet the speaker has an answer that clarifies why McKay and Harlem Shadows still mean so much: “But after sleep I’ll wake with greater might, / Once more to venture on the eternal quest.”