Banjo
Claude McKay
Banjo
Black seamen, drifters and musicians on the Marseille waterfront — the novel that gave Négritude its vocabulary, written by a Jamaican who preferred the docks to literary Paris.
Read our takeHome to Harlem
Claude McKay
Home to Harlem
by Claude McKay
The first bestseller by a Black American novelist — written in France, set in Harlem, and denounced by the movement it belonged to.
- 1928
About Claude McKay
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeJake Brown deserts the army in France and works his way back to Harlem, looking for a woman he met on his first night home and lost by morning. Around that thin thread Claude McKay assembled the Harlem the respectable press did not want described: cabarets, rent parties, dining cars, longshoremen, sex bought and sold. It sold better than any novel by a Black American writer had, and W. E. B. Du Bois said in print that it left him feeling as though he needed a bath.
The full story
Jake Brown, a Black American soldier, deserts a labour battalion in France, spends time in London, and works a passage back to New York. On his first night in Harlem he meets a woman, spends the night with her, and finds in the morning that she has left money in his pocket and no name. The search for her runs under the rest of the book without ever quite driving it.
What the novel actually does is move Jake through the working life of Black New York: as a longshoreman refusing to scab, as a Pullman dining-car cook, through cabarets, gambling rooms, boarding houses and rent parties. In the dining-car section he meets Ray, a Haitian intellectual displaced by the American occupation of his country, educated beyond any use the United States will make of him, and paralysed by it.
The Jake–Ray pairing is the argument. Jake lives instinctively and is largely at ease; Ray thinks constantly and is wretched. McKay does not resolve it in favour of either, and Ray's dissatisfaction carries directly into the sequel, Banjo, which picks him up in Marseille.
Why we recommend it
A bestseller that split its own movement
It made McKay's name commercially and cost him the approval of the Harlem Renaissance establishment in the same season.
Written in France, about Harlem
McKay had not lived in New York for years when he wrote it. The Harlem here is remembered from a distance, which is part of its intensity.
It sets up Banjo
Ray, the Haitian intellectual, carries straight over into the Marseille novel. Read them in order.
What this book explores
The real history
W. E. B. Du Bois reviewed it with open disgust, objecting that it fed a white appetite for Black low life. The quarrel is one of the defining arguments of the Harlem Renaissance.
Timeline
1923–1928
McKay is living in France; the novel is written abroad.
1928
Harper & Brothers publishes Home to Harlem; it becomes a bestseller.
1928
W. E. B. Du Bois attacks the book in The Crisis.
1929
Banjo follows, carrying Ray to Marseille.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Harper & Brothers
- 1928
Paperback
- Paperback
- Northeastern University Press
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
Harlem Shadows
Claude McKay
Harlem Shadows
The collection that opened the Harlem Renaissance, written in strict sonnets by a Jamaican who refused to soften either the form or the anger.
Read our takeRomance in Marseille
Claude McKay
Romance in Marseille
Written around 1930, unpublished for ninety years: a novel of the Marseille docks with a disabled Black protagonist and openly queer characters, decades ahead of anything that could be printed.
Read our takeHome to Harlem: frequently asked questions
Why did W. E. B. Du Bois dislike Home to Harlem?
He believed its interest in cabarets, sex and street life pandered to white readers' appetite for Black low life rather than advancing the race. He said so bluntly in The Crisis, and the exchange became one of the Harlem Renaissance's defining arguments.
Was Home to Harlem really the first Black American bestseller?
It is generally described as the first novel by a Black American writer to reach bestseller status.
Do I need to read it before Banjo?
It helps. Ray, the Haitian writer who dominates the second half, continues as the central consciousness of Banjo in Marseille.
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