as a novelist by sketching the 'semi-underworld' of urban African American workers that he had inhabited between 1914 and 1919. The draft of one novel, 'Color Scheme,' McKay evidently destroyed after its rejection. Later, however, he was encouraged to expand a short story into his first published novel, Home to Harlem (1928).
In Home to Harlem McKay tries to maintain in tension the three elements that interest him about the lives of rootless, urban African American working men in America; they are represented by the three central male characters, Jake, Zeddy, and Ray. Jake is drawn back to Harlem from abroad by its night life, its Baltimore, Goldgraben's, and Congo bars. But while Harlem's dark-eyed women, its 'couples…dancing, thick as maggots in a vat of sweet liquor, and as wriggling,' dominate his desires, he rejects the role of 'sweetman': 'Never lived off no womens and never will. I always works.' By contrast, Zeddy is always out for the main chance, arguing against Jake's refusal to scab: -346-
'Youse talking death, tha's what you sure is. One thing I know is niggers am made foh life. And I want to live, boh, and feel plenty o' the juice o' life in mah blood. I wanta live and I wanta love…. I loves life and I got to live and I'll scab through hell to live.'
On the other side, the educated Ray envies Jake's natural spontaneity and his capacity for happiness: 'I don't know what I'll do with my little education. I wonder sometimes if I could get rid of it and go and lose myself in some savage culture in the jungles of Africa.' The underlying ambivalence of Ray's views suggests that McKay (who slightly differentiates himself from Ray when the latter reappears in Banjo) has not altogether worked through the political dimensions of his deep attraction to the 'primitive' and presumably exotic qualities of black life. McKay clearly differentiates Jake's natural decency and sense of proletarian solidarity from Zeddy's comic and sometimes ugly blundering, but the roots of that difference, personalities aside, remain unclear. Nor does there seem to be any real way of reconciling Jake's desire for some of Ray's Western 'edjucation' and Ray's need for the resources of Jake's earthy happiness. Robert M. Greenberg has suggested that Jake's virtues are 'essentially preindustrial ones, qualities that can only foster a marginal life for an individual in the urban North.' The characters of Home to Harlem are marginal in another sense, too: they are able to pick up jobs, gigs, money because, though the novel seldom touches on it, times are still flush in the white world.
In Banjo (1929) the ideological drift of Home to Harlem is more fully worked out. Ray meets Banjo — Jake without traces of workingclass ideology — comes to reject the Western civilization that has been taking 'the love of color, joy, beauty, vitality, and nobility out of his life,' and decides to throw in with Banjo's marginal and dangerous but joyful style of living. What distinguishes black life on the Marseilles waterfront in Banjo is its specifically African quality, defined by the variety of African and diaspora characters who populate the Ditch. Marginality emerges here not as a crushing burden or, at best, a temporary declivity from which people will eventually climb but as a soulful, rhythmic space within which an alternative life to that of white culture can be enacted. It is, perhaps, a differently romanti-347- cized, and equally problematic, version of the 'muck' in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
One may read in the changes from McKay's earlier stories to Banjo and his later Jamaican novel, Banana Bottom (1933), a movement from a fundamentally class to a largely racial basis of solidarity, a movement opposite to that dramatized in Richard Wright's powerful novella 'Bright and Morning Star.' Jake's commitment to worker solidarity is limited: while he will not scab, neither will he join a union — like most 'bottom dogs,' though he is 'no lonesome wolf,' he is suspicious of all forms of entanglement — especially if they come in white. In 'Bright and Morning Star' Sue, who is suspicious of virtually all whites, ultimately sacrifices her own life to protect her Communist son's comrades, white as well as black, and also to exact some vengeance for his lynching. The stories of Uncle Tom's Children (1938), of which 'Bright and Morning Star' is the last, move from African American protagonists who are victims toward those who increasingly embrace radical struggle. In the process, they also seem to move away from the black folk culture (especially religion) associated with the rural South, as well as with the Caribbean or ultimately Africa, that sustains McKay's central characters. In Native Son (1940) that has disappeared; indeed, James Baldwin complained of the book that it lacked 'any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex group reality.' There is, of course, a good deal of truth in that criticism. But it misses precisely the sense in which Wright's title links Bigger Thomas to the long line of utterly marginal men who populate proletarian novels of the thirties — especially those written in Chicago by men from mid-America. Bigger is the most thoroughly dispossessed victim of the social processes also dramatized by Algren, Kromer, and Conroy, among others, the processes by which Depression Americans were finally, wrenchingly cut off from earlier, mostly rural sources of traditional value and set adrift in the urban jungles of capitalism. In Native Son the American dream of freedom and flight passes overhead as an advertising gimmick while Bigger and Gus play out the distance in harsh laughter.
At the same time, the ending of the novel focuses Wright's doubts about the ability even of a developed class analysis to account for such thoroughgoing alienation. What emerges in Bigger's final encounter with Max is much the same problem that William Attaway -348- confronts in Blood on the Forge (1941). Like hundreds of thousands of African American people in the decade after 1914, Attaway's three Moss brothers, Mat, Chinatown, and Melody, flee from the exploitation and violence of rural Kentucky to the steel mills near Pittsburgh. As Richard Yarborough has pointed out, Attaway portrays the men's movement into the promised Northern land as, in fact, a descent into an industrial wasteland. All three are destroyed in that process: China is blinded in a mill explosion; Melody injures the hand that enables him to root himself in music; and Big Mat is killed leading strikebreakers.
From one point of view, the experience of Wright's and Attaway's characters represents at its extreme the experience of all workingclass men caught between a dying rural world and an industrial system whose humane potential is waiting to be born. But reading Blood on the Forge against Thomas Bell's novel of three generations of immigrant Slovak steel workers, Out of This Furnace, published the same year, suggests that the differences are, finally, critical. For Bell's book ends triumphantly, with an impending birth and with the victory of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in Braddock presented as the expression of the American values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Moreover, in Out of This Furnace African American workers like the Moss brothers are altogether invisible — except, perhaps, in the name of a particularly violent trooper called 'Blackjack.' Attaway wrote no novels after Blood on the Forge. What seems to me played out in these novels of African American life are a series of unresolved conflicts: between the values embodied in forms of cultural nationalism and forms of classbased solidarity; between the construction of the South as 'home' and value-center and the North as 'promised land'; between versions of pastoral and versions of proletarianism. Arna Bontemps perhaps tried to avoid such conflicts by setting his groundbreaking novel of African American self-assertion and rebellion, Black Thunder (1936), in the antebellum South. Still, by modeling black militance even in a historical slave revolt like that of Gabriel, Bontemps encountered the demand from the Alabama school in which he was teaching that he renounce his radical associations — mainly his friends engaged in the struggle to save the Scottsboro Boys and in support of Gandhi's nonviolent demonstrations in India. How to show his re-349- nunciation? Why, burn all the 'race-conscious' and therefore provocative books in his library. African American intellectual life in the United States simply provided no refuge from the politics of race.
In a formal sense, other working-class women writers of the thirties did not follow Agnes Smedley's autobiographical lead. More fundamentally, however, Daughter of Earth was paradigmatic, for narratives of coming to consciousness and fathoming the painful contradictions of gender and class were at the heart of books by writers like Meridel Le Sueur, Olive Tilford Dargan, Myra Page, and Tillie Olsen. In The Girl — only parts of which were published in the 1930s — Le Sueur succeeds perhaps better than in any of her other work in holding together the contradictory imperatives that have marked her long, complex career as writer and Communist Party activist. These involve the tensions between sexual awakening and 'political' consciousness, between modernism of style and the effort to reach a working-class audience, between the writer as seller of words or as peoples' oracle, and above all between the logic of individual advancement and the power of collective action. In her work, these are all linked. In certain ways, The Girl duplicates the pattern of other books that trace the coming to consciousness of a working-class
