Home to Harlem

Home to Harlem

By Claude McKay.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Dedication
4. Home to Harlem
   1. First Part
      1. I: Going Back Home
      2. II: Arrival
      3. III: Zeddy
      4. IV: Congo Rose
      5. V: On the Job Again
      6. VI: Myrtle Avenue
      7. VII: Zeddy’s Rise and Fall
      8. VIII: The Raid of the Baltimore
      9. IX: Jake Makes a Move
   2. Second Part
      1. X: The Railroad
      2. XI: Snowstorm in Pittsburgh
      3. XII: The Treeing of the Chef
      4. XIII: One Night in Philly
      5. XIV: Interlude
      6. XV: Relapse
      7. XVI: A Practical Prank
      8. XVII: He Also Loved
      9. XVIII: A Farewell Feed
   3. Third Part
      1. XIX: Spring in Harlem
      2. XX: Felice
      3. XXI: The Gift That Billy Gave
5. Endnotes
6. Colophon
7. Uncopyright

Imprint

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To my friend
Louise Bryant

Home to Harlem

First Part

I

Going Back Home

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. Jake was used to all sorts of rough jobs, but he had never before worked in such a filthy dinghy.

The white sailors who washed the ship would not wash the stokers’ water-closet, because they despised the Arabs. And the Arabs themselves made no effort to keep the place clean, although it adjoined their sleeping berth.

The cooks hated the Arabs because they did not eat pork. Whenever there was pork for dinner, something else had to be prepared for the Arabs. The cooks put the stokers’ meat, cut in unappetizing chunks, in a broad pan, and the two kinds of vegetables in two other pans. The stoker who carried the food back to the bunks always put one pan inside of the other, and sometimes the bottoms were dirty and bits of potato peelings or egg shells were mixed in with the meat and the vegetables.

The Arabs took up a chunk of meat with their coal-powdered fingers, bit or tore off a piece, and tossed the chunk back into the pan. It was strange to Jake that these Arabs washed themselves after eating and not before. They ate with their clothes stiff-starched to their bodies with coal and sweat. And when they were finished, they stripped and washed and went to sleep in the stinking-dirty bunks. Jake was used to the lowest and hardest sort of life, but even his leather-lined stomach could not endure the Arabs’ way of eating. Jake also began to despise the Arabs. He complained to the cooks about the food. He gave the chef a ten-shilling note, and the chef gave him his eats separately.

One of the sailors flattered Jake. “You’re the same like us chaps. You ain’t like them dirty jabbering coolies.”

But Jake smiled and shook his head in a noncommittal way. He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not as a stoker. He didn’t care about the dirty old boat, anyhow. It was taking him back home⁠—that was all he cared about. He made his shift all right, stoking four hours and resting eight. He didn’t sleep well. The stokers’ bunks were lousy, and fetid with the mingled smell of stale food and water-closet. Jake had attempted to keep the place clean, but to do that was impossible. Apparently the Arabs thought that a sleeping quarters could also serve as a garbage can.

“Nip me all you wanta, Mister Louse,” said Jake. “Roll on, Mister Ship, and stinks all the way as you rolls. Jest take me ’long to Harlem is all I pray. I’m crazy to see again the brown-skin chippies ’long Lenox Avenue. Oh boy!”

Jake was tall, brawny, and black. When America declared war upon Germany in 1917 he was a longshoreman. He was working on a Brooklyn pier, with a score of men under him. He was a little boss and a very good friend of his big boss, who was Irish. Jake thought he would like to have a crack at the Germans.⁠ ⁠… And he enlisted.

In the winter he sailed for Brest with a happy chocolate company. Jake had his own daydreams of going over the top. But his company was held at Brest. Jake toted lumber⁠—boards, planks, posts, rafters⁠—for the hundreds of huts that were built around the walls of Brest and along the coast between Brest and Saint-Pierre, to house the United States soldiers.

Jake was disappointed. He had enlisted to fight. For what else had he been sticking a bayonet into the guts