Home to Harlem

1. Home to Harlem Final Lecture

2. Relapse Talking Points 1) When we reach the bottom of this paragraph, we see that, for Ray, “Only the Russians of the late era seemed to stand like giants in the new.” What do you make of his penchant for this literary epoch? Does his taste help us to better understand Ray or/and to better understand why Ray’s psychic life is so frustrating? What is the rhetorical significance of McKay’s association of Ray with these 19th century writers? 2) Ray’s machinations about making (an art in which “vague, incomprehensible words and phrases stormed (and about rethinking he nature of art) are easily associated with a distinct literary movement. What is this movement? What is the significance of Ray’s inability to name it? 3) Ray’s machinations about the possibility for art to be more than just a “clear cut presentation of life” point to a rejection of a different literary movement. What is it? How does it stand in contradistinction to the movement invoked earlier? 4) How is McKay using this passage to make a meta-textual commentary on his own literary aesthetic? 5) Ray later relates that Uncle Sam shattered his dream of writing like the Russians “until life appeared like one big disease and the world a vast hospital?” What poet does this passage invoke? What is the significance of his invocation for McKay’s purposes here? 6) What is the grand carnage to which Ray refers? What is its rhetorical and polemical significance? Dreams of making something into words. What could he make… and fashion? Could he ever create art? Art, around which vague, incomprehensible words and phrases stormed? What was art, anyway? Was it more than a clear-cut presentation of a vivid impression of life Only the Russians of the late era seemed to stand up like giants in the new. Gogol, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tugurniev. When he read them he now thought: Here were the elements that the grand carnage swept over and touched not.

3. A Practical Prank A Practical Prank “Your feelings against that sort of thing are fine, James, said Ray. But that’s the most I could say for it. It’s all right to start out with nice theories from an advantageous point in life. But when you get a chance to learn life for yourself, it’s quite another thing. The things you call fine human traits don’t belong to any special class or nation or people. Nobody can pull that kind of talk now an get away with it, least of all a Negro.” “Why not? Asked Grant. “Can’t a Negro have fine feelings about life?” “Yes, but not the old false-fine feelings that used to be monopolized by educated and cultivated people. You should educate yourself away from that sort of thing.” “But education is something to make you fine!” “No, modern education is planned to make you a sharp, snouty, rooting hog. A Negro getting it is an anachronism. We ought to get something new, we Negroes. But we get our education like—our houses. When the whites move out, we move in and take possession of dead stuff. Dead stuff that this age has no use for.” “How’s that?” “Can you ask? You and I were born in the midst of the illness of this age and have lived through its agony.... Keep your fine feelings, indeed but don’t try to make a virtue out of the,. They’ll become all hollow inside, false and dry as civilization itself. An civilization is rotten. We are all rotten who are touched by it.” “I am not rotten,” retorted Grant, “and I couldn’t bring myself and my ideas down to the levels of such filthy parasites.” “All men have the disease of pimps in their hearts,” said Ray. “He can’t be civilized and not. I have seen your high and mighty civilized people do things some people would be ashamed of—” “You said it, the, most truly,”cried Jake, who, lying in bed was intently following the dialogue. Talking Points • Ray begins by asserting a distinction between knowledge gained from “theories” and knowledge gained “in life”? He seems to exclude the Negro from the locale of the theorist, but he does so while espousing a theory. How does the passage resolve this seeming paradox? What does this resolution suggest about the nature of this other education--one away from fine feelings--and its socio political and economic tenets? • What is the rhetorical impact of the division Ray makes between “educated and cultivated people” and the imagined community that educates themselves away from them? Who is being indicted? What cultural processes and conflicts are being called into (and perhaps criticized) here? • Ray rejects the notion that Grant’s idea that education makes you fine (as well as the very idea of fine feelings) in very telling socio-political terms. What are they? What political discourses do they invoke? What words in the passage invoke these discourses? • The political discourse that Ray does invoke is here juxtaposed against his remarks about civilization (which in turn invoke primitivism) in such a way as to yoke the two together. What is the rhetorical and political import of this tie? How does is redefine primitivism, or does it? • Play Ray. Why can’t man be civilized and not have “the disease of pimps in his heart”? What does this suggest about how Ray’s understanding of “civilization.” What ironic role does the term “parasites” play in this passage? Why would civilization make Grant hollow inside if he made a virtue of them? • What is the metaphorical resonance of the “dead stuff” to which Ray points? Why does McKay note that these ideas and ideals are the inheritance of a people who have tossed them away? How does rotting play into all of this? • What rhetorical purpose does the ambiguity of Jakes final line in this passage serve?

4. He also Loved Her clothes were hanging there, too. There were three gowns—a black silk, a glossy green stain, and a flimsy chiffon-like yellow thing. In a corner of the lowest shelf was a bundle of soiled champagne-colored silk stockings and in the other four pairs of shoes—one black velvet, one white kid, and another gold finished. Jerco regarded the lot with dog-like affection. “I wouldn’t touch not one of her things until she’s better,” he said. “I’d sooner hock the shirt of my back.” Which he was preparing to do. He had three expensive silk shirts, presents from Rosalind. He had just taken two out of the wardrobe and the other off his back [....] Talking Points • What is the rhetorical effect produced by Jerco’s fetish-isation of Rosalind’s clothing? What does this fetish suggest in light of their “business relationship”? • McKay juxtaposes the image of an emasculated Jerco (a dog before women’s clothing) with an invocation of a masculine stereotype, that of the provider who will “hock the shirt of [his] back” to support his feminine counterpart. What is the impact of this juxtaposition? And what rhetorical purpose does Rosalind’s death (a death that makes this assertion of masculinity null and void) produce? How does the fact that the shirts are gifts complicate all of this? • When Jerco slits his throat he as described as “a great black boar,” invoking the language of primitivism to describe an act that is the indirect result of unfair labor and market practices. What ends does this serve? • Here, again, the idea of living sweet and emasculation are tied to each other in McKay’s Harlem (where living sweet is hardly out of the norm.) Is this the same old thing? Are we to equate Jerco with Zeddy? Or is more going on here? • Why do you think that McKay chooses to let Ray’s voice usurp that of the narrator’s during this chapter, offering us a storyteller framed inside the discourse of an(other)? Or Why have RAY, in particular, relate this story given the fact that we have just learned he hates “parasites” and that civilization makes all men pimps?

5. A Farewell Feed Talking Points Almost strikingly, the narrator begins this passage by stating that life burned more intensely in Jake than in Ray. Given their past actions, why should we consider this statement to be true, and (if indeed we do), how does this detail recast our visions of Jake and Ray as they appear throughout the novel? How is this assertion developed or disturbed by the fact that the we know Ray secretly despises Agatha and most of Harlem (the novel’s locale of jubilant life?) How is this assertion supported and or contradicted when the narrator relates that Ray drank more in that he could “distill into active animal living”? How is the language of primitivism working here? Given that the narrator frames this condition as what gives rise to a need to write, what is McKay (meta-textually) trying to convey about the goals of his own project and the project (or goal) or writing in general? The narrator then relates that if Ray had enjoyed irresponsibility in the same way as did Jake, things could “have been different” for him, but instead he and Agatha are slaves to the “civilized tradition.” Is this an indictment of Ray? A valorization of Jake? How is the notion of irresponsibility figured here? Vice, virtue, both? And if any or all, what does this suggest about the value(s) of irresponsibility and primitivism? Ray confesses as he leaves for Europe that he does not know what do to do with the education he’s acquired, and that it’s only served to term him into a misfit. Why in McKay’s world should that be (or is it?) the case? Is it an inevitable predicament for an educated African-America. If so, why so? . “Life burned in Ray perhaps more intensely than in Jake. Ray felt more and his range was wider and he could not be satisfied with the easy, simple things that sufficed for Jake[…] But he drank in more than he could distill into active animal living. Maybe that was why he felt he had to write.”

6. Spring in Harlem Jake went to Aunt Hattie’s to feed. Billy Biasse was there and a gang of longshoreman who had boozed and fed and were boozing again and, touched by the tender spring night, were swapping love stories and singing: “Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there, / Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there, /Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there, / Back home in Dixie I was bawn in/ “Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there,/ Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there,/ Back home in Dixie is a brown girl there,/ And I wonder what nigger is saying to her a bootiful mawnin’.” ` A red-brown West Indian among them volunteered to sing a Port-of-Spain song. It immortalized the drowning of a black sailor. It was made by the bawdy colored girls of the port, with whom the deceased had been a favourite among the stevedores and sailors of the island” “Ring the bell again, /Ring the bell again, /Ring the bell again, /But the sharks won’t puke him up/ Oh, ring the bell again “Empty is you’ room,/ Empty is you’ room, /Empty is you’ room,/ But you find one in the sea. /Oh, empty is you’ room. “Ring the bell again, /Ring the bell again, /Ring the bell again, /But we who feel the pain. /Oh, ring that bell again.” Talking Points • The songs of the community (national and international) are a seminal metaphor throughout the novel. How are they functioning here? • What kind of information is being exchanged and between whom in these songs. • Despite the tender spring night, these lyrics are hardly uplifting. Keeping in mind the lumpen, to what rhetorical effect doe McKay deploy these songs?

7. The Gift that Billy Gave Negroes, like all good Americans, love a bar. I should have said, Negroes under Anglo-Saxon civilization.” “We GOTTA celebrate to-night,” said Felice when Saturday came round again. Jake agreed to do anything she wanted. Monday they would have to think of working. He wanted to dine at Aunt Hatie’s, but Felice wanted a “niftier” place. So they dined at the Nile Queen restaurant on Seventh Avenue. After dinner they subwayed down to Broadway. They bought tickets in the nigger heaven of a theater, whence they watched high-class people make luxurious love on screen. They enjoyed the exhibition. There is no better angle one can look down on a motion picture than that of nigger heaven. They returned to Harlem after the show in a good mood to celebrate until morning, Should they go to the Sheba Palace where chance had been so good to them, or to a cabaret? […] “You really think so, sweetness?” They were walking to the subway station along Lenox Avenue. “I ain’t thinking honey. I know it. I’ll nevah fohgit it again and it’ll always give us good luck.” Talking Points • Describe the irony of McKay’s portrayal of “nigger heaven.” How does it, or does it, relate to the novel’s themes of black nationalism and or internationalism? • What do you make out of the fact that the novel ends with Felice and Jack trusting solely in luck and folk superstition? • How does the first quote make us rethink the “cage of civilization” theme that McKay has deployed throughout the novel.