Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by John Lowney

As much as Home to Harlem identifies Jake with a predominantly African American Harlem, the novel's introduction of his character, as part of a multinational, multiracial crew on a trans-Atlantic freighter, foregrounds how national identity is subjected to a transnational logic of racial and class hierarchy. The novel's opening two sentences suggest that racial categories are self-explanatory: "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" (1). Yet such an apparently self-evident equation of "Arab" with "dirty" is complicated by the narrative's subsequent racial contradictions. Within the racial hierarchy of this ship, which relegates "the Arabs" to the lowest level of "filth," Jake is elevated to a higher status than his fellow stokers. Yet he is not deceived when a white sailor says to him," 'You're the same like us chaps. You ain't like them dirty jabbering coolies'" (2-3). Jake's unstated response suggests an experie nced consciousness of how the interrelated hierarchies of race and class render such "flattery" suspect:" ... Jake smiled and shook his head in a non-committal 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" (3). The material consequences of racist ideology supercede any spurious attempts to bridge racial divides, as the subsequent narration of Jake's earlier wartime experience reinforces. Like other African American soldiers who had enlisted to fight, Jake is limited to manual labor at the army base camp. Frustrated, he makes a seemingly impulsive decision to leave the army and travel to England, a decision the potential consequences of which eventually follow him "home to Harlem."

Significantly, Jake leaves France because he is seduced by the kindness of an English sailor who calls him "darky" rather than "nigger." He is seduced despite the admitted knowledge that "back home" such language would signify "friendly contempt." Although he "thought how strange it was to hear the Englishman say 'darky' without being offended" (5), Jake settles in London's increasingly racially mixed East End and even lives with a white woman. When postwar race riots disrupt Jake's temporary complacency in London, however, he realizes that England is hardly exempt from the racial hatred he had identified with the United States. His initial lapse of judgment, the moment of trust "colored" by his comparison of white American and English treatment of blacks, becomes painfully evident to him. He has no choice but to leave the "white folks' war" (8) as far behind as he can, so he embarks for Harlem on the freighter.

Because Jake is a deserter, albeit from a military that had deserted him in his desire to fight for his nation, he cannot leave the war entirely behind him. As casual as his picaresque migrant life appears to be, as confident as he is that he can always find another job or another lover, he is an outlaw throughout Home to Harlem. Yet his status as a war deserter does not seem unusual in Harlem, and the possibility of arrest for desertion is only vaguely threatening until the end of the novel. While his friend and fellow veteran Zeddy warns him as soon as he returns that the "'gov'mant still smoking out deserters and draft dodgers'" (22), even offering rewards to those who turn them in, this specific threat becomes submerged within the more general threat of random arrest that black men take for granted in McKay's Harlem. Nonetheless, Jake's outlaw status is given significant structural weight in the novel. Not only does he come "home to Harlem" as a war deserter, he eventually leaves Harlem as a result of be ing publicly exposed as such. The novel's primary narrative weight is given to Jake's quest for Felice, the "sweet brown" prostitute with whom he falls in love his first night back in Harlem, only to lose her until the novel's conclusion, when they are reunited and eventually depart for Chicago. The geography of this quest is not informed by a mythic pull of Harlem as a black Mecca, however, even though Felice herself embodies this myth with her attractiveness, her generosity, and her elusiveness. [19] It is defined instead by the more pragmatic need to escape the "white folks' business," to find refuge among black migrants like himself.