One of the most striking things about Home to Harlem is that no one seems to be at home in Harlem. Not Jake, the novel’s main character, a Virginia‑born African American migrant to New York; not Ray, his friend, an educated Black Haitian immigrant; and not its itinerant Black residents, whose precarious lives seem to consist of an endless rotation from boardinghouse to pool room to nightclub.
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Their restlessness in some ways mirrors the peripatetic life of the author himself, a Black Jamaican immigrant whose portrait of his adopted community provoked a firestorm of criticism from the African American intelligentsia at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The novel meditates on the meaning of home for Black people, migrant or native, educated or not, in the first decades of the twentieth century.
In many ways Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem represents the experience of Black displacement, writ large. The Harlem of the 1920s was an unprecedented cross‑section of the Black communities of the New World: Southern‑born African American migrants just arrived in New York City as part of the Great Migration of the early twentieth century; Black Caribbean immigrants who came as part of the largest wave of mass migration in United States history; and native‑born Black New Yorkers themselves.
This singular mix created a vibrant transnational Black culture that gave Harlem its reputation as the Black Mecca. In the early twentieth century many of these populations were still new to New York, and to one another. Home to Harlem reveals a Black community in a state of becoming.
The novel is a landmark in American literary history. Home to Harlem was the first bestselling novel by a Black author in the United States, propelled by white readers fascinated by Harlem’s famed nightlife. Not until Richard Wright published Native Son in 1940 did another novel by an African American author make the bestseller list.
Home to Harlem was the first bestselling novel by a Black author in the United States, propelled by white readers fascinated by Harlem’s famed nightlife.
Home to Harlem also appears to be the first sustained fictional portrait of Black urban life in the US, anticipating the “street” literature of African American writers in later decades. The novel’s portrait of a polyglot Black community heralds the arrival of a new kind of Black urban identity.
This is not to say that Harlem did not already have a robust traditional African American community. Indeed, in 1928 it was home to prominent African American churches, fraternal societies and civic organizations, and, particularly, an enthusiastic Black reading public. Two years before, the New York Public Library finally acknowledged the importance of Black readers and Black writing by acquiring the vast holdings of Afro‑Latinx bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, housing the collection in its Harlem branch.
Harlem was also home to a flourishing printscape. These journals, magazines, and newspapers provided fertile ground for its flowering literary culture by catering to its diverse communities of Black readers. Serial publications included The Crisis, the NAACP’s newspaper for the African American professional class; Negro World, aimed at a working‑class Black diasporic readership; and Fire!, the short‑lived but influential avant‑garde African American literary magazine led by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.
Not just writers but also a wide array of Black artists and musicians called Harlem home, including part‑time residents like the calypsonians who regularly traveled between Trinidad and Harlem to record and perform their music.
Home to Harlem was published at a time of rapid social change, particularly in New York, where evolving gender roles effected a radical transformation in social attitudes toward sexual behavior. New York had also experienced an unprecedented influx of immigration that was changing the culture and complexion of the city.
On the one hand were restrictive measures like the Immigration Act of 1924, which attempted to stem the tide of non‑whites flooding into the United States. On the other hand were the influential new ideas about race and sex transforming the cultural landscape.
In 1925 Alain Locke published The New Negro anthology, which advocated for a new Black “primitivism” in the arts. Black writers like McKay, Hughes, and Hurston responded by writing stories about formerly taboo subjects on intra‑Black violence and sex. Home to Harlem presents a Black world teeming with disreputable denizens: crossdressing entertainers, queer lovers, assorted “fairies,” “dandies,” and “pansies”; thieves, gamblers, hustlers, pimps, sex workers; color‑struck sugar mamas and their “sweet men.”
This radical expansion of Black life in African American literature was the by‑product of these major cultural shifts. The relative political radicalism that characterized Black New York society after World War I reflected new aesthetic focus on urban Black identity paired with a political disposition toward Black rights, as articulated in The New Negro.
For Black communities in the United States and abroad, Harlem was a magnet of economic possibility, a hub of creativity and political discourse. It was also a draw for other, less respectable, forms of Black expression: both the “Mecca of the New Negro” and the “Mecca of the ‘Big Bluff,’” as one Trinidadian performer derisively put it.
When McKay wrote Home to Harlem, though, he was living in France. In fact, McKay did not spend much time in Harlem during the 1920s. He was already a published “dialect” poet in Jamaica when he migrated to the United States in 1912 at the age of twenty‑three to study at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. He abandoned his studies to work at a series of laboring jobs before moving to New York, where he gained a reputation as a member of the city’s influential leftist intellectual community.
Yet even then McKay was not quite at home: at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay was actually traveling back and forth between New York and London or France, producing poetry and journalism for English communist Sylvia Pankhurst’s weekly magazine, Workers’ Dreadnought.
In 1928 McKay had already established himself as a serious poet in the United States. He was best known—and, perhaps, is still best known—for “If We Must Die,” his fierce protest poem against the slaughter of Blacks by racist white mobs in Chicago during the so‑called Red Summer of 1919. The poem anticipates the era of the New Negro and its unapologetic advocacy of African American rights.
Home to Harlem extends the poem’s social justice politics, although not in the ways that modern readers might expect. Anti‑Black racism is not the primary animating feature of the novel. Its radicalism lies partially in its portrait of a flourishing Black world that exists despite white racism.
What unites the novel’s motley cast of characters is that none of them are focused on the doings of the white society that surrounds them. The world of the novel is hermetic, a Blackspace that owes nothing to white culture.
White society is not especially visible, and the white characters who occupy the fringes of the story are nameless, like Jake’s East End girlfriend, who he seeks out when he decamps to London after the Armistice. The white woman wants a deeper relationship with Jake, but for him she is merely a sexual convenience, only referred to as “Jake’s woman,” “a creature of another race—of another world.”
In the end Jake ditches both his white girlfriend and the promise of multiracial camaraderie in the stable but culturally isolating atmosphere of post–World War I London. Instead he chooses to go home, back to the visceral racism of the United States, where the memory of racist epithets hurled by whites still enrages him.
For Jake, Harlem’s cultural attractions are virtually indistinguishable from the sexual allure of Black women:
It was two years since he had left Harlem. Fifth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and One Hundred and Thirty‑fifth Street, with their chocolate‑brown and walnut‑brown girls, were calling him.
“Oh, them legs!” Jake thought. “Them tantalizing brown legs!….”
Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love. “Harlem for mine!” cried Jake.
“Harlem for mine!” Jake’s exclamation reminds the reader that, unlike London, or indeed the larger United States, Harlem belongs to Black people. In all of its endless sexual possibilities, Harlem possesses a primal, almost physical attraction for “natural” Black men like Jake, who operate from an instinct for pleasure and self‑preservation.
For Jake, a presumably straight man, Black women “painted like dark pansies”—that is, wearing makeup like gay or cross‑dressing men—are an allurement to return home, not a disincentive. In a novel that is both picaresque and peripatetic; that begins, literally, on a ship in the middle of the ocean; Harlem, in all of its chaotic glory, represents a racial constant in an unstable modern world.
Familiar signifiers may be shifting, traditional populations may be uprooting, but Harlem remains Black as ever. Its primal Africanity becomes a stand‑in for the lost homesteads of the Black south, the lost homelands of the Caribbean, and indeed the original ancestral home for Blacks in the African diaspora.
Counterintuitive as it may be, Harlem in this rendering is the closest thing to Africa for a modern, transnational, urban community of Black migrants.
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From Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Belinda Edmondson.
