Customer Reviews

Long Way From Home

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If I ever write my autobiography, I hope that I model it after Claude McKay's 1937 A LONG WAY FROM HOME. In 29 short chapters McKay (1889 - 1948) rapidly covered the first 48 years of his life, from birth and growing up black in Jamaica through college in the USA, and work and travel in England, France, the USSR, Spain and North Africa. He wrote simply, directly, unpretentiously. He highlighted his lifelong dislike of white people putting down or snubbing black people (or worse). He laid out his many debts of gratitude to a string of mentors and models from every decade of his life. These names included George Bernard Shaw, critics Frank Harris and Max Eastman, dancer Isadora Duncan, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White and other writers black and white.

Having worked on trains, posed as a model, having shoveled coal on ocean-going vessels and labored on the docks, when Claude McKay wrote about "low-life" Negroes, he wrote whereof he knew: including prostitutes, dance clubs and the working people of Harlem. Black intellectuals and middle class strivers who made and patronized the 1920s and 30s "Harlem Renaissance" lauding "the New Negro" were often unkind to McKay. They wanted to "uplift" low-down Negroes to their own cultivated label, said McKay. They blamed him for having more white than black friends and admirers, for working in "downtown" Manhattan writing for white journals. McKay was not a joiner. He stood aloof. He wanted to be a great poet and he demanded that his work be approved for its quality, not because its author was black.

Like other contemporary black novelists, Claude McKay minutely described acute intra-Negro community awareness and gradation of shades of darkness. I don't know if he coined the word "negroid" but he used it repeatedly in A LONG WAY FROM HOME. "Negroid," to McKay, covers a universe inhabited by full blacks, mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons -- all words he uses. McKay describes the phenomenon of negroids increasingly, deliberately and joyously "passing" for white. He meditates on the great NAACP leader Walter White. How could such a fair skinned man think of himself as Negro?

McKay found few places in his travels where people of different races interacted as equals -- without precisely being color blind. He was in the USSR for many months in the last years of Lenin's rule. There he was treated royally, without being a member of a communist party. Nor did color matter on the docks of France's Marseilles, in Spain's Barcelona or in French West Africa.

He devoted seven chapters to his stay in Russia, meeting Trotsky and other Soviet leaders, reading his poetry before large groups, inspecting Red Army and naval resources and being flown through the clouds by the Air Force. He wrote:

"From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly feted on every side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended. The Nep [NOTE: Lenin's New Economic Policy] was flourishing, the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen of good luck! Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black ikon" (Ch. 15).

He felt that he was better treated in Russia than his artistic work to date had merited.

"I left Russia with one determination and one objective: to write. ... I often felt in Russia that I was honored as a poet altogether out of proportion to my actual peformance. And thus I was fired with the desire to accomplish the utmost" (Ch. 20).

A score of the author's poems are strewn through A LONG WAY FROM HOME. The one that made him famous was a sonnet, "If We Must Die" written during the race riots of America's 1919 Red Summer. From that day on Claude McKay was a hero to black people, a champion of people proud of their skin color. McKay down the decades would urge Negroes everywhere to pull together self-consciously into organized black groups, to flex their political muscle and to demand an equal place at the white man's table. In the 60s and 70s his message resonated strongly with a younger generation of American blacks.

Returning to the Christianity of his Jamaican childhood after decades of free-thinking agnosticism, Claude McKay was baptized Roman Catholic in 1944. He died in terrible health, poor but apparently happy, teaching in a Catholic school in Chicago. He was the grand old man of the Harlem Renaissance. His poems and novels are constantly re-issued today.

-OOO-