Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on a Lonely Winter Night in Harlem)

“Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;

Through the lone night until the last snow-flake

Has dropped from heaven upon the earth's white breast,

The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet

Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.”—African-American poet, novelist, and essayist Claude McKay (1889-1948), title poem of Harlem Shadows: Poems (1922)

I recounted some details on the life of Claude McKay in this post from four years ago. But this year, on the centennial of Harlem Shadows, seemed like a good time to sample the work of this major figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

In this title poem from the volume, McKay evokes the plight of Harlem prostitutes. They ply their trade under the worst possible weather conditions. (I can't read about that "snow-flake" without a shudder.) They are only “girls,” compelled to take up degrading work (in the prior stanza, to “bend and barter at desire’s call”) on desolate streets.

Though McKay evokes a larger “stern harsh world” responsible for their condition, the “poverty, dishonor and disgrace” they experience really come at the hands of a prejudiced white society.

In its vivid picture of sex workers in the inner city, this poem reminded me of “Buy and Sell,” a melancholy song from Laura Nyro’s debut album. I don’t know if she read any McKay growing up, but I would not be surprised, because she absorbed so many lyrical and musical influences. But the works of both are individual and unforgettable.

Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on Where Spring Winds ‘Go Laughing By’)

“Too green the springing April grass,

Too blue the silver-speckled sky,

For me to linger here, alas,

While happy winds go laughing by,

Wasting the golden hours indoors,

Washing windows and scrubbing floors.”— Poet-novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948), “Spring in New Hampshire” (1920)

Claude McKay, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance that brought a cultural flowering to the neighborhood in the 1920s, died 70 years ago this past Tuesday. I thought of writing about him when I came across the 150^th anniversary special issue of The Nation—one of those mega-issues that I can’t resist picking up on the newsstand but which take me forever to get around to reading.

The McKay poem I stumbled across in that issue was “Home Song,” the only one of his that ever appeared in the venerable progressive publication. I liked it well enough, but, in researching his work online, I found that I enjoyed this particular one even more.

As I indicated in a prior post about McKay, this Jamaican immigrant was deeply critical of racial and class inequities in America in the first half of this century. That criticism is introduced, gradually but unmistakably, by the last couple of lines in today’s quote. Due to the need to perform menial labor, “Washing windows and scrubbing floors,” the narrator can’t enjoy a spell of weather that seems especially dazzling (even the winds, which are normally harsh and fierce in other poems, are described here in almost human terms—“happy…laughing.”

In her cultural history of Manhattan in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, Columbia University professor Ann Douglas remarks that, while much of McKay’s prose uses African-American dialect, his poems after his first collection are “impeccably Anglo-European in their regular meter and standard English diction.” “Spring in New Hampshire” is a good example. It’s easy to imagine it coming from the pen of a Romantic poet—Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, maybe even John Clare.

Over the course of his nearly three remaining decades, McKay probably spent more hours than he wished in urban environments, “wasting the golden hours.” Anger over the plight of African-Americans led him to embrace Communism, until the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 resulted in his break with the Party.

Through the 1940s, McKay’s literary output, reputation and health withered. By the time he died in Chicago, he was largely forgotten. More recently, as interest in the Harlem Renaissance has revived, so has fascination with this poet of passionate protest and intense lyrical feeling.

Quote of the Day (Claude McKay, on the ‘Bread of Bitterness’ Fed African-Americans)

“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,

Giving me strength erect against her hate,

Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.”— African-American poet-editor Claude McKay (1890-1948), “America” (1921), in Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953)

As I thought of this past weekend’s horrifying events in Charlottesville, Va., I came across this poem. It was written at a particularly low point in this country’s history, after Jim Crow had become entrenched not just at the state and local level but, at the behest of southern-born President Woodrow Wilson, through much of the federal government.

Personally, I favor setting monuments to prominent Confederate figures in a historical context rather than removing them. But the ugly hate and violence displayed in the town that Thomas Jefferson called home demonstrates not merely that these sculptures give tangible form to the inexpressible sorrows of a region that suffered much in a war fought 150 years ago, but also that they hold special potency to all too many bigots today.

This is the “bread of bitterness” that Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay assailed nearly a century ago. Our job today is to assure that the venom of the “tiger’s tooth” in America then will be drained for good.

For those despairing of America’s true place in the world, it would do well to recall the Jamaican-born McKay’s own ideological journey. A Communist when he penned these lines, he eventually turned against what was widely regarded as the political and social order of the future. Despite all the problems he still perceived in race relations, he nevertheless became an American citizen in 1940. 

(For more about McKay and the poem "America," please see this post from the Workman Publishing blog featuring a conversation with school librarian and author James Klise.)