Claude McKay: Poems Claude McKay

Early life in Jamaica

Festus Claudius McKay, known as Claude McKay, was born September 15, 1890, in Nairne Castle near James Hill in upper Clarendon Parish, Jamaica.[4] He referred to his home village as Sunny Ville, a name given to the area by locals.[5] He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. He had seven siblings.[6] McKay's parents were active and well-respected members of the Baptist faith. Thomas was a strict, religious man who struggled to develop close relationships with his children due to his serious nature. In contrast, Hannah had a warmth that allowed her to give love freely to all of her children. Thomas was of Ashanti descent, while Hannah traced her ancestry to Madagascar. Claude recounted that his father would often share stories of Ashanti customs with the family.[7]

At the age of four, McKay went to school at Mt. Zion Church. Around the age of nine, he was sent to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, also known as Theo, a teacher, to be given a proper education. His brother was also an amateur journalist.[6] Due to his brother's influence, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science, and theology.[8] In his free time, he would read poems, including Shakespeare. He started writing poetry of his own at the age of 10.[6]

As a teenager in 1906, he became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenda, maintaining his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met Walter Jekyll, a philosopher and folklorist, who became a mentor and an inspiration for him, who also encouraged him to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect, and set some of McKay's verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. They were the first poems published in Jamaican Patois, a dialect of mainly English words and Twi (Ghanaian language) structure. McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads (1912), was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911.[9][10]

In the poem "The Tropics in New York", McKay reminisced about the Caribbean.[11] The poem is set in New York and was written while McKay lived there as a laborer. The fruits he sees in New York make the speaker of the poem long for Jamaica, and thus Caribbean fruits are imagined as part of the New York cityscape. The colors of the fruit remind him of the colors and diversity in his native island and "hungry for old familiar ways / a wave of longing through my body wept".[12]

First stay in the US

McKay left for the US in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). He was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated; this inspired him to write more poetry. At Tuskegee, he disliked the "semi-military, machine-like existence" and quickly left to study at Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University). At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. Despite his superior academic performance, in 1914, he decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York City, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Imelda Edwards. However, after only six months of marriage, his wife returned to Jamaica, where their daughter Ruth was born. McKay would never meet his daughter.[13] As detailed in the Chronology of Gene Andrew Jarrett's 2007 edition of A Long Way From Home, during this period (1914-1919) McKay first managed a Brooklyn restaurant, which failed, next worked as a waiter at a hotel in Hanover, New Hampshire, then at a Manhattan women's club, and longest and most happily as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. In 1918 McKay met Frank Harris, then editor of Pearson's Magazine. His avowal of writerly integrity had a lifelong effect for McKay, as he relates in his memoir, A Long Way From Home. Harris featured four poems and a short prose piece about his biography and poetics, in the September 1918 issue of the magazine, McKay's first prominent appearance in print. In 1919, McKay met Crystal and Max Eastman, publishers of The Liberator magazine, where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922.[14] As co-editor of The Liberator, he published one of his most famous poems, "If We Must Die", during the "Red Summer", a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies.

In this period McKay joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).[8] He also became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP. These included other Caribbean writers such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfred Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded a semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. In early fall 1919 McKay traveled to London, perhaps prompted by pressure from the Justice Department which was engaged in a nationwide attack on pacifists, socialists and labor organizers (the "Palmer Raids") which especially targeted the IWW.[15]

Sojourn in the United Kingdom

In London, McKay moved in socialist and literary circles; he frequented two clubs, a soldiers' club in Drury Lane, and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association, who had published two of Walter Jekyll's books. It was during this period that his commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst, and George Lansbury. McKay was soon invited to write for Pankhurst's magazine, Workers' Dreadnought.

In April 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled "Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine", it insinuated gross hypersexuality in black people in general. Lansbury refused to print McKay's response,[16] so McKay did so in Workers' Dreadnought, writing:

Why this obscene maniacal outburst about the sex vitality of black men in a proletarian paper? Rape is rape; the colour of the skin doesn't make it different. Negroes are no more over-sexed than Caucasians; mulatto children in the West Indies and America were not the result of parthenogenesis. If Negro troops had syphilis, they contracted it from the white and yellow races. As for German women, in their economic plight, they were selling themselves to anyone. I do not protest because I happen to be a Negro... I write because I feel that the ultimate result of your propaganda will be further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race... who have been dumped down on the English docks since the ending of the European war... Bourbons of the United States will thank you, and the proletarian underworld of London will certainly gloat over the scoop of the Christian-Socialist pacifist Daily Herald.[17]

Since January 1920, McKay had been involved with the Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a council communist group active in the East End with a majority of women at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper. He worked closely with the Finnish Bolshevik Erkki Veltheim. He attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden.

When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles "calculated and likely to cause sedition among His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population," McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" attributed to "Leon Lopez", which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers' Dreadnought.[18]

Trip to Russia

McKay was invited to Russia during the reconstruction of the country by the Communist Party led by Lenin.[19] In November 1922, in what he referred to as his "Magic Pilgrimage," he traveled to Russia to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd and Moscow, where he encountered Max Eastman who was also a delegate.[20] McKay financed his trip to Russia by repackaging and selling Harlem Shadows, "complete with a signed photograph and an inflated price tag" to members of an NAACP donor list and conserved the funds thus raised by working his way across the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool as a stoker on a freighter. He was greeted in Russia with what one historian characterized as "ecstatic welcome" and "rock-star treatment."[21]

Later travels

McKay wrote about his travels in Morocco in his 1937 autobiography A Long Way from Home. Before this journey, he went to Paris, where he contracted a severe respiratory infection and required hospitalization. After recovering he continued traveling, and for 11 years ventured around Europe and parts of Northern Africa.[22] During this stint he published three novels, the most notable of which was Home to Harlem, in 1928. Reception to the novel varied. In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that it represented "different ways of rebelling against Western civilization", adding that McKay was not entirely successful in articulating his protagonists. However, other people thought that the novel provided a detailed portrayal of the underside of black urban life, with its prostitutes and gamblers.

He also wrote Banana Bottom during this 11-year span. Here McKay presented a clear depiction of his principal theme, that black individuals quest for cultural identity in a white society. His final year abroad saw the creation of Gingertown, a collection of 12 short stories. Half of these tales depict his life in Harlem and the others revolve around his time in Jamaica.[22]

Later life

McKay became an American citizen in 1940. In 1943 McKay started "Cycle Manuscript", a collection of 54 poems, all but four of them sonnets, often with political subjects and often in tones of satiric invective. After the manuscript was rejected by Harper and Dutton, he wrote to his old friend and editor Max Eastman, asking him "to look through" all the poems and to make any needed revisions. Despite Eastman's efforts, McKay's collection was not published during his lifetime. It is included in his posthumous Complete Poems. Its editor William J. Maxwell discusses this manuscript's history in an extended note. In the mid-40s McKay began to associate with Catholic cultural activists and studied Catholic social theory, first in New York City and then in Chicago where he moved in April 1944; he was baptized there in October 1944.[23] Before his conversion, he had written to Max Eastman, about "doing a lot of reading and research, especially on Catholic work among Negroes—Because if and when I take the step I want to be intellectually honest and sincere about it". (McKay to Eastman, June 1, 1944). Five months after his baptism, he wrote Eastman to assure him that "I am not less the fighter." (McKay to Eastman, October 16, 1944, Rpt. in Passion 305).[24] In 1946, advised to seek a better climate for his health, he moved first to Albuquerque and then to San Francisco, before returning to Chicago in 1947.

On May 22, 1948, he died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 58 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York.[25]