Claude McKay, Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance

A Biography

Wayne F. Cooper

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780807167304
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

"Cooper paints a meticulous and absorbing portrait of McKay's restless artistic, intellectual, and political odyssey... The definitive biography on McKay."—Choice
Although recognized today as one of the genuine pioneers of black literature in this century—the author of "If We Must Die, " Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and A Long Way from Home, among other works—Claude McKay (1890–1948) died penniless and almost forgotten in a Chicago hospital. In this masterly study, Wayne Cooper presents a fascinating, detailed account of McKay's complex, chaotic, and frequently contradictory life.
In his poetry and fiction, as well as in his political and social commentaries, McKay searched for a solid foundation for a valid black identity among the working-class cultures of the West Indies and the United States. He was an undeniably important predecessor to such younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and also to influential West Indian and African writers such as C. L. R. James and Aimé Césaire. Knowledge of his life adds important dimensions to our understanding of American radicalism, the expatriates of the 1920s, and American literature.
"Mr. Cooper's most original contribution is his careful and perceptive analysis of McKay's nonfiction writing, especially his social and political commentary, which often contained 'prophetic statements' on a range of important social, political, and historical issues."—New York Times Book Review

1

The Jamaican Family Background

In 1921, Claude McKay wrote an article on the Irish revolution in which he declared that neither the British government nor the British Left really understood the Irish. But, he said, he thought he did. “My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them,” he explained. “And then I was born and reared a peasant; the peasant’s passion for the soil possesses me, and it is one of the strongest passions in the Irish revolution.” The remark provided insight into both the Sinn Fein movement for Irish independence and McKay’s own background and character. It also illustrated McKay’s limitations as a communist theoretician. “For my part,” he remarked, “I love to think of communism liberating millions of city folk to go back to the land.”¹ Although this statement may have betrayed an incurable romanticism, McKay’s roots did, indeed, run deep in Jamaica’s black peasantry. Its history, in fact, largely defined the place of Claude McKay’s immediate family in nineteenth-century Jamaica. Theirs was the story of transplanted Africans forced to cultivate an alien soil. They survived to claim it as their own. Their history became Claude McKay’s most basic legacy. The McKay family had its origin in almost the exact geographical center of Jamaica, in upper Clarendon Parish. The mountains that dominated the environment would later be celebrated by Claude McKay in his earliest poetry. It was a pleasant land, whose seasons varied between the drier spring and summer months and the wet period, which began in October and lasted through March. The environment of Claude’s boyhood—its mountain streams, its lush richness of soil and vegetation, its bright sunshine and variegated natural colors, the very sounds of tropical country life—would always remain vivid in his memory. At the end of his life, he fondly recalled the great fertility of the land of his birth: “There grow in abundance, as if spilled straight out of the Hand of God—bananas, oranges, coco, coffee, pimento, breadfruit, ackee, mangoes, sugar cane and all the lesser varieties of edibles such as various kinds of beans and peas, okra, cashews, cabbages, sweet potatoes, cassava and arrow-root.”²

Claude McKay’s parents had emerged from the black peasantry of upper Clarendon. By his birth in 1890, the free peasantry formed the majority there. Although this black peasantry was of relatively recent origin, its roots reached far back into slavery. Long before legal emancipation, Jamaica’s slave population had been striving toward independence. In the nearly inaccessible interior, several maroon communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had won their freedom and a degree of autonomy within the colonial structure. On the plantations, slave revolts had been frequent, but the desire for freedom also expressed itself in other ways. Over the years, slaves had gained certain customary rights and privileges into which they poured their energy and ingenuity. By the 1830s, for example, from their own traditional provision grounds (garden plots), Jamaican slaves had devised an islandwide system of Sunday produce markets upon which the colony had come to depend for much of its food. From this system of provision grounds and slave markets, the freed slaves moved naturally toward acquiring land and expanding their economic opportunities.

With the end of slavery in the 1830s, many former slaves left the sugar plantations on the coastal plains and in the valleys and occupied the largely uncultivated mountainous interior. Some obtained clear tide to their land; most simply claimed ownership by right of possession and cultivation. As a result, during the first three decades after emancipation, a significant proportion of Jamaica’s African population transformed itself into a free black peasantry.³ The road to independence proved a hard one. For decades, the blacks’ interests remained subordinated to those more favorably placed in the island’s complex social hierarchy. Between the blacks at the bottom and the traditional white-planter class at the top (who dominated the island’s oppressive legislative assembly), there existed a small mulatto elite, the mixed-blood class also known as colored, whose interests as property owners did not always coincide with those of their darker kinsmen. In addition, after emancipation Chinese and East Indians were imported as contract laborers to replace those blacks who had left the sugar fields. They, too, soon deserted the plantations. Many left Jamaica, but those who remained soon competed with the tiny Jewish and Lebanese commercial communities in Jamaica. Their collective small-scale retail trade squeezed every available penny of profit from the struggling black peasantry.⁴

By the mid-1860s, chronic economic depression, drought, crop failures, famine, long-standing discriminatory legislation, and an antiquated judicial system combined to bring peasant discontent to a boil. At Morant Bay on October 11, 1865, black peasants attacked the parish courthouse and killed eighteen officials, planters, and their subordinates. British troops dispatched to the scene by the royal governor, Edward Eyre, speedily and brutally suppressed this rebellion. At the governor’s behest, among those summarily executed was a mulatto politician from Kingston, George William Gordon, whose chief offense was his outspoken airings of small peasant grievances in the Jamaican assembly and his attacks on Governor Eyre’s leadership.

The Morant Bay Rebellion and its outcome—largely random execution of black males in the vicinity, together with Gordon’s martyrdom—led in Britain to a temporary revival of old abolitionist concern for the welfare of blacks in the British colony. A royal inquiry resulted in the removal of Governor Eyre and, most important, the abolition of the discredited, bankrupt Jamaican assembly. It was replaced by direct crown-colony rule in 1866. In the last third of the nineteenth century, crown-colony government at last brought order, some social reform, and a measure of stability, if not prosperity, to the colony’s economy.⁵

During Claude McKay’s boyhood in the 1890s, the acute troubles of slavery and the postemancipation period had been left behind, but certain legacies of those years remained vividly alive within the McKay family. Claude’s parents had both grown up in the postemancipation period. Although the details of their early lives remain sketchy and often uncertain, some important facts are clear. Both families had experienced slavery, and both retained a clear memory of its harshness.

On Claude’s mother’s side, tradition told of an origin in Madagascar (a few slaves did in fact enter Jamaica from East Africa). That same tradition also told of a family bond so strong that, when faced with the slave auction block, they had agreed upon death before disunity. “And this fact solemnly announced in the market by the oldest white-haired Negro among them, had such an effect upon prospective buyers that it was impossible to sell them as individuals, and so they were all taken away together to those hills at Clarendon which their descendants still cultivate.”⁶ In Claude’s boyhood, a mulatto planter clan, the Woolseys, which had perhaps owned his mother’s family, still lived nearby in their decaying plantation home. Although greatly reduced in circumstances, if not in numbers, they still clung precariously to a slightly higher status than their peasant neighbors. The oldest among them often recalled the troubles she had had in disciplining her slaves.

Claude believed his father to be of Ashanti origin. He remembered that his father knew certain Ashanti customs and remembered stories of Africa, which he related to his children. Whenever his sons’ behavior or cocky self-assurance angered him, he would remind them that their grandfather had been a slave and “knew how cruel the white man could be. You boys don’t know anything.”⁷

Although such memories remained alive within them, McKay’s parents had also been molded by missionary influences and by the deep attachments of a newly independent peasantry to the soil. From their youth, both had made profound and permanent commitments to Christianity and to the cultivation and improvement of their own land. Upon these bedrocks they based their marriage and their lives.⁸

Claude’s father, Thomas Francis McKay, was born around 1840 in the vicinity of Staceyville, a little community near the great Bull Mountain in upper Clarendon.⁹ Little is known about Thomas’ parents. At some point in his youth, Thomas Francis came under the decisive influence of a British missionary, who converted him to Christianity, instructed him in the fundamentals of reading and writing, and helped mold in him a rigidly fundamentalist, Old Testament cast of mind that absolutely forbade smoking, drinking, dancing, swearing, extramarital sex, or dishonesty in any form. Thomas Francis quite early chose a straight and narrow path and never deviated from it.¹⁰

Few of his neighbors, perhaps even few of his fellow churchmen, adopted so wholeheartedly the puritanical Christianity of nonconformist England. One of the constant complaints of missionaries throughout the nineteenth century was the ease with which professing Christians in the hill country of Jamaica both joined the church and broke its moral codes. More than a few (some said a majority) continued also to believe in Obeah, the evil magic of African origin, and consulted Obeahmen on the sly. The random beliefs and practices as well as the spirit, of African religions suffused black Jamaica. Many broke away from orthodox Protestant churches. They were constantly forming and re-forming native church sects whose unlettered pastors, the missionaries knew, allowed free vent to practices and doctrines of non-Christian origin.¹¹ Most black peasants had eagerly accepted the flexible spirit of Christianity but had left its rigid doctrinal orthodoxy to the anxious guardianship of the European missionaries. Thomas Francis McKay, however, grasped both spirit and doctrine in a tight embrace. Even more surprising, he actually practiced what he preached. In a region of syncretistic Afro-Christian religious beliefs, he stood as a clear exception to the rule.¹²

In My Green Hills of Jamaica, a late memoir of his boyhood, Claude stated that the missionary who had converted his father had been a Scotch Presbyterian. But others dispute this, maintaining that Thomas had from the first been a Baptist. This seems more likely. Upper Clarendon apparently had no Presbyterian mission churches in the mid-nineteenth century but did have numerous Congregationalist and Baptist missions, and there was a Baptist church at Staceyville during the elder McKay’s youth. Without question, Thomas McKay did spend his adult years as a senior deacon in the Baptist church.¹³

The Baptists had by far the greatest respect and the largest following among the black peasantry. The first Baptist missionaries to Jamaica had been black men, former slave preachers from the United States. In the years after the American Revolution, they had filtered one by one into the island and had immediately won converts. Two of these men, George Lisle and Moses Baker, proved particularly successful. Eventually, Baker felt the need for help. He appealed to the Baptist Missionary Society in London, which sent its first missionaries to Jamaica in 1814. More soon followed.

In the tradition of Baptist ministers, more than one of these early missionaries identified completely with their congregations. They became so absorbed in defending the interests of their black followers that they were eventually accused of fomenting discontent and at least one major slave revolt. After emancipation, Baptist missionaries, along with other Protestant denominations, accompanied the freedmen into the interior, where they laid out villages, built churches, established schools, and educated future leaders like Thomas Francis McKay.¹⁴

Although the white missionaries of Jamaica fostered a mid-Victorian morality that few Jamaicans ever accepted as completely as Thomas McKay, the effects of their labors were not negligible. One black Jamaican clergyman later wrote that the early Baptist pioneers like George Lisle and Moses Baker had been “pathfinders,” men who had made an important contribution “in the making of a people.” Because of their efforts, he concluded, “we who were no people, are now a people.”¹⁵ Thomas McKay would have undoubtedly concurred with such sentiments.

At the end of the 1860s, though serious and upright, Thomas was as yet unsettled. As a young man, he had farmed and worked as a laborer on local road maintenance crews. As he approached his thirtieth year, he was still unmarried. Around 1869, he found himself in the small community of Sunny Ville, about twelve miles from Stacey-ville. He had been lured there to court a local girl who a friend thought would make Thomas a good wife. The friend’s matchmaking proved errant but not futile. In the way of love, the unexpected happened. Attending church in Sunny Ville, he chanced upon another who interested him more: Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, the lithe young daughter of a local farmer. Not more than fifteen or sixteen at the time, Hannah had a bright smile and a gentle, gracious manner, which no doubt helped the intense stranger feel at ease in her presence. Equally important, she had a good Christian upbringing and she excelled in her letters. Thomas was stirred. He became a regular Sunday visitor.¹⁶

In her turn, perhaps, Hannah was pleased to be courted by such a mature and serious man, so unlike the local gay blades. Her father also liked him; he even gave Thomas a bit of land down the hill from his own home. Events moved swiftly. Thomas and Hannah Ann married in 1870, and they began their life together in a three-room thatched cottage Thomas constructed on his new land.¹⁷

Thomas Francis quickly proved himself an able, productive farmer. In addition to his own piece, he soon began to cultivate all the land owned by his father-in-law, who could no longer work because of infirmities. Through diligent labor and alert management, Thomas Francis eventually expanded his properties far beyond those of the average small landholder. Claude recorded years later that “in a short while he had acquired a dray with mules by which he would take his produce and his neighbors’ to the far off markets, [and] by the time I left for America in 1912,. . . my father had acquired at least one hundred fertile acres.”¹⁸

For years both Thomas Francis and Hannah Ann worked “grimly hard” to achieve prosperity. Thomas labored incessantly in the fields with hoe, cutlass, and pickax. His wife did the household chores, cultivated the gardens adjacent to their home, managed the small stock—chickens and goats and perhaps a pig or two—and all the while cared for an ever-expanding family.

During the first two years of marriage they had no offspring. Then between 1872 and 1890, Hannah Ann gave birth to eleven children, eight of whom (seven boys and one girl) lived to maturity. Uriah Theodore, their oldest son, was born March 23, 1872. There followed Matthew, Rachel (the only girl), Thomas Edison, Nathaniel, Reginald, and Hubert. Finally, on September 15, 1890, their last child was born. He was named Festus Claudius, after a Roman governor and an emperor mentioned in the New Testament Book of Acts. As Claude McKay, poet and novelist, he would celebrate the hills of Clarendon and the black peasantry of Jamaica.¹⁹

McKay’s family was not unique in its relative prosperity, its strictly Christian profession, its literacy, and its upwardly mobile thrust, but such families were in the minority. They were to be found sprinkled among the great majority of poorer small landholders, whose limited acreage, meager education, common-law marriages, and Afro-European religious beliefs consigned them to an e...