Chapter 1Sunny Ville

Foreword

For twenty years I have written about American women of letters and the cost of their own visibility. Didion assembling a public self in front of the cameras until the self and the assembly could no longer be told apart; Sontag curating her seriousness the way other people curate a house. If I had to name my subject in a single sentence, it was the transaction between a writer and the audience that wants to fix her into one legible thing — the cool Californian, the difficult intellectual — and keep her there. I know the shape of that transaction. I know where it turns, where the writer begins to believe the version of herself the public has agreed to buy.

Claude McKay would seem to be the opposite of everything I have spent my career learning. He was not a woman. He was not American by birth, and not, in the ordinary sense, by allegiance. And where my subjects spent their lives being looked at, McKay spent his last decade being forgotten — his books out of print, his name a footnote, his death in a Chicago hospital in 1948 noticed by the New York Times in a few short paragraphs. A writer's erasure is a different and lonelier subject than a writer's fame.

That was the door I went in through, and it opened onto the same room. Because the thing McKay refused was the thing my women refused: the single self the audience demanded. His audiences merely demanded it more often, and from more directions. Harlem wanted its dialect poet. The Communist International wanted its Black revolutionary. The Renaissance wanted a race man who would stay in Harlem and behave. Each of them held out a version of himself to inhabit, and he walked out of every one — out of Tuskegee, out of Kansas, out of The Liberator, out of Moscow's orbit, out of the movement he had helped to found. I had assumed I was writing about a man the world discarded. I found a man who kept discarding the world's terms first.

I had expected, going in, to write a book about decline: the bestseller of 1928, the poverty of the 1940s, the Catholic conversion that his secular friends read as the surrender of a broken man. That book is available in the record if you want it. But it describes the wrong man. The leaving that looks like failure from the outside was, from the inside, the most consistent thing about him, the one principle he never once betrayed. He left when an institution required him to be something he was not. He did it in a Kingston constabulary uniform at twenty-one, and he was still doing it at fifty. The consistency was absolute. It was not the record of a man falling apart. It was the record of a man who would not be assembled.

I worked from the public record, which in McKay's case is unusually full and unusually scattered: the two memoirs he left, one written in bitterness and one in longing; the poems, from the Jamaican dialect books of 1912 to the sonnet that traveled from the House of Commons to the cells at Attica; the reviews and quarrels preserved in the radical press of the twenties; the two novels that sat in archives for the better part of a century and came into print, to astonished notices, only in the years just past. I conducted no séances, and I have invented no confidences. Everything in this book that McKay felt, he wrote down somewhere, or someone who watched him wrote it down, and I have tried to earn every inference from that page.

What makes him worth a book is what the last seventy years have made unarguable. The man who was filed under transitional — significant, the textbooks said, for pointing toward what came after — is claimed now as a founder by more traditions than any single writer should be able to hold at once: the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean novel, the Black Atlantic and the queer canon and the literature of disability, the modernist fiction of the international port. He belongs to all of them and was reducible to none, which is precisely the quality the reduction had always missed. He carried the hills of Clarendon in his body through Harlem and Moscow and Marseille and Tangier, and he was still writing about them when he died. A man that homesick, that far from home, for that long, is worth the years it takes to follow him.

I came to McKay as a biographer of the watched, and found a biographer's subject in the unwatched — a man whose whole life was the argument that no audience, hostile or adoring, gets to say who you are. I did not expect him to change how I read the women I have spent my life on. He did. That is what the great ones do. They make you set your certainties down and look again.

— Eleanor Whitlock, Morningside Heights

Chapter 1 · Sunny Ville

The village had no church, no post office, and no name that appeared on any colonial map of Jamaica until the surveyors came through in the 1890s and wrote down what the people who lived there already called it. Sunny Ville sat in the hills above the parish capital of Clarendon, in the interior of the island, away from the coast and the plantation lowlands where sugar still dictated the terms of Black life forty years after emancipation. The hills were different. The soil was poor for cane but adequate for small farming, yams, breadfruit, plantains, the subsistence crops that allowed a family to eat without selling its labor to the estates. The McKay family farmed their own land. That fact shaped everything that followed.

Thomas Francis McKay, known to everyone as "Pa," was a peasant farmer of unusual standing. He was a deacon in the Baptist church, owned several acres, and carried himself with the gravity of a man who had never worked for wages on another man's property. His wife, Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, the daughter of another landowning family, traced her own ancestry to Madagascar by family tradition. Thomas McKay's lineage, he maintained, ran back to the Ashanti people of what is today Ghana. Their marriage joined two small holdings into something approaching modest prosperity, not wealth, never wealth, but independence. In Jamaica in the late nineteenth century, for a Black family, independence was everything. It meant your children went to school. It meant you answered to no overseer. It meant you could think.

The McKays owned enough land that Thomas qualified to vote under the property franchise, a fact that mattered enormously in colonial Jamaica. Voting rights required the ownership of property valued above a certain threshold, and most Black Jamaicans, descendants of plantation laborers and indentured workers, never crossed that line. The McKays did. The distinction was not merely legal; it was psychological. A man who had the franchise lived differently inside his own head from a man who did not. He argued with the magistrate rather than accepting his rulings. He read the Kingston newspapers to understand what the colonial government was doing. He expected that his children, particularly his sons, would go into the world prepared for it.

Claude McKay would later write of his father with the mix of love and wariness that marked so many of his accounts of authority figures. Thomas was "strict and religious, but manly and independent," in the estimation of one family account. He had a "domineering manner" that his children navigated cautiously, and he could be cold in ways that Hannah's warmth compensated for. Hannah gave her love freely to all of her children, and the youngest, Claude, was among the most pampered. Hannah died on December 19, 1909, when Claude was twenty, of dropsy following months of decline; he had come home from Kingston to care for her in her final illness, and he stayed at her bedside through the long worsening. The loss settled into him in a way that even his later distance from Jamaica could not soften. He rarely wrote about her death. He wrote, instead, about what she had shown him: the landscape, the kitchen garden, the domestic rhythms of a Jamaican hill farm. The loss became an absence he carried in his body through every country he would ever live in.

Festus Claudius McKay was born on September 15, 1889, the youngest of what grew to be eleven children. His mother was forty and was bearing and raising children for two decades. By the time he arrived, the household was a functioning economy of older siblings, some already grown and working. The name Festus was Roman and unusual; Claudius was classical; neither name was common in rural Jamaica. Thomas McKay was a reader, and a man who named his youngest son after Roman figures was a man with ambitions for that son's mind.

He attended Mt. Zion Church school from age four, the local institution through which the colonial system transmitted English literacy, English hymnody, and English historical consciousness to the children of the parish. The school taught in Standard English; the children spoke Jamaican Creole to each other on the way home. From the earliest age, then, McKay lived in two linguistic registers simultaneously: the formal English of the classroom and the flexible, rhythmic Creole of the yard. He learned to move between them with the facility of someone who belongs fully to neither. That bifurcation would define his entire literary career.

The hills of Clarendon were not isolated. Jamaica in the 1890s was a Crown Colony, governed from Kingston and ultimately from London, and the colonial system extended into every parish through a network of constables, magistrates, schoolmasters, and ministers. But the hills had their own culture. The language was Jamaican Creole, what the English called "patois" and what the people who spoke it simply called talking. It was English refracted through West African syntax, compressed and rhythmic, full of proverbs and indirection. A child growing up in Sunny Ville heard two languages: the Creole of the yard and the Standard English of the schoolroom and the church. McKay heard both from birth, and the tension between them, between the language of home and the language of authority, became the central problem of his early poetry and, in a different form, of his entire literary life.

He was a small child, fine-boned, watchful. What he wrote about, over and over, was the landscape. The hills, the river valleys, the smell of wet earth after rain, the sound of insects at dusk. Jamaica was not a concept for him; it was a sensory world, and he carried it in his body for the rest of his life, through Harlem and Moscow and Marseille and Tangier, through decades of exile, through poverty and illness and conversion and death. When he was dying in Chicago in 1948, it was Jamaica he was writing about.

His older brother Uriah Theo McKay, known as U'Theo, was the most important figure of his childhood after his parents. U'Theo was twenty years older, a schoolteacher and a freethinker, the family intellectual. He had read Darwin and Huxley and Spencer. He was an agnostic in a community of devout Baptists, and he kept a personal library that was remarkable for a rural Jamaican schoolmaster: English poetry, philosophy, natural science, the works of rationalist thinkers. When Claude was seven or eight, he went to live with U'Theo in the neighboring village of Mount Douro, where U'Theo ran the local school. The arrangement was practical: U'Theo ran a school in a village too distant for daily commute, and the McKays trusted the eldest son to take responsibility for the youngest's education. The intellectual consequences were enormous.

U'Theo gave Claude books. Not children's books, but Milton, Pope, the Romantics. Keats, Shelley, Byron. He gave him Huxley's essays and Haeckel's scientific materialism. He gave him the works of the English Fabian socialists, the Webbs, Shaw, Wells, whose arguments for gradual social reform through education and organization filtered into the hills of Clarendon through U'Theo's postal subscriptions. He taught formal English grammar and composition. He introduced the idea that received belief, religious belief in particular, should be tested against reason. Claude was eight, nine, ten years old, reading Shelley's atheism and Keats's sensuousness in a village in the Jamaican hills. The combination was unusual and formative. He learned English literary tradition from the inside, as a student of its forms and music, while simultaneously living in a world where that tradition was an import, a colonial artifact, a language of power that did not describe his actual life.

Claude began writing poetry at age ten, imitating the English models he knew. Keats above all, whose lush sensuousness appealed to a boy living in a landscape that was itself lush and sensuous. But imitation dissatisfied him from early on. He could write a competent Keatsian sonnet about a Jamaican sunset, but the poem always felt borrowed. The sunset was his; the language was not. He was also reading Paul Laurence Dunbar, the African American poet who had earned wide fame in the 1890s and early 1900s by writing in Black American vernacular English. Dunbar confirmed that dialect could be serious; his success was proof. But Dunbar had also been trapped by his success, expected to keep performing dialect for white audiences who found it charming and found his Standard English poems uncomfortable. McKay took the confirmation and rejected the trap.

The tension produced something rare: a boy who loved English poetry and understood, even before he could articulate the understanding, that English poetry could not contain him. The forms could. The iambic pentameter, the sonnet, the quatrain, these were tools, and he learned to use them with precocious skill. But the content, the assumptions, the landscape of English Romantic poetry, the daffodils, the nightingales, the Lake District, belonged to someone else's country. His country had different birds, different flowers, different rhythms of speech. The question of how to use the tools of English poetry to say something about Jamaica, something true, something that sounded like people actually talked, was the question he began working on before he was fifteen.

School was easy. He was quick and retentive, and U'Theo's private tutoring had put him far ahead of his classmates. He read constantly.

The other education was the village itself. Sunny Ville and the surrounding communities had a culture that was oral, musical, and deeply rooted in African-descended traditions that the colonial system either ignored or actively suppressed. There were folk songs, work songs, Anansi stories, Revival Zion ceremonies, the complex social rituals of the market and the yard. The language of this culture was Creole, and its rhythms were not iambic. They were syncopated, percussive, closer to the rhythms of West African speech than to the rhythms of English verse. McKay absorbed these rhythms as naturally as breathing.

He also absorbed the social structure of rural Jamaica, which was more complex than the binary of Black and white that governed American racial life. In Jamaica, there were gradations: Black, brown, near-white, white, Chinese, Indian, Syrian. The lighter your skin, the higher your place in the colonial order. But in the hills of Clarendon, where everyone was Black, the relevant distinctions were economic, who owned land, who labored on someone else's. The McKay family's landholding gave them status. They were not the poorest; they were not the richest. They were respectable, churched, literate. Claude grew up with a sense of belonging to a community and a class within that community, and that sense of rootedness, of having a place, was something he spent his adult life trying to recover after he left.

The colonial system was omnipresent but not total. The schools taught the English curriculum: English history, English literature, English geography. Jamaican children learned about the Thames before they learned about the Rio Cobre. They memorized Wordsworth but not the songs their grandmothers sang. The message was clear: real culture came from England; what existed in Jamaica was at best picturesque and at worst barbaric. McKay internalized this message, every colonial subject did, but he also resisted it, because the evidence of his senses contradicted it daily. The life around him was vivid, complex, beautiful, and fully human. The poetry he was learning to write would have to account for that.

Jamaica in the 1890s and 1900s was also a place where the politics of race were visibly contested in ways that complicated the binary of colonized and colonizer. The Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, when Paul Bogle and George William Gordon led an uprising of Black Jamaican peasants against the colonial government, and Governor Edward John Eyre's brutal suppression of the rebellion killed over 400 people and flogged hundreds more, was living memory for the older generation. The rebellion and its suppression had been a defining political event in the history of the British Empire, provoking a parliamentary inquiry and a major public controversy in England about the limits of colonial authority. Jamaica's Black population had not forgotten it. The memory lived in the oral traditions of the hills, in the way older people talked about the constabulary, in the wariness that even prosperous Black families like the McKays maintained toward the colonial administrative apparatus.

McKay's father Thomas was a deacon, a landowner, a man with the franchise, and he was still subject to a colonial system that could, if it chose, revoke everything he had built. The precariousness of Black prosperity in colonial Jamaica was not hypothetical. It was structural, built into the laws and the institutions and the personnel of colonial governance. Thomas McKay's dignified bearing, the gravity his neighbors noted, was partly the natural self-possession of a successful man and partly the controlled performance of a man who knew that dignity, in a colonial society, was something you asserted precisely because it was not guaranteed.

Claude absorbed this lesson without being told it directly. He watched his father navigate the colonial world. He watched his brother U'Theo move between the private world of freethought and the public world of the village school, where the curriculum required him to transmit colonial values he privately questioned. He watched the constables, later including himself, enforce laws that the community experienced as arbitrary and oppressive. The watching shaped a habit of mind that would define his entire literary career: the habit of seeing the structure behind the surface, of understanding how power organized itself, of refusing to accept the official account of what was happening.

The constabulary experience, which lasted less than a year in 1911, was the final education before departure. He joined the Jamaica Constabulary Force for practical reasons (steady income, a uniform, social respectability) and found himself inside the machinery he had been observing from outside his entire life. He was issued a rifle and a badge and sent to patrol markets and courts and public spaces in Kingston, the island's capital. Kingston was a shock after the hills of Clarendon: a port city, hot and crowded, organized around the explicit hierarchy of color and class that the rural interior kept somewhat more concealed. Light-skinned Jamaicans and white colonials occupied the commercial and administrative heights. Dark-skinned Jamaicans occupied the streets, the markets, the docks, the domestic service jobs in the homes of the wealthy. The constabulary's job was to manage the interface between these populations, to keep the lower from impinging too visibly on the upper, to enforce the petty regulations, licensing laws, vagrancy statutes, public order codes, that kept the poor in their place.

McKay's poems from this period, the Constab Ballads, documented what he saw and did from the inside, in the language of the people being policed. The shame was concrete: he was enforcing the law against his own people, collecting fines from market women who sold their produce without the correct permits, standing guard while magistrates handed down sentences that bore no relationship to the severity of the offense. He lasted less than a year in the constabulary before resigning in 1912. The resignation was the right decision and the only one he could make. It was also the first in a long series of institutional exits (from Tuskegee, from Kansas State, from The Liberator, from the Communist International's orbit, from the Harlem Renaissance) that would define the pattern of his life. He left when the institution required him to be something he was not. The consistency was absolute.

By his mid-teens, he was restless. The village was small, the opportunities limited. U'Theo had taught him everything he could. The next step, for a bright boy from a respectable family, was either further schooling in Kingston or an apprenticeship in one of the trades. What actually happened was more contingent and more consequential: he met a man named Walter Jekyll.

McKay would later write of this period with a longing that never faded. In "Flame-Heart," he recalled the Jamaican landscape: "I have forgotten much, but still remember / The poinsettia's red, blood-red in warm December." And in "The Tropics in New York," a wave of homesickness at the sight of tropical fruits in a Manhattan shop window would trigger the lines: "A wave of longing through my body swept, / And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, / I turned aside and bowed my head and wept." The man who would wander the world for decades never stopped writing about this place.

Jekyll was an Englishman, born in 1849, a younger son of the minor gentry who had come to Jamaica in the 1890s for reasons that were partly botanical, partly musical, and partly personal. His sister was Gertrude Jekyll, the celebrated English garden designer whose influence on twentieth-century horticulture remains visible in gardens across Britain. Walter was the family's intellectual wanderer: a folklorist and gentleman amateur, interested in Jamaican folk songs, the Creole language, and Jamaican plant life. He had also translated Schopenhauer and had a serious engagement with German philosophy that gave his mentorship of McKay an unusual intellectual depth for a colonial patron relationship. He was almost certainly homosexual, a fact that likely contributed to his decision to build a life in Jamaica rather than in England, where the Labouchère Amendment of 1885 had criminalized homosexual acts. He had a house in the hills not far from Sunny Ville, and he had developed a pattern of befriending the most intellectually gifted local boys he encountered and attempting to develop their talents.

The relationship between Jekyll and McKay has been the subject of careful scholarly speculation. Jekyll was white, English, upper-class, and in his fifties. McKay was Black, Jamaican, working-class, and in his teens. The power differential was enormous. But what is clear from McKay's own accounts and from the poetry that resulted is that Jekyll did something no one else had done: he told McKay to write in Creole. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native Jamaican dialect -- against McKay's own initial instincts. Not in Standard English, not in imitation of Keats or Shelley, but in the actual language of his community, the language the colonial system taught him to despise.

This was a radical instruction. It went against everything the schools taught, everything the social hierarchy reinforced. To write serious poetry in Creole was to claim that Creole was a language capable of seriousness, that the people who spoke it had thoughts and feelings worthy of literary attention. Jekyll understood this; he was a folklorist, and folklorists in the late Victorian and Edwardian period often valued "authentic" folk expression precisely because it had not been corrupted by metropolitan culture. His motives were not entirely altruistic, there was an element of the collector, the connoisseur of the exotic, but his practical effect on McKay's development was liberating.

McKay began writing in Jamaican Creole. The poems poured out. For the first time, the language of the poem matched the world the poem described. He wrote about village life, market women, the constabulary, the courts, the churches, the fields. He wrote about what he saw, in the language he heard, and the result was something new in Caribbean literature. Not entirely new, there had been dialect writing before, and some of it was accomplished, but McKay brought to Creole poetry a seriousness and a formal skill that elevated it from the picturesque to the literary.

Jekyll did more than encourage; he facilitated with methodical care. He had connections in the publishing world, and he used them strategically. He edited McKay's poems, helped him prepare manuscripts, set some of McKay's verses to music (a labor of genuine aestheticism, not mere patronage), and worked the correspondences necessary to arrange London publication. He wrote extensive notes on the Jamaican dialect used in the poems, partly as a scholarly gloss and partly as a guide for English readers who would encounter Creole phrasing without the cultural context to parse it. The notes were published alongside Songs of Jamaica and represented the first systematic scholarly treatment of Jamaican Creole as a literary language. This was a more radical scholarly act than it appeared: Jekyll was asserting that McKay's vernacular had a grammar and a logic worth explaining, that it was a language and not merely corrupted English.

The result was Songs of Jamaica, published in 1912 by Aston W. Gardner & Co. in Kingston, likely the first book-length publication of dialect poetry by a Black Jamaican writer, when McKay was twenty-two. A second collection, Constab Ballads, followed the same year, published by Watts & Co. in London. Both were published with financial support Jekyll had arranged. Both were written primarily in Jamaican Creole. Both were, in their quiet way, revolutionary, though the revolution would not be recognized as such for several decades, when the postcolonial Caribbean writers of the 1950s and 1960s looked back and found McKay already there, standing at the beginning of the tradition they were building.

But that was the future. In the years between his meeting Jekyll and the publication of those first books, McKay was growing up, and growing up meant encountering the world beyond the village in ways that were not always gentle.

He left U'Theo's house as a teenager and went to Kingston, where he took up an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker, a wheelwright, by some accounts. The work bored him. Kingston was larger and rougher than anything he had known: a port city, hot and crowded, with a visible colonial hierarchy that was harsher and more explicit than the subtle gradations of the hills. For the first time, he experienced racism not as an ambient condition but as a direct, personal affront. Light-skinned Jamaicans and white colonials treated dark-skinned working people with open contempt. The police, the constabulary, were instruments of that contempt.

He did not last long as a cabinetmaker. He returned to the hills, restless and dissatisfied, and continued writing. Jekyll continued mentoring him. The poems accumulated. He was also reading more widely now, not just English Romantics but American poetry, the Fireside Poets, and the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Black American who had achieved fame by writing in African American vernacular English. Dunbar was a model and a warning: he had proved that a Black poet could succeed by writing in dialect, but he had also been trapped by that success, expected to perform his Blackness for white audiences who found the dialect charming and the Standard English poems uncomfortable.

McKay took from Dunbar the confirmation that dialect poetry could be serious, but he would not make the same accommodation. His Creole poems were not performances for outsiders. They were the literature of his own community, written for people who spoke that language and lived that life. This distinction, between performing one's culture for the dominant gaze and expressing it for its own sake, would follow him to Harlem and define his relationship to the Renaissance he would help create.

The Kingston constabulary year produced some of his sharpest early poems. The Constab Ballads set down the brutality and absurdity of colonial policing with the authority of a man who had worn the uniform himself.

The constabulary poems were angry, granular, and formally accomplished. They described the beating of prisoners, the corruption of officers, the petty tyrannies of the colonial court system. They were written in Creole, and they were written by a man who had worn the uniform and knew what it meant to be simultaneously an agent and a victim of state power. This dual consciousness, insider and outsider, participant and critic, was a mode McKay would inhabit for the rest of his life. He was always in the room and always watching the room from outside it.

By 1912, he had two books published, a small local reputation, and no prospects. Jamaica was too small for him. The colonial system offered no path for a Black poet who wrote in Creole and hated the constabulary. Jekyll, who had been his patron and his bridge to the publishing world, was aging and could not sustain the relationship indefinitely. McKay's family, proud of his books but practical about the future, encouraged him to seek education and opportunity abroad.

The obvious destination was England, the mother country, the source of the literary tradition he was trained in, the place where his books had been published. But McKay chose America. The reasons were partly practical, a scholarship to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama had been arranged, possibly through Jekyll's connections, and partly temperamental. America was bigger, louder, more various, and it had a large Black population whose culture and politics interested him. He had read Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. He knew that Black America was engaged in a debate about racial progress that had no equivalent in colonial Jamaica. He wanted to be part of that debate.

In the summer of 1912, at the age of twenty-two, Festus Claudius McKay boarded a ship and left Jamaica. He carried two published books, a letter of admission to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a small amount of money (his father had given him something, and Jekyll had contributed something, and the prize money from the Institute of Jamaica had not been entirely spent), and a head full of English poetry and Jamaican landscape. He did not know that he would never live in Jamaica again. He did not know that the place he was leaving would become the place he spent his life writing about, that the further he traveled from Sunny Ville the more central it would become to his imagination. He did not know that he was about to enter a country that would give him fame and then take everything else.

The ship sailed north. The hills of Clarendon dropped below the horizon. The twenty-two-year-old poet, small, dark, intense, carrying his two slim volumes, watched Jamaica disappear.

He would carry Jamaica in his body for the rest of his life. The homesickness that surfaced in "The Tropics in New York" — the longing that swept over him at the sight of tropical fruit in a Manhattan shop window, written after he had been in America for six years — and the ache of memory in "Flame-Heart" were two versions of the same reckoning: what had been lost, what could be recovered, what remained. The poems were a conversation with his own memory, and the conversation continued for thirty-six years, until the memoir My Green Hills of Jamaica, which he was working on when he died, returned him one last time to Clarendon.

He was leaving the only place that had ever been home. For the next thirty-six years, until his death in a Chicago hospital, he would be looking for another one. The search would produce some of the greatest poetry and fiction of the twentieth century. It would produce exile and poverty and illness and a Catholic conversion that surprised everyone who knew him. It would produce the poem that Winston Churchill was long said to have read to the House of Commons and that Attica prisoners would pass from cell to cell. It would not produce another home. The one he had was gone, below the horizon, the hills of Clarendon receding into the sea, already becoming the subject matter of a life's work rather than the life itself.