Home to Harlem

To my friend
Louise Bryant

First Part

I

Going Back Home

All that Jake knew about the freighter on which he stoked was that it stank between sea and sky. He was working with a dirty Arab crew. The captain signed him on at Cardiff because one of the Arabs had quit the ship. Jake was used to all sorts of rough jobs, but he had never before worked in such a filthy dinghy.

The white sailors who washed the ship would not wash the stokers’ water-closet, because they despised the Arabs. And the Arabs themselves made no effort to keep the place clean, although it adjoined their sleeping berth.

The cooks hated the Arabs because they did not eat pork. Whenever there was pork for dinner, something else had to be prepared for the Arabs. The cooks put the stokers’ meat, cut in unappetizing chunks, in a broad pan, and the two kinds of vegetables in two other pans. The stoker who carried the food back to the bunks always put one pan inside of the other, and sometimes the bottoms were dirty and bits of potato peelings or egg shells were mixed in with the meat and the vegetables.

The Arabs took up a chunk of meat with their coal-powdered fingers, bit or tore off a piece, and tossed the chunk back into the pan. It was strange to Jake that these Arabs washed themselves after eating and not before. They ate with their clothes stiff-starched to their bodies with coal and sweat. And when they were finished, they stripped and washed and went to sleep in the stinking-dirty bunks. Jake was used to the lowest and hardest sort of life, but even his leather-lined stomach could not endure the Arabs’ way of eating. Jake also began to despise the Arabs. He complained to the cooks about the food. He gave the chef a ten-shilling note, and the chef gave him his eats separately.

One of the sailors flattered Jake. “You’re the same like us chaps. You ain’t like them dirty jabbering coolies.”

But Jake smiled and shook his head in a noncommittal way. He knew that if he was just like the white sailors, he might have signed on as a deckhand and not as a stoker. He didn’t care about the dirty old boat, anyhow. It was taking him back home—that was all he cared about. He made his shift all right, stoking four hours and resting eight. He didn’t sleep well. The stokers’ bunks were lousy, and fetid with the mingled smell of stale food and water-closet. Jake had attempted to keep the place clean, but to do that was impossible. Apparently the Arabs thought that a sleeping quarters could also serve as a garbage can.

“Nip me all you wanta, Mister Louse,” said Jake. “Roll on, Mister Ship, and stinks all the way as you rolls. Jest take me ’long to Harlem is all I pray. I’m crazy to see again the brown-skin chippies ’long Lenox Avenue. Oh boy!”

Jake was tall, brawny, and black. When America declared war upon Germany in 1917 he was a longshoreman. He was working on a Brooklyn pier, with a score of men under him. He was a little boss and a very good friend of his big boss, who was Irish. Jake thought he would like to have a crack at the Germans. … And he enlisted.

In the winter he sailed for Brest with a happy chocolate company. Jake had his own daydreams of going over the top. But his company was held at Brest. Jake toted lumber—boards, planks, posts, rafters—for the hundreds of huts that were built around the walls of Brest and along the coast between Brest and Saint-Pierre, to house the United States soldiers.

Jake was disappointed. He had enlisted to fight. For what else had he been sticking a bayonet into the guts of a stuffed man and aiming bullets straight into a bull’s-eye? Toting planks and getting into rows with his white comrades at the Bal Musette were not adventure.

Jake obtained leave. He put on civilian clothes and lit out for Havre. He liquored himself up and hung round a low-down café in Havre for a week.

One day an English sailor from a Channel sloop made up to Jake. “Darky,” he said, “you ’arvin’ a good time ’round ’ere.”

Jake thought how strange it was to hear the Englishman say “darky” without being offended. Back home he would have been spoiling for a fight. There he would rather hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes, whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt. He preferred white folks’ hatred to their friendly contempt. To feel their hatred made him strong and aggressive, while their friendly contempt made him ridiculously angry, even against his own will.

“Sure Ise having a good time, all right,” said Jake. He was making a cigarette and growling cusses at French tobacco. “But Ise got to get a move on ’fore very long.”

“Where to?” his new companion asked.

“Any place, Buddy. I’m always ready for something new,” announced Jake.

“Been in Havre a long time?”

“Week or two,” said Jake. “I tooks care of some mules over heah. Twenty, God damn them, days across the pond. And then the boat plows round and run off and leaves me behind. Kain you beat that, Buddy?”

“It wasn’t the best o’ luck,” replied the other. “Ever been to London?”

“Nope, Buddy,” said Jake. “France is the only country I’ve struck yet this side the water.”

The Englishman told Jake that there was a sailor wanted on his tug.

“We never ’ave a full crew—since the war,” he said.

Jake crossed over to London. He found plenty of work there as a docker. He liked the West India Docks. He liked Limehouse. In the pubs men gave him their friendly paws and called him “darky.” He liked how they called him “darky.” He made friends. He found a woman. He was happy in the East End.

The Armistice found him there. On New Year’s Eve, 1919, Jake went to a monster dance with his woman, and his docker friends and their women, in the Mile End Road.

The Armistice had brought many more black men to the East End of London. Hundreds of them. Some of them found work. Some did not. Many were getting a little pension from the government. The price of sex went up in the East End, and the dignity of it also. And that summer Jake saw a big battle staged between the colored and white men of London’s East End. Fisticuffs, razor and knife and gun play. For three days his woman would not let him out-of-doors. And when it was all over he was seized with the awful fever of lonesomeness. He felt all alone in the world. He wanted to run away from the kindheartedness of his lady of the East End.

“Why did I ever enlist and come over here?” he asked himself. “Why did I want to mix mahself up in a white folks’ war? It ain’t ever was any of black folks’ affair. Niggers am evah always such fools, anyhow. Always thinking they’ve got something to do with white folks’ business.”

Jake’s woman could do nothing to please him now. She tried hard to get down into his thoughts and share them with him. But for Jake this woman was now only a creature of another race—of another world. He brooded day and night.

It was two years since he had left Harlem. Fifth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, and 135th Street, with their chocolate-brown and walnut-brown girls, were calling him.

“Oh, them legs!” Jake thought. “Them tantalizing brown legs! … Barron’s Cabaret! … Leroy’s Cabaret! … Oh, boy!”

Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love.

“Harlem for mine!” cried Jake. “I was crazy thinkin’ I was happy over heah. I wasn’t mahself. I was like a man charged up with dope every day. That’s what it was. Oh, boy! Harlem for mine!

“Take me home to Harlem, Mister Ship! Take me home to the brown gals waiting for the brown boys that done show their mettle over there. Take me home, Mister Ship. Put your beak right into that water and jest move along.” …