Amiable with Big Teeth

March 13, 2017
Unpublished in the author’s lifetime, this recently unearthed work by Harlem Renaissance writer McKay (1889–1948) is both a brilliant social novel and a historical document shedding light on two oft-overlooked episodes from the history of America’s African-American community: the campaign to aid Ethiopia after the invasion by Fascist Italy, and the debate among the black intelligentsia over Communism. It is the 1930s and Harlem is abuzz with festivity as the Hands to Ethiopia committee receives an envoy, Lij Tekla Alamaya. But controversy soon engulfs the neighborhood, as Soviet agent Maxim Tasan infiltrates the cause and plans to turn its various constituents against one another. These include the eccentric and flamboyant Professor Koazhy; the committee’s leftist secretary, Newton Castle; and the committee’s chairman, Pablo Peixota, who winds up between a rock and a hard place once his daughter, Seraphine, falls in love with Alamaya. But is Alamaya an impostor? And will the committee’s good intentions fall victim to anti-Communist hysteria? As witch hunts mount, questions of black identity come to drive this fiercely political novel, which doesn’t shy away from examining the hypocrisy of Harlem’s moral leaders, nor from frank discussion of assimilation and the quandary of the socialist reformer in the era of Stalin. The novel suffers from some repetition—probably reflecting that McKay was unable to revise it—but remains a complex, extraordinarily even-handed portrait of American blackness in a time of war.

January 1, 2017
Newly discovered novel by the great chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance, a sweeping satire of clashing ideologies and ambitions north of 110th Street."The time was ungodly tough for God's swarthy step-children": written in 1941, McKay's novel describes a time a few years earlier, when Harlem was alive with talk of African-American civil rights as Franklin Roosevelt entered his third term as president. The proponents of "Aframerican"--McKay's coinage--self-determination have a new cause in an Ethiopia beset by an invasion on the part of fascist Italy. As the novel opens, a certain Pablo Peixota, said to be Brazilian, is at the head of a boisterous crowd gathered to honor the arrival of an envoy from Haile Selassie's besieged throne; "the Emperor of Ethiopia had condescended," McKay writes, "to send a representative as a token of his goodwill and to give encouragement and inspiration to the efforts of the Aframericans." Most effortful of all is a strange fellow named Professor Koazhy, who arrives "bedecked in a uniform so rare, so gorgeous, it made the people prance and shout for joy." He aims, it seems, to outdo the emperor himself in splendor, but the good professor has other intentions. So, too, do the local Communists, who, seeing a political movement building, can't help but want to co-opt it: "the Hands to Ethiopia was not interesting as one means of defending Ethiopia, but only as an organization that might be captured by the Marxists to help expand the gargantuanesque inflated maw of the Popular Front." Against this backdrop of rising contention are a string of characters who, with aims ranging from the noble to the self-serving, drop in and out of the narrative. McKay writes with broad, pointed humor without resorting to lampooning, although the symbolism gets a little heavier handed as it arrives at an unexpectedly violent close. Full of now-arcane references to historical moments and political movements past but still engaging and well-paced.

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January 1, 2017

One of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance, writer McKay produced a final 1941 novel that was first discovered in 2012 and finally published this year. The title describes communists in Harlem, like wolves in sheep's clothing.

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