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Unpublished in the author’s lifetime, this recently unearthed work by Harlem Renaissance writer McKay (1889–1948) is both a brilliant social novel and a historical document shedding light on two oft-overlooked episodes from the history of America’s African-American community: the campaign to aid Ethiopia after the invasion by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.