
From the author of Home to Harlem, a novel about dreams, diaspora, and drifting back home
Lincoln Agrippa Daily, known to his drifter cohorts on the 1920s Marseilles waterfront as "Banjo," passes his days panhandeling and dreaming of starting his own little band. At night, Banjo, Malty, Ginger, Dengel, Bugsy, Taloufa, Goosey, and even Jake of Home to Harlem prowl the rough waterfront bistros, drinking, looking for women, playing music, fighting, loving, and talking--about their homes in Sengal, the West Indies, or the American South; about Garvey's Back-to-Africa Movement; about being Black. When Ray, a writer, joins the group, it triggers his rediscovery of his African roots and his feeling that, at last, he belongs to a race, "weighted, tested, and poised in the universal scheme."
Claude McKay was a writer and poet. Born in Jamaica in 1889 to peasant farmers, he wrote poetry and fiction about Black life in Jamaica and America. His books include Harlem Shadows (1922); Constab Ballads (1912); and Songs of Jamaica (1912), as well as a number of novels and short-story collections. A key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, he was also involved in many social causes, particularly in the fight for racial justice. He died in Chicago in 1948.