The best-selling, semi-autobiographical 1928 novel Home to Harlem by Jamaican-born poet-turned-novelist Claude McKay (1889-1948) was embraced by Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langton Hughes who wanted to "tell it like it is" for black folks rather than provide uplifting stories of role models whites considered "credits to the race." In it, the partially educated would-be writer Raymond, who fled Haiti observes without condemning various forms of "vice," particularly pimping, though like Jake whom Ray romanticizes (“There was something so naturally beautiful about his presence,” McKay rhapsodized, “that everybody liked and desired him), Ray does not undertake pimping (or sexual congress with prostitutes).

There is no plot, no character development, and no sex in Home, though there is a lot of discussion about women using sex to control men and fraught relations between the sexes and considerable sentimentality about comradely male-male relationships. 

In the 1929 de-facto sequel, Banjo, where plotlessness is registered in the subtitle ("novel without a plot"), which Ray (rhymes with "McKay"), a sometimes poet too intellectual to relax and enjoy whatever may come,  is in the Red Light district (the Ditch) of Marseilles, which seems populated by people born everywhere except France, Ray's romanticized embodiment of instinct and black masculinity, "Banjo" (christened in his native Alabama Lincoln Agrippa Daly) is very similar to the US-born Jake.

Jake and the other "boys" take what they can get sexually, but are homosocial by preference. Also, Banjo has heterosexual relations; Ray has none in the book, though (like McKay who never saw the son his wife bore) Ray had left a progeny and its mother back in the USA. At the end of the novel, Ray and Jake go off together, leaving Jake's latest female amour behind after Ray makes sure Jake does not want her to travel with him.

The episodic ("wallowing in filth" in the view of Negro-betterment reviewers) book has less in the way of attempts to capture dialect than Home, but, like the previous novel, has frequent lectures from Ray about literature and oppression and working-class solidarity (dissolute lumpenproletariates were not correct foci for the socialist realism orthodoxy increasingly prescribed by Stalinist cultural policy, either).

As Home was welcomed by Hughes, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican future prophet of Negritude, enthusiastically embraced Banjo for its uninhibited truthfulness. Though I am sympathetic to resisting demands to provide edifying representations, I don't think that Banjo "speaks Truth to Power," and was easily read as confirming prejudices about "uncivilized" (sex-crazed, instict-driven, booze-soaked) blacks (it is an instance of naturalism exaggerating "vice," rather than realism IMHO).

©2012, Stephen O. Murray

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