A long way from home

by Claude McKay

My stories finished, I mailed them to Louise Bryant who received them on the very morning she was leaving for America. Summer was at its meridian in Marseilles. It was hot, and that was good for me, a straight dry heat and sweet to the skin. Nothing of the sticky, uncomfortable and oppressive summer heat of New York and London and Paris. One gets into the warmth of Marseilles as a West Indian boy burrows into a heap of dried sugar cane after the liquor has been pressed out, and feels sweet and comfortable lying down deep in it.

I took a holiday from thinking out stories and writing and took to the water. Way down at the end of the great Marseilles breakwater, with the black sailors on French leave, dockers and beachcombers, we went in bathing. But I discovered a better bathing place in l'Estaque, fifteen minutes by trolley from Marseilles, and went out there with an American friend for the rest of the summer. Formerly l'Estaque was a fishing village with a big beautiful clean and sheltered bay. Cézanne loved to paint there. But now it is a squalid factory town and the center of the cement and tile industries. In its population there are many foreigners: Poles, Italians, Russians, North Africans, even some Germans who call themselves Austrians. They live in ugly cabins on the hill and work in the factories and on the new Rhône canal. All the dirty water of the cementing and tiling flows into the bay. But a little outside the town, a little out beyond where the canal enters the bay, there still remains a wonderful wide sheet of splendid deep clean water. There I went every day for the rest of the summer, floating for hours upon my back with the healing sun holding me up in his embrace.

Suddenly there came three days of mistral, and it was fall. I don't like the mistrals of Marseilles. Happily just then I received an invitation from Max Eastman to visit him at Antibes. Soon after I got that letter another came from Louise Bryant. She said she had found a publisher who was interested in printing my stories and that I should soon hear from her again.

I went to Antibes. The next interesting thing was a letter from William Aspenwall Bradley of Paris, telling of his coming down to Antibes to see me about my work. When Bradley arrived he said my stories were accepted for publication as Harlem stories and he suggested that I should do a novel of Harlem instead, because a novel would bring me more prestige and remuneration than a book of short stories.

I seized upon the suggestion, and with the story, "Home to Harlem," as the design I built up a book upon scenes of Harlem life. They were scenes of the Harlem I knew during the many years I lived there and worked as a porter in New York buildings and clubs and as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Many persons imagine that I wrote Home to Harlem because Carl Van Vechten wrote Nigger Heaven. But the pattern tale of the book was written under the tide of "Home to Harlem" in 1925. When Max Eastman read it he said, "It is worth a thousand dollars." Under the same title it was entered in the story contest of the Negro magazine Opportunity. But it did not excite the judges. Nigger Heaven was published in the fall of 1926. I never saw the book until the late spring of 1927, when my agent, William Aspenwall Bradley, sent me a copy. And by that time I had nearly completed Home to Harlem.

I lived a hermit and ascetic in Antibes and achieved Home to Harlem. I finished it in the summer of 1927 and fled to Marseilles. The Negroid colony of the Vieux Port was greatly changed. Many of the foreign Negroes were deported. Some had died of disease.

Also, I had an opportunity to see the Vieux Port from a different angle, from the inside out. Jules Pascin, the painter, had sent me a letter of introduction to his friend, Le Corse, of the Vieux Port. I had seen Pascin in Paris with his Negro model, Aicha. I never care for letters of introduction when I am visiting a new place for the first time, for I like the sensation of being a total stranger in a strange place and sampling the strangeness of it until I find myself a little and get acquainted.

Now, however, as I had already approached Marseilles independently in my own way, and as it was one of those places which stirred me up to creative expression, I was glad to make use of Pascin's letter. Perhaps it would be a means of providing something complementary to my impressions.

I looked up Le Corse and found his wine shop not far from the Rue de la Bouterie, one of the most sordid streets of mancebías in the world. Le Corse was a solid man, built like a bull, with the head of a hog. He read Pascin's letter and was immediately friendly. He poured me a big glass of good red wine and we drank together. He said that any friend of Pascin's was his also, and that I could have all that the Vieux Port had to offer, as much as was in his power—anything I liked.