Romance in Marseille

by Claude McKay

  Notwithstanding the single city pinpointed in its title, Romance in Marseille is thus a work of stowaway fiction, like Banjo a reflection on the art of improvised movement around a black world rediscovering its far-flung corners and relations. Unlike Banjo, however, Romance is stowaway fiction incited by the prospect that black fugitives would seek restitution for losing too much while making the world smaller. A consistent feature of McKay’s dispatches from abroad is his appetite for news and gossip. Again and again, the Jamaican traveler implores his American correspondents to bundle and send him whatever engaging local journalism they can. Before he learned firsthand that Dede had lost his feet but won his lawsuit, McKay could not have missed press reports of another remarkable case of legal resistance to “brutality on the high seas.”29 In the spring of 1927, both the New York Times and the black-owned Amsterdam News prominently shared the “unusual story” of “Jonathan Gibson, a 21-year-old Negro of Kingston,” Jamaica, who had pressed a “suit against the steamship Princess May, operated and owned by the Di Giorgio & Co., Inc.,” of New York City. The Princess May reliably hauled fruit and passengers from West Indian ports to Manhattan Island, and Gibson, an underemployed tailor chasing opportunity in America, chose it as a safe craft on which to hitch a ride. Four days after the Princess May shoved off from Kingston—the Jamaican capital where McKay had briefly worked as a policeman—Gibson was spotted by an officer, however, “and dragged from his hiding place.”

  What followed, alleged Gibson, was an ordeal reprising some of the worst punishments of slavery. “Gibson said his hands were manacled behind his back”30 and fixed by handcuffs “to an upright stanchion at a point level with the deck rail.” “Every time the vessel rolled,” Gibson testified, “the deck fell away and he was left suspended by the handcuffs, leaving him in agony until the ship righted itself.” Waves “washed over the rail and soaked his shoes, causing the leather to contract and his feet to swell.” Near the end of his agonizing voyage, he was removed from the deck and penned in a cabin, “crazy with pain.” Like McKay’s friend Dede, Gibson was detained at the immigrant hospital on Ellis Island after landing. There, similar to Dede, “gangrene necessitated the amputation of the fore portion of each foot. Gibson . . . charged that the gangrene caused him to suffer from toxic psychosis and that for part of the time at the hospital he was insane and placed in the psychopathic ward.” In the eyes of the Jamaican stowaway, his initially voluntary ocean voyage descended into a reenactment of the physically tormenting and psychologically traumatic Middle Passage once forced on his African ancestors. The Statue of Liberty, its torch raised less than a mile from the Ellis Island hospital,31 welcomed him to anything but.

  Yet Gibson employed an emphatically modern and especially American weapon in seeking revenge on the living ghosts of slavery, a disabling as well as peculiar institution. According to the Times, he filed suit against the Princess May in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, hiring lawyers to argue his case—an official “action in admiralty”—before Federal Judge Grover M. Moscowitz. Gibson and his team sought no less than $100,000 in damages, about $1,500,000 in 2020 currency. Dr. William H. Egan, a New York physician, was introduced as a prosecution witness to testify that “the condition which necessitated amputation of part of Gibson’s feet could have been caused only by some physical pressure which constricted the bloodvessels [sic].”32 Another stowaway on the Princess May, Sidney Gunter of Jamaica, was called to the stand and “substantiated Gibson’s story.” Not surprisingly, the ship’s captain conceded none of this, attesting “that Gibson had been treated humanely. He denied that the stowaway had been manacled to a stanchion, and produced the log of the vessel to show that the weather on May 24, 1926,” the longest day of Gibson’s nightmare, “was clear and only a small amount of spray came over the side.” Regardless of the height of the waves, continued the defense, the poor state of Gibson’s feet “before he boarded the vessel could have caused his later condition.”33 On the third day of the trial, the judge sided with the company, curtly dismissing the charges. Simply put, “Moscowitz said he did not believe Gibson’s story,”34 and the Jamaican failed to match Dede’s coup and recover damages.

  Consciously or not, on one of its lower frequencies, Romance in Marseille retries Jonathan Gibson’s case. In the courtroom of the novel, McKay judges his countryman’s suit in place of the Honorable Grover Moscowitz, and rules, with prejudice, in favor of the prosecution. Lafala, Romance’s Gibson, is a comparably English-speaking, non-American black protagonist. He too stows away, is detected in his hiding place, is locked up and to all intents tortured by his white captors, and brings suit after losing both feet in a New York hospital. (McKay’s novel begins with the just-amputated Lafala stranded in a sick bay somewhere in the city, feeling like “a sawed-off stump,”35 dreaming of the “leg play” of his West African boyhood, and anxiously musing on the way forward.) Resembling Gibson’s case, defense lawyers for “the company”—an anonymous substitute for Di Giorgio, Inc., the owners of the Princess May—argue that Lafala came aboard with diseased feet. Crucially, in distinction to the original litigation, McKay’s stowaway collects all he asks, and more, when challenging his fate. Lafala pockets his share of $100,000 in damages, exactly, from the steamship company, reaps the affection of a fellow black stowaway and of his previously untrustworthy North African lover, and acquires the means to cross the Atlantic and eventually return to Africa on a first-class ticket. When his trial is done, Lafala’s loss of bodily mobility has incongruously led to greater freedom of movement and an enhanced pursuit of happiness. By the final chapters of Romance, arrest, isolation, conspiracy, and murder shadow Lafala’s windfall, altering its meaning, but the novel begins with a stowaway fairy tale, a semi-utopian granting of back pay to an African whose wings are clipped but who flies away along a route once bloodied by the transatlantic slave trade. Call Lafala’s hard-earned jackpot reparations for slavery, if you like, in imaginative miniature.

  The sweep of Lafala’s courtroom victory stems in no small part from the good legal fortune of Nelson Simeon Dede. As we have seen, the immediate prototype for Romance in Marseille’s leading man was not Gibson, thwarted by the real Judge Moscowitz, but this luckier Nigerian stowaway McKay had befriended in France. Over the course of his February 1928 letter to literary agent William Aspenwall Bradley, McKay recounts that Dede hid in the hold of a Fabre Company steamer bound for New York in 1926, the same year as Gibson’s trip on the Princess May. He was found out by a ship’s officer and, like Lafala after him, locked in a frigid water closet for the rest of the voyage. Dede’s protests that the WC was an icebox were ignored, and, after the steamer docked, both he and the French shipping line learned that his feet were frostbitten. Sometime during American immigration processing, Dede’s legs were amputated below the knees, apparently at the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, the first public health hospital in the United States and the site of Jonathan Gibson’s medical detention. He recovered his will in time to hire what McKay stereotypes as “one of those Jewish accident lawyers.”36 Paving the way to Lafala’s effective Jewish attorney in Romance, Dede’s lawyer won the day in a New York courtroom, bringing home a $17,000 settlement.37 He took a $5,000 cut, notes McKay, while Dede, armed with his $12,000 portion, far less than Gibson’s hoped-for pile, set sail for Nigeria fitted with prostheses. On the way to West Africa, Dede was waylaid and imprisoned once more. When his ship stopped over in Marseille, the Fabre line arranged for French authorities to incarcerate him for “clandestine embarkation”:38 in other words, for the offense of stowing away on a Fabre ship two years earlier. The loss of Dede’s lower legs, the French company apparently decided, was not sentence enough. What stowaway, whatever the absurdities of American justice, deserved to be paid for his crime?

  Confirmation of the details of Dede’s case outside of McKay’s correspondence is thin; it is the odd striking stowaway story of the era that is difficult to find in the black press. But a reason for
the lack of journalism on Dede is not hard to discover. The absence of coverage presumably reflects the likelihood that his grievance never went to trial. Dede’s lawyer negotiated and settled out of court, McKay suggests, and the arrangement in this circumstance almost certainly included an agreement not to spread the story to journalists black, white, or sensationally “yellow.” It would have been in the interest of all parties—Dede, his lawyer, and especially the Fabre line—to keep the strange facts under wraps.

  In Romance in Marseille, by contrast, the story of Lafala’s amputation and lawsuit is splashed all over the popular press. Parodic counterfeits of actual African American newspapers scream with headlines hyping the exchange of limbs for cash at the core of the case (and at the core of racial capitalism more broadly). The United Negro, for example, a send-up of the Garvey movement’s Negro World, runs with the banner “AFRICAN LEGS BRING ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS.”39 The onetime owner of these African legs, sums up McKay, “had conquered Aframerica with a whoop. Very literary were the days that ensued for Lafala.”40 Putting Dede’s example aside, McKay no doubt drew on the Jonathan Gibson trial, and its lurid life in newsprint, when riffing on the translation of Lafala’s disability into “[v]ery literary” fame. The ensuing satire of black American journalism—just one of the “Aframerican” institutions McKay delighted in skewering—helps to explain a puzzling remark of the author on Romance’s debt to a “[f]unny case.”41 Offsetting its veins of romance and tragedy, elements of the novel are intended as grotesque social satire, something like the politicized grim humor of George Grosz’s caricatures of disfigured veterans amid Berlin prostitutes and profiteers, drawings McKay honored as “rare and iconoclastic” art.42 More specifically, Romance’s breed of black comedy targets the grinding of black flesh and bones through the mechanisms of a capitalist culture industry in league with the shipping industry. The sensational drifting of Lafala’s detached legs across the banner section of the front pages is more historically momentous, McKay reckons, than the unrecorded burial of Dede’s feet in a potter’s field outside the immigration hospital. Like Gibson, Lafala dearly purchases a flash of mass-market fame and therefore takes on an archetypal significance. He becomes a public figure of the black body both supplemented and truncated by modern technologies of rapid transportation and instant mass myth-making.

  Dede’s explicable absence from the tabloids and other journalistic sources is not duplicated in McKay’s own archive. Thanks to McKay’s record-keeping, less casual than usual in this instance, we know with some assurance that the author of Romance in Marseille intervened directly on Dede’s behalf with the “Directeur en Chef” of the Fabre Line. A copy of a carefully typed letter to this effect, addressed from Marseille in January 1928, now sits among McKay’s papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.43 McKay begins this letter to the Fabre honcho with flattery and pathos: “By a happy chance I discovered today that you were Consul for Liberia, whose President, Mr. King, I happened to meet some years ago. . . . May I therefore, [sic] bring to your attention the case of a poor West African boy from Nigeria who stowed away last winter on one of your boats going to New York and had the dreadful misfortune of having his feet frozen in the place where he was locked up, so that they had to be amputated in the immigration hospital in New York?”44

  Dede, that poor West African boy, no longer required compensation for his lost limbs, states McKay. His lawyer had “negotiated a settlement with the Fabre Line in New York, and the boy received a certain sum that was paid to him through the British Consul in New York.”45 What was still needed was Fabre’s intercession to withdraw the charge of clandestine embarkation. In return, Dede was willing to refund the full cost of his stolen 1926 passage, “aller et retour, Marseille–New York,”46 in order to “get out of prison (where he is very miserable, after having gone through a whole year of sickness and suffering) and get home to Nigeria, Africa, as soon as possible.”47 In his corner, McKay was willing to pledge that his novel showcasing Dede—the brewing Romance in Marseille—would treat Fabre more generously if the director’s assistance was given. Dede “was one of the liveliest of the stranded black seaman and the best dancer of the Charleston and the Black Bottom, for which he was much admired by the girls of Vieux Port quarter. Now he will never dance again!”48 For all these losses, “a happy story” based on his life “was still possible,” McKay promised, one “showing that the Compagnie Fabre stood honorably by Dede after his accident.”49 Dangling the possibility that Fabre would be cast not as a corporate villain but as an enlightened hero of race-blind French civilization, McKay did not hesitate to employ the prospect of Romance as textual blackmail. If the novel to be written allowed him to act the part of Jonathan Gibson’s second judge, reversing the negative decision of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, it also permitted him to outdo Dede’s official lawyer. And if effective representation of his Nigerian client would require him to make Fabre’s director a virtual coauthor—the comic or tragic destination of Romance was seemingly up to him—it was a loss of aesthetic autonomy McKay was willing to contemplate.

  McKay’s letter to Bradley implies that Fabre’s director in chief considered his offer one he could not refuse. “We got [Dede] out two weeks ago,”50 McKay boasts in the key of the royal “we.” The polished text of Romance in Marseille signals the same favorable result. McKay’s closest self-reflection in the novel, the Caribbean radical Etienne St. Dominique, once “hailed as the dark star rising in the European literary horizon,”51 does his best to spring Lafala from a second imprisonment by flashing a press clipping and other literary credentials. An executive of the offending steamship company, promising Lafala’s release, says “to St. Dominique with a smile ‘Now don’t go away and write anything bad about the company.’ ‘I couldn’t now,’” replies St. Dominique, “smiling back.”52 For as long as it takes to free Lafala, McKay relaxes his characteristic disgust for the art-appreciating liberal idealism associated with the graying ambassadors of the Harlem Renaissance. Ironically enough, in fact, he creates a literal-minded dramatization of “civil rights by copyright,”53 historian David Levering Lewis’s skeptical label for elite Harlem’s wager that black art could secure the full citizenship unsecured by political protest. In the parable of the dark literary star and the pale shipping executive, black artistic capacity (St. Dominique’s ability to achieve copyright) neatly routs the racist distortion of the law (the suspension of Lafala’s droits civil).

  What McKay does not create in his finished Romance, however, is a novel in which black art’s sway over white power safeguards a finally “happy story.” Neither reparations for Lafala’s pilfered limbs—an emblem of racial and wage slavery repaid—nor a second rare visitation of justice arranged by St. Dominique prevents McKay’s protagonist from returning to Africa all alone, troubled by forged word of Aslima’s renewed disloyalty. (The would-be climactic scene of Lafala shoving off from Marseille for his African birthplace indeed takes place offstage, and is cause for only secondhand celebration.) Symbolizing the joint redemption of North and West, Islamic and Christianized Africa, the increasingly true love of the Moroccan Aslima for the West African Lafala cannot save her from her French Corsican pimp. Romance’s hard-boiled final sentences capture Aslima throwing “up her hands like a bird of prey,” her jealous European handler “cursing and calling upon hell to swallow her soul.”54 The hurdles that Lafala and Aslima confront in sealing a trans-African love match, and in giving birth to a generically comic (as opposed to darkly humorous) novel, disclose more than the limits of McKay’s bargain with Fabre’s director in chief. McKay’s Banjo ends with a Huck and Jim–style black male pair escaping from civilized feminine influence, their vagabond story poised to continue in territories “a long ways from here.”55 Written from another country, the furious, plot-stopping conclusion of Romance, a more expansively queer novel by a nautical mile, insists on the importance of black women in the rebinding of the black wor
ld. Romance in Marseille, which opens as a male stowaway fantasy, closes as a warning of the tragedy that haunts male-only strategies for universal Negro improvement.

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  Despite its eighty-seven years of near-invisibility, Romance in Marseille has never been a lost book. Amiable with Big Teeth, the McKay novel of the Italo-Ethiopian War unearthed by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in 2009, was as unknown as it was unpublished before its appearance as a Penguin Classic in 2017. Romance in Marseille, on the other hand, has been known to a handful of McKay scholars with travel budgets, if to virtually no one else, prior to this Penguin edition. Since the 1940s, first one, then two hand-corrected typescript versions of the novel have been hiding in plain sight in two of the world’s richest archives of Afro-Americana: the James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.56 Why, then, has this obscure but not secret book by a major modern author, Langston Hughes’s pick as the “best of the colored poets”57 and a recognized pioneer of both the Harlem Renaissance and the Francophone Négritude movement, so long evaded print? The reasons are diverse—we discuss the matter in greater detail in “A Note on the Text”—but they begin with the unease of agents, editors, and fellow writers presented with its seeming obscenity and genuinely undissembled treatment of gay and lesbian life. They continue with the existential trials McKay faced during his half decade of on-and-off work on the text. Disabling illness, ungenteel poverty, and French and British government harassment destabilized not only the writing process but also his confidence in promoting its final result. Mislaid plans, copyright limbo, and occasionally sketchy behavior by aspiring rescuers frustrated several efforts to expose the book in the decades after McKay’s death. This first publication of Romance in Marseille thus marks not so much the unexpected discovery of a valuable novel as the long-overdue freeing of one, the amplifying of entertaining and historically significant voices previously trapped in an archival vacuum.