Amiable with Big Teeth

by Claude McKay

  Biographer Wayne Cooper suggests that the importance of McKay’s articles and correspondence from the late 1930s has not been fully appreciated: “In a real sense they represent the culmination of his writing career, a summing up of his concerns as a creative writer. As such they form a logical sequel to his earlier preoccupations as a poet and novelist.”19 Something similar might be said about Amiable with Big Teeth. From this perspective it makes perfect sense that the author of Home to Harlem and Banjo would have been drawn to the Italo-Ethiopian crisis as a potential topic for fiction. McKay was himself directly embroiled in the debates in Harlem around the Popular Front, Communism, and the rise of fascism, first of all. And the Italian invasion of Ethiopia—even more than the Spanish Civil War, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, or the second Joe Louis–Max Schmeling fight in June 1938—was arguably the single event in the period that most powerfully inflamed the imagination of blacks throughout the world, as an attack on the very principle of black sovereignty at a time when the great majority of peoples of the African diaspora lived under colonial domination. “Almost overnight,” as the great historian John Hope Franklin famously observed, “even the most provincial among the American Negroes became international-minded.”20 As a result, the very word “Ethiopia” came to seem “confluent” with the notion of Africa: it “became a most ancient point of reference—a term signifying historicity and racial dignity in ways the term ‘Negro’ could not match.”21 McKay himself hints at this unparalleled symbolic resonance in Harlem: Negro Metropolis, reflecting on the depth of sentiment in the African American response to the Italian invasion:

  To the emotional masses of the American Negro church the Ethiopia of today is the wonderful Ethiopia of the Bible. In a religious sense it is far more real to them than the West African lands, from which it is assumed that most of the ancestors of Aframericans came. They were happy that the emperor had escaped alive. As an ex-ruler he remained a symbol of authority over the Negro state of their imagination.22

  One of McKay’s coworkers on the FWP, Roi Ottley, observed a couple of years later that “from the beginning the Ethiopian crisis became a fundamental question in Negro life. It was all but impossible for Negro leaders to remain neutral, and the position they took toward the conflict became a fundamental test. The survival of the black nation became the topic of angry debate in pool-rooms, barber shops, and taverns.”23 Historian William Scott puts it in equally emphatic terms:

  [T]he pro-Ethiopian crusade of African-Americans represents an extraordinary episode in modern U.S. black history. A mass impulse, its scope was broad and its force intense, exceeding in size and vigor all other contemporary black freedom protests. In magnitude and might, no other black-rights agitation of the interwar years paralleled the scale and depth of African-Americans’ pro-Abyssinian remonstrations.24

  In the literature of the period, perhaps the most obvious parallel to McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth are the Ethiopian-themed serial novels George Schuyler published under multiple pseudonyms between 1936 and 1939 in the Pittsburgh Courier. But Schuyler’s “Ethiopian” work is only one strand of his prolific exploration of the possibilities of black pulp fiction, which includes nearly three dozen stories set everywhere from Harlem to the Mississippi Delta to “the African bush.”25 Schuyler’s work in this vein tends to involve lurid tales of “international intrigue” with elements of science fiction: even when they allude to contemporary events, it is usually in the service of vindicationist Pan-African fantasy, as in “Revolt in Ethiopia: A Tale of Black Insurrection Against Italian Imperialism” (1938–39), in which—to quote editor Robert A. Hill’s plot summary—“a wealthy young black American on a cruise gets involved with a beautiful Ethiopian princess seeking a hidden treasure needed to finance Ethiopia’s war against Italian occupation.”26 In contrast, despite its own sensationalist elements, Amiable with Big Teeth is much less concerned with fantasy and much more framed as a caustic, even overtly polemical, depiction of the complex Harlem political landscape in the mid-1930s as it shifted in the shadow of international events.

  In this respect, it is striking how many plot points and characters in Amiable with Big Teeth are derived from historical antecedents, starting with the Princess Benebe hoax at the heart of the novel (see Chapter 16). Among the many hustlers, impostors, and frauds that sprouted in Harlem during the mid-1930s,27 one of the most famous was a certain Princess Tamanya, purported to be an Ethiopian princess and the first cousin of Emperor Haile Selassie. In the summer of 1935, Princess Tamanya summoned journalists to a sumptuous suite in the Broadway Central Hotel to give an impromptu press conference about the plight of her nation. It was later revealed that Princess Tamanya was in fact Miss Islin Harvey, a local girl who had been put up to the stunt by the notorious black promoter and PR wizard Chappy Gardner, a man once referred to as “the black P. T. Barnum,” and an eventual member of the Negro Writers’ Guild in 1937.28 Although McKay transposes the fictional version of the fraudulent Ethiopian Princess Benebe into a somewhat different context in Amiable with Big Teeth—making the masquerade the work of the villain Maxim Tasan, a white Communist infiltrator, rather than a black entrepreneur—he draws directly on many of the details of the Tamanya story as it actually took place at the time.

  Although there does not appear to be a single historical source for the novel’s villain, Maxim Tasan, the character’s name seems to be in part an allusion to the prominent Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov, who, starting in 1930, served as the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Litvinov represented the Soviet Union in the League of Nations between 1934 and 1938; indeed, during the Italo-Ethiopian crisis he was the chairman of the League of Nations Council.29 He visited New York in 1933 on his way to Washington, DC, where he met with President Roosevelt and successfully persuaded the United States to recognize the legitimacy of the Soviet government, and his comments on US race relations—during his visit, Litvinov declared, “White workers cannot free themselves so long as a Negro nation is enslaved in the Black Belt of the South”—were reported widely in left-leaning black newspapers.30

  It is perhaps not a coincidence, either, that when he first returned to New York in 1934, McKay was represented by a particularly repugnant and ineffective literary agent named Maxim Lieber.31 This second Maxim was not only a member of the Communist Party of the United States, but also a key player in a Soviet espionage ring in New York. Lieber’s role as a spy was not revealed until years later, during the Alger Hiss affair at the end of the 1940s.32 Biographer Wayne Cooper conjectures that while McKay may have been aware of Lieber’s party membership, he “certainly had no knowledge of Lieber’s employment as a Soviet agent.”33 Intriguingly, however, there is evidence that McKay did have knowledge of Soviet espionage in the period. In an article published in the New York Amsterdam News in May 1939, McKay contended that “if Negroes do not assert their independence, radicals will use them precisely as any other political party,” adding that “there are significant angles of the radical approach towards the Negro which are known to initiates only.” He proceeded to divulge what he described as “information received some time ago” in support of his claim:

  I was told that some five years ago the Russian Communist Party dispatched a secret agent to America to gather material facts and to report on the economic status and the political possibility of the American Negro. Incognito the Russian comrade visited Harlem and other Negro communities, made a survey of living conditions among the common people and interviewed some of the leading Negroes, who were not aware of his identity. Upon the completion of his study the Russian recommended to the American Communist Party that Negroes should be organized as an autonomous cultural group, similar to the various language groups, with their own leaders, clubs, publications, etc. But the local Communist hierarchy objected, saying that Negroes would resent organization along such lines.

  However, there was a minority of colored comrades, who supported the Russian’s viewpoint.34
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  Whether or not Lieber was the “secret agent” in question, it is a tantalizing archival tidbit, suggesting that in concocting Maxim Tasan, McKay was transposing elements of the historical record, alluding to fact (and perhaps both to Litvinov and Lieber) while warping and reworking it in the interest of a polemical interpretation of the Communist influence in 1930s Harlem.35

  The Ethiopian envoy in the novel, Lij Alamaya, functions as a similar sort of composite of historical reference points. Less than a year after McKay returned to the United States, he witnessed firsthand the upsurge of concern in Harlem for the Ethiopian cause. In the late 1930s, he became personally acquainted with the most prominent Ethiopian emissary in New York, Dr. Malaku Bayen, who was Haile Selassie’s cousin and personal physician. Bayen had attended medical school at Howard University in Washington, DC, where he met his African American wife, the former Dorothy Hadley. Due to the military crisis in Ethiopia, Bayen returned home in June 1935, but fled with the emperor to London in the wake of the Italian invasion. And in September 1936 Bayen was dispatched back to the United States to serve as a “Special Envoy for the Western Hemisphere,” charged with raising funds to support the Ethiopian struggle for independence.36 On September 28, Bayen gave a rousing speech to an audience of two thousand at Rockland Palace in Harlem, where he proclaimed that “our soldiers will never cease fighting until the enemy is driven from our soil.”37 He worked closely with the United Aid for Ethiopia, one of the most important Harlem organizations, but gravitated away from it when “members of the American Communist Party took sharp interest in the United Aid and attempted to transform it into a Communist front.”38 In August 1937, Bayen founded a new aid organization called the Ethiopian World Federation, appointing a respected Methodist minister, the Reverend Lorenzo H. King, as the organization’s president.39 McKay not only discusses Bayen in Harlem: Negro Metropolis, but also includes a photo of him at an event in Harlem (which Bayen allowed him to use free of charge).40

  In fact, however, Bayen was the second Ethiopian envoy to be sent to Harlem during the crisis. The opening scene of Amiable with Big Teeth is a thinly veiled depiction of a monumental rally held in December 1935 at the Abyssinian Baptist Church by the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia, one of the first aid organizations. Lij Tasfaye Zaphiro, a young functionary who had been a member of the Ethiopian delegation in London, had come to New York that month, and he was one of the featured speakers at the rally, which attracted an audience of nearly four thousand.41 In fact, it was Zaphiro, working in collaboration with African American supporters including the Reverend William Lloyd Imes, the pastor of the prestigious St. James Presbyterian Church, and Philip M. Savory, an insurance executive who was co-owner of the New York Amsterdam News, who went on to found the United Aid for Ethiopia (the same organization that would later support Bayen in his fund-raising efforts in the fall of 1936).42

  Initially Zaphiro also drew support from the Committee on the Ethiopian Crisis, the most important white-run aid organization, which was directed by John Shaw, a naturalized American born in the United Kingdom who ran an import-export business with significant commercial ties to Ethiopia.43 Largely due to those ties, Shaw was subsequently appointed as the honorary Ethiopian consul in the United States, and as such he began to attempt to consolidate the Ethiopian aid effort (which had been scattered among a confusing plethora of overlapping organizations) under the umbrella of yet another newly formed group, the American Aid for Ethiopia.44 Unconvinced of the need for African American–run Ethiopian aid initiatives, Shaw came to distrust Zaphiro and the United Aid for Ethiopia in particular. In March 1936, questions were raised about Zaphiro’s credentials as an official envoy of the Ethiopian government, and Shaw was instrumental in bringing about Zaphiro’s abrupt recall to London.45 His departure was met with consternation in the black press; as one newspaperman wrote a few months later in the Chicago Defender, for instance: “Black America accepted the slender, lemon-colored youth with the pronounced Oxford accent and regal bearing with open arms. Although he carried no papers, no letters of introduction, nor anything to officially stand him in good stead when called upon to prove his status, the public was willing to take him at his word.”46 But Shaw saw to it that the young Ethiopian envoy was discredited, thereby undermining the black-led United Aid for Ethiopia at the same time. This is to say that in Amiable with Big Teeth, with Maxim Tasan’s elaborate scheme to destroy the credibility of Lij Tekla Alamaya (and thereby to destabilize the black-run Hands to Ethiopia), McKay again transposes and refashions a historical episode in the service of the novel’s critique of Communist intervention in Harlem politics.

  Another man who was pivotal in the founding of the United Aid for Ethiopia was Willis N. Huggins, an African American high school teacher, bibliophile, and historian who became deeply involved in the effort to support the Abyssinian cause, even traveling to Geneva in the summer of 1935 to deliver a petition to the League of Nations.47 Months before Zaphiro’s arrival in the United States, as the scope of Italian imperialist designs on Ethiopia was beginning to become apparent, Huggins was one of the first to plan an organized African American response through the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Ethiopia. On a rainy night in early March 1935, he was one of six speakers at a packed inaugural meeting of the Provisional Committee at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.48 In December, Huggins also spoke at the Abyssinian gathering where Zaphiro was first introduced to the Harlem public.49 From the beginning, Huggins insisted on the symbolic importance of Ethiopian independence to peoples of African descent around the globe, warning in the wake of Italy’s victory that “with the fall of Addis Ababa comes the fall of the black world.”50

  In Amiable with Big Teeth, the memorable character of Professor Koazhy seems to be yet another hybrid figure loosely based on Huggins as well as another black bibliophile and independent historian, Charles C. Seifert (who, like Koazhy in the novel, assumed the title of “Professor” even though he held no official degree). McKay knew both men personally: he thanks Huggins in the acknowledgments of Harlem: Negro Metropolis (just as Huggins thanks McKay in his 1937 book Introduction to African Civilizations),51 and the two men appeared together at various public events in Harlem, such as the December 1938 panel held at the 135th Street Library where they discussed “Anti-Semitism and the Negro.”52 McKay was acquainted with Seifert, too, through the thriving networks of black independent historians and bibliophiles in Harlem. Four years earlier, at a time when he was unemployed and homeless, McKay supported himself for a few months toward the end of 1934 by working as a sort of research assistant for Seifert in exchange for room and board, helping him “shape up and write his researches” on ancient African history.53 McKay was disdainful of the work itself, complaining to his friend Max Eastman that “the old fool” Seifert was “always butting in on me with senile talk about ancient African glory.”54

  But in Amiable with Big Teeth, the portrayal of Professor Koazhy is largely sympathetic. Most notably, in the novel’s almost comically melodramatic conclusion, the duplicitous Maxim Tasan meets his doom during the ritual sacrifice performed during the gala of the Society of African Leopard Men at the hands of Koazhy’s Senegambians. In McKay’s fiction, in other words, the avenging force that finally defeats the Communist menace emerges from what is seemingly the most unlikely of sources: the circuit of black bibliophiles and independent historians like Huggins and Seifert who, while often dismissed in their time and largely forgotten since, were crucial in the emergence of organized black radicalism throughout the twentieth century.55

  Even as the novel’s denouement alludes to actual historical controversies involving tales of “leopard men” and human sacrifice in colonial Africa,56 it is important to recognize that the Senegambians are not some mystical cohort dedicated to “primitive” ritual. Instead, they are an autonomous, underground diasporic fraternity involving African Americans as well as Africans (such as Diup Wuluff)—at once a sor
t of voluntary study group (at the end of Chapter 1, Koazhy is called a “historical mentor” to the Senegambians, who are described as his “students”), a political and even martial organization (ready to rumble in street fights when necessary, as in the conflict in front of Reverend Trawl’s church in Chapter 10), and a sort of secret society. So, in the novel, the force of retribution is ultimately rooted in an impulse toward diasporic solidarity, historical documentation, collective study, and political liberation that is generated out of some deep, possibly fundamental wellspring in black life, in a manner that at once provides the momentum behind African American institution-building and exists somehow beyond or outside formal institutions.

  While considering the stakes of the historical transpositions woven into Amiable with Big Teeth, one might also ask about the origins of McKay’s suspicions of the Communist Party, which prove so central to the plot of the novel. In this respect it is helpful to turn to the many articles and editorials on politics and current events that McKay began publishing in the late 1930s. He penned a regular column in the New York Amsterdam News for two months in the spring of 1939, and wrote a steady string of pieces for journals including the New Leader, Opportunity, the American Mercury, and Common Sense.57 Major themes include not only the aftermath of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis and the Spanish Civil War, but also and more broadly the implications of the Popular Front, the threat of fascism in Europe, and Harlem politics (especially anti-Semitism among African Americans).58 Even as he took up this wide range of contemporary issues, McKay also became involved with the journal The African: Journal of African Affairs, founded in October 1937 by the Universal Ethiopian Students Association. As Wayne Cooper describes it, African “sought to expose the injustices committed by European imperialism in Africa, to inform readers about black problems in the United States, and to encourage American blacks to see their problems in a broad, international perspective. It also sought to keep alive the strong black interest in the fate of Ethiopia.”59 McKay not only published a piece in the journal (a fascinating essay about Tangier),60 but at one point he was even in negotiations with the group to take over the editorship, in what was planned as a collaboration with poet Countee Cullen.61