Amiable with Big Teeth

by Claude McKay

  “Would he do it?” Tasan demanded eagerly. “Would he kill a man?”

  “Of course he would as part of the performance,” said Diup. “He is a real leopard man and if you want the actual thing done as it is done in Africa he will get his victim here just as he would in Africa. But you must have a victim. Who is he?”

  “I have a victim in mind,” said Tasan, “but can I trust you? Will you swear to keep it a secret?”

  “I swear by my mother’s head and the leopard’s claws to keep the secret,” said Diup.

  “Whether the victim is killed or not?” said Tasan.

  “Whether the victim is killed or not,” repeated Diup.

  “It is Professor Koazhy,” said Tasan.

  “Professor Koazhy!” cried Diup, his eyes ablaze like a ferocious wild cat’s.

  “Sure,” said Tasan. “He’s a pest in the community and a fakir pretending to know all the mysteries of ancient Africa, all the fetish practices and magic rites. Koazhy is the worst of the fakers in Harlem, thriving on the African racket. It would be appropriate if he were destroyed by the real African magic. If it can be done, it would be a perfect ending.”

  “It can be done,” said Diup, looking steadily down on the floor.

  At last it was the exciting day of the leopards’ dance for Ethiopia-and-Spain. In the center of the immense Bamboo Hall there was built an impressive kraal, which provided a realistic environment for the performance of the leopard men. Stage and society, literati and sport-lights, Broadway organized a hectic hike to Harlem to enjoy the leopards disporting themselves in their imitation skins.

  The well-mixed throng, eager in its expectation of a new thrill of novelty, filled the hall to capacity. Everything was thoroughly prepared, for the comrades of the Comintern excel in promotion and publicity. What other group could assemble such a large and distinctive gathering flavored with ingredients of all strata of society? Among the distinguished Harlemites, Professor Koazhy was conspicuous. He had received a special invitation and unlike Pablo Peixota and Lij Alamaya, who were not present, he was too vain not to accept.

  The leopards were corralled, dozens of them herded up by Diup’s energy and skill. Brightly spotted with arched tails they plunged in and out of the kraal with regal animal elegance and Maxim Tasan was uplifted with pride in his spotted skin and the whole delightful creation of his imagination. Diup had insisted that Tasan too should be disguised as a leopard with, as a mark of distinction as a special guest, a white plume attached to his tail. Diup informed Tasan that that was the custom in Africa when a white was initiated in the ritual of the black art. Thus the conception and execution of the plan of the leopard dance had projected Tasan into the holy diabolical inner sanctum of black magic.

  Director Diup was also distinguished as the leader leopard with two tails. He cracked his long-lashed animal-training whip and the leopard men lined up in ring formation, shaking their paws, shaking their tails, dancing on two feet and dancing on four feet, striding and shaking, leaping and shimmying to the tintamarre of the black orchestra, dominated by the profoundly fatalistic pounding of the tom-tom.

  Gorgeously dressed like tropical birds and fascinated by the spotted skins, eagerly the women rushed to find partners among the leopard men. The revelers leaped across the barriers of caste and place and brains, dividing man from man and man from animals, and recklessly gamboled in a whirling orgy of abandon. And Tasan gamboled with them wildly as he never had before. He was intoxicated by the strangeness of his savage role, the sensation of astonishing his illuminated circle with the achievement of possessing the inside knowledge of an initiate of a primitive animistic secret society.

  All night the leopards, prompting and leading the dancing, frolicked with their human partners in and out of the kraal. And when dramatically they all collapsed together, exhausted, lying in formation of a semi-circle along the kraal, it seemed as if the performance had reached its climax. But Maxim Tasan could not leave with his departing friends, because for him the greater climax was still to come. At last Diup signaled to him and they disappeared from the scene.

  At first, when the plan was worked out, Tasan had expressed his unwillingness to be present at the final denouement of the leopard dance. But Diup had informed him that, according to the African ritual, he had to witness the deed himself, otherwise it could not be executed. Diup and Tasan drove to the corner of a dismal street. They dismissed the taxicab and walked down into the heavy shadows. Diup led Tasan into the damp obscure corridor of an apparently deserted building. Diup instructed Tasan to wait there while he disappeared. Left alone in the jungle of his thoughts, it seemed to Tasan as if he was waiting through the terror of an age. The dreary malodorous corridor of the condemned building in that sinister street was like a cavernous lair of evil spirits who existed upon destruction and death. And for the first time Tasan felt afraid of the hell he had created.

  But he was reassured by Diup’s appearing with a brother leopard man, the authentic one, who was entitled to do, and capable of executing, the final act of the dance. And now silently, Diup leading the way with Tasan following and the other behind, the three leopard men started to climb the dirty, rank, rubbish-impeded stairs of the humid building.

  To Tasan those steps seemed more difficult than the thousands he had negotiated through the intricate years of intrigue. Perhaps he reflected it might have been best if he had not resorted to the exorcism of black magic. It was not as simple as it appeared to the ignorant on the surface. It was satanic, Tasan thought, and from experience he knew what it meant to be an ally of Satan. The night was speeding like a tardy owl winging onward to its hidden rendezvous, but to Tasan it seemed an unending night of nights.

  At the top of the last flight of stairs they discovered three other leopards crouching around a man wearing a hideous whitened mask. The man removed the mask and Tasan ejaculated: “Professor Koazhy!”

  “Professor Koazhy alive in the flesh,” said Koazhy. He said something sharp as the crack of a whip in a phrase unintelligible to Tasan. And Diup answered in another, equally unintelligible.

  “What does that mean?” Tasan asked.

  “It is the password of Professor Koazhy’s Senegambians, of which I am a member,” said Diup.

  “You a member?” said Tasan.

  “Yes, I’m a leading member,” said Diup, “and the pledge of a Senegambian is more sacred than the oath of a member of the Society of Leopard Men.”

  Koazhy held up his right hand, his crooked fingers making a strange sign. The crouching leopards quickly divested Maxim Tasan of his civilized clothing and left him wrapped in his leopard skin. He tried to protest, but discovered that he was gagged. He was whisked up over the roof to its perilous edge. The street below was deserted and as ominously silent as the jungle of Tasan’s imagination.

  “Jump!” said Diup. “Do to yourself what you told us to do to Professor Koazhy.”

  Tasan drew back with a horrible look of fear, turning in an attempt to flee. But the leopard men blocked his way and pressed him back to the edge of the roof.

  “Jump!” said Diup, and at his signal the leopards struck their claws into Tasan.

  Tasan was shot through with excruciating pain as if a shower of poisoned darts had penetrated his vitals. With the stifled whine of a trapped beast he leaped up and over the roof, his vile body breaking upon and dashing his brains among the garbage of the neglected Harlem pavement.

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Habent sua fata libelli: A Latin phrase meaning “Books have their fates,” or, “Books have their own destiny,” attributed to Terentianus Maurus, a grammarian from the Mauretania region (now Morocco), who probably lived in 2 AD. The phrase comes from a longer verse, Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli (meaning, “According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny,” or, “The fate of books depends on the reade
r’s comprehension”), in Terentianus’s De litteris, De syllabis, De Metris, but has since often been used in its short form as a broad assertion about books. See, for example, Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” from Illuminations.

  2 On Roth, see Jay A. Gertzman, Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013); Gertzman, “Not Quite Honest: Samuel Roth’s ‘Unauthorized’ Ulysses and the 1927 International Protest,” Joyce Studies Annual (2009): 34–66; and Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Soliloquy of Samuel Roth: A Paranormal Defense,” James Joyce Quarterly 37, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 459–77.

  3 Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura, ed. Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 2013); Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . , ed. John Callahan and Adam Bradley (New York: Modern Library, 2011); Jack Kerouac, La vie est d’hommage, ed. Jean-Christophe Cloutier (Montreal: Boréal, 2016); Jack Kerouac, The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings, ed. Todd Tietchen (New York: Library of America, 2016); Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2015); David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

  4 Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987), 347.

  5 See “The Cycle,” in McKay, Complete Poems, ed. William J. Maxwell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 241–69. McKay’s agent Carl Cowl helped arrange the posthumous publication of Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969). The Jamaican memoir finally appeared nearly three decades later: McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories, ed. Merwyn Morris (Kingston: Heinemann Educational Book, 1979). Regarding McKay’s work on these projects, see Cooper, Claude McKay, 363–65.

  6 In 1938 and 1939, the literary agent Laurence Roberts wrote McKay regarding the submission of the manuscript of Harlem Glory to publishers (he refers to the book both under that title and as “Mellinda and Buster,” after the names of two main characters). See Roberts’s letters to McKay, 27 July 1938 and 8 February 1939, Folder 177, Claude McKay Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The book was published posthumously by McKay’s last agent, Carl Cowl, under the title Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990).

  7 Carl Cowl, letter to Jean Wagner, 7 February 1970, Box 12, Folder 16, Michel Fabre Collection, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

  8 On McKay’s time in Morocco, see Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Taste of the Archive,” Callaloo 35, no. 4 (2012): 944–72.

  9 Wayne Cooper, introduction to The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1912–1948 (New York: Schocken, 1973), 37.

  10 For McKay’s perspective on the Harlem Artists’ Guild, see especially Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 249–51, which introduces a number of concerns that resonate in Amiable with Big Teeth, especially in Chapter 20 (“Art and Race”).

  11 McKay offers a thorough recollection of the Negro Writers’ Guild endeavor in the last chapter of Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 240–49.

  12 Cooper, Claude McKay, 311. Cooper does not provide exact dates, but suggests that McKay was hired by the FWP by April 1936. It should go without saying that there were links among these various black intellectual circuits of activity. Ellen Tarry, who would later become one of McKay’s closest friends, told an interviewer that it “must have been around 1936” that someone in the Negro Writers’ Guild “introduced me to Claude McKay and he asked me to come down and work on the Federal Writers’ Project.” Ellen Tarry, transcript of interview by W. J. Weatherby, 2 November 1966, WPA History, Reel 5, [Federal] Writers’ Program Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL).

  13 There are extensive lists of the topics covered and articles produced by the project in Reel 5, [Federal] Writers’ Program Collection, Schomburg Center, NYPL.

  14 McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 240.

  15 On the anti-Italian demonstration at the Bella Restaurant, see “3 Police in Harlem Hurt Fighting Mob,” New York Times (July 13, 1936): 3. Joseph Fronczak describes a similar protest in the street outside the Italian-operated King Julius General Market in October 1935: see Fronczak, “Local People’s Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 2 (2015): 272.

  16 The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) included documentation on Gladys Bentley and the Ubangi Club, such as Wilbur Young, “Gladys Bentley,” 28 August 1939, Reel 1, [Federal] Writers’ Program Collection, Schomburg Center, NYPL. The description of the Ubangi Club comes from another essay in the FWP: Richard Bruce Nugent, “Gloria Swanson,” Reel 1, [Federal] Writers’ Program Collection, Schomburg Center, NYPL. For more information on Bentley, see James F. Wilson, “‘In My Well of Loneliness’: Gladys Bentley’s Bulldykin’ Blues,” in Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 154–91.

  17 See, for example, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 175–78, 189, 226. There was extensive newspaper coverage of the Italo-Ethiopian crisis as it unfolded in the fall of 1935 and the spring of 1936. There were also a few important, albeit short, pamphlets on the topic, including the African American roving journalist J. A. Rogers’s The Real Facts About Ethiopia (1936; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1982); and the doctor and Ethiopian envoy Malaku Bayen’s The March of Black Men, Ethiopia Leads: Official Report of the Present State of Affairs and Prospectus: An Authentic Account of the Determined Fight of the Ethiopian People for Their Independence (New York: Voice of Ethiopia Press, 1939). Another important publication that touches on the crisis, Roi Ottley’s book New World A-Coming: Inside Black America (1943; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1968), drew extensively on the work of the FWP.

  18 For more on the nuances and resonances between Harlem: Negro Metropolis and Amiable with Big Teeth, see Jean-Christophe Cloutier, “Amiable with Big Teeth: The Case of Claude McKay’s Last Novel,” Modernism/modernity 20, no. 3 (September 2013): 557–76.

  19 Cooper, introduction to The Passion of Claude McKay, 37.

  20 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (1947; repr., New York: Knopf, 1969), 574.

  21 Cedric J. Robinson, “The African Diaspora and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis,” Race & Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 60.

  22 McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 176. This viewpoint was widely shared among African American commentators in the period. For instance, an August 1935 editorial in Opportunity magazine contended that “Ethiopia has become the spiritual fatherland of Negroes throughout the world, and from Bahia to Birmingham, and from New York to Nigeria, peoples of African descent have been stirred to unparalleled unity of thought.” “And Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Arms” [editorial], Opportunity 13, no. 8 (August 1935): 230.

  23 Ottley, New World A-Coming, 109.

  24 William R. Scott, The Sons of Sheba’s Race: African-Americans and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 210.

  25 Robert A. Hill, afterword to Black Empire, by George Schuyler, ed. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 269.

  26 See Hill, “Bibliography: George S. Schuyler’s Pittsburgh Courier Fiction, 1933–1939,” in Schuyler, Black Empire, 344. Here is the full bibliographic record: Rachel Call [George S. Schuyler], “Revolt in Ethiopia: A Tale of Black Insurrection Against Italian Imperialism,” Pittsburgh Courier (July 16, 1938–January 21, 1939). Other examples of Schuyler’s black internationalist serial fiction include “The Ethiopian Murder Mystery: A Story of Love and International Intrigue,” Pittsburgh Courier (October 5, 1935–February 1, 1936); “The Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World,” Pittsburgh Courier (November 21, 1936–July 3, 1937);
and “Black Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern Africa,” Pittsburgh Courier (October 2, 1937–April 16, 1939). A selection of this work is available in Black Empire and the follow-up volume Ethiopian Stories, ed. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994). On the vindicationist tradition in African American political thought, see especially Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  27 For a provocative reflection on the “black impostor” as a political actor, see Robert A. Hill’s consideration of a number of such hoaxes in the period: “King Menelik’s Nephew: Prince Thomas Mackarooroo, aka Prince Ludwig Menelek of Abyssinia,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 15–44; as well as scholarship on the faux “African” prophetess Laura Kofey, including Barbara Bair, “‘Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God’: Laura Kofey and the Gendered Vision in Redemption in the Garvey Movement,” in A Mighty Baptism: Race, Gender, and the Creation of American Protestantism, ed. Susan Juster and Lisa MacFarlane (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 38–63; and Richard Newman, “‘Warrior Mother of Africa’s Warriors of the Most High God’: Laura Adorkor Kofey and the African Universal Church,” in This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography, ed. Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 110–23.

  28 Sadie Hall, “Sketches of Colorful Harlem Characters (Chappy Gardner),” 29 August 1939, Reel 1, [Federal] Writers’ Program Collection, Schomburg Center, NYPL. On the Princess Tamanya hoax, see FWP, Almanac for New Yorkers, 1938 (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937). Even though she was ousted as a fraud, Princess Tamanya nevertheless went on tour giving concerts across the country between 1935 and 1940. See for example “Tamanya Appears with Italian Group,” New York Amsterdam News (November 23, 1940): 11.