Amiable with Big Teeth

by Claude McKay

  99 McKay, letter to Simon Williamson, n.d. [likely early 1942], Box 1, Folder 2, Claude McKay Papers (Additions), Schomburg Center, NYPL.

  100 McKay, letter to Mr. Kohn, 23 March 1942, Box 1, Folder 1, Claude McKay Papers (Additions), Schomburg Center, NYPL.

  101 McKay, letter to Catherine Latimer, 19 February 1941, Box 1, Folder 4, Acquisitions 1925–1948, Schomburg Center Records, Schomburg Center, NYPL.

  102 McKay, letter to Carl Cowl, 28 July 1947, Box 2, Folder 44, Claude McKay Collection, Beinecke Library.

  103 Cooper, Claude McKay, 222.

  104 McKay, letter to Ivie Jackman, 15 September 1943, Countee Cullen/Harold Jackman Memorial Collection, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University.

  AMIABLE WITH BIG TEETH

  EPIGRAPH

  1 Walter Bagehot (1826–77): British businessman, essayist, social Darwinist, and journalist. This stanza, suggesting that men create gods in their own image, appears in Bagehot’s essay about religion and morality, “The Ignorance of Man” (1862). Bagehot provides no source for the verse, and it is likely that he composed it himself.

  CHAPTER 1

  1 “. . . Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Out Her Hands to God.”: From Psalm 68:31 (“Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”). Starting in the nineteenth century, many African diasporic theologians and political thinkers interpreted this passage as a prophecy of the coming vindication of the black race.

  2 Senegambian Scouts: In the original typescript, McKay had first called the group the “Yoruba Scouts.” In revising the manuscript he crossed out “Yoruba” and inserted “Senegambian.”

  3 Aframericans: In the original typescript, McKay had first used “Afro-American” in this paragraph. He revised the word here (and consistently throughout the rest of the book) to “Aframerican.” See the Introduction.

  4 The Emperor of Ethiopia: Haile Selassie I (1892–1975) assumed the throne as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930.

  5 Back-to-Africa movement: The slogan “Back to Africa” was the phrase most commonly associated with the nationalist movement of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which became the largest and most influential popular organization among African Americans in the early 1920s. In the typescript, McKay had originally written “Garvey movement,” later revising it to “Back-to-Africa movement.”

  6 Herodotus, Volney . . . and a hundred more: Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE), pioneering Greek historian and author of The Histories (440 BCE) on the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars; Constantin-François Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820), French philosopher, historian, and politician; Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), French scholar and philologist famous for publishing the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs; Segismundo Moret (1833–1913), Spanish politician and writer; E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934), English orientalist and philologist; Enno Littmann (1875–1958), German orientalist; Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), German archeologist and ethnologist.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 in the heyday of the Pan-African movement: This is an allusion to the “pomp and splendor of titles and uniforms” associated with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (see Ch. 1, note 5), rather than to the Pan-African Congresses organized by Garvey’s rival, the editor and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945.

  2 Harlem Hospital . . . Lincoln Hospital: Harlem Hospital (founded in 1887) is a teaching hospital on Lenox Avenue and 135th Street in Manhattan; Lincoln Hospital (founded in 1839) is the major medical facility in the South Bronx section of New York City.

  3 “the Ethiopian Lij is the equivalent of the European prince”: The Ethiopian title Lij is a Ge’ez word that literally means “child.” It is a title issued at birth to sons of members of the Mesafint, the hereditary nobility in Ethiopia (in contradistinction to the Mekwanint, individuals often of humble origins appointed to specific government or court offices).

  4 the Garvey Pan-African movement: See Ch. 2, note 1.

  5 “sanctions against Italy”: Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935; the following month the League of Nations condemned the aggression and imposed economic sanctions on Italy.

  6 “foul-mouthed Trotskyite”: i.e., a follower of Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia who, after resisting the rise of Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), was expelled from the Communist Party and then in 1929 exiled from the Soviet Union. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. To an American Communist supporter of the Soviet Union in this period, the charge of being a “Trotskyite” would imply an unconscionable betrayal of the Soviet cause.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 the notorious numbers game: The numbers game or racket (often referred to simply as “the numbers”) is an illegal lottery in which the better tries to pick a sequence of three digits to match those picked in a drawing the following day. In the Harlem of the early twentieth century it was largely controlled by organized crime “operators” or bosses. McKay discusses the numbers game in a chapter of his book Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

  2 a Mason . . . Colored Elks: A Mason is a member of a fraternal organization in Freemasonry, a system of affiliation with origins going back to medieval craft guilds in Europe. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks is a fraternal order originally founded by Joseph Norcross in New York in 1868.

  3 the Pan-African organization: See Ch. 2, note 1.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 Garveyites: i.e., followers of Marcus Garvey (see Ch. 1, note 5).

  2 the Emperor’s coronation: Haile Selassie I (1892–1975) assumed the throne as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. The original typescript of Amiable with Big Teeth lists this date erroneously here as 1932 (although the correct date is given later).

  CHAPTER 5

  1 the famous 409 Edgecombe Avenue: The landmark thirteen-story 1917 apartment building overlooking the Harlem River Valley at 154th Street that was one of the most prestigious addresses in the Sugar Hill area of Harlem, with residents including W. E. B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins.

  2 “soon after the Harlem Riots”: On 19 March 1935, after mistaken reports circulated that a police officer had beaten a black teenager accused of stealing a penknife from a store on 125th Street, thousands participated in street demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in three deaths and extensive property damage. It soon became known as Harlem’s first “great” riot.

  3 “Jardin du Ciel of the Plaza Alhambra”: Possibly a reference to the Harlem Alhambra, a large theater on Seventh Avenue at 126th Street that featured vaudeville and later blues and jazz performers, and that included a large glass-covered roof garden. The Seminole Cabaret seems to be a fictional establishment.

  4 in Menelik’s days: Menelik II (1844–1913), the Negus (“King”) of Shewa from 1866 to 1889 and Negusa Negest (“King of Kings,” or emperor) of Ethiopia from 1889 until his death, who, during the 1880s, forcibly expanded the sovereign territory of Ethiopia. In the Battle of Adwa of March 1896, Menelik’s forces successfully repelled the Italian army’s attempt to invade Ethiopia.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 skillful Tammany politician: Founded in 1786, Tammany Hall was a political organization associated with the Democratic Party in New York City. The Tammany patronage “machine” organized voting blocks among immigrants in the city and exercised enormous influence over party nominations and local government through the mid-twentieth century.

  2 A Trotskyite group: See Ch. 2, note 6.

  3 the Savoy: The famous Harlem ballroom for music and dancing that operated from 1926 to 1948 and was located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets.

  4 the Tuskegee Idea of Special Group Development of Aframericans: Founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the Tuskegee Institute was an African
American educational institution focusing on training teachers devoted to Washington’s philosophy of “industrial education,” which emphasized self-reliance and vocational instruction in agricultural labor.

  5 Stalinites against Trotskyites: See Ch. 2, note 6.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 Apollo Theater: The legendary music hall founded in 1934 on 125th Street in Harlem.

  2 the flamboyant Aframerican Hubert Fauntleroy Julian: Hubert Fauntleroy Julian (1897–1983), Trinidad-born African American fighter pilot, parachutist, and adventurer who gained notoriety in the early 1920s performing aerial stunts over Harlem, sometimes at events organized by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Nicknamed “the Black Eagle,” Julian traveled independently to Africa during the Italo-Ethiopian War to fight against the Italian invasion; for a time he was even put in command of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force (which, however, consisted of only three airplanes).

  3 the Rasses, the Queen of Sheba . . . the kind of specie: Ras (which in the Ge’ez language literally means “head”) is the highest noble rank in Ethiopia, the rough equivalent of “field marshal” or “duke.” The Queen of Sheba is a biblical figure whose visit to King Solomon in Jerusalem is recounted in I Kings 10. “The kind of specie”: i.e., the type of coins used as currency in Ethiopia.

  4 the glorious intoxicating era of Prohibition: Prohibition imposed a ban on the sale, production, and transportation of alcoholic beverages in the Unites States. Enacted with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, it remained in force from 1920 to 1933.

  5 the policy game: The policy game (or simply “policy”) is another name for the illegal lottery called the “numbers.” See Ch. 3, note 1.

  6 Lindbergh . . . by immortalizing it in a popular dance: Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902–74), American aviator and the first man to successfully cross the Atlantic Ocean by airplane in a single flight. The “Lindy Hop” dance originated in Harlem in the late 1920s. Although it included steps similar to dances that had been popular more than a decade earlier (such as the “Texas Tommy”), it became commonly known as the “Lindbergh Hop” or “Lindy Hop” after Lindbergh’s flight (or “hop”) across the Atlantic in 1927.

  7 some exciting international signatures in that book: Most likely a list of names with aristocratic connotations in the period, rather than references to specific historical figures. For example, Duke of Marlborough and Baron Glenconner are titles in the peerage of England; the House of Bourbon-Parme (or Casa di Borbone di Parma) is an Italian cadet branch of the French House of Bourbon; the Colonna family is an Italian noble family that had great influence in medieval and Renaissance Rome; the House of Braganza is a Portuguese ducal and later royal house; Hohenlohe is the name of a German princely dynasty; the House of Segur is a family of the French nobility; Bibesco is the name of an aristocratic family in Romania.

  8 Marcel Proust (1871–1922): Famous French modernist novelist and critic, known for his À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927.

  9 “the Harlem remnant of the lost generation”: Possibly an allusion to the epigraph of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), credited to Gertrude Stein (“You are all a lost generation”). The phrase is commonly interpreted as a reference to the directionless hedonism of the American expatriate generation after World War I.

  10 Hitler . . . half apes: Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he first outlined his Nazi political ideology, was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926.

  11 knobkerry: An African club or blunt weapon.

  12 Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky . . . Czarist regime: Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Russian writer best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877); Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81), Russian writer whose major novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), Russian author whose works include the novel Fathers and Sons (1862); Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), Russian playwright and short story writer whose works include the plays The Seagull (1896) and The Cherry Orchard (1904); and Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, primarily known as Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Russian socialist realist writer whose works include The Lower Depths (1902). The Russian state was ruled by a succession of czars from its consolidation under Ivan IV in 1547 through its expansion into the Russian Empire under Peter the Great in the seventeenth century, until the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, in which the czarist regime was overthrown in favor of a Communist government.

  13 Sugar Hill: The exclusive area roughly between West 145th Street and West 155th Street in the northern section of Hamilton Heights in Harlem.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 what Carl Sandburg dubbed the “hog city”: Most likely an allusion to the poem “Chicago” (1914) by Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), which opens: “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; / Stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders.”

  2 one of the famous Jubilee Singers: The choral ensemble of the historical black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were founded in 1871 to raise money to support the school, and rapidly became famous for their performances of Negro spirituals on tour across the United States and (starting in 1873) in Europe.

  3 a meeting for Scottsboro’s boys: The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. The Communist Party played a key role in appealing the boys’ original convictions, although after multiple retrials (during which one of the alleged victims admitted that the rape story was a fabrication), five of them were nonetheless convicted by all-white juries and served significant prison time. Their case incited international indignation as a blatant miscarriage of justice.

  4 at the Savoy dancing palace, the Renaissance, the Witoka: On the Savoy, see Ch. 6, note 3. Built in 1924, the Renaissance Ballroom was a large ballroom on Seventh Avenue and 139th Street that included a dance hall, a casino, a theater, shops, and restaurants. The Witoka Club was a nightclub located at 222 West 145th Street in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s.

  5 Father Divine (1876–1965): An influential and controversial African American spiritual leader and self-proclaimed “deity” who founded and ran the International Peace Mission movement, with branch communes located around the New York area and eventually internationally. In the early 1930s he held notoriously lavish banquets for as many as three thousand guests at his property in Sayville, New York. McKay includes a chapter on Father Divine in his book Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).

  6 Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936): A Bolshevik revolutionary who in 1917 was one of the seven members of the first politburo in the Soviet Union. He went on to be the head of the Communist International, before being ousted by Stalin from the Soviet leadership in 1926 and executed after a show trial in 1936.

  7 a horde of Union Square comrades and friends: i.e., sympathizers and fellow travelers from gatherings in Union Square, the park on Broadway at Fourteenth Street in Manhattan that was a historic gathering spot for radical political groups.

  8 “Come on, you Union Square soldiers”: See previous note.

  9 “John Brown’s Body”: An American marching song popular among Union soldiers during the Civil War.

  10 American democracy: In the original typescript, McKay had written: “shirt-sleeve diplomacy was one of the pillars upon which rested American diplomacy.” This redundancy appears to be an error, and it seems likely that he meant “American democracy.”

  CHAPTER 9

  1 Father Divine: See Ch. 8, note 5.

  2 “the eunuch of the Queen Candace . . . converting the Ethiopians to Christianity”: According to Acts 8:26–40, a eunuch “of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians” came to Jerusalem to worship and was baptized
by the apostle Philip. The passage may not refer to a specific historical queen, since in the Meroitic language the word Candace means “queen” or “queen mother.”

  3 “like Harlequin at a carnival”: Harlequin is a stock character from the Italian commedia dell’arte theatrical tradition, an agile and mischievous servant who competes with Pierrot for the affections of Colombina. Possibly an allusion to the famous painting Harlequin’s Carnival (1924–25) by Joan Miró, in which the figure of Harlequin appears sorrowful in the midst of Mardi Gras revelry.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 Isaiah 53:6: The fifty-third chapter of the Book of Isaiah describes the sufferings of Christ. In the King James version, Isaiah 53 opens: “Who hath believed our report?” Verses 6–7 read in their entirety: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” Thus the fragment of these verses in the chapter title alludes to the efforts (depicted in the chapter) of Newton Castle and his pro-Soviet followers to discredit Reverend Zebulon Trawl, the Hands to Ethiopia African American aid organization, and by extension the Ethiopian envoy Lij Alamaya. The Harlem protesters are here compared to “sheep” that have been led “astray” by Castle’s slander.

  2 Sufi Abdul Hamid (1903–38): Born Eugene Brown, Hamid was an African American labor leader and a convert to Islam known above all for his role in the boycotts of white-owned Harlem businesses in the 1930s over discriminatory employment practices. Due to his vitriolic criticism of Jewish store owners in particular, he was often accused of anti-Semitism and was sometimes described in the press as the “Black Hitler.” McKay devotes a chapter to Hamid and the protests in Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940).