Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille. I got to McKay’s record of their free time (and hard times) late and—for a season or so—I worried I might be overvaluing his tales from the cité. Was I too juiced by his joyful scenes of musicking? I wondered if that stuff might just be my cup of Cointreau until I met up with a current Ph.D. candidate who’s writing on “lived experience” of black mariners in the 20th Century. I asked if she’d read Banjo. Turned out the book had inspired her thesis. Black music lovers should look forward to reading that, but you can sail with me to McKay’s Marseille in the meantime…
I was steered to Banjo (1931) by a passage in Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015)—a text that focuses on the twinned rise of roots musics and the recording industry between 1925 and the Great Depression. Denning tells how vernacular musics—“Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’s jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula” etc.—found local audiences and soundtracked anti-colonial movements. These musics reverberated throughout the world, thanks largely to seamen bearing records and “the polyphony of colonial ports.” Denning cites Banjo’s tale of black mariners and musicians living on the margins in Marseille as he investigates soundscapes by the sea in the uproaring 20s.
Banjo is a worldly book, but, as Denning would likely allow, its angle isn’t as transnational as Noise Uprising’s. Claude McKay’s p.o.v. on his port of choice is a Black Atlantic one: “In no other port had he ever seen such a piquant variety of Negroes…It was as if every country of the world where Negroes lived had sent representatives…” He’s alive to race matters as he sets the scene for night—“between Square and the Ditch”—and day—“between breakwater and the docks”—in Marseille:
Most of the whites, especially the blond ones of northern countries, seemed to have gone down hopelessly under the strength of hard liquor, as if nothing mattered for them now but that. They were stinking dirty, and lousy, without any apparent desire to clean themselves. With the black boys it was different. It was as if they were just taking a holiday… They drank wine to make them lively and not sodden, washed their bodies and their clothes on the breakwater, and sometimes spent a panhandled ten-franc note to buy a second hand pair of pants.
The novel’s lead character is a vagabond Afro-American banjo player who’s “worked at all the easily picked up jobs.” He’s intent on putting together a Black Atlantic band that will bring together musicians from West Africa, the Caribbean, and down home America. He cares more about fun than money and the narrator hints he’ll never live large. Yet the bands he forms are always hot. The first ensemble jumps off when he and Malty (of the West Indies and New Orleans) —“the best drummer on the beach”—“walk into a dream”: “four music-making colored boys with banjo, ukulele, mandolin, guitar, and horn” just off a cargo ship. They end up jamming in a “Senegalese” (i.e. Francophone West African) club where Banjo plays “Shake that Thing”:
It roused an Arab-black girl from Algeria into a shaking-mad mood. And she jazzed right out into the center of the floor and shook herself in a low-down African shimmying way. The mandolin player, a stocky, cocky lad of brown-paper complexion, the lightest-skinned of the playing boys, had his eyes glued on her. Her hair was cropped and stood up shiny, crinkly like a curiously-wrought bird’s nest. She was big-boned and well-fleshed and her full lips were a savage challenge. Oh, shake that thing!
“Cointreau.” The Negroid girl called when, the music ceasing, the paper-brown boy asked her to take a drink.
Here’s another taste from Banjo’s delicious scenes of musicking—this one evoking a performance of a “rollicking,” “insinuating,” West African song called “Stay, Carolina, Stay”:
The whole song—the words of it, the lilt, the patter, the color of it—seemed to be built up from that one word, Stay! When Taloufa sang, “Stay,” his eyes grew bigger and whiter in his charmingly carnal countenance, the sound came from his mouth like a caressing appealing command and reminded one of the beautiful rearing young filly of a pasture that a trainer is breaking in. Stay!
“Stay, Carolina, stay.”
One player slights Taloufa’s song—“There isn’t much to it” said Goosey: “it’s so easy and the tune is so slight, just one bar repeating itself.”—but another member of their crew sets him straight (even though he isn’t in the band)…
“Why it’s splendid, you boob!” said Ray. “It’s got more real stuff in it than a music-hall full of American songs! The words are so wonderful”:
“I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
Stay, Carolina stay.
Stay, Carolina stay…”
Banjo’s author McKay wasn’t a musician but he got the charm of craft talk:
“Don’t blow on the flute so hard; you kinder kill the sound a the banjo,” said Banjo to Goosey.
“I can’t do it any other way. A flute is a flute. It mounts high every time above everything else.”
“I tell you what, Banjo,” said Ray. “Let Goosey play solo on the flute, and you fellows join in the chorus. The chorus is the big thing, anyway…”
That crafty interlude leads to an apotheosis:
So Goosey played the solo. And when Banjo, Taloufa, and Malty took up the refrain. Bugsy, stepping with Dengle, led the boys dancing. Bugsy was wiry and long-handed. Dengle, wiry, long-handed, and long-legged. And they made a striking pair as abruptly Dengle turned his back on Bugsy and started round the room in a bird hopping step, nodding his head and working his hands held against his sides, fists doubled, as if he were holding a guard. Bugsy and all the boys imitated him, forming a unique ring, doing the same simple thing, startlingly fresh in that atmosphere, with clacking of heels on the floor.
It was, perhaps, the nearest that Banjo, quite unconscious of it, ever came to an aesthetic realization of his orchestra. It if had been possible to transfer him and his playing pals and dancing boys just as they were to some Metropolitan stage, he might have made a bigger thing than any of his dreams.
Ray, the suggestive voice who helps the band find the groove above, is a writer who runs with Banjo’s band. A stand-in for McKay, his musings on race and class, “prejudice and business,” remain pertinent nearly a century on. Try this line on a Trumpish patriot who “loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life around which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” Or this meditation on double-consciousness of black intellects (still right on in Obamatime) which elaborates on Ray’s own uncharitable—and overthought—response to a white British beggar:
Once in a moment of bitterness he’d said…“Civilization is rotten.” And the more he traveled and knew of it, the more he felt the truth of that outburst. He hated civilization… Only within the confines of his own world of color could he be his true self. But as soon as he entered the great white world, where of necessity he must work and roam and breathe the larger air to live, the entire world, high, low, middle, unclassed, all conspired to make him painfully conscious of color and race.
Should I do this or not? Be mean or kind? Accept, give, withhold? In determining his action he must be mindful of his complexion…Oh, it was hell to be a man of color, intellectual and naturally human in the white world. Except for a superman, almost impossible.
Ray’s choice to join Banjo’s crew is a roots move that’s instinctive and conscious. From West Africans he got “a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots” but he feels even closer to American “working boys” like Banjo (though note how he distances himself from mucker poses below):
Ray loved to be with them in constant physical contact, keeping warm within. He loved their tricks with language, loved to pick up and feel and taste new words from their rich reservoir of niggerisms. He did not like rotten-egg stock words among rough people any more than he liked colorless refined phases among nice people. He did not even like to hear cultured people using the conventional stock words of the uncultured and thinking they were being free and modern. That sounded vulgar to him. But he admired the black boys’ unconscious artistic capacity for eliminating the rotten dead stock words of the proletariat and replacing them with startling new ones. There were no dots and dashes in their conversation—nothing that could not be frankly said and therefore decently—no act or fact of life for which they could not find a simple passable word. He gained from them finer nuances of the necromancy of language and the wisdom that any word may be right and magical in its proper setting.
Claude McKay was gay and those “tricks” in the passage above or the phrasing of “pick up and feel and taste” may prick the attention of queer theorists, but Ray’s aestheticism isn’t just a cover story for down low sexting. McKay/Ray was/is a writer after all. And, as a natural-born Tolstoyan[1], his art has a moral import even though it’s far from propaganda. Banjo’s messages to and from the grassroots don’t avoid horrors in France or the “United Snakes.” One plot twist late in the novel leads to the revelation happy-go-lucky Banjo witnessed the lynching of his younger brother—“a pink temptation kept right after him and wouldn’t let him be until he was got and pulled the way of the rope.” Ray reflects on Banjo’s (and his homies’) “gusto” in a summative passage:
Never had Ray guessed from Banjo’s general manner that he had known deep sorrow. Yet he when he heard him tell Goosey that he’d seen his own brother lynched, he was not surprised, he understood, because right there he had revealed the depths of his soul and the soul of his race—the true tropical African Negro. No Victorian-long period of featured grief and sable mourning, no mechanical-pale graveside face, but a luxuriant living up from it, like the great jungles growing perennially beautiful and green in the yellow blaze of the sun over the long life-breaking tragedy of Africa.
Banjo’s crew (and orchestra) breaks up in the course of the novel, though they hang tight again before the end when Banjo and Ray light out for (unknown) territories. But the group’s solidarity is always provisional. Even their best times together tend to be fraught. Clubbing is regularly interrupted by cuttings and shootings. Marseilles flics are corrupt racists so there’s no protection to be had from “official fists.” Something mean about the city is revealed to Ray through the novel’s good times, bad times segues. Beneath the sunny, Mediterranean vista of Desire, he feels the presence of a shadowy network of grasping cops and pimps, landlords and cabbies. One house-proud “chauffeur” becomes the representative of Marseille’s unbeautiful side. Ray had once been a friend to this driver, giving him tips about clients wanting rides/whores. But he’s grossed out when the man takes a petty, bourgie penny-saver’s stance toward the flesh trade:
What made the chauffeur so unbearably ugly to him now was that he was trafficking obscenely to scramble out of the proletarian world into that solid respectable life; whence he could look down on the Ditch and all such places with the mean, evil, and cynical eye of a respectable person.
Ray doesn’t confuse self-respect with respectability. But both he and Banjo refuse to make a spectacle of themselves when workers on a great ship of the line throw out food to the poor. Other brothers aren’t so proud. McKay pictures them in the garbage line:
Kitchen boys, two to each can, toted the garbage down a gangplank to dump it in the cart. The rank stuff was rushed and raided by the hungry black men…They fought against one another for the best pieces. One mighty fellow sent a rival sprawling on his back from a can and dominated it, until he had extracted some precious knuckles of bones with flesh upon them. Another brought up a decomposed rat which he dashed into the water, and wiping his hand on the sand, dived back again into the can…
“Look at the niggers! Look at the niggers!” the passengers on deck cried, and some of them went and got cameras to photograph the scene.
That hoot of contempt is echoed a few pages later by an Indian anti-colonialist intellectual who’s put out when West African musician Taloufa is lured away from a political discussion by a band who coax him into playing “a tormenting, tantalizing, tickling, tintinnanbulating thing he called ‘Hallejuah Jig.’” Michael Denning notes an “irreconcilable gap” between “jazzing” and “serious talk” in Banjo. But it’s clear McKay doesn’t identify with the Indian’s No-in-murmur to groovy Black Atlanticism—“‘Just like Niggers,’ he muttered, turning away.”
McKay’s politics coexisted with his aesthetics. And he had an eye not just an ear. As is apparent in this Fauvist scene where Ray and Banjo take a walk on the “Corniche”—a road cut into a bluff that looks out over Marseille’s harbor. A good place to fade out of his indelible book:
Two ships were going down the Mediterranean out to the East, and another by the side of l’Estraque out to the Atlantic. A big Peninsular and Orient liner with three yellow-and-black funnels was coming in. The fishing-boats were little colored dots sailing into the long veil of the marge. A swarm of sea gulls gathered where one of the ships had passed, dipping suddenly down, shooting up and around joyously as if some prize had been thrown to them. In the basin of Joliet the ship’s funnels were vivid little splashes of many colors bunched together, and, close to them in perspective, an aggregate of gray factory chimneys spouted from their black mouths great columns of red-brown smoke into the indigo skies. Abruptly, as if it rose out of the heart of the town, a range of hills ran out in a gradual slope like a strong argent arm protecting the harbor, and merged its point in the far-away churning mist of sea and sky.
“It’s an eyeful all right,” said Banjo.
Ray said nothing. He was so happily moved. A delicious symphony was playing on the tendrils that linked his inner being to the world without, and he was afraid to break the spell. They walked the whole length of the Cornice…
NOTE
[1] “For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist as a man and remained for him the most wonderful example of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.”