74 pages • 2 hours read
Home To Harlem
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Going Back Home”
The novel opens with a description of the freighter on which Jake, the protagonist, is sailinghome. It is dirty, manned by Arabs,and a berth he picked up in Cardiff, Wales. The white crew refuses to clean the Arabs’ bathroom facilities, while the ship’s cook dislikes the Arabs because they refuse to eat pork. The Arabs’ food is usually taken to them with garbage mixed in with it. Jake finds the Arabs’ way of eating—eating a piece of meat out of a common pan then tossing the remainder back in—strange, and he eventually comes to dislike them for these habits and their general lack of hygiene. He pays the cook money to have his food prepared separately.
One of the white sailors tells Jake is he is just like them, not the Arabs, but Jake rejects this idea since he was signed on to work as a stoker instead of a deckhand, a position reserved for whites. The quarters he shares with the Arabs are smelly and dirty, which he blames on them. He sings to the ship, telling it to take him to the beautiful, brown-skinned women walking down Lenox Avenue in Harlem, his home.
“Jake was tall, brawny, and black” (3), a longshoreman with a crew of his own back in 1917 when the U.S. declared war on Germany. He enlisted, hoping to fight the Germans. The winter after he enlisted, he sailed to Brest with his all-black company, excited by the prospect of fighting on the front. Instead, he and the members of his company constructed huts to house American soldiers. Construction duty was not what he had trained for. Jake took a leave and went to Havre for a week, where he stayed drunk at a café the whole time.
One day, an Englishman who called him “darky”—a term that would have offended Jake back home coming from the mouths of racist Americans but did not in the mouth of the Englishman because it came from “friendly contempt” (5)—struck up a conversation with Jake about where he had been and where he was going. The Englishman told him his ship was short a hand, so Jake went over to London in search of work. He found work as dockhand at the West India Docks. He drank in Limehouse and lived in the East End of London with a white woman until the end of the war on New Year’s Eve, 1919.
By 1919, there were many black men in the East End. Some were unemployed, while others got a government pension. Their presence raised the price of sex. The white and black East End inhabitants fought with their hands, knives, and guns over the women.
Jake began to question his decision to come to Europe to fight in “‘a white folks’ war” (8). Black people were always getting involved in the affairs of whites, even when it did not really involve their interests. Jake began to see his woman as a white person and their relationship soured. He had been gone from home for two years and began to long for the bodies of the black and brown women of Harlem. Back in the present, Jake thinks about how foolish he was to think he could be happy in Europe. The chapter closes with his plea to the ship to take him home.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Arrival”
Jake is paid his wages, fifty-nine dollars, and takes the ferry and the express to Harlem. He eats and drinks, noting that everything costs more, then leaves his suitcase at a saloon on Lenox Avenue. He walks down Seventh Avenue, excited to see the Harlem sights again. “His blood was hot,” (10) and in his excited state, he finds Seventh Avenue to be too genteel for him. He returns toLenox Avenue to ogle women, then goes to the Baltimore, a cabaret.
In the cabaret, a girl who is impressed with the tailoring of his gray suit, made and bought in England, makes eye contact with him. She is attracted to him, “something in his attitude, in his hungry wolf’s eyes.” She is “brown, but had tinted her leaf-like face to a ravishing chestnut,” and beautifully dressed (11). Jake orders a Scotch and soda (a drink he told her was an English one that was better than the straight whisky of Americans), but she just wants a ginger ale. A cabaret singer comes to their table to sing, and Jake gives a big tip.
Jake touches the pretty girl’s hand and asks if she is there with anyone. She says she is not and asks if he landed in New York today. When he says he did, she is surprised and notes that she hadn’t heard of any soldiers coming in that day. Jake lies, claiming he came in on a special boat, then the two walk out to stroll down Lenox Avenue. In each other’s presence, Jake and the girl are overwhelmed by each other. Despite her response to him, she begins to bargain with him over the price of sex with her. He agrees to a generous twenty dollars in the end, and he is glad to pay it because she is so beautiful.
They go to a buffet flat (a private home that served food and is open to guests by invitation only) run by a racially mixed woman who seems to know the girl. The proprietress serves beer, wine, and hard liquor. African-American men of various shades gamble while couples in another room dance to a blues record. Jake opts to dance with the girl;he marvels at how good it feels to be in Harlem and on Lenox Avenue. After the drinks, Jake only has a fifty-dollar bill, which he gives to the girl. The two sleep together that night, fulfilling one of Jake’s fantasies about returning to Harlem.
The next morning, Jake wakes up in the woman’s apartment a contented man. She serves himbreakfast, and he gets dressed. Afterward, he wanders down Lenox Avenue, happy despite not having any money. He discovers the fifty he gave the woman tucked in his pocket with an affectionate note.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Zeddy”
Flattered and excited by the woman’s gesture, Jake thinks about turning around to go back to her but changes his mind because he thinks a man should “‘never let a woman think you’re too crazy about her’’(17). Jake walks to Uncle Doc’s saloon, where he left his suitcase, then has a Scotch and soda, telling Doc that he learned abroad that it was better for his belly. As he drinks, his friend Zeddy Plummer comes upon him and slaps him on the back.
Zeddy, who had enlisted as well, asks where he has been all this time. Like Jake, Zeddy never got to fight the Germans. Zeddy complimentsJake on his English suit. Zeddy is surprised Jake spent time in Englandand asks him what he is up to today. Zeddy is working on the docks. Jake tells him he has to find someplace to stay, grabs his suitcase, and then goes to a poolroom, where he beats Zeddy at the game. Afterwards they get a chicken dinner from Aunt Hattie’s, a dark, basement place that is famous for the delicious food, especially the pork chops. Aunt Hattie, and older woman missing her two front teeth, admires Jake so much that she rubs up against him sensuously.
Zeddy and Jake reminisce about Brest, France, where they were stationed. Zeddy talks about the arduous work they did to build the soldiers’ huts, the YMCA where only white soldiers could stay, the fights that black and white men used to get intoin the brothels on the main drag, burying one of Zeddy’s close friends (killed by Americans) in the cemetery there. The black men in Brest were always on the defensive against the white Americans, not the Germans.
Zeddy asks where Jake went, and Jake tells him he went to London. Zeddy tells Jake that he can’t tell anyone else that he is a deserter. The government is on the hunt for deserters and people who evaded the military draft. Jake says Zeddy is his friend, so he isn’t worried about him informing on him.Zeddy tells him that he should be close-mouthed about his status anyway:black people can be amazingly loyal sometimes, but other times, Zeddy says, they “will just go vomiting their guts to” whites (23).
Zeddy says Jake must have been eager for black women’s company and bodies while in Europe. For his part he kept a French woman while he was deployed; he taught her English, and she taught him both novel sex and French. He was glad to get back to the incomparable women of Harlem, however. Jake says the women also brought him home and he found exactly what he was looking for after he landed. He hopes to find the woman of the night before. The two men part with the promise to meet at Doc’s tomorrow night. Jake also learns from two other old friends that there is ample work for longshoremen.
After leaving Doc’s, Jake walks through the streets in search of the girl’s apartment and talks to and about the city. He’s going to work on the shore now and not go back to the holds of ships. New York is the same, but now that he has been to Europe, he is struck by how much meaner and stiffer the white Americans are than the white Europeans. It’s warmer in American than it is in Europe, though, and American air is as intoxicating as Scotch. “‘O Lawdy, Lawdy!’ exclaims Jake, who wants to live to a hundred and finish [his] days in New York” (25).
Jake jumps to get closer to the sky and the air, then notices that Harlem is “darker, and noisier, and smellier,” but is still Harlem despite pushing through the racial boundaries all the way to Eight Avenue (26-27). Jake has never seen so many bourgeois blacks, with their fancy cars, and there are more black-owned shops. Seventh Avenue is more genteel, as he remarked earlier. Harlem is “bigger,” “better,” and “sweeter,” too (26).
At some point, Jake realizes he is lost. The street names—all based on numbers—have gotten him turned around, and they all look the same. He can’t find the girl’s street, doesn’t even know her name, in fact. “I ain’t gwine to know no peace till I lay these here hands on mah tantalizing brown again” (27), says Jake, so he decides to head back to the Baltimore, where he first met her.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These opening chapters serve as an exposition that introduces the protagonist and a central theme of the novel. The protagonist, Jake Brown, embodies several heroic, black male figures out of African-American literature, up to a point, while the settings and Jake’s observation of them develops the theme of the connection between place and identity.
Through flashback and narration, Jake is presented as a soldier, sailor, and lover, but one whose ability to occupy those hypermasculine roles is undercut because of racism. Like many African Americans during this period, Jake decides to enlist out of a desire to fight for his country. The armed forces are still deeply segregated during World War I, and Jake’s experience of being confined to menial labor represents a realistic rather than romantic perspective on the lives of African-American soldiers. The experiences of both Zeddy Plummer and Jake also highlight how much of a danger racial violence was to African-American soldiers even as they served their country; Zeddy’s observation that he feared his fellow soldiers more than the Germans is a testimony to the paradox of African Americans fighting for democracy abroad but experiencing little of it for themselves.
Jake also embodies another important figure of black masculinity, namely that of the black sailor. Black sailors, such as Olaudah Equiano, can be found at the very start of the African-American literary tradition. Within this tradition, the black sailor represents the African-American yearning for freedom on the seas—a stark contrast to the confinement that enslaved and free blacks experienced on land.As is the case with Jake’s soldiering, his stint on board the ship is far from idealized. The ship is described as filthy, Jake’s employment options on board the ship as limited due to race, and racial hierarchies are still in effect on board.
Both abroad and at home, however, Jake is able to embody the role of the lover. The conversation between Zeddy and Jake about the white women with whom they slept includes sexual innuendo and explicit crudity, but this discussion is not just there for titillation. Jake’s ability to have sexual liaisons with white women while in Brest and in London demonstrate that he does experience a greater degree of freedom abroad; in the U.S., such violations of the color line by black men and white women frequently served as pretexts for racial violence such as lynching. The freedom to engage with a white woman offers a form of freedom not available in the U.S.
By the end of his stay in London, however, it is clear that Jake has had his fill of white women, having learned that sex abroad and sex at home are all the same.Jake’s longing to go home is couched in terms of a longing to return to the bodies of black women, a desire he fulfills immediately when he has an encounter with Felice upon returning home.
Although Jake’s encounter with Felice is brief, the description of the domestic tranquility he experiences after spending the night with her underscores the importance of black women to Jake’s gender and sexual identity.Felice represents a kind of metaphorical home for him. That this ability to be at home in the world is elusive is reflected both by the fact that Jake does not know Felice’s name and that he is not able to make his way back to her place.
The desire to go home to Harlemis a thread that runs throughout the entire novel and is represented through the use of apostrophe—a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses a person who is not present or an inanimate object. Jake’s apostrophes here and throughout the novel are all presented in language that is influenced by the blues and jazz, popular African-American musical forms that thrived in Harlem: they are essentially songs.
Jake’s songs to the ship and to Harlem itself serve to underscore the connection between place and identity, specifically between Harlem and Jake’s identity. Within these songs, Jake offers observations on his surroundings and compares European cities and Harlem, and the Harlem he knew before the war and Harlem after the war. These songs are an indication of how Jake’s identity changesbecause of his experience abroad and by the events that unfold after his return home. These songs are thus an important means of characterization.
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