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introduction • xxi
mobility: “I had wandered far and away until I had grown into a truant
by nature and undomesticated in the blood” (chapter 13). McKay felt
at home only while traveling. The farther away he got from his native
or residential home, the closer he came to an understanding of himself
as a tourist, socialite, thinker, and politician.
Not all black intellectuals approved of McKay’s vagabond spirit.
Toward the end of McKay’s decade abroad (early 1930s), James Weldon
Johnson wrote him a letter asking him to return to the United States so
that he could support the Harlem Renaissance (chapter 27). A few
years later, Locke interpreted McKay’s self-described “truancy” as racial
delinquency. Despite the concern of the black intelligentsia, however,
he remained committed to travel because he was a bona fide “internationalist,”
not simply an African American (chapter 26).
McKay himself questioned the validity of African American identity
as it applied to him. The people he encountered in his travels did not
always characterize him as African American either. In Russia, a British
woman bonded with McKay because he was “born a British subject and
had lived in London” for an extended period (chapter 19). Later, during
his tour of Morocco in the late 1920s, the British consulate “accosted”
McKay and inquired whether he was an “American.” McKay replied: “I
said I was born in the West Indies and lived in the United States and that
I was an American, even though I was a British subject, but I preferred to
think of myself as an internationalist” (chapter 26). Internationalism
enabled him to overcome the fragmentation of his native, national, and
residential identities and to interact with people and cultures in many
different foreign lands. Thus, A Long Way from Home is the documentation
of McKay’s international travels, but it is also a highly introspective
treatise on being at home in the world even as the geocultural degrees of
separation between McKay and his “homes” increased.
“From a Long Perspective”: Literature, Labor, and Leisure
Internationalism also determined McKay’s approach to literature,
labor, and leisure. Shortly after his arrival from Jamaica, he dropped
out of Kansas State College to become “a vagabond with a purpose.”
This purpose included balancing “the experiment of daily living” with
“the experiment of essays [or attempts] in writing.” Daily experience
and literary writing went hand in hand; McKay understood one
through the other. More importantly, this coordination of life and