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introduction • xxxiii
had once anointed as a pioneering “youth” of the Harlem Renaissance.
Locke was neither surprised by the symbolism of the title A Long Way
from Home nor impressed by the story itself. McKay had become “a bad
boy who admits he ought to go to school and then plays truant. It is this
spiritual truancy which is the blight of his otherwise splendid talent.” 24
Elsewhere in “Spiritual Truancy” Locke detailed McKay’s shirking of
the two responsibilities that African American writers should bear:
“racial spokesmanship” and the demonstration of a racially “representative
character.” According to Locke, McKay had oscillated between
embracing and repudiating the doctrines of political radicalism that
Locke had dismissed in 1925 as “quixotic” and potentially detrimental
to the Harlem Renaissance. 25 Locke concluded that McKay’s commitment
to “expatriate cosmopolitanism and its irresponsible exoticisms”
made him “the enfant terrible of the Negro Renaissance,” guilty of
“spiritual truancy and social irresponsibility.” 26 Nothing less than a tit
for tat, Locke’s tone in “Spiritual Truancy” was obviously intended to
match McKay’s in A Long Way from Home. Locke also sought public
revenge for the acerbic letters he had received from McKay impugning
Locke’s manhood, cultural intelligence, ethical propriety, and racial
leadership. 27
Locke was not alone in indicting McKay’s retreat from the responsibility
of racial leadership imposed on successful black writers. When
McKay returned to Harlem in 1921 as a celebrity, his loss of “the rare
feeling of vagabond feeding upon secret music singing” precipitated
his disenchantment with politics. Hubert Harrison, a black Socialist
and close friend, urged him to take an active role in racial uplift
because he “owed it to his race” (chapter 9). But McKay was ambivalent.
He philosophized: “I have a poet’s right to imagine a great modern
Negro leader. At least I would like to celebrate him in a monument
of verse. For I have nothing to give but my singing” (chapter 29). Yet
by restricting the meaning of black leadership to poetic terms, he
demonstrated a reluctance to implement philosophical ideas in official
cultural or political capacities. Apparently, this ambivalence
strained his already fragile relationship with the Harlem Renaissance
intelligentsia. Many of them, following the lead of Du Bois’s famous
claim that he needed to take a bath after reading Home to Harlem, had
resented the unflattering portrayal of misbehavior, promiscuity, and
improprieties of Harlemites in the novel.