Home To Harlem

A Haitian exile and former Howard University student, Ray is one of Jake’s closest friends. Through much of the novel, Ray works as a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he meets Jake. Ray’s great aspiration is to become a writer capable of transforming the reality of the underworld of Harlem into art.

Having learned about literature by reading the great writers of the previous century, Ray is uncertain about his ability to accomplish this great task.

Ray is a sensitive, cerebral man who feels ambivalent about being identified with the African Americans among whom he has been thrown by the segregated U.S. He is challenged by the economic conditions in which he lives, his anxieties about being trapped in a conventional life by his love for his girlfriend (Agatha), and his seeming inability to enjoy life in the moment. His admiration of, desire for, and imitation of Jake are, in part, an effort to address his alienation.

He represents the figure of the black intellectual, the black artist, and the black immigrant to the U.S. during this historical period; he is the character that bears the greatest similarity to McKay himself, and a compelling argument can be made for Ray as a dual protagonist alongside Jake because of the dominance of his narrative during the middle section of the novel.

Like Jake, Zeddy Plummer is a veteran of World War I. Unlike Jake, he stays in the military for his entire tour. Zeddy’s greatest desire is to find a woman with whom he can settle down, but he is unable to do so because colorism makes most of the women of his acquaintance find his dark skin unattractive and because he gambles away all his earnings. His foray into the sweet life—being a kept man—ends when the woman keeping him refuses to tolerate his forays into Harlem in the company of other women.

Despite his friendship with Jake, Zeddy becomes his antagonist during the novel. He sends Jake on a job as a strikebreaker at the beginning of the novel, demonstrating his lack of scruples, which he justifies by pointing out discriminatory labor practices. His romantic frustration and desire to avoid paying his gambling debts lead him to moments of violence, including a confrontation with Jake over Felice at the end of the novel.

The confrontation nearly ends in death when he pulls a razor on Jake and Jake pulls a gun on him. Although he is contrite afterward, the fear that he mightretaliate or that his public accusation that Jake is a cowardly deserter may result in Jake’s arrest serve as major motivations for Jake and Felice’s departure from Harlem at the end of the novel.

A sex worker Jake encounters on his first night back in Harlem, Felice is the object of Jake’s affections throughout the novel. Felice, whose name means “happiness,” becomes Jake’s idealized version of black womanhood from the moment she returns the cost of sex to Jake after their initial encounter. While Jake assumes that life with her will provide him a loving foundation that will at last allow him to settle down and be himself, the reality is that her profession increases the possibility that Jake will be confronted with violence from other men, something he hates. Although Felice is ostensibly the love of Jake’s life, she is—like many of the women in the novel— a relatively flat, static character who is absent for much of the narrative.

Known as “The Wolf” by the other characters (a man who eats his own kind, other men), Billy is the owner of a gambling den and a constant companion to Jake. He plays a crucial role in the novel by helping to take care of Jake when he becomes gravely ill and by gifting Jake the gun with which he defends himself and Felice during Zeddy’s attack. Like his creator, Billy is an openly gay man who has managed to make a place for himself in Harlem despite theexplicit homophobia of the times. Billy is known for his sense of humor, especially his use of sexual innuendo.

Rose is a singer who asks Jake to live with and be kept by her after meeting him in the Congo cabaret. Rose is so accustomed to brutality as a sign of masculine virility that she brags to a friend about being hit by Jake during a confrontation. Her relationship with Jake is portrayed as a filler, one that serves to satisfy Jake physically but not emotionally because of his infatuation with Felice. As a type, Rose is a blues woman like those represented in the songs she sings. 

Madame Laura is the owner of a Philadelphia brothel Jake visits with Ray, and the mother of a boy who socializes in the brothel with her clients. She is, for Ray, a symbol of the corruption of life in the underworld, but her affection for Jake and decision to seek him out when she finds out he is ill make it clear that she is a more complicated character than Ray assumes.

A dark-skinned woman, former sex worker, and successful cook, Ginhead Susy is originally from South Carolina. She is the constant butt of jokes about her skin and unattractive appearance; Susy is obsessed with lighter-skinned men. After being taken advantage of by a light-skinned man she keeps, she decides to set up Zeddy as a kept man in her place in Brooklyn. He is also unfaithful to her, confirming her cynical ideas about relationships between the sexes.

A customer of Billy’s, a dandy, a pimp, and at one point the kept man of three different women, Yaller Prince is a light-skinned admirer of Jake and brings him the gossip during his illness. Yaller Prince represents the most predatory instincts of the Harlem underworld and is thus seen as “slimy” (237) by his peers. Yaller Prince is last seen being severely beaten on the street by the boyfriend of one of his former sex workers.

A former sex worker and closest friend of Susy, Ms. Curdy is considered unattractive because of birthmarks that mar her skin. Having been controlled by a dark-skinned pimp early in her life, Ms. Curdy is obsessed with procuring a kept man with dark skin. She claims to have serviced members of high society during her days as a sex worker and is thus condescending to her peers based on her supposedly inside knowledge of the upper class and whites.

The first waiter aboard the Pennsylvania Railroad engages in an epic and ultimately successful battle to sabotage the chef, who earns his enmity after he calls him a “‘bastard-begotten dime snatcher’”(169) an insult that hurts because it is true. His attacks on the chef illustrate the phenomenon known as “crabs in a bucket,” namely the desire of African Americans to cut down other African Americans who seem too proud of their success.

A dark-skinned man who runs the kitchen on a dining car on the Pennsylvania Railroad, the chef is a man who abuses his subordinates and refuses to eat food or engage in behaviors that are associated with African Americans. The chef is respected by his white superiors because of his competence but is summarily demoted after losing his cool with the steward. The chef’s desire to emulate his white superiors makes him a symbol of black respectability in the novel.

Ray’s beautiful and quiet girlfriend, Agatha appears in the novel only briefly when she visits an ailing Jake on Ray’s behalf. Agatha is the stereotypical good girl who fantasizes about working on the railroad if she were a man but nevertheless wants to settle down with Ray and have an ordinary, upstanding life. Ray abandons her to escape this conventional life.